Maria Meindl

Heartbreaking Momentum

February 12, 2015

‘Gruelling’ was the word that came to mind as I watched Marathon, a new theatre and dance piece by Aharona Israel, part of the Progress festival at The Theatre Centre. Gruelling in a good way.

Clad in running gear, the three performers run in circles for a full, hyperkinetic hour. Besides the occasional “change!” signalling a change of direction, they call out words like “traffic!” “remember!” “hora!” “shiksa!” and “grenade!” accompanying each with a stylized gesture.

But nothing changes, really. They just get more and more exhausted. Shoulders slump, footsteps shuffle. For one seemingly interminable passage, they don’t change direction at all. “Are you dizzy?” They ask the audience. Yes. We’re all dizzy. The only place to slow down or stop is the middle of the stage, but the introspection that happens there is unproductive, tormented or both. Best to keep running.

The performers address the audience, and each other; still, the words don’t so much tell a story as create a collage of commonplaces. Punctuating the relentless rhythm of the footsteps, phrases return as they would in an exhausted runner’s mind.

Bathed in an atmosphere of machismo, the lone woman is jostled, pulled and blocked with a jarring lack of deference. At one point she’s herded menacingly into the middle, a place where she does not want to be. She shouts out obscenities with the best of them, yet her speech is marked by a girlish quality as she defines her role as a bereaved relative, a suffering sibling. The rituals of grieving she describes have a formulaic, unsatisfying quality. She offers food insistently, then pinches disgustedly at her trim figure, wherever she can find flesh.

War does not appear as a featured event; it emerges from the prevailing mood. The occasional raids, with their atmosphere of panic and confusion, are not followed by any hint of rest. The race continues, as fast as ever. Thus, momentum itself becomes a heartbreaking plot element. The most disturbing moment comes at the end. Because Marathon doesn’t end. The three performers keep on running, and we have no choice but to abandon them.

Marathon is very much rooted in contemporary Israeli society, but to me, it’s a universal cry for rest and introspection. These individual, exhausted bodies are make up a country, and in our visceral response to them, we can’t help but recognize elements from our own lives.

Small Axe, big shift

January 25, 2015

A few years ago, actor and playwright Andrew Kushnir was with a friend and colleague in their dressing room. The friend — who was from Jamaica — talked about being gay and coming from an oppressed culture. Kushnir, who’s of Ukrainian descent, said something in the order of, “I know how you feel.”

The friend gently and — as Kushnir often reminds us — generously, disagreed, giving rise to Small Axe, an exploration of what white people can and — and can’t ever — know. It’s on at The Theatre Centre until February 1.

Small Axe is documentary theatre; the text is drawn from interviews with lesbian and gay people of colour living in Canada. It’s delivered by five actors standing on platforms mounted on a simple scaffold, with Kushnir, front and centre, at stage level. He starts by telling the audience: “I am white; you are black,” framing the show as a a kind of theatrical address to his friend, but also setting up a dynamic of constantly shifting perspectives. We won’t be able to take any of what follows at face value.

There’s nothing more fascinating than people’s real stories, offered without pretense or manipulation. Having actors present them live provides so many more dimensions than any film; the human voice and body can invoke a whole world.

The initial stories are not-unfamiliar narratives of coming out, but the plot soon thickens to a murky brew of homophobia, racism and colonialism. Each story has an opportunity to stand on its own terms, then instantly, others layer and collide, making facile judgments impossible. Fragments circle back, gaining new levels of meaning every time they’re heard. Without losing sight of the horrors of homophobia in Jamaica, we discern the legacy of slavery that underlies it. The trauma is real, but just as real is the celebration of sexuality infusing all the stories.

“What is between stories?” asks Kushner. He had his own story, and tried to share it with his friend out of a simple desire to reach out to another person, never imagining that he might be opening a wound. And even now — as his respondents point out — Kushnir, the white guy, is the one standing centre stage, holding the microphone, not to mention the funding. He’s the one who gets to shape how the story will be told. It’s not the Jamaican story he’s telling, but his own story about recognizing his part in oppression.

Kushnir spends most of the play listening, and his task as an actor is hard. The stories may be grippingly dramatic; still, the main action of the play is internal. With his face, and some expressive movement as tools, Kushnir needs to convey what teachers of writing often disparage as a “shift in sensibility.” Small Axe is living proof that a shift in sensibility can both important and interesting. This play has been worked and reworked, torn apart and put back together a thousand times. To me, it shows. There’s a solidity and subtlety to this play, that could only have taken years to build.

The play wraps up with a more interactive segment. One of the speakers warns Kushnir against over-simplification. As a white person, and straight to boot, I can’t be the one to say whether he succeeds in avoiding it. I do know that Small Axe is a bid for attentiveness, patience and delicacy of feeling in a time of overblown plots and trite answers. I’m glad to live in a place where this kind of conversation can happen, even if its not often enough.

Essential reading

August 29, 2014

The title of Karyn L. Freedman’s One Hour in Paris: a True Story of Rape and Recovery is ironic. In the time it takes to watch an episode of Madmen or dry a load of laundry, the twenty-two year old Freedman’s life was changed, brutally, and against her will. The attack which — by the clock’s measure — lasted one hour has remained with her ever since. Freedman is unequivocal when she states, “trauma is permanent.” After that hour in Paris, it became a lifetime’s task for Freedman not only to live in the world with her trauma, but to decide how, when, and to whom to tell her story.

Not the least of her challenges as a rape survivor has been living at odds with the sense of safety most of us are schooled to take for granted. Writes Freedman,

Although this picture is slowly changing, historically, at least in the West, girls have been taught from a young age that the world is basically a safe place and that so long as you are sufficiently careful and intelligent, you can protect yourself from any serious harm. … So how does the rape survivor reconcile this dominant worldview with what has happened to her? After all, it cannot be true both that the world is a safe place and that you were raped unless, of course, the rape was your fault. The other alternative is to reject the dominant worldview, but this means accepting the fact that we live in a world where women, by virtue of being women, are at risk. For a variety of reasons, it can be easier and less painful to believe instead that being raped was a result of your own poor choices. (73)

I found it — I’m grasping for the right word here – Satisfying? Nourishing? … Essential! — to have it affirmed that the world is not really a benign place for women; we are at best undervalued, at worst, the targets of a merciless and systematic campaign of subjugation. It’s uncomfortable to talk about it, yet I think we all – on some level – feel it.

I’m not  – thank goodness – a victim of rape and hesitate even to write this for fear of diminishing the experience of anyone who has been through it. A vague sense of threat is not the same as full-on trauma. Freedman describes her panic attacks, her catastrophic fears. She has been robbed of the ability to be at ease in her body.

Yet all of us live with whatever attitudes, beliefs and habits of thought make rape such a common occurrence. Dissociation, cognitive distortion, simple abuses of power hurt us all. And the victims of rape include our friends, teachers, colleagues, daughters, and mothers. In her introduction, Freedman dedicates the book to rape survivors, and tells her own story with an unflinching intimacy, yet there is also a sense of universality.

“[Rape is] a problem that is the result of the way that societies are structured and resources and power distributed. The fact that rape is a social problem can be hard to remember, because rape is also intensely personal and deeply isolating.”

The book is less than 200 pages long, progressing from a detailed and frank account of the rape itself, through Freedman’s oh-so-understandable – though ultimately failed — attempts to minimize her trauma. Then comes the story of the tough and courageous work she did in therapy to first (as the title of one of chapter puts it) live in it, then live with what she uncovers. She goes on to write about how her world eventually expanded from the narrow horizon rape imposed on her. She has traveled to Africa, (ground zero — as she puts it — in the war against women), formed a healthy, loving relationship and even revisited the scene of her rape.

This process has not been a straight line. As that hour in Paris moved further and further into the past, Freedman’s understanding of it became increasingly nuanced. There were also excruciating, infuriating moments where the rapist’s violent actions continued to reverberate through her life.

The book is written in accessible, matter-of-fact language; still, beneath the surface we can discern a framework of questions that Freedman, a professor of philosophy, must regularly address, questions of what we know and how we know it, of the relationship between body and mind, of subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity, of what language can and can’t do.

Her inquiry into how society has historically constructed trauma is utterly fascinating. I found myself wishing for more of this sort of discussion, informed by philosophical rigour and grounded in personal experience. I would have loved to hear more of Freedman’s thoughts on Africa, where sexual assault is so widespread, and resources so limited, and about how, as Freedman herself wonders, the women find it possible to survive.

At the prospect of publishing her book, Freedman writes that she “stopped breathing.” Grappling with a fresh outcropping of panic, she felt her rapist’s knife against her throat. During her ordeal, he told her to shut up, and now here she was, committing the ultimate act of rebellion against his threats. (Actually, the section made me think of a wonderful article by Stacy May Fowles — not about her rape experience — but about the anxiety of the first-time novelist.) I would like to hear more about Freedman’s process of freeing herself from this panic, and her interpretation of what all this means.

But I respect Freedman’s choice  – and clearly it was a choice – to keep this book short and to the point. It has integrity in this form. And even though I wanted to hear more, I would not wish the pain of revisiting the experience on anyone. Better still, I wish no one had a rape story to tell.

Making order, and other impossible tasks

August 19, 2014

No blogging all summer! I took a break to do a big purge in my office – not a very successful one. I didn’t end up throwing much away; mostly just cursed and sweated and rearranged things. Well, sort of. There wasn’t even time to finish it all, and now life is getting busy again.

That’s fine by me. The whole undertaking invoked a cascade of depressing thoughts. Shouldn’t some library be clamouring for my archives by this time? Look at all these manuscripts I’ve been working on for years and years and years! Will anything ever get finished? And these shelves of journals filled with nothing but worries! What have I done with my life?

Etc.

But I did manage to make some fall resolutions. In the interests of making more room for what’s already there, I’ve decided to refresh this blog by covering more plays and performance events. That’s why I was delighted to hear about Light and Shadow: an exploration of lighting and choreography presented by Made in Canada Dance at the Winchester Theatre last Saturday night. The programme was the culmination of a workshop with lighting designer Arun Srinivasan, and two of the pieces were repeated, with different lighting designs.

Exploration … workshop … I’m there! I can never get enough of process, it seems. So even though it was just a one-night event, and thus, not the greatest subject for review, I’m going to cut my performance-writing teeth on it anyway.

Silencio, a Flamenco piece, opened with three dancers seated in a row on straight-backed chairs. The fourth chair, standing empty, served as a chilling symbol of loss. This piece was a study in containment and explosive release. The dancers’ bodies seemed to be packed with grief which found expression in rhythmic stomps and claps.

Peggy Baker’s Land/Body Breath was initially performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, among the sculptures and paintings in the Thomson collection of Canadian Art. On Saturday, the repertory stream of Baker’s summer intensive program danced it on a bare stage.

The music, first performed by singers Fides Krucker and Ciara Adams, was interpreted this time by a group of people who mostly don’t identify themselves as singers. Entering along with the sixteen dancers, they gathered in a circle to one side, singing fragments from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” which evolved into bubbling, chaotic sounds invoking running water. This gave way to a series of piercing nasal tones that made them sound like a troupe of gleeful mosquitoes. They finished with a throat-singing backup to Krucker’s rendition of Neil Young’s “Helpless.”

Away from the artworks which had originally surrounded the piece, the dancers formed a kind of shifting landscape of their own, swirling, gyrating, rolling down to the floor and getting up again as one large, complex entity before ending up in a line across the stage. Backed by the steady pulse of throat singing, Krucker’s “Helpless” carried a sense of dignity that was heartbreaking. It did not protest against helplessness or try to fix it, but merely laid it out in a matter-of-fact way. The dancers, lined up along the stage swaying like grass or young trees had a quality of immense vulnerability.

The work I wished I could have seen twice was the gorgeous Tryptich by Alias Dance Project, On its website Alias acknowledges Street Dancing as an influence and indeed the movements of these three young women looked like soft, graceful breakdancing. There was an immense solidity to these dancers, and I was continually surprised to notice that they might be supporting themselves on one leg, or even one arm rather than both feet. They seemed to be able to multi-purpose various parts of their bodies. Most admirable was piece’s emotional tone, which, for me, captured something essential about adolescence. There were moments of trouble, of disorganization both within the individual and among the dancers. They would resolve, only to destabilize again. The angst was portrayed great respect, and the mutability worked because the emotional reality of each moment was so clear.

To me, the changes in lighting design did not make a big difference. Maybe this is not a bad thing. For a lay audience-member, a lighting design which draws attention to itself surely can’t be doing its job. But in the end, seeing the two pieces repeated served as a reminder that this was a live event, impossible to reproduce, exactly, from one time to the next. It gave a sense of continuous process, a question mark rather than a full stop.

And all this brings me to my second resolution of the fall: to start keeping journals again.

Blogger-i-nations

May 30, 2014

Thanks to Carin Makuz at matildamagtree.wordpress.com for inviting me to participate in this blog tour.  Here’s a link to the post itself. It’s been a great opportunity to get better acquainted with other writers, as well as to reflect on how things are going these days.

The week of June 2, the blog tour torch goes to two writers I admire. The first is Ellen S. Jaffe author of — among works in every genre — Skinny Dipping With the Muse from Guernica editions.  It’s a powerful collection with great breadth of feeling: poignant, witty, sexy and wise, it strikes so many notes. The other is Julia Zarankin, a writer of hilarious and touching non-fiction and a finalist in Prism‘s non-fiction competition. She’s also a fellow contributor to The M Word.  She’s also an ardent and devoted birder.

Okay, here are the four questions I answered for the tour …

What am I working on?

My essay, “Junior,” recently came out in The M Word, so that has led to a number of readings. It’s also – and this is the best part – led to some fascinating conversations about motherhood, both in and out of print. Here‘s a great example. The Draft Reading Series just wrapped up its ninth season, and there’s been some administration to do. I also teach Feldenkrais classes in a couple of Toronto locations.

And … this winter – thanks to the dear Toronto Arts Council – I was blessed with lots of time to work on a non-fiction manuscript, The Last Time We Were All Together, a memoir about the decade-and-a-half that I spent as a care-giver, with a few music-hall songs thrown in to lighten things up.

I am also working on an ambitious series of novels about charismatic spiritual leaders and the groups which cluster around them. Research for The Last Time We Were All Together will also be useful for this series.

How does my work different from others’ in this genre?

My non-fiction manuscript is my own story so I guess that makes it unique, but lately, I feel that there’s too much pressure on writers of non-fiction to dress up or distinguish their experiences in some way. Maybe I’m just at the writing stage where I need to stick my fingers in my ears and hum. Honestly, though, I just want to tell my story well, hoping that others who go through the experience of care-giving at a young age will have a few more points of discussion and options for getting through it with grace.

Why do I write what I do?

I write things that are compelling to me, and stay that way, because these days, projects tend to drag on for a long time. Fiction, I write because I love the process. It is totally pleasurable for me. Non-fiction, I write because it’s meaningful. When I read really good non-fiction, it gives me a way of navigating my own experience. If I can do this for even one person then the work put into it – however painful or tedious — is worthwhile.

How does my writing process work?

I get up, I walk, I write. If I have something unavoidable to do in the morning, I get up very early, I write, I walk. Perspiration over inspiration is my motto.

I really have been fortunate over the last few months in that I’ve actually been able to make writing the main thing in the day. It’s like a dream come true. Of course nothing stays the same and I’ll cope with whatever comes next, but I’m also reaching a point where I don’t mind admitting it’s better this way. I have managed in the past to convince myself that I get more done or get less bent out of shape by rejection when I have a job or some focus other than writing, but I am getting too old for that. The truth: more time is better. Everyone should have more time.

Defining Moments

May 2, 2014

Many years ago, I went to a wedding, and at dinner, sat next to a woman with a toddler on her lap. The child did some kind of toddler-thing, and an object from the table – a salt-shaker, I think – went flying. I caught it in mid-air and placed it out of harm’s way, while the conversation continued.

Later, the woman asked me where my kids were. Twenty-five years old, and with no plans to procreate, I was stunned. This appeared to surprise her.

“Well then, you’ll make a very good mother,” she concluded, beaming.

The question of having kids was never not fraught, for me, but for some reason, I felt quite sanguine about that conversation. I took the remark as a compliment even as I recognized that a salt shaker was not the only potentially dangerous projectile in the room. Assumptions were flying around, too.

She didn’t say, for instance, “Wow, with a quick reflex like that, you really should run for mayor.” Or more to the point, “Thanks.”

The conversation was okay because I knew she meant well. And looking back, I wonder if including me in the category of mothers was the best way she could find to express, and strengthen, a sense of kinship with me. For a split second we had shared something important.

In the years that followed, assumptions about motherhood were to make my choices very fraught indeed, yet I went on connecting with mothers in ways that were as reflexive as catching that salt-shaker. Getting along with children has been an acquired skill, but I’ve always been hungry for books, films, conversations about mothering, even though I never had a child of my own. It was all fine, as long as I didn’t think about it too much. But I think about everything too much.

And this is one of the many reasons I was thrilled to have an essay in The M Word, Conversations about Motherhood edited by Kerry Clare. I’m in good company: among thoughtful women, thinking about motherhood. And not just women who are – in the physical sense – mothers.

Clare writes in her introduction of the “presumed gulf between women with children and women without them, one that is usually presented as unbridgeable.” Yet she also points out that there’s a perceived “central zone” of maternity to which none of us really belong. The book includes stories of abortion, adoption, step-parenting, ambivalent parenting (and non-parenting), infertility, miscarriage, the tragic death of children as well as the choice not to have children … and being more-than-okay with that. There are also families of all shapes and sizes.

It’s impossible to be objective, so I won’t be. My first reaction when reading the stories all together was to feel the physical gulf reinforced. I have never given birth, and never will. For better or for worse. The book reminded me of what I had accepted long ago: I will spend my life in constant mourning for that loss, though the feelings wax and wane. Yet it also made me realize how grappling with that grief brings its own rewards.

Having a child is different from not having one. The trick is not to value one life path more highly than the other. This, I think, is strength of The M Word. The book is presented in a balanced way, in alphabetical order, by its very form asserting that all have equal weight. Of course, this book does exist in a neutral climate. Assumptions are what do the damage. My hope is that the intimacy of the stories will create windows for women into each other’s worlds. This certainly happened, for me.

Heidi Reimer’s gorgeous description of birth and bonding invokes an experience that even “natural” mothers can’t always rely on, and an important gift of the book is the way essays such as Heather Birrell’s “Truth, Dare, Doubledare” express this. Indeed, Reimer’s own essay goes on to show that giving birth is only a small part of what mothering really means.

In “A Natural Woman” Amy Lavender Harris takes on the concept of The Natural. (‘Natural’ is a word I use in my essay, “Junior,” as well.) Natural and Mothering go together, we all know this, but the connection needs to be constantly, vigorously interrogated. Assumptions, expectations, habits can become so entrenched that they seem to come from within, or from some divine source, or from some combination of the two. We can’t reliably tell the difference.

But while motherhood may not be inherently natural, or nature inherently motherly, I do believe it’s natural for women to step outside our silos and participate in the big conversation. There was something — I daresay — natural, in the way I caught that salt-shaker, years ago. The way we all continued talking.

The M Word is also striking for the amount of deep, inner pain and conflict it expresses around motherhood, even though the families depicted are mostly resilient, and children are always a gift. Reproductive choice – understanding it, using it responsibly, coping gracefully when it is taken away, is the dramatic fulcrum for the essays in this book as it is in women’s lives. Choice is of course still being undermined. But even generations from now, even in the scenario I hope for, where choice is both universal and well understood, we will only just have begun to sense how its lack has affected us. We are still paying the price of having been defined by motherhood, for so long.

Union Street by Pat Barker invokes a world not so very far behind us, and a situation that still obtains in many parts of the world. When I read The M Word, I thought of the at-times agonizing intimacy of Barker’s book. She portrays the women in a working class neighbourhood in northern England. At first read, I pegged it as taking place just after World War Two, a grittier version of Call the Midwife; then it became disturbingly clear that this was the 1970s. The women’s choices are severely limited, and not surprisingly, the key moments, the defining dramas of their lives are played out on the stage of motherhood.

In “Iris King,” Barker creates a character who gives constantly: to her husband, her children, her neighbours, her extended family … and shows just how far she’s ready to go when the time finally comes to say “no.” A mother’s struggle to bond with her girl-child provides the dynamic in “Lisa Goddard.” Barker relentlessly lays out the horrors of Lisa’s domestic situation, the conditions under which the child is conceived and gestated, culminating in an alienating experience of hospital birth. At the end, we can begin to appreciate the courage it takes this woman to feel a sense of hope, as new life is brought into the world.

These are stories of rape and abuse, at work and in the home, all of it endured from pure economic need. The stories have the same epic – and brutal — quality as Barker’s later portrayals of the First World War. The author mercilessly, yet respectfully, lets the traumas play out, leaving each story only when her characters have reached moments of transcendence and grace. In this way, she lets them define themselves. Yet she never normalizes the conditions under which they live. Union Street is something to be left behind.

Union Street — and its modern-day counterparts around the world — are the reasons the very struggles in The M Word are to be celebrated. But the world of The M Word, too, must evolve into something new and better.

This is why I found it so encouraging to read another anthology called A Family by any Other Name: Exploring Queer Relationships, edited by Bruce Gillespie. There’s an exquisite hopefulness to this book, despite the difficulties many of its contributors have endured. Marriage, parenting, family-building, are presented as fresh and filled with sweetness. There are sad experiences: adoption is interrupted by an intolerant system in “Piecing my Family Together” by Jason Dale. In Jean Copeland’s “The Gay Divorcee,” a woman falls prey to age-old illusions about marriage.

Yet there is also “What She Taught Me” by Ellen Russell, a story of partner-loss, which is sad for sure, but it is also a celebration of a life shared. In “Hiddur Mitzvah” S. Bear Bergman describes the rich weave of old and new traditions that he and his husband are passing on to their son. A couple in Sarah Griffe’s “Rare Species” navigate the unfamiliar social terrain of raising a son with two moms. They proceed tentatively, but find they can sometimes dance.

Jeffrey Ricker in “Operation: Baby” concludes:

… when things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped, we make do. It’s what queer people have always done, take a shitty situation and sift through it for what is worth salvaging. … Give us something broken and we’ll fix it. We’ll make it better than it was to begin with, even. We do it with houses, we do it with neighbourhoods, and when we need to, we do it with families.

That’s a lot of responsibility to take on, but he’s right; the family is seriously in need of renovation. And conversations are part of the repair.

Books are a Girl’s Best Friend

January 24, 2014

The headline for Kerry Clare’s blog post said it all. The Morning After: What Do We Do Now?

News of the imminent closing of the Annex branch of BookCity hit hard. There’s a terrible finality to it. We’ll probably never see an independent book store on that strip of Bloor Street again. Bookstores are intimate place which weave into our personal stories. When they disappear, they carry a lot of memories with them.

I lived south of Bathurst and Bloor through many tough times in my twenties and thirties. There were nights when I’d go to Book City just to get out. Well into the evening, the doors were open, the lights were on, and I knew there would be other people there, people who shared something with me, even if I didn’t talk to them. When I was broke, I knew I wouldn’t be pressured to spend money. I could just be there among books and magazines, dipping into worlds created by people I knew were probably as lonely as me but had somehow turned it to their advantage. (By the way, whenever times were better I did spend money there as I continue to do.)

All these thoughts came at a time when I was gobbling up Anthony De Sa’s Kicking the Sky, which evokes the neighbourhood where I lived during those years, the area just to the west and south of Bathurst and Dundas. The descriptions of the neighbourhood are richly detailed, as are the accounts of what it was like to be a kid in Toronto in the seventies. The book is set in the Portuguese community, following the murder of a shoe-shine-boy, Emanuel Jaques, on Yonge Street. This is, in my memory and that of many others, the year when Toronto lost its innocence. For the Portuguese community, the experience was devastating.

Kicking the Sky is a dark book, in which we see a group of adolescent boys exposed to the seamiest and most corrupt aspects of adult life. Redemption comes through family and friendship, but there’s also an escape presented … through books. In the midst of the violence of their everyday lives, the group of boyhood friends talk about Lord of the Flies, which they’re reading in school. The intelligence and sensitivity of that conversation tells us that they’re going to be okay, that they’re building a capacity to create meaning from whatever happens to them.

Introducing himself at the beginning of the book, the narrator, Antonio, throws in a few remarks about his love of learning and of language. He has found a way of hiving off and protecting this part of himself, and we know it’s developing and maturing, even as he experiences a violent coming-of-age. Reading allows this part of him to grow, and so does public school. We know that new possibilities await him beyond the story’s end. To me, the most subtle aspect of this brutal book is its greatest strength.

It’s yet another argument for the importance of books and reading in children’s lives.  What about book stores? So many discussions, since the news of Book City’s closure, have hinged on whether we will live to see the end of bricks-and-mortar bookshop in our lifetimes, always with the question of whether the next generation will ever know the magic of being introduced to books this way.

Kerry’s post is accompanied by a photo of her daughter, giving rise to the chilling thought that Harriet may some day look at the photo just as I look at the picture of myself  on the deck of a ship in 1960, back when the most reasonably priced way for a family to cross the Atlantic was by ocean liner. As a middle-aged woman, will Harriet look back on this photo as evidence that she was part of a vanished way of life?

It’s scary to imagine a generation who feel that way about bookstores. They are places where the value of valuing books is transmitted from one generation to the next. Libraries are, too, of course, but in a bookstore, money changes hands. It’s good for kids to read, and see their parents reading, no matter how the books get into the house. But an online purchase is abstract. In a bookstore, the parent (or in the case or yours truly, the aunt) takes out her wallet and pays. When you leave, there may have to be some calculation to see if there’s enough left for ice cream. Maybe there’s discussion about where the money came from to allow this splurge in the book store.

My most cherished bookstore memory is one of largesse. Whenever there was a windfall in our house, my father, an artist, would take me to what we called “Britnells” at Yonge and Bloor. Officially, it is was The Albert Britnell Book Shop, and The Starbucks which took it over has, fortunately, preserved the woodwork and lighting, the tiles on the floor. It was a plush, classy place, and had a hallowed quality. Our household income fluctuated, but in the big picture, we didn’t have much. A visit to the bookstore would happen when my father got a grant, sold a drawing, or got some other one-time infusion of cash. In Britnells, we were rich.

My father would buy me whatever I wanted, as many books as I wanted. I remember a particular visit, when I was about eleven years old. I left the store laden with a pile of so many Anne of Green Gables books that I had to balance them with my chin. These were hardcovers, with dust-jackets. I still have them.

Afterwards, we went to the Coffee Mill for a treat, and talked enthusiastically, both of us on a kind of high. I told him my ideas and plans, and he listened very earnestly. My father’s way of taking me seriously nourished me in the most profound way. In these discussions, I could feel my self growing and strengthening, just as I could feel my nightly glass of milk feeding my bones.

I knew I was being initiated into something, prepared for something. Books were the currency of love in our household. At Christmas and birthdays, and sometimes “just because,” my father would buy my mother books in the anticipation of sharing them. He loved my mother,  his mother, had loved his father in the same way. I looked forward to a friendship with the generation before, that would be built through books.

The value being conveyed to me in Britnells was that you can, and should, gorge yourself on books and stories – on culture, whether or not you really have the money for it. You should always have more books than you can carry. To this day I don’t feel like I’ve really got anything to read unless there’s a pile of five books on the arm of the chair. Years later, I watched the film Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, on late-night-TV. There’s a scene where Jane Russell, selects jewelry. “I’ll have that and that, and that and that,” she says, in the most delightfully nonchalant fashion. It made me think of that day in the bookstore.

It was a kind of largesse my father got to display only in this setting, only at times like this. Maybe he was being the father he most wanted to be. All I know is that I felt utterly loved, utterly taken care of. That feeling was just the first part of that scene to disappear, but the memory is beautiful.  And so are the books.

Momentum

December 16, 2013

Just do it.
Don’t put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today.
If you wait for perfect conditions, nothing will ever get done.
If you want something done, ask a busy person.        

For years I have fueled myself with some version of these sayings, and I know I’m not alone. Without them, almost nothing would get written in this world where time and attention are in ever shorter supply. I’m not alone, either, in the truckload of perfectionism, self-doubt and just plain guilt I haul to my desk every time I sit down to write. Sometimes the only way to get past all this is to blast violently through it, or distract myself with a full schedule. We all do what we have to do. Lately, though, I’ve begun to think all this relentless doing may be costing us all more than we care to admit.

I recently finished a contract which stuffed twenty-five to thirty extra hours of work into an already-full schedule. Throughout the year I continued to organize the Draft reading series and carry on my Feldenkrais practice. I also completed a draft of my novel. And I was oh-so aware, during this time, that among the writers in my community, I am a real lightweight. Some have forty to sixty-hour a week jobs, and/or children, and/or elderly parents, and/or health problems, themselves. Some of these responsibilities have come by choice, some, not so much, but they keep on writing. Every day during this busy year I admired them, and counted my blessings that I had so few demands to juggle.

And then the contract finished, and I went from being insanely busy to moderately busy, from responding to someone else’s expectations, working in someone else’s office, to establishing my own framework again. I felt my whole system slow down. The alarm which had never failed to wake me at five a.m. all year, now feels like a joke. Where this time last year I’d whip through each day’s agenda, I now require half an hour of pacing up and down the hall, staring out the window, and researching the most recent outfit of the Duchess of Cambridge, between every item on my “to-do” list. Chores which I’ve been stashing in stray pockets of time have expanded to fill whole weekends. How did laundry get to take that long?

Decision-making has slowed down, too. The tiny implications of each course of action weigh on me, my naturally detail-oriented mind ruminating for days over how to word a three-sentence email. My body has become a veritable symptom factory, each rash, each sore throat, each bout of dizziness providing fuel for the epic sessions of worry that precede sleep each night. And I’m sensitive. I – who inured myself so brilliantly to office politics in the interest of getting through the day – now find myself bursting into tears if someone looks at me wrong.

I am, in short, going crazy.
I should just get busy again, right?
That’s what I’m starting to question.

In Feldenkrais lessons, there’s an instruction that often accompanies repeated movements. If you are raising your leg a number of times, you’re asked to lay it down and pause between the movements, starting each one from the very beginning rather than being carried along on momentum. It’s easy, verging on automatic, for most of us to let a mechanical rhythm take over, and if the goal is the raise a leg in the air twenty-five times, then we achieve the goal. But it’s not about the goal.

I’ve always been fascinated with how much of every movement is present from the beginning – and by ‘beginning’ I mean even the intention to move, even the way the system mobilizes to do it. If I tend to clench my jaw when I lift my leg, the seeds of that action are there at the very, very start. It’s only in being really quiet, taking time for the transition, that I become aware of it. To me, this moment of awareness is the wellspring of creativity, the moment when something truly new can happen. On the other hand, if I don’t pause, the habits and preconceptions that were there at movement one, are likely to be there at movement twenty-five.

I know this on a kinaesthetic level, from the quiet and introverted context of doing Feldenkrais work. I also believe that everything I write is infused with my whole world view, my whole way of being in the world. If the very tiniest part of that world view is picked up by only one reader, it becomes part of a much, much bigger conversation. And most of this never reaches the level of conscious discussion or even thought. That’s where I think just do it exacts its price.

We need to hear what parents, care-givers, busy working people have to say, and usually the only way they can say anything is in fits and starts and late night fifteen- minute scribbles.  Just do it. Of course. Whatever it takes. Yet there’s a fine line between making the best of a tough situation, and normalizing an unjust one.

Here’s where I start feeling really tired. Do I make a plea for more arts funding at this point, or maybe a total reorganization of society?  I truly despise the stereotype of the artist as special, and exempt from the responsibilities and attachments of adult life. Yet I’m starting think we need the space to get a little bit crazy, to receive credit for just how hard it is to get up every day and make something from nothing. Sure, we can just do it, but really, we should have time to stop and worry about which word to use, even if it also means worrying whether having trouble finding it might be a sign of dementia.

It’s not just about the words, but about the thoughts behind them. And there needs to be space to question habits of thought before the words spread too far to take back.

A Woman Looks on War: three poems by Mona Gould

November 11, 2013

Peace! Peace!

Lay down your lances in the dust
Though they may be bright and sharp and clean;
They would not so remain; and flecked
With blood they bear a bitter sheen.

Where once your head was eager turned
To meet the bugle’s martial cry
Take to yourself the wind instead
The sound of waves on rock; the high
Thin song of trees, of soughing boughs,
Of wagon wheels that patient turn
Creaking and slow, as homeward bound
They pass the woods, where pine and fern

Make sweet green scent, and clover lies
Like heavenly grass beneath the skies.

Lie down against the good brown earth
Kin to your dust; and know that here
Is rest from strife, and holy peace
And dark still healing for your fear.

Winner of the Canadian Authors’ Association Peace Prize for Poetry, 1936, and published in Poetry Yearbook, 1936. Poetry Group, Canadian Authors’ Association Montreal Branch.

Spring Sunday … In a Small Town

To-day they’re having Church Parade;
The Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides,
The Cubs and the Brownies,
Are all out, full force.
The uncertain, fumbling band begins a staggering march
And off they go, curling in a snaky line
Round the corner from the Market Square,
Under the old town clock.
All the people in town
Seem to have hurried down to one spot
To see their “young hopefuls” swinging past.
They don’t march any too well, either,
But that isn’t noticed.
There they go up the steps of the old gray church
And in at the door.

There isn’t any need for tears pushing up to the surface
But they do!
The peace of it!
The ironic, terrible sense of security,
The threat under the dream!
Let the band play,
Let the children march,
Let the parents weep!

From Tasting the Earth, MacMillan of Canada, 1943

Prayer at Queen and Yonge

What was he thinking,
The young soldier with the empty sleeve
And one foot off,
Watching the long, noisy Conga line
That snaked down Yonge Street?

You couldn’t tell by his eyes.
They were neither interested
Nor excited –
A little tired, maybe,
And sad, surely,
But not interested.

He stood in a safe doorway
And seemed more alone
Than anyone ought to be
On a day of celebration.
And yet, no one ventured to say to him,
“How is it with you …?
What’s the good word, Buddy?”

What he carried in his heart
Was his own quiet business.
If the shell that took his arm and foot
Also took his best friend
Well… your guess was as good as mine.
There were no cheers left in his heart
That much was apparent.

If by any chance he was toting up
What HE had paid for This Day
With his own body
I pray God, that for all the years of his life
He will find it a fair exchange.

Unpublished poem from the late 1940s.

A note on copyright: This work is covered by a Creative Commons Canada Attribution No-Derivatives License. Please feel free to enjoy and share the poetry of Mona Gould. It may be used without cost, providing you acknowledge the author and reproduce the work correctly. Mona Gould’s three books of poetry are available for free download on Project Gutenberg.

Process of Elimination … How Paper Remembers, by John Ide

June 16, 2013

Question:
How does paper remember?

Answer:
As randomly as we do.

This exchange might seem a little rigorous for a Saturday morning chat, but it’s typical of the conversations I have with my friend John Ide. We go back a long way; before he was friends with me, he was friends with my grandmother. For both of us, that meant listening to different versions of the same memory, coloured by the current mood, feud or opinion. My grandmother riffed on memory. Now, John and I spend a lot of time interrogating it.

What’s true? What’s a story? What’s a story about a story? Does memory change in the telling? Does it change the teller, or the person who hears? And what about stories that are not told – our own, or those of our elders?

I went to visit him last month during an unexpected heat wave, rushing out the door in a coat on a day when only a tee shirt was needed, tossing a digital recorder in my bag. John will be exhibiting some new drawings at the Loop Gallery, June 22 to July 14. I am excited to see them, to talk about them, and write about them.

John’s apartment is in one of those quiet and green pockets that you can still find in downtown Toronto, with ceramics and artworks carefully arranged within a small space. The desk is the focus of the room, a desk where he spends between five and ten hours a day, drawing.

The current work is part of a series he’s been creating for the past three years, work requiring little space, few materials – only pencils (HB and 2B), Stonehenge paper (often used for printmaking), chalk pastel and erasers – and lots … and lots … of solitary time.

His latest method is to lay down areas of colour in pastel, then crosshatch over the whole surface first in HB, then in 2B pencil. Then he uses a kneaded eraser to lighten precisely delineated shapes. The eraser sometimes picks up the graphite; sometimes smudges it or rubs it in deeper.

The drawings are striking for a gentle but uncompromising quality, their rich texture lost in reproduction, especially online. You have to see the works in person, spend time with them and look at them from various angles to appreciate what these surfaces have to offer. You see not just fields of dark and light, but the impressions of all the layers of cross hatching that went before. Particularly compelling are the rough edges of the paper, which stand out like lace against the white mat.

I want people to know about these drawings not just because I like them, but because they’re all about retreat from the marketplace, from goal-driven pushing, and chatter. They’re about someone being true to his process. I want to believe in a world where that kind of work wins out; for John, it’s just relaxing.

“Everything I do to the paper, changes the paper … The marks themselves: some of them hold bits of the graphite, some release it. I’ll find as the drawing is being built over time, white lines begin appearing, as if the paper has remembered where a line was before, but it’s been erased, the graphite was removed from the line, but now that the paper’s surface has received graphite, that indentation, like in an etching, has stayed light. And so I have white lines appearing across the drawing here and there, and that’s a random memory that’s appearing in the drawing.”

I wonder how others will see these drawings, without knowing their story. And that brings me to another frequent topic of conversation: What can be said about art?

The almighty Artist’s Statement can exert a kind of tyranny over both artist and viewer. As Tom Wolfe once wrote in The Painted Word, “Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.” Where myths and stories might once have inspired paintings, now the prevailing narratives are imposed by literary critics.

But for John, it’s not just about getting away from story or even image, it’s about getting away from thought.

“More often than not it’s the random aspects of the drawing that are working for me.  Any time when I begin to apply my thought to the drawing or I begin to put a preconceived dictate to what I think is working, that’s when the drawings begin to flounder.”

At the exhibition, there’ll be a tape loop playing of the sound of the pencil scratching on the paper, a sound that, he says, draws him forward, keeps him involved with the materials, with the surface and with the present moment. Certainly this is a meditative process, one in which the materials themselves become collaborators.

“The aesthetic control — those subtleties of dark and light — they just happen, and the more I’m there in the drawing, the more I’m there with the sound, not thinking of anything, the more I’m there to notice, ‘Oh, these little lights have shown up, I’m going to enhance them.’ I didn’t plan them to be there, I only recognized that they were there and I could bring them out a bit more.”

Yet narrative has always been a big element in John’s work. In the 1980s he explored history and memory in various installations. Family, or I Was Born in a Funeral Parlour, Forever Seduced by Glamour and A Funny Kind of Kid drew on his own memories. In 1989 he became the first archivist for my grandmother, Mona Gould. For Moments (1989), he assembled and curated not only images and texts, but many hours of tape of Mona telling stories of the past.

John has also been writing a memoir about his mother, who got polio in 1953 and lived out the rest of her years as a quadriplegic, depending on mechanical assistance to breathe. Inevitably, this has meant tangling with the thorny issues of memory’s reliability. When discussing the past with family members and friends of the family he found that they all remembered things differently. The writing and re-writing process continues …

But, knowing John and his work for so long, I know that the process of creating narrative has also been essential to this recent, non-objective work. Writing is all about revision, laying down layer after layer, and sometimes, strategically taking away.

In earlier drawings, there were faces, hands, figures, and gradually he covered them over. By looking sidelong at the paper you could imagine you saw the echo of one of these images, but could never really be sure. Now, John is working just with areas of colour, but the effect is the same. The areas of light and dark in these drawings resemble clouds in their ability to receive projections, give rise to stories. They are the suggestions of images, but in the end they are nothing more than mirrors of our own minds.