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Towards the end of an unpublished one-woman show called The Passage of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Pam Bustin, Georgia advises “You want to be an artist—do the work—and get the work out there .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