status update?

reading: world englishes (englishai?); the politics of language education in Canadian immigration
shooting: yoga, tattoos, bodies in (and out of) motion
listening: hiatus, bison ("the arcade fire of folk"... heh), and... well, all of this
planning: career move (vertical, not lateral)
laughing: at this breakdown of murakami themes
writing: not much outside academia

If I were to write, I'd write about the lives we lead and wish we led; about breaking bad habits and wanting what we can't have; about forgiving those who look you in the eye and lie; about focusing on the beauty and turning away from negativity; about smelling roses and the perfect way to say que te vaya bien and nothing more.

remembering eleven

i remember...

dancing through the night and riding home in the shocking cold of january

skimming ice chunks across a frozen lake

looking over vancouver as its light seeps into the night sky

holding eva on my shoulder and feeling love

standing on a rooftop, looking over volcanoes and feeling totally out of place (and loving it)

listening to the prettiest french accent and asking her to dance

chatting with mayan children and showing them how to skip rope

crossing a guatemalan farm, stopping to look into a night sky illuminated with stars

cooking easter dinner for twenty-two friends and re-purposing most of my furniture to seat them

wandering into the forest with my favourite friends and discovering spongelandia

exploring portland and its craft beer culture

being crushed amongst tens of thousands of fans as arcade fire closes out a festival

flying kites high above saturna island while orcas swim along the shore

shouting in the crowds of occupy vancouver and wondering if change will come

loving someone enough to turn around and walk away

admiring a golden tree while autumn winds tore it apart

climbing over a frozen ridge, terrible drops behind my feet, to find the freshest snow and the steepest slopes

dancing through the night and plodding home in the shocking cold of january

in this immense confusion

But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. 

Years ago, Douglas Coupland told me that the 20s are the hardest, most confusing, and loneliest time of a person's life. I 2/3 disagree. Still, I think he was on to something when he spoke about the confusion, about the immense confusion of living in a world without rules, a world where moral absolutes are shown to be fairy tales, lovers strangers, and stability a sham. It's also a world where new relationships friendships lovers are around every corner, a world where emotions are worn on one's sleeve, a world to discover and play in.

As one friend comes out to me, another's marriage stumbles. Thoughts and memories of my past whirl and haunt me while friends search for a meaningful present and look beyond the borders of Vancouver to an imagined future. An adored companion gets on a one-way flight and I sit and watch and wonder how it felt when I did this - did I ever leave a hole in a person's heart? For so long I've played the role of the friend and confidant, the person who brings people together around him and wants them to be happy.

It's been a long time since I've drawn blood and had the world revolve around me.

We celebrate my niece's first birthday this weekend and I lie on the floor and play with her. I watch her range of expressions and I'm lost in the simple sweetness of seeing this child grow. I've spent my years of confusion and it's this pleasure that I want now. I want to watch her grow and be there step-by-step as she comes to know us and the world of love surrounding her. I want to see my friends, centred in love, find fulfillment.

But this is a world without rules where pain and joy share a roof, where excitement and disappointment often walk hand-in-hand, where mountaintops demand valleys. It's complicated, it's confusing, and it's without order.

We used to have God and could rest in the belief that all was as He ordained. Then we killed Him and were left with the abyss and the unknowable stars. With a world that offers heaven and hell, but one without angels or demons... just us. Not fallen angels, nor creatures with a higher calling, nor evil waiting for hellfire. Just a world of animals seeking heaven under a sky of immense confusion, looking to one another for salvation and fleeing the lick of the flames.

Is there beauty in that?

the last sigh

When real love, the great grand thing itself, came along after she had gone, how bitterly, then, I resented my lot! With what hunger and rage I yearned to slow down the too-fast ticking of my unheeding internal clock! She never shook in me the child's conviction of his own immortality, which was why I could wish so lightly to throw away my childhood years. But Uma, my Uma, when I loved her, made me hear Death's lightning footsteps as they ran towards me; then, O then, I heard each lethal scything of his blade.

Rushdie - Moor's Last Sigh

what if they declared an emergency and nobody cared? (pt ii)

The real shame of Attawapiskat

richard wagamese

From Friday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Dec. 02, 2011 2:00AM EST

After seeing the images of Attawapiskat First Nation beamed around the country in recent days, a viewer could hardly be blamed for not believing that they were looking at a part of Canada, or that the people enduring this travesty are their aboriginal neighbours. Plywood walls, plastic-covered windows, 20 people sharing a two-bedroom house, a one-burner hot plate to cook for a whole family, lack of insulation, plumbing or electricity – the scene is tragic and heartbreaking.

But the people of such remote reserves have been living in a dire situation for a long time. The real shame of Attawapiskat is that the people who knew these conditions existed never told Canadians about them. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives knew. Shawn Atleo’s Assembly of First Nations knew. But it has taken a tragedy to reveal the stark truth.

It’s Mr. Atleo’s job as AFN national chief to know if his people are living under deplorable conditions. Each elected chief in the assembly has a responsibility to let him know. It’s then his responsibility to tell Canada about it and demand action.

In turn, the federal government has the responsibility to act. The job of an aboriginal affairs minister includes informing government when people are suffering. With that knowledge, it’s the responsibility of a prime minister to inform Canadians and tell us what the government intends to do about it.

Mr. Atleo failed to show leadership long ago. I’ve been a journalist since 1979, and I know how easy it is to craft a press release, hold a news conference and inform the public. But you have to want to do it. You have to want to confront wrong and demand change. I wonder if having his budget depend on a cozy relationship with the government prevents him from doing that.

In a recent interview with the CBC, Mr. Atleo alluded to a great number of other native communities in crisis. But rather than identify them and challenge the government to action, he let the opportunity pass. He murmured something about changing the status quo, yet squandered the opening to confront it.

Rather than initiate immediate physical action, Mr. Harper scheduled another meeting with Mr. Atleo. Then he put Attawapiskat under third-party management. What this effectively means is that the government put the blame squarely on the Indians. The subtext is that native leaders mismanaged millions and put their own people in danger. Meantime, nothing was being done for the people freezing in unheated tents, beyond the generosity offered by the Red Cross and fellow Canadians.

Interestingly, the result of Thursday's Harper-Atleo meeting was to agree to hold another meeting.

No, the real shame of Attawapiskat is that one government wants to ignore and blame while another wants to retain the status quo for its own survival and have another meeting. Shame on Mr. Atleo and Mr. Harper not doing anything before the story broke. Shame on them for merely booking another meeting. Shame on them for relying on the Red Cross to do the job they should have finished long ago. Shame on them for failing Canada.

what if they declared an emergency and nobody cared?

It's been three weeks since Attawapiskat First Nation took the extraordinary step of declaring a state of emergency. Since then, not a single federal or provincial official has even bothered to visit the community. 

No aid agencies have stepped forward. No disaster management teams have offered help.
Meanwhile temperatures have dropped 20 degrees and will likely drop another 20 or 25 degrees further in the coming weeks. For families living in uninsulated tents, makeshift cabins and sheds, the worsening weather poses serious risk ... 

Dr. John Waddell from the Weeneebayko Health Authority was in the community during this tour. He was emphatic that conditions had deteriorated to the point that an emergency situation was unfolding. Families are facing "immediate risk" of infection, disease and possible fire from their increasingly precarious conditions. Dr. Elizabeth Blackmore repeated this message of immediate risk just this past Friday at a press conference at Queen's Park. 

You'd think that a medical warning from a provincial health authority would move government into action. Think again. When it comes to the misery, suffering and even the death of First Nations people, the federal and provincial governments have developed a staggering capacity for indifference. 

Try to imagine this situation happening in anywhere else in this country. We all remember how the army was sent into Toronto when the mayor felt that citizens were being discomforted by a snowstorm. Compare that massive mobilization of resources with the disregard being shown for the families in Attawapiskat ... 

What we are witnessing is the inevitable result of chronic under-funding, poor bureaucratic planning and a discriminatory black hole that has allowed First Nations people to be left behind as the rest of the country moves forward. 

Take education for example. Not only are First Nations children systemically denied access to comparable levels of funding and resources available to non-Aboriginal students but, in the case of Attawapiskat, they don't even have access to a school. It's been 12 years since the community's grade school was shut down because children were being exposed to dangerous levels of benzene from the badly contaminated ground. Frustrated grade school children finally took matters into their own hands. They were led by 13-year-old Shannen Koostachin who launched a national campaign to shame the government into action. This fight for equal education has gone all the way to the United Nations. 

What other Canadian kid has to fight, organize and beg for access to clean and equitable schools?

I could keep quoting, but just read the article. Then think about if this ever could have happened in the community where you grew up.

There is something very, very wrong in Canada.

that pain in your stomach

It just shocks me, how even hearing from him can cause me so much pain. It's not that I want to be with him anymore, because I don't, but I can't leave that part of my life in the past. It's not a healthy connection, but thoughts of him twist me up inside, hurt me. The body, reacting to this threat, looks to fight or flight, but I just can't do either... I'm stuck. I can't demand solitude and I can't run away. I'm stuck.

Heartbreak.. too common to be surprising and too gut-wrenching to find peace.

the ground beneath her feet

As I read, I pay attention to phrases which stop me with bluntness, shock me with beauty, and sadden me with inchoate admiration. I mark them and keep them for later days so I can turn back and remember the wisdom and relive the beauty.

Reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie's ode to love, beauty, loss... to our better angels and affinity with the demons, I found myself turning pages over and over, frustrated, amazed, humbled and in wonderment over the prose, the insights into the realities and potentials of love, the expert writing of a master. As an insatiable audiophile, Rushdie's exploration of music left me feeling like a child in an adult's world; as a photographer, he humbles me with a lover's intimacy of the creation of art; as a writer, he breaks my heart with a mastery of words unutterably beyond my ken. But it's a recognition of and respect for a true master to pause and be humbled, to bathe in the glow of genius.

Something I love about Rushdie is his ceaseless use of intertextuality that situates his work within a canon of literature, music, popular culture, ancient religion and mythology; it takes its place in this palimpsest as a peer in the only conversation that matters: what it means to human. His work continually alludes to the world of art, but shyly so, making it easy to read on and miss all of the references; however, when they are recognized, it's a moment of charming connection between the author and reader, a wink and a nudge, a sly nod of mutual understanding and respect. And it's something that I look forward to as I will one day re-read his canon and understand his work in a new way, creating a text that is influenced by my own life.

I can't recommend highly enough this book.

Below, a few of my favourite lines from the book.
----------------------

When a woman who obsesses you hands down harsh judgements, they go deep. And when the chance to make those judgements come true offers itself, maybe you take them, maybe you live down to her low opinion of you and spend the rest of your life with the no-longer-deniable accusation stabbing you in the heart.

We repeat in ourselves the faults of the ones we have loved.

Love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

It's tough to speak of the beautify of the world when one has lost one's sight, an anguish to sing music's praises when your ear trumpet has failed. So also it is hard to write about love, even harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. Which is no excuse; happens to everyone.

Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost.

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? ... Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.

All they had in life was attitude, but it was a steed which would get you a long way if you knew how to stay on its back.

She embraced instability, her own and the world's, and made up her own rules as she went along. Nothing was certain in her vicinity any more, the ground was always trembling, and of course the fault lines spread through her from top to toe, and faults in human beings always open up in the end, like cracks in the groaning earth.

What was it like, the First Photograph? Its subject: nothing more elevated than the view from the workroom window... All is dull, still, dim. No hint here that this is the first quiet note of what will become a thundering symphony, or it may be more honest to say a deafening cacophony. But (I switch metaphors in my excitement) a floodgate has been opened, an unstoppable torrent of pictures is to follow, haunting and forgettable, hideous and beautiful, pornographic and revelatory, pictures that will create the very idea of the Modern, that will overpower language itself, and cover and distort and define the earth, like water.

Here the polyphonic reality of the road disappeared and was replaced by silences, mutenessses as vast as the land. Here was a wordless truth, one that came before language, a being, not a becoming. No cartographer had fully mapped these endless spaces. To journey down some of these tracks was to travel back in time for over a thousands years.

While the gods are occupying centre stage, we mortals must hang about in the wings. But after the stars have finished all their tragic dying, the extras come on stage - it's the end of the big banquet scene - and we get to eat up all the fucking food.

He hunted it as a madman hunts his doom.

It fizzled; she drifted away, as I knew she would. Nothing really went wrong between us, but then there really was nothing between us to go wrong. We were both filling in dead time, and one day she woke up and looked at me and had forgotten who I was. I went to take a shower and didn't hear her go.

Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to be... that is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape... it's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterward retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball... it's done.

Male love is a kind of self-assessment. We allow ourselves to love only those women to whom we feel we have a right to pay court, to whom we dare aspire.

turn this cacophony into an orchestra

Grad school has been a blessing. It has, if anything, opened too many doors and I'm having trouble keeping them all sorted in my mind. If life is like a song, I'm struggling to find a way to lay these tracks in their right place so they can run concurrently, rising and falling on their own energy within the tempo of my life. To find a way for them to sing together as an orchestra, each supporting each, working towards a greater beauty than their separated sums.

I was feeling overwhelmed with all the parts of my life moving in different directions: my 9-5, the literature review for my schoolwork, a research project I want to begin in January, liaison work for another program, and a personal project that I want to make a career out of. Leaving unmentioned friends and loves, this has been a lot to listen to as they shriek in dissonance, each competing for my attention. Muting these thoughts and opening a book found my answer:

He hasn't fully grasped how to make of multiplicity an accumulating strength rather than a frittery weakness. How the many selves can be, in song, a single multitude. Not a cacophony but an orchestra, a choir, a dazzling plural voice ... In short, he is still trying to settle on his one true line to follow. Still looking for ground to stand on, for the hard centre of his art.
Rushdie - Ground Beneath Her Feet

There's some wisdom to that. Don't see competing songs as disruptive, but as calling for their home amongst the rest of the voices.

be thankful

 

Now I saw a friend of mine, the other day,

And he told me that my eyes were gleamin'.

Oh I said I'd been away, and he knew...

Oh he knew the depths I was meanin'.

And it felt so good to see his face,

All the comfort invested in my soul,

Oh to feel the warmth, of his smile,

When he said, 'I'm happy to have you home.'

Oh oh-oh, I'm happy to have you home.