When in Doubt, Shoot it Out

So now the NRA wants to pull out all the economic stops (an odd proposition from so conservative an organization) to afford an armed guard in every school in the U.S.  There's no money for teachers, books, librarians, etc., but now there needs to be money for armed guards, so that when a bad guy with a gun enters a school, he (and it seems always to be a he) will be met by a good guy with a gun. What  logic. What's next: "The only way to keep our kids safe from drugs in schools is to make sure every bad guy with drugs who enters a school comes face to face with a good guy with drugs?"

Feeding or Starving the Fears

Towards the end of an unpublished one-woman show called The Passage of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Pam Bustin, Georgia advises “You want to be an artist—do the work—and get the work out there . . .  Create for yourself.

“We work. We must work. It’s why we are here. To search. To explore our world. . .

“Do not let the fear stop you.

“You must not let them stop you from marking your passage.

Although the advice in this context is aimed at an audience of would-be artists, I think it explains a lot about what is in the background of a lot of things left undone or unsaid in a lot of lives in general.  In my life most particularly (because isn't it all always about me?). In a fundamentally truly Protestant sense, we all have a search to conduct, are here for our passage through to mark.  But there is a level at which this is romantic guff suitable only for the relatively safe world of urban, educated, sort-of-middle class Western European to North American straight culture.

For Bustin’s O’Keeffe, for example, the risks would seem to be mostly in the realm of symbolic violence—some bad reviews: “Let them write what they will—knowing you did what you must.” Emotional bruising of a rather precious sort. What if the “marker” of the “passage” is an acid-throwing, gun-slinging bomb tosser, or a white-power, gay bashing troglodyte? For a little girl in Taliban territory, the writing medium on which that passage gets marked is going to be her own body, and the text will be inscribed at best in blood, missing limbs, and scars. As it will be for members of any disadvantaged population whose deprivation is the price of someone else’s comfort, peace of mind, and relative privilege.

There are a lot of “house-elves” in the world who are trained to believe and conditioned to act on the belief that their existence is merely to stand and wait. To Milton, the whole human race and much of the heavenly host had that function: to stand and wait for the opportunity to post and speed at God’s bidding o’er land and ocean without rest was itself a privilege. 

The house-elves in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are the unpaid, unpensioned, unrewarded, unclothed toilers in the kitchens; they are the bed makers, clothes washers, floor scrubbers who, even the children assume, love their lives and do not want any more out of it than to work for the comfort of their masters. Should they displease their masters, they can be sent off merely by giving them the “gift” of an article of clothing—even a mismatched pair of old socks. And good luck finding work with that on their record.

Hermione Granger, at the start of her fourth year at Hogwarts is shocked to learn that all that food and luxury that appears at the start of each term and at each feasting day in the school year is the product of the largest staff of house-elves in the world. She has been the unwitting beneficiary of the massive “magic” of slave labour. So she launches a movement (of three) to improve the lot of the house-elves: the Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare (S.P.E.W.). Oddly enough (or predictably enough), when the movie version of The Goblet of Fire had to make cuts to fit a 600+ page novel into a two-hour movie, that whole sub-plot of the house-elves was one of the deep cuts, a disposable secondary passage in the story that could be sacrificed in telling a tale of the battle of good against evil. 

This all does not completely negate the advice Bustin’s Georgia gives, of course. Given the opportunities and the necessary skills, marking one’s passage without or even in the face of fear is a rite if not a right. In our relatively safe society it might be a tag on a public wall. A symbol carved into a tree (if one can find a tree). A tent occupying a vacant lot or a public square not designated for public camping. A secret posted on the internet. Even a few seconds of exhibitionism recorded for a posterity that the poser might regret one day but that seems like a good idea at the time. The marking can take so many forms and lead to so many consequences. A bad review might take the form of getting laughed at. It might be getting shunned. It might be getting driven to suicide because of public and cyber bullying. Even our relatively safe culture has a capacity for blood sports.

Georgia (and Bustin through her) speaks of risk taking on the level of “daring” to send a poem or short story or bit of dramatic dialogue off for publication, and risking rejection. I’ve experienced it at the level of sitting at a table in a public place and offering to write a page of prose or poetry on a topic of the audience’s choosing, though in a protected middle-class North American life, that can seem pretty daring, too. 

That’s part of the problem, I think. We let our fears get so precious, or we get so precious in our fears, that we assume we are changing the world when we step for a few seconds outside our own comfort zones, or redefine our comfort zones at the expense of a few moments of relatively safe risk. 

Like posting to a blog site that maybe half a dozen people look into on a good week. Man, that’s guts . . .

Yet, given the way I was raised, and let myself get comfortable, it’s taken a long time to get even to that stage. 

So when I look back at some of the theatre reviews I used to write in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, and some of the more acidic assessments I expressed, I wonder who I was back then, that I could write such stuff for public consumption. About people with the courage to put themselves and their talents out there for public viewing. Or who were more afraid of anonymity, of not going public  than of risking the violence of a bad review.

I didn’t keep a scrapbook of those musings and mud-slingings, by the way. It’s just that I read a book recently on the early years of Twenty-fifth Street House Theatre in Saskatoon, and Dwayne Brenna, the author, quoted several of my reviews and interviews. I did remember writing those things, once I saw them quoted. I didn’t always remember the state of mind I was in at the time I wrote them. But apparently I was not as fearful as I recall. Or I was more afraid of being thought a wuss with no critical standards who loved everything than of being thought a mean-spirited jerk. Both opinions were expressed at various times over those years. Sometimes about the same review. And in retrospect, I wouldn’t want to take back any of what I wrote, because I do recall a level of self-editing that went into those pieces in the first place--taking out some of the more cruel-sounding assessments.

I recall meeting a history grad student at a concert in the Centennial Auditorium one evening, someone my first wife, Sam, was taking a course with at the U. of  S.  He was from Toronto, and scorning the arts in Saskatoon in general, the public critical attitude in particular. He snorted that the performers knew they could come out “and spit on the stage” and know they would get a positive review from the timorous reviewers from the StarPhoenix, the local newspaper. He went on and on. Then he asked me, condescendingly, what I did. I replied, blandly, “Oh, I’m a reviewer for the StarPhoenix.” 

He thought / half-hoped I was kidding: a startled, half-chuckled “No…”.

Then he got confirmation from Sam.

Then he tried to backtrack and exclude me from the previous comment.

Then he shut up. 

The coward.

A Sketch of a Different Past

Virginia Woolf, in her “A Sketch of the Past,” states, incorrectly, I believe, “Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison.” Woolf laments such a standard against which to assess herself, since she was “never at school, never competed in any way with children [her] own age, [she had] never been able to compare [her] gifts and defects with other people’s.” 

Lucky her.  Never having had to belie herself with false compare, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Sonnet  130 (My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”).

It seems to me I’ve lived my whole life flailing against or taking comfort from some standard of comparison or other. Not often was it comfort. 

It began with always being compared by my parents to other people’s kids. Usually negatively, to motivate me to try harder.  Or by teachers, coaches, friends, girlfriends, spouses (the first mostly frequently and inconsistently. I was better than her previous boyfriend, but in the end less than her father). Co-workers (again unevenly). Other students, as a student. Students, as an educator.

Most damagingly, because I learned the habit early, by myself, always trying to find that one key skill, that one slightly better grade, that one higher degree, that would make me acceptable, maybe even successful by comparison. Not outstanding. That was for other people’s kids. And for cousins. Except those cousins who were “bad blood,” and to be avoided (this rather depended on which parent was doing the comparing, and to which set of cousins).

What’s so necessary about other people’s achievements and failings as a measure of who we are and what we have achieved, or even found worthwhile? Nothing. Sorry Virginia. It does not matter one minor bit of body lint what anyone else is doing or has, or had, done. You are (well, in your case, were) what you are (were), and what you fashion(ed) yourself into. If that happens to be a copycat existence, that, I know, is truly a path to all manner of dissatisfaction. Unless one can lie to oneself outrageously. 

Someone else’s achievements are someone else’s.  They do not make me a lesser person, by comparison.  Someone else’s defects are someone else’s. They do not make me a better person, by comparison. 

And if I write that often enough, maybe I can make myself begin to believe it. 

I am what I have done and left undone, for whatever reasons I did the done and didn't the undone.

I am the frightened two-year old in his crib, with a nurse helping my mother take the stitches out of my fat little left hand, and sometime later out of my chin, and sometime later still out of the back of my head. I am, and always seem to have been, accident prone.

I am the three-or-so year-old climbing the latticework fence my dad had just built, and told me not to climb. I didn’t know why not, because it wasn't that hard. Then I broke several of the lathes. The warning wasn’t for my safety; it was for the safety of the fence. 

I am the four-year-old building a snowman in the few inches of winter slush on Avebury, in Victoria.

I am the same four-year-old with my little brother, in a do-it-yourself recording booth (probably in Eaton’s in Victoria) telling our dad, away down east somewhere, getting reattached to the RCAF as a peacetime flight instructor,“Hi, Daddy,” and “Wish you were here” to the whispered promptings of our mother. Then explaining with an indignant sob, how I had just had a needle that day, “and it hurted.” And wondering aloud, with no prompt. “Daddy doesn’t speak?...”

And the six-year-old, going again with my little brother, hand in hand and list in pocket,  through the gathering dusk of winter Claresholm, to the meat market and the drug store on errands for our parents and for comic books for ourselves. I assumed at the time that they just let us go, having taught us the route, and introduced us to all the shopkeepers of a small town. We felt very responsible. Either they followed us, out of sight, to make sure we didn’t get lost or confused, or just go our own way for our own childish reasons. Or they took advantage of a little privacy in the light housekeeping motel unit that was our home for four that winter. I was older before I suspected they might have followed us, and a lot older before I realized they might have needed some privacy, let alone what they might have needed it for. The comic books were probably the bribe in the chore, and the price of privacy. 

And the nine-year-old scared at going to a new school in a new city, hiding in snowbanks trying to play hookey, rather than face the new and uncertain.

I am the eleven year-old school safety patroller with my white belt and big stop sign. And later the twelve-year-old with my Captain’s badge and record book, having my recommendation for patroller of the year ignored by the local police constable who oversaw the safety patrol program. He’d picked the winner, the son of a friend, months earlier.

And the fourteen-year-old, in my Boy Scout uniform, standing on shaky knees not very well hidden in navy-blue shorts, part of an Honour Guard saluting our friend Brian, from his graveside in early June 1963. He had been complaining of a sore knee the previous August, on a three-day camp-out in the Saint Mary’s River valley, south of Lethbridge. Bone cancer, as it turned out.

GROWING PAINS

A friend dead at fifteen

one quarter of the age

I remember him from

later in a life

time he never lived.

Chewed up

by bones that grew

too long too fast,

    metastasizing

into a short story or

a lyric of a life learning

of eternity too soon.

Was he the stuff of Chums

and Boy’s Own?

The hero of Scouting for Boys?

Not really.  But

who ever was?

Schooled as we were in the

thousand instinctively nasty ways

boys will be boys.

What did we learn from his death,

the first of our crowd

to have his own funeral?

Boy Scouts in shorts,

saluting at his grave side:

we would not cry

after all. We were becoming

Men. Grim-faced,

prepared

 

And a whole assortment of other younger me’s, doing things as only I could, within the limits and out to the extent, of my own abilities and understanding, at the time: shagging foul balls and selling pop and peanuts at the local ball diamond on Sunday afternoons; snaring gophers in the vacant lots; ending up in Emergency with sprained ankles needing wrapping, and gopher bites needing tetanus shots. The usual.

Compared to nobody. Gifts my own. Defects my own.

Bonding Routine

“E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v,” : 

This bit of “found poetry” was the “subject” line for some spam that came through my e-mail recently. I thought it might make for an interesting starting line for a writing prompt, as recommended by Natalie Goldberg. Here’s what has come of it.

E, a place that, they afterwards learned, bore a v, was a most private and unassuming address in a rather ordinary looking gated community. The “v” E bore was its mark of distinction, engraved on the address plate on the front of the house above and to the left of E’s upper ^--, in order to distinguish ^vE from its cross-town suburban counterpart, E².  Where E² was a lab devoted, so far as the public was even interested, to arcane things to do with particle string theory, v-bearing E was the office away from the office for several of Bond’s employer’s weapons and special effects masters. It looked on the outside like an over-sized bungalow made of brick, but it was built onto a hillside, and its basement went in and down several steel and titanium sheathed storeys, emptying out into something that would have embarrassed the Bat Cave: A toyshop of destruction, right beside a full-sized, fully equipped gymnasium and firing range.

        But that was not ^vE’s most interesting feature. To get there, without a high security clearance or a licence to kill, you had to have dated or caught the amorous attention of M, James Bond’s boss. Because right across the hall from the weapons lab and fitness centre was a fully stocked boudoir, in which M entertained – well, whomever she pleased. Or more to the point, whoever pleased her. Though as she got older, that list grew shorter, along with her temper. 

       Unlike the employers of the director of the CIA, M’s bosses were not prudes. If she wanted to dally, even at her age, she had their full co-operation.  They had, after all, recruited her years ago for her talents at dalliance. With her relaxed, elegant beauty and her Oxford Ph.D. in the history of applied sexual anthropology, she had been one of their best agents for seducing cold-war enemy agents to reveal more than their physical skills under the covers, back in her younger, less acerbic, days.

           All those years of whoring for Queen and country had pretty much used up her patience with fumbling twits, impressive mostly for the fact that higher-ups believed they could be trusted with information, when they were just men, after all. Well—most of them. Some of those Russian agentesses had been spectacular. Almost as spectacular as M in her prime. Almost as spectacular, and a little harder to impress—the only real challenges to her inventiveness, but ultimately the key to her advancement up the ranks.

       None of M’s guests, for reasons best left to the imagination, ever took note of the ^v on the way in—only on their exhausted way out, their senses a tuned a bit higher to the finer details. But it was the thing they recalled ever after—maybe ruing, maybe relishing, the realization they had just become another notch on her headboard.  

#############################################

Now—where did that come from? Probably the fact that the newest Bond movie came out this last week, though I haven’t seen it yet. But I’ve sure never wondered what M’s back story was. Not until that weird V-bearing E opened the gate. Does this mean I am to become a knocker-off of Bond prequels? Something to look forward to in my retirement. Something even to retire to pursue—a career as a soft-core cold-war espionage pornographer. Who knew?

Natalie Goldberg, in her entertaining and irritatingly inspiring book Writing Down the Bones, a book that's been around since 1986, so it's been inspiring and irritating for over a generation now, writes of Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with an absurd but strong first sentence like, "As a man sauteed his hat he was thinking of how his mother used to saute his father's hat, and how grandmother used to saute grandfather's hat, " or "Like a white snail the toilet seat slides into the living room, demanding to be loved." Her invitation is to follow this lead, to "dive into absurdity and write."

So I tried.

Here's what's come out--at least these are two I don't mind sharing:

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Ginger stepped orangely out of the rainbow and strolled through the unobstructed vision Ralph thought he was having of his rosy future.  He removed his glasses to make sure he had the right chromatic correction, then replaced them. No. She definitely came from a shade or two too far up the spectrum. Too bad, too, because in every other respect she was a perfect fit for the life Ralph had planned far into his level-headed future. He began to reconsider his options, wondering if maybe he hadn’t set his sights a tad too narrowly, or if some cosmetic adjustment could make up for her deficiencies. Ginger, a playful sort who had just wanted to add a little spice to the life stewing flavorlessly in Ralph’s monochromatic imagination, grew impatient with his dithering and procrastination, and withdrew, back into the prism that was her home. “I simply have no time for the terminally bland,” she muttered.

###########

The Queen Margharita pizza ordered the customers at the table to pay attention.  She was steamed. Well, baked, actually. Not half-baked, like before, like earlier on when nothing had gone right. She wanted fully to be the star, celebrated at this moment when something like perfection seemed possible out of the disgrace of earlier the same evening.   

The idiot rookie line cook who had falsified his resumé had begun a trial incarnation with a cheap undergarment of some ghastly commercial pesto before anyone could stop him. Then for a petticoat layer, he’d poured some weird reddish sauce over the pesto—which did deserve being hidden, but still…. A lady has her standards.  Then he had layered on an overskirt of processed mozzarella slices, the taste and texture of semi-congealed wall plaster. She had been sent out looking so common, then ingloriously been sent back, to finally just slip herself off the platter and into hiding in a plastic bin.

She had re-emerged in all her regal splendour when a qualified courtier, understanding the job and sensing the importance of decorum and occasion, fitted her out to emerge with dignity and command appreciation for all her richness. Her unbaked nakedness first moisturized and rouged with deep crushed romas;  this foundation decorated with an overlayer of tiny perfect dots of buffalo bocconcini buds, elegantly arranged and floated over the smooth silk of the tomatoes; a few perfect, locally grown, fresh basil leaves delicately, greenly, accenting the whole—just enough to get the aromas wafting into the hall. She commanded respect for her elegant simplicity, and everyone had damned well better acknowledge the fact.

She just hoped the diners were talented and gracious enough to appreciate what she brought to the occasion, whatever it was. There was no going back this time. She’d rather go out the front door cold and ignored in a doggy bag than have to return, discarded, to the kitchen with all the common trash.