" . . . and be counted . . .

I was at a late-summer poetry retreat on Saturday (August 25). Our second session was to write a poem in one of four modes or themes: Protest/Death/List/Biblical story rewrite. I thought of  David and Goliath, and of cases such as those who fought Big Tobacco for so many years, and of those like Dewayne Johnson, who recently won a major award in a suit against Monsanto over the effects of Roundup upon his health. In the end, I think all four modes are at play here.

“. . . and be counted”    Don Perkins

The Bible tells us, over and over,

how God relies on outsiders,

wanderers in the wilderness,

outcasts from society,

barren women, unwed mothers,

shepherd boys, unwelcome prophets,

the weak, the lame, the sick,

to show his power

to make winners from losers,

to reward the faithful.

We read these stories;

we take hope that faith

in that kind of power in our own time

can still rightfully and righteously

arrive at positive ends.

And sometimes…a sickened school gardener

takes on the boardroom

and profit margins;

puts his faith in the rule of law,

makes his cancer the springboard

to hold wealth to the sticking point

of its own all-devouring greed,

stands up and says, “To Hell

with your falsified research

your self-serving cover-ups.

Don’t deny me. I am the evidence,

standing in this court of law

and before the court

of public opinion,

as the only-just-still-living proof

of the evil your poisonous work has done.”

And sometimes…Justice divines

a vital truth behind the smokescreen,

and rules: “Bless you. I agree.”

Bead and other timeless work

Bead and other timeless work

I am reading The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. And I meet Bankole, a character sharing some of my skepticism and disillusionment over “the church” and organized spirituality. He had gone to church with his wife while she was alive, and had “wanted to believe,” but never could. 

Years ago, when our son was in primary elementary and junior high, we had given the church a lot of our time and energy, and a fair bit of cash from our on-again-off-again contract teaching jobs (though according to one rector, none of us never gave enough—because we were too materialistic…). We felt we owed it to our son to expose him to that side of human nature and society, and let him eventually make up his own mind. Eva had been raised Roman Catholic, but felt pretty much unwelcome since her divorce and remarriage to me, another divorcé. But we went to the next best thing, historically speaking, an old-line Protestant church nearby with a dynamic rector and sound congregational involvement. That lasted until he left to take another parish in another city. 

Then the parish got “professionalized,” and began to be constructed around some weird shifts in theology. A long story. But it involved things like the next rector giving a lesson to the children that involved a lot of toys (including toy guns, as I recall), then telling the ones who had received the toys as props that they could keep them: “Isn’t that cool! You come to church and you get free stuff!”  Then after the children went off to Sunday School, he preached a sermon to the rest of us about not being materialistic, but willingly separating ourselves from a lot of our cash to support the good work of the church. Like renovating, refurnishing, and re-equipping the staff and clergy offices, paying the highest salaries in the district, including to a lot of part-time staff in the youth and children’s ministries. People with no theological training, but the right attitude.

That’s where it began to hit the fan, for us. We would go to church after a week of demanding work, looking for a period of calm and contemplation. Volunteer still for greeting and coffee serving and, in my case, reading the lessons. But be harangued about needing to give more. And be pounded mercilessly by a pair of bands that replaced the “old fashioned” church music we could all sing along to with new religious rock, sometimes in five and six-minute concert arrangements that left us standing there listening instead of participating. And we would leave feeling worse, more left out, than we had when we arrived. 

And then there was the new Youth Minister—who was paid more than I was for my job, even though I had four degrees to qualify for mine, and he had a single degree, not in theology, to under-qualify him for his. But could he talk the talk…and arrange the new music for a youth band. 

Unfortunately, he could not actually prepare the material in advance or show up on time for things like taking the teens on a weekend retreat. Nor could he handle some basic questions of the sort that teens will ask. Especially teens like our son. 

One day, the Youth Minister was giving a talk about recognizing and avoiding cults. He explained by rote some of the ways cults created communities and organized youth activities and demanded a lot of time and cash for the good work of the faithful, etc. And our son, maybe 13 at the time, said, “Yes, but we do all of that kind of thing here. How is that different? Or are just another cult?” And got pretty much a “because we’re a church doing God’s work and I say so. Stop being impertinent” answer. Not very convincing. So he left the youth group and we left that congregation and after a few visits elsewhere to listen to other smug preachers reassure their smug congregations that their community was the front door to heaven, stopped going to church anywhere. 

And nobody called from those expensive new offices to find out why we were no longer attending or donating our time or talents. Evidently we had not been donating enough cash to be worth worrying about, though some other long-time, better off members who also left did get calls. And friends from the congregation never called, and our son began to be unwelcome to come and visit their kids. Who wants a trouble-maker visiting and spreading a bad attitude or asking difficult questions?

But honestly, I would have had to leave anyway. I had begun to feel like a fraud and hypocrite reciting the various creeds. I could not truly “get with the narrative.” Though I could deliver the lessons with gusto, it was all a performance. I wanted faith in something, and my parents and grandparents and their generations had believed and had taught us that the church is where you went to find it. Not for me. Not this way.

When I read some of my contemporaries—their poetry, or their advice on getting my life and soul in order and finding the path to true spiritual harmony with everything (especially the nature we as a species seem bent on destroying because God gave us permission and even the responsibility to do so)—I wonder where I will ever find that something. But there are hints that seem to work. A morning meditation helps with my blood pressure problem. So, of course, does the medication I take in the evening. That also seems to be helping my insomnia, which is too bad in some ways—I used to get a lot of writing done between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. 

The advice to get up and write something, produce “morning pages,” as Julia Cameron calls them in The Right to Write, is sometimes a help. Better yet was the advice I found there and elsewhere to write wherever and whenever the urge and opportunity coincided. And some advice on not beating myself up when there were periods of total unproductivity. That last sounded then and sounds still like Matthew Arnold and his idea that in human history there were of periods of preparation and periods of creativity. The periods of preparation were periods for criticism. 

Or for blogging instead for writing new poems?

Or for walking along, thumbing the smooth glassy pebble in whites, light butterscotch toffee and streaks of  blood purple that I found in a pathway of crushed grey rock. It has become my one-bead worry string, I suppose (without the string). And I realized the other morning that the pebble and my thumb were rubbing atoms off each other and releasing them back into the dust and ashes of the universe, to find new attachments. That was a strangely comforting thought. The pebble and I are, after all, dust from the same exploded star of eight or so billion years ago.Or so Jill Tarter explains us.

Back April, during Poetry Month, I was part of a local “30/30” group writing a poem a day each in response to prompts from a pair of sources. One prompt, from Day 5: “Grave Indifference,” put me into a carpe diem mood, musing on the cycles of life and reconstitution. It observed, in part, our lot as

Dust of a dead star conformed

as living earthly humans

working out our places

in the grander order of things,

An order that seems to be:

From dust we come,

as complex dust we thrive

to reproduce more dustlings.

To reproduce, we seize the day

take or induce erotic chance

to make something from ourselves

to carry on the erotic dance.

So cheer up. Keep worrying that bead, and let it worry you back. We never stop having an atomized place or function in it all.

Desire Paths

“Desire paths”: visible, virtual, and figurative

The first time I can recall encountering the term “desire paths” was in Tom Hulme’s TED talk, “What can we learn from shortcuts,” TED February 2016: He was referring to a muddy “trap” in a great green space in Highbury Fields in north London: “People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing. Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance,” or what he later terms a path of “low friction.” 

Hulme finds such paths “fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge” (emphasis added). So, in a sense, it is not what they connect or how they connect that makes them fascinating, but how they mark a line of disconnection between what the “official” design might be and what popular use says is more important. Maybe that is also why a large site on Reddit,  /DesirePaths, collects pictures of long and short desire paths from all over the world. Hundreds of them. And the Comments that accompany the photos give voice to an evident urge to define these paths, to differentiate them from other kinds of dirt and pressed sod byways. For example, one commentator, who has followers, insists that desire paths have to connect officially designed and paved routes in order to be true desire paths. Paths across vacant fields with no paved edges are not true desire paths. Think of them more as goat trails.

I have to admit to a certain interest in desire paths about this city, Edmonton, and with the debates about their nature and functions. That said, I do not buy Hulme’s claim that “path of least resistance” is necessarily the motive for these paths’ coming into existence. It seems equally significant that these paths can in fact be read as acts of deliberate resistance: “Make all the nice formal concrete patterns you want—we will go the way that suits us.” Similarly, desire paths are not necessarily matters of  “low friction.” They can be read as statements of people rubbed the wrong way, now rubbing back. And we seem to like this evidence there is still room for “we the people” (individually, or collectively) to vote with our feet, reinforcing each other’s choice not to go “that way,” the paved way, but to go the way that for our own reasons we have declared the better, more practical or preferred way. Some designers, as on several university campuses I have heard of, have figured out the best way to “go” is to grass everything in between buildings, then let the people create the paths that work for them, then pave the “desire paths.” I have also seen new desire paths appear in the grass to cross paths with the newly paved routes. There is something in asphalt or concrete that demands a “Don’t even think of fencing us in” response. 

I also think from experience and observation that some desire paths are invisible—like at the crossing at an intersection not far from where I live: 111^th St and 51^st Ave. The whole is pavement and concrete, with LRT tracks running N/S on 111th St. It is a risky intersection even when a pedestrian follows the walk signals. Not as risky as a desire path Hulme uses to illustrate his talk. That highly dangerous path is in Brasilia. It crosses fifteen lanes of traffic along its route. Brasilia was designed on the expectation walking was on its way out as a mode of moving human about, that people would use cars to get where we wanted to go. People have demonstrated otherwise. In fact, Brasilia desire paths come up often in internet searches. 

Apparently people in Edmonton have also decided we can dodge cars to get where we want to go. So at 111^th St and 51^st Ave, I watched a young woman in a black dress walk halfway across against the traffic light on 111th, smiling as she listened to music coming from the smartphone or iPod she was holding. She walked through a gap in the northbound traffic and around the gates designed to protect pedestrians from moving trains. Then she stood on the divider in the centre of 111^th St, and waited for a gap in the southbound lanes before finishing her crossing. 

Now, admittedly, she left no visible mark on the pavement or the concrete, but there is a virtual desire path there nonetheless, intersecting at times with the painted crosswalks, but only where they happen to coincide with her preferred angle of passage. And she is not the only person I have seen make this crossing, or one parallel to it. But the surface does not take an easy impression from their feet. It is not yet like the stone steps that Henry Kreisel’s protagonist, Jacob Grossman, encounters when he returns visit family in pre-WWII Vienna: “The steps, though of stone, were worn down by the tiredness of the feet that had climbed them through the long years” (The Rich Man 72). There just has not been enough time yet. Or maybe enough tiredness. Moreover, the virtual desire path at 111^th St and 51^st Ave. illustrates that there another principle as work beyond the shortcut in physical space. Desire paths result because, Hulme asserts, “People are resourceful. They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time.” 

So, if desire paths, visible or virtual, are marks of resourcefulness in making connections, are they not perhaps recognizable as metaphors for metaphors? For figures of speech that connect some “here” to some ”not here,” as my friend, the poet Alice Major, understands the construct. The here and the not here can be separated by space, time, gender, mythology, history, or any other such “container” as Lisa Martin, another Edmonton poet, calls them. Containers are necessary for us to approach what Martin calls the “puzzle of materiality.” We need some structure to help us distinguish things from each other, even as in Major’s analysis, we use the structure to help us see and acknowledge shared properties as well as differences. Martin writes of a character named Pascal, the Quebecois fiddler, “…working his feet  / to artfully dislodge the desired feeling, dancing / the path to understanding…” (“Dancing  the path to Understanding,” Believing is not the same as Being Saved, 84).

Creating visible, virtual, or metaphorical desire paths is in part about collectively dancing that path to understanding, even as we (perhaps) unconsciously go our own individual and collective “separate” ways, “dislodging” official (or “authorized”) instructions about how and where to go, what to understand, share, and conform to, and why and how or how far. It is also, in a sense Martin talks of elsewhere, about “authorizing” ourselves—of exploring our own spaces, knowledge or forms of knowledge against other uses of space, time, knowledge or forms of knowledge. We may find ourselves taking the official or “normal” route perhaps part of the way, but deserting it or rejecting it when it does not get us where we feel the need to go, not efficiently, not with due respect for our own share in whatever field we traverse or passage of understanding we negotiate.  

Meanwhile, a poem I wrote and submitted in response to a call for poems about “unknown Edmonton:”

Desire Paths                  Don Perkins    (Aug /18 version)

Whose feet, whose need,

pressed into sod and soil

this soft tracery,

these lines intersecting and by-passing

public pavements for private urgencies on private matters?

Official names designate official, planned, and produced streets

to honour those who have made official, designated concrete

contributions to our official history.

How, though, do we name and acknowledge

the anonymous agents who created

these records of and for our collective

self-authorizing passage,

these gentler, friendlier, unsanctioned

markers of “us”?