Not too Jovial

Reading Week draws to a close, with a sore throat and cough setting in between stuffed ears. Joy of joys.

The shining news is that the sky cleared tonight after the biggest one-day snowfall we've had in ten years. And there was the new(ish) moon, escorted across the evening sky by two planets: Jupiter and Venus. Jupiter is Holst's Bringer of Jollity. Jupiter may be bringing it, but I'm not receiving it. Jupiter=Jove, root of joviality, and I'm not going there, either. Venus is the goddess of love, but I'm not feeling that, any more than the joy. Still, I have to admit, with this conjunction, tonight's view was spectacular. 180 degrees away in the east, Mars made his contrary way up the night sky as well.  Last night, we waded through the unshovelled new snow, with more still coming down, to the LRT to get to an ESO choral concert, a concert that was worth the wade. Two faces of late winter, each brilliant in its own way.

In the next room, Eva and our neighbour, Dale,  talk of getting a card for Tina, whose old black lab, Allie, had to be put down earlier this week--a lumbering old sweety, Allie, but her kidneys gave out, with no hope for recovery. Dale explains that she can't even begin to imagine what comes after death. That the shmaltzy sympathy cards about meeting again do not seem to cover the territory. I recall thinking, the day I heard that Mom had finally finished "living with cancer," that at least she now knew what came next, if anything.

We did not have a funeral service for Mom.. She had some strange ideas about disappearing quietly, so her sisters had her ashes interred with her parents in a cemetery in Surrey, B.C., that would not even allow another marker on the site. It took ten years, but I finally broke down at a memorial service for a woman I hardly knew, for me to realize I had done a really bad job of grieving. Had not done it at all, actually. Mary Charlotte, the assistant rector at the neighbourhood Anglican church, arranged a private ceremony in the chapel, just her, Eva and me. We entered Mom's birth and death dates into the registry, and I began to understand the concept of "closure."

This week was also the first anniversary of Dad's death. His birthday (he would have been 90 this year) was the first February 16th I can recall for over fifty years I hadn't sent a card or letter, or made a birthday phone call. Last year, when I'd called him in England (where he had been living for much of the last ten years) beginning Feb. 16th, there was only a full answering machine responding, for several days. Then a phone call about 9:30 the evening of the 21st.

We did have an interment ceremony for him in mid-April, on a snowy wet Saturday in Union Cemetery in Calgary.  Dad's plot (which has Mom's name and dates of birth and death on the same marble plaque as Dad's, a province away from where she is actually buried) is within a short walk, and sight, of Great-grandfather Andrew Porter's plot, where Grandmother Perkins and her sisters are also interred. It was a small service, led by me (I got that news from my sister, Vicki, the evening before). So that was better closure.

And a year later, my sister and brother are still trying to get all the legal and government forms filled out (some for the third time, because one bureaucrat cannot hand the same form or certificate across the hall to another in the same department without one or the other losing track of it). His estate is not large or complicated (except for the fact one bank account is in England, so we need an English solicitor to handle the paperwork. Ever try to hire an English solicitor from Canada, over the internet?), but it still has taken a lot of messing about. I have shivers, thinking of the case in Chancery in a Dickens novel (Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in Bleak House)--a case that went on for years, until all the estate had been devoured in legal costs. There is a life after death--but it's a half-life, in legal documents, computer files and unfinished, at times seemingly unfinishable, business. The Ojibway three-or-four-day road wouldn't be even decent a start, anymore.

A messy day in a messy week

I guess I'm pretty average. Start with great plans and a list of things to take up. Then every day happens. Or every week. Annnnnd....the meetings come along. And the e-mails demand answers. And the big revelations and epiphanies short-circuit into the "self-delete" file. Or they look pretty puny on the screen. Doesn't stop the nagging sense of unfinished or even unstarted business.


Right now I'm having a visit from my old friend insomnia, from all the little worries of the day that I didn't get put in place by bed time. Like our dog's snaggletooth. It looks pretty harmless, even comic the way it puts a permanently puzzled look on George's face, with the lower right canine tucked inside instead of outside, but it's apparently been erupting even further, or he's bumped it, or something, so now, instead of  leaving a little rubbed spot on his upper gums, it's digging into the back of his upper canine. So he needs dental work or he could lose both upper and lower. I didn't want to do much earlier, because he's so darned cheerful and playful, and trusting. When we had to have our Springer Spaniel's broken toe set, it made him pretty suspicious of everything we tried after that, and gave him an erratic temper. I'd hate to see George get the same way. But he'll be a lot worse off if we don't do something. Poor little guy. No dental plan for the dog, either.

There's a piece in GEIST Magazine this month, from J.R. Carpenter: "Words Dogs Know." Perfect the way it puts a canine Zen spin on things. My favorite right now is this:

melancholia When playtime is over and the long nap in the dark is over, and the early morning walk is over, sometimes in a hurry, sometimes even in the rain, the people shut the door behind them and the dog is left to his lonesome.

Left on his lonesome, George eases his melancholia by redecorating. One recurrent signature is to centre my boot carefully in the middle cushion of the white leather sofa he is never supposed to get on.  When he's had a bout of removing everything from the pocket where we temporarily house all the plastic tubs and trays and cardboard tubes for the recycling, or of playing hamster with newspapers and magazines, or of just getting into things, he disappears to the bottom of the basement stairs as we come in the front door, and becomes deaf to our calls. When he's done nothing but nap or chew his pigskin stress-relievers, or stand on the coffee table beside my wife's easy chair and stare out the window (which he can see out of perfectly without getting on anything), he greets us all happy and bouncing and shaking himself with pleasure. So when he's not at the door, we have first to go looking for what he's done, and couldn't stop himself from doing.

I think his word would be perspective: When the people aren't wasting the barbecue to cook fish (which is fit only for cats) or chicken (which they don't seem to realize is fit for sharing with the dog), its flat top is best valued as the highest point in the back yard, the command tower from which to keep a dutiful eye out for all those things one has to keep an eye out dutifully for, and from which to bark the bark at all those things at which one has to bark the bark. 

Maybe this space is my barbecue top, tonight.

Not this blogboy

I was reading Hal Niedzviecki's account of his entry into blogspace, and how he got no comments, or only negative ones about how uninteresting his posts were. So he began to get more personal, to let out about things in his private life--like a fight he was having with his brother. And he got popular.

So I guess I should be writing about my long, problematic relationship with my father, a relationship that has not ended being problematic just because he died about  a year ago, just after his 89th birthday, leaving me with a lot of  unasked and unanswered questions about why he was the way he was.

I recall writing the night I heard from my uncle that Dad had died that "for two hours now, I have been the oldest surviving member of the family of Max and Berna Perkins." There's part of the problem--it was always about me, even when he died. But all of us, his kids he kept talking of wanting to get back nearer to from England (to which he had moved in his early seventies) waited for years for some word of encouragement or acknowledgment of our successes or even an "I'm proud of you." That just wasn't part of his vocabulary. I think it was because he was pretty dissatisfied with the way his own life went, after he was about 23.

Before that, he'd enlisted in the RCAF at 17, been called up before he finished grade 12, was trained and on active duty as a fighter pilot by the time he was 19, and lived to tell us about it. And not to tell us about big chunks of it. In his time, after WWII, no big system for PTSD counselling--a thanks from the government and "get back to normal." The older he got, the tougher that normal got to get back to and stay back at.

We were actually proud of his service record, though embarrassed when he would do things like say to some kid on the C-Train in Calgary, too young to know what he was talking about, "Why don't you stand up and give an old Spitfire pilot a seat?"  But why not? The kid should have been embarrassed, not us.

Oh, there are stories I could indulge in, of slights and slug-fests, and whines and wobbles I could emote. Snide comments about how, by his mid-seventies, he finally could give a shy grin and a shrug and say, "They tell me I should hug my kids more," and give us the hugs we had craved decades earlier. Not that we couldn't be grateful in our late forties and early fifties, as I was at the time, but still... The old dog could learn new tricks. Or the old bull, as he used to consider himself. And maybe it was sincere, and he was just unpractised. And maybe it was just  my conditioning that made me look for the trick in it.

Yeah--I could write about all that. It was reading a "Happy Birthday" greeting in last Sunday's Edmonton Journal, to someone turning 90, and being jarred by the fact we could have been planning such a celebration for Dad, for next month, if undetected, untreated (and at his age probably untreatable) metastatic prostate cancer hadn't interfered with that possibility. But I don't want to write about such things. Too personal. Too much not for public consumption. Too likely to make me look bad, which is not the looked-for in all this. Sorry.

Tribalisms and truths

Rob Shields makes the point in his foreword to The Time of the Tribes, by Maffesoli, that aesthesis, in the classical sense, had to do with truth and beauty, or truth and correctness, not in an absolute sense but as defined by collective experience and consensus. It wasn't really news that beauty was a matter of consensus, and subject to shifting and differing community standards. A short walk through any shopping mall with a large population of young people will show that there are all sorts of ways to present oneself or makes oneself presentable, even within a generation. It was rather more surprising to hear that truth and correctness were subject to debate. I felt like Diane Keaton's character, Erica, in Something's Gotta Give, when she complains to Jack Nicholson's character, Harry, that he has deceived her. He answers, "I've always told you some version of the truth." She howls back that "the truth doesn't have versions." But, of course, she is wrong. Armies of spin doctors out there live with that convenient truth every day.

           I think what Shields is getting at is related to something Leslie Marmon Silko says about the role of story in helping build consensus, or maybe it's the ways consensus relates to stories, in traditional Pueblo cultures. Maybe in many such tribal cultures? Story telling has two functions: a) to define and preserve tradition (i.e. to define and reproduce cultural norms), and b) to accommodate change. The Pueblo, Silko explains, "sought a communal truth, not an absolute. For them, truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries" ("Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination").

          Tribalism is no longer a village thing, however, not something set by geography, blood and marriage ties. We do not live in a single, reasonably homogeneous tribalized culture anymore, and have not for rather a long time in urbanized North America (or pretty much anywhere else in the urbanized world). We are in an age predicted by Tesla and given a name by McLuhan. Tesla, in a 1926 interview in Colliers Magazine, predicted: 

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Picking up on something like this idea McLuhan in, Understanding Media (1964): said “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” And somewhere along the way mentioned the "global village" in an era of tribalism mediated by electronic technology: "...electronic technology creates not the nation but the tribe."

In effect, as I see it, electronic technology creates not the tribe, but multiple tribalisms--a lot of villages one can be part of from one electronic centre, a centre that moves when we do (or when our shirt pocket does--though doctors advise us not to carry those devices so close to our hearts). Maybe even a lot of different kinds of villages. And it creates different ways to belong, electronically.

       What am I saying about "friendships" negotiated through Facebook, if people who are in that tribe (or in a  tribalized group within the bigger world of my Facebook friends) are not something or someone I'm following on my Twitter? And if they are or are not in my "Contacts" list on my cell phone? Or in my e-mail? Or even in the hard copy notebook I carry such information around in? Do my different social media/electronic and non-electronic communications devices, that let me reach out and touch someone, not only connect me with different tribes, based on different loyalties and interests? Do they also create different kinds of tribes through the different ways they mediate the connections?  Am I tribalized different ways by every medium I tribalize through? Even if the same person or persons are members with whom I associate via different media, are my tribal relations different in each case?

        If so, are the truths open to me and the beauty I can be exposed to and levels of correctness I can reach some kind of consensus over, different because of the different webs and socially mediated, electronically programmed conventions through which I seek consensus?

       Somehow the idea of epistemes begins to gnaw at the corners of my curiosity. What are the unexamined norms the different tribalizing media make me party to?

Have to start somewhere: or, the journeys of a thousand words

This is not quite the realization, or the attempted realization, of a New Year's resolution, because I didn't have the idea in time to make a resolution. But some resolve will be part of keeping it going. It's not that the idea of producing a thousand words or so each week is in any way daunting. I write more than that most days. But I do not write them on a keyboard, usually, except for what I produce at work.  And I have been doing most of my writing by word processor or similar technology since the late 1970s, when the newspaper I worked for (the Star Phoenix in Saskatoon) went automated. I was the first MA student in my U. of S. program to write his thesis on a personal computer (a Xerox, with 8-inch disk drives, and less memory than a kids' toy these days).

What I usually write with when I'm in the mood is a fountain pen, in some nice notebook. My pen of joy these days is in the new Visconti Van Gogh "Starry Night" pattern, a Christmas present. It sends ink flowing gently over a CD 15 notebook. In Private Reserve "Midnight Blues" ink. None of this does a lot to make me a penman of note--my handwriting never has been grandly cursive. More henly scratchive.

I read of a fountain pen that did its owners some good in The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Daniel Sempere, the protagonist, covets a Montblanc Meisterstuck (thought the book spells it "Meinsterstuck" apparently to distinguish it from the "real" thing). The pen is part of a numbered series, with a gold nib. Daniel sees it in the window of a shop near his father's book shop. The shopkeeper tantalizes him with the story that this was the pen Victor Hugo used to write Les Miserables. Daniel's father is less than convinced, but does not want to ruin Daniel's delight in the pen and the story. Nor does he want to thwart Daniel's plans to become a writer--plans being held back by trying to produce stories with a Staedler pencil, a number two. Still, the father is shocked at the price of the pen, and skeptical about whether such pens even existed in Hugo's days. He tells the fifteen-year-old Daniel to keep writing with the pencil, and that he will get him the pen before he has finished his first story. 

The fatherly skepticism is calculated to send a reader of on some research. At least, it did me. The Meisterstuck was first made in 1924. That's more than a sneeze away from pre-1862, when Les Miserables was published. The reference to Les Miserables is partly to get an intertextual connection between mid-20th-century Barcelona and mid 18th century Paris, I think. Besides, the fictional author, Julian Carax, wrote the fictional piece of fiction, The Shadow of the Wind, in Paris, having had to run from his home in Barcelona. There is even an evil Inspector, Fumero, echoing the Inspector hounding the pages of Les Miserables. In fact, though the Mei(n)sterstuck that Daniel does receive for his 16th birthday does not make him into a successful writer, he is able to return it to its previous owner, Carax, who wrote The Shadow of the Wind with it, and who then uses it to revive his own writing career. Something about the writer making the pen, not the pen the writer, I think.

What's this got to do with anything. Beats me, but I do love the feel of a pen in my hand, and the sight of the ink line shaping itself to the twists of my wrist and arm as I move the pen across the page. The way each different fountain pen I write with has its own array of distinctive expressive lines, and seems to take to its own ink. Glowing Private Reserve Electric DC Blue for the other Visconti Van Gogh; tropical Monteverdi Turquoise for the Acme "Nancy Wolff" pattern, with the dogs parading all around the barrel. The lush purple finish of Private Reserve Tanzanite for the Monteverdi. It's not quite the same as the tick, tick, tick of the keyboard, though there is some pleasure in watching the letters and lines accumulate across the screen, I have to admit.