speech

I read at a local bookstore/cafe last night. It's strange reading aloud when you don't often get the chance to. Your words detach from your mouth and circle the room, quick to become separate entities. Suddenly, they seem like strangers. Your own voice sounds strained in your ears, wavering, like you've been crying. It is difficult to look at the people in the room. It is as if you are afraid to see how your writing has impacted them. Or if it has at all.

I often think of books, especially those of poetry and fiction, as private matters. Readings remind me that they are public matters. Shared matters. A reading can sometimes remind me of church--people, like so many congregants, suspended for a moment in the power of speech and insight, or just captivated by another's vulnerability. They can seem like the perfection of human contact--when the truth about one thing or person is channeled through a story and dropped, like a gift, at the foot of another.

Readings remind me to write as beautifully as I can. Writing reminds me to speak as truthfully as might be possible. And that is enough for today.

mint and pine nuts

The other day a friend remarked in jest, on the subject of my blog(s): "Everything you write is about food!" I took a look back, through my own online chronicle and the one on which I share with a certain boy. She was right. I do write a lot about food. Not to mention think and talk about it. Many of my conversations with my mothers lately have included something along the lines of "hey, I made this amazing..." or "we had such and such for dinner." When it comes to subjects, of writing or of conversation, food is one of the most forgiving.

I began to think that I was probably predestined to like chopping, mixing and stirring, given my maternal history. But however accurate that explanation, it still seemed too one-dimensional. I have come to love food--its acquisition, combination, preparation and consumption--for many reasons, some on "my" terms, some on others'. Food is a source of immense joy for me, plain and simple. But it is for my mother to, so now I'm back where I started.

I think what I love so much about cooking is the range of simplicity and complexity it offers. How often in life can you open up a book, follow some directions, and come out with a pleasing, useful result? There is something so satisfying about it when life starts to feel like its not yielding much. Open book, find object of desire, follow steps, and your plate is heaping with a new creation. And even better is when you have almost everything you need for some obscure recipe (Israeli couscous? check. French lentils? got it) and only have to go out and buy two ingredients. Like mint and pine nuts. I wish writing a story was that easy. A pen, a page, some mint and pine nuts.

Maybe it is. Maybe I do already have most of what I need.

The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. ~Tom Robbins

(now who can write about food like that?!)

preface to the unread

How does one go about choosing a book to read? With so many slots of time in a day to be filled, and with so many possible literary interventions, how does one begin to decide? Words, in their teeming multiplicity, cry out to adorn our lives: the time between bus transfers, the minutes waiting for a pick-up, the parts of a day not easily labeled morning, afternoon, evening.

What makes us pick up a book, the collection of another's mental processes, the imprints of a human mind at work on some subject--love, betrayal, censorship. What is it we look for when we crack those alluring covers, with their stamps of approval: "staff pick," or "Oprah's book club?" Maybe we look for new meanings for the world. For order, for symmetry, or maybe just for newness. What ideals do those unread pages signify? I admit: to be more knowledgeable, cultured, entertained.

One of my struggles is always this: classic, contemporary, or something different altogether. I am not one of those author-groupies, who follows one particular author through his or her entire body of work until I have exhausted my resources. I am also not a mystery junkie, a chick-lit chick, or a erudite classicist. I am greedy for variety. I want it all. The beauty of the old works, the experimentalism of the new ones, and a little self-help or spiritual growth advice on the side.

This makes choosing a book very difficult for me. I know many people go purely on recommendations. But my sources are perhaps too prolific, and I have trouble extracting something from the cloud of "you HAVE to read ____" or "you haven't read ____?!!?" Sometimes I springboard from one to another, forging an errant path between themes, styles, and genres.

There are times when I read a book because I somehow feel I should, as in my last, the Brothers Karamazov. Other times it's more random, something I was given, or picked up in some used bookstore somewhere, in a moment of ravenous story-hunger. But I must read, for literature opens the doors in my head that have been fused closed by too many layers of paint. It caffeinates my creativity, and fertilizes my desire. It gives me a somewhere when I feel nowhere, another place when I am feeling out of place, intimacy when I am an island, solitude when I am scattered.

worlds a part (a story from India)

Oh sad, neglected little blog! How I have crushed you under my preoccupied feet, and treated you with such undeserved contempt and scorn! You who have been such a faithful slate for my verbal wanderings, such an open door to vast expanses of writerly wondering. I return to you, hoping you'll receive these worn, forgotten thoughts.

Many of you have asked about India, on facebook and otherwise. There are a few reports "straight from the field" on our couple blog, but here I wish to relay one story that I think translates the whole of the trip quite poignantly.

While sauntering an evening away in India's hip yoga capital, Rishikesh, Mark and I were crossing one of the main bridges over the Ganges that bisects the town. This bridge is patrolled by a tribe of monkeys, who pace along the railings and swing from the cables, waiting for treats. Once in awhile, with a good streak of luck, a person can cross the bridge unperturbed by these mangy, red-bottomed fur balls. But not this time.

One particular monkey had stationed himself near the end of the bridge. Just when I thought this crossing would be a monkey-free one, there he was, perched mischievously on the rail. Now a monkey is not a particularly intimidating creature. Quite the opposite, actually. With their crouching stature, human-like features and matted gray coats, they are hardly a fearsome bunch. But there I was, in a new country, engulfed in a swarm of newness and difference. I didn't know what to expect of these little creatures, roaming free from zookeepers and unencumbered by the West's safety fences. These guys were wild and free to attack my head at will.

The bridges in Rishikesh are a constant rush of bodies, motorcycles and bikes. But near this particular monkey, the crowd had thinned a little, perhaps in deference to its unpredictability. As I summoned up my strength to pass this strange and ratty creature, backed by Mark's faithful encouragement, the monkey's little face contorted in an evil scowl and set its beady eyes upon me in a look of malicious intent. The combination of that wrinkly face, the foreboding frown and violent hiss, was enough to make me jump three feet backwards into the safety of the crowd of strangers.

A few seconds passed, and then one by one the brave ones (my hubby included) slipped by its watchful post to the other side. "Come on Jenny, just come. Just walk, you'll be fine," he assured me. And so once again I called on bravery (that virtue that is is so unused in our culture of luxury) to help me pass that furry devil.

Beside me was a small group of Indian women, dressed in black saris, and with their heads covered. They were older women, and they seemed to be traveling together in a tight-knit group. They too had held back after the monkey's display of discourteous behaviour. As I began to pass the monkey, I felt the hand of one of these women brush mine. Thinking it was just an accidental touch, I did not respond. When the small, leathery hand then firmly clasped mine, I knew it was no accident. I returned the grasp, and together, holding hands like two frightened school girls, we succeeded in running the gauntlet of our fear. She let go of my hand on the other side, but before descending to the street with her companions, threw me a delighted shriek of amusement. I will never forget her playful smile, as if to say thank you for conspiring with me.

Throughout our trip to India, as with other past adventures, I made an effort to accept a culture and a people vastly different from the familiar. Sometimes it was easy, as in the case of holding that old woman's hand. Sometimes it was difficult, and required great courage. But that one moment summed up a trip that will remain forever on my heart and in my mind. It only took a few seconds for that woman to teach me how similar we all are, in our silliest fears, our bitterest loses, and our loftiest joys.

Top Eleven reasons to smile

11. The sky is a brilliant blue and I hear a chirping bird
10. My bike did some serious hills yesterday
9. I get pizza tomorrow instead of a journalism lecture
8. We had corn on the cob last night for dinner
7. We found a really eccentric local coffee roaster
6. I'm doing a free yoga class in half an hour
5. I got an advance copy of the new Feist album (due out tomorrow) for 6 bucks!
4. My parents were here over the weekend (yay!) and they brought us a bottle of Dad B's wine
3.We're now registered for the MB half marathon (yikes!)
2. We leave for INDIA on Thursday

and the number 1 reason I'm smilling today...

1. I'm gonna be published! (see April 10th's post...they want it!)

idleness and barbeques

I just sent my first official query to a magazine. Querying is what optimistic freelancers do in the hopes of getting assigned an article. It’s the first one I’ve sent to an editor I’ve never met. The first editor who is not a benevolent friend trying to help me get my words out there. It sounds self-depracating, but the pros tell me to expect rejection and then keep trying.

Classes are quickly approaching their end. My mysticism class is wrapping up with Moby Dick, a voluminous American classic dotted with spiritual and philosophical illumination—all on the back of the 19^th century whaling industry. Meanwhile, on the other side of campus (I’ve been listening to too much Carrie Bradshaw), journalism class provokes me to long afternoons in the sun pondering the craft of writing.

Take last week’s journal entry:

I want a recipe for good writing, but it is a pull-everything-out-of-the-pantry-and-get-creative kind of endeavour. It is full of holes and half-attempts. Cliches become casualties on the road to creativity, and my best risks just threaten an alienated readership. I’m taught what not to say, and how to be clearer: “Look, who would actually say that?”(I would.)

Current mass journalism seems to be the pursuit of clarity at the expense of beauty. It corrodes the temples of words I’ve built in my mind, making them seem superfluous, gaudy, ornate.

Perhaps they are right, and good writing is clear, full of what people would actually say, and only that. For I am no Austen, no Dickens, or Thoreau even. I live today, in the 21^st century of shortened words, of “text.” Of WTFs and LOLs and all the rest of language’s vestigial parts.

And so today, rather than writing, I feel like doing anything else. Wandering, dreaming of idleness, barbeques, a new tattoo. In joy the days slip by with ease. In the absence of joy, every minute is lead.

Cheers, it’s spring in New York State! Let’s go publish!

Riddle of blue

While I was home in Winnipeg over the break, the question “so what do you DO down in Syracuse?” came almost every day. This has never been my favourite question to answer, but people are interested. These annoying life-check questions are part of what make friends friends. Thus, today a feeble attempt to sketch out my life as a legal alien living south of the 49^th parallel.

I think that part of the problem is that in the last few years, I haven’t really “Done” much, in the capital D-doing sense of the word. I got good grades, but I’m not in grad school. I haven’t even applied. Rare were the jobs I held onto for more than a year, mostly involving beverages of some sort. Easy to get and easy to quit. One University degree lies folded up between photo albums in my parent’s basement, next to my high school diploma. As the months tick on, I realize how much of it means little to me. As the years tread on, I realize that the little bit that does matter, matters a hell of a lot.

I didn’t become a teacher, a nurse, or a lawyer. I don’t own a power suit, and I don’t really want to. But then there are those old goals that poke their heads up now and again. The novel, the café, the triathlon. Little bits of envisioned selves that take smaller forms now: Reading in them. Sitting in them. Running and cycling—two out of three isn’t bad.

So, what do I DO down here in Syracuse. Being unemployed leaves a whole lot of time for doing the things I always said I wanted to do. I often miss the world of structure and routine, where earning a living through honest work keeps me sane. However, what will be will be, and here I am, on an F2 visa, unable to earn even a penny polishing wine glasses (one of my many, underappreciated skills).

And so, I spend my days taking free courses at the University, listening to my professors wax poetic about leaves or good writing. (Or gripe about the war in Iraq or bad metaphors.) I practice Haydn’s Creation along with singers who are better than me, but whom I hope will sing loud enough to drown out my squeaks. I knit, un-knit, and knit again. I learn to bake bread, grow sprouts, and incubate my own yogurt. I try to break a 9-minute-mile. I go to films and Health Expos and anything free, I lift weights and do yoga on Mondays down the street. I read books, and I stare out the window waiting for the day the sun will pummel the clouds out of existence. (When it does, I am invincible.) I spend far too much time on the Internet, but a satisfactory zero hours in front of the t.v. I try to write articles that might sell. I hang out at the library down the street, or sip lavender lattes in basement cafes with my hubby.

Life, as we know it, leaves little to be desired. And yet I am a hungry creature. Desire is scrawled across my being.

I have tried hard to gather knowledge, prove my skills, and justify myself to the world. (While the people that matter already accept me.) A perennial quest for uniqueness or essence, maybe. In the lives of those I admire most, I see a new goal: to live for today, with more compassion for others and more grace for myself. To live out knowledge and to work hard. To question and doubt, and yet be satisfied in a life of faith. It is a never-ending quest. But today, today the Syracuse sky is mysteriously blue, and I am on my way out to bask in its riddle.

ode to a finished book

I finally finished Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace. The work of this mid-20th-century French Jewish activist-mystic (yet defying categorization), is now on my list of most difficult books I've "read." I put read in quotes, because sometimes, when reading, the clarity and meaning of words evaporates, leaving them behind as mere objects. It makes for an interesting reading experience: When words betray their purpose, to communicate, and leave me instead with a vague sense of things--of brilliance and truth, or at least of worth. There is something in her writing, something that evaded me right through to the last word. But I ploughed on, believing the discipline and, in her words, attention, to be somehow good for me.

I will give you two quotes. To complicate this post with more than that would be much too heavy for the general purposes of the internet (speed, surface, mass accumulation of that which quickly slips through the fingers).

"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation."

"Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul."

Wow. That's all I can say.

ashes

We walk through the town square, the church bells an antiphon to our rushed drive downtown. I think that as long as churches ring their bells, there is reason to be alive. Those bells bring majesty to the public doman, glory to the void of city rhythm. A man on the street corner bellows, his face pink, his eyes brimming with scriptural ammo: "It is only by grace that you are saved!!! Those ashes on your forehead cannot save you! Repent for the day is near..." He's partly right, but he's wrong about the ashes.

Ash Wednesday found us in St. Paul's Cathedral, kneeling at the altar, getting our foreheads dirty. There was a different message than the one we'd just heard on the street. This one reminded us to beware of religiosity, and of showing off our feeble attempts at righteousness. (Close the door, do this in secret.) These were softer words, rising up to a vaulted ceiling where the they formed little gold nets for our prayers. "Remember," he says to me, "that you are dust and to dust you shall return." He says this to ten, fifty, one-hundred people kneeled alongside me. He puts ashes on wrinkled, brown, smooth, and cream foreheads alike. The same words, spoken to many but new to each. The translation of Job I just read for Mysticism class ends with this .. . comforted that I am dust.

Why ashes, anyway? Why something so tangible, and yet so fleeting? (Gone, with a puff, like a seeded dandelion.) Before our time, people would recognize mourners by the ashes on their faces. The ashes showed that in their sadness the mourners had neglected the daily household duty of keeping the ashes in the fireplace under control. Today it might seem religious to walk around sporting ashes on your forehead. Like some kind of cross around your neck, icon-emblazoned t-shirt, tattooed Buddha on your arm. But there was a time when it was just inevitable. The stuff of trying to live, and work, and be human. Again I am surprised at the dailyness of of life and faith.

This spot of ash. I bent too low I hit the earth; old fire, powdered terra. The solid remains of fire touching my skin. What will not be burned, gracing my skin. We springboard into Lent (lenct, germanic root word for Spring), with sunshine on our shoulders and darkness on our faces. We are grateful to be light and dust.

lend me your ear

How do you know when you’re supposed to be a writer? (How do you know when you’re supposed to be anything?) I have failed so far in trying to pin my interests on a particular vocation. Maybe it is because I love this earth so much that I don’t want to deny any part of it. Maybe that is an optimistic view, and I am really just lazy.

And yet I keep coming back to writing, and its impervious demons: How dare I assume that my words will count, that they will be worthy of even an ear? There is so much noise around us, thousands of messages breeding cacophony. My own voice seems obstructed by the words themselves.

How can I be confident in this journey when I have not yet seen the map, let alone the end? How can I obey when I have not yet heard?

I cannot be sure that my love of words should translate into writing. There are so many ways to love words. And so it seems, more and more each day, that writing is neither an act of confidence nor skill, but faith. And faith is one of those companions that no matter how persistently you push it away, it just keeps turning up in the strangest places. Faith just doesn’t know how to let go.

As always, I am full of questions. In my prouder moments I believe I could be a good mother, teacher, architect, counsellor, nurse, editor, graphic designer, chef. But in William Stafford’s words, the world waits there / thirsting after its names. Who am I to turn away? Adam has passed on his duty, and I feel incredibly small in front of the silence that longs to be turned into song.

jump in

My writing has been infrequent, these pages empty. Not, however, for lack of words. Perhaps I am tiring of this form. Perhaps I am longing for the old ways of quill pens and parchment paper. But the technological side of me still lures me, begs me to throw my words at this teeming and cavernous Internet mass.

I don't know where to begin after all this time. Less than a week left of Jen-the-single-person, and I find that I am neither deeply mourning nor ecstatically celebrating its passing. I am simply welcoming it. Being single had its joys, its somehow pleasureable pains, its exquisitely lonely walks in the woods. I will miss the parts of myself that reflected the good things of singlehood. This is largely unexplainable to me. Yesterday at a family gathering it was said that to marry young is the best way. That may be the way of many, but not of us all. Did I feel the need to defend my 26-year-hiatus from wedded bliss? Partly, but I kept it to myself, wrapped up in my private cocoon of experiences.

I won't miss the wondering and the restlessness. It's not that marriage fixes a person completely, or covers over the wounds of other hopes turned sour. But I am grateful and excited to have chosen the journey. For the companionship that will provide a base and an inspiration for the rest of me. For the parts that it will heal and illuminate. Marriage does not legitimize a person, and I have always resisted it being seen as a stamp of approval upon a person's life. I'm looking forward to sharing what I (sometimes reluctantly) love about myself. I'm looking forward to the side-by-side. I'm looking forward to the challenge of another, facing me in a call towards selflessness.

Next Friday I will greet more than I will bid farewell to.

Amidst all the preparation of flowers, cakes and music, we wait expectantly for the Saviour of the world. What a tiny matter our celebration seems in comparison to this grand announcement.

Life seems so much bigger when you step back to look at it.

So let go, let go, jump in, oh well what are you waiting for?

And so jump in I do.

das capitals

it seems as if i've switched, in the last few entries, to titles beginning with lower-case letters. maybe i'm feeling as though what i have to say lately is less important. maybe it's a confidence thing. maybe it's an aesthetic thing, but i've noticed that more and more people are jumping on this anti-capital bandwagon.

and then i thought, maybe it's a poet thing.

yeah, that could be it, because it's so much prettier to write poetry that fits along a single line and doesn't just out into the white space above, exerting itself like some kind of primadonna.

so there i go, reading into things that probably don't matter much at all, in the wide scope of things. but that is writing, that is criticism, and that is poetry. without them we would be stuck in the present. trapped in the constant momentum of doingdoingdoing. never stopping to ponder. never possessing the ability to look back. never wrapping our fingers, sticky with the present, around the world whizzing past us.

house of words

Syracuse, NY. Sitting on a back porch, looking at a leaning fence and a blue house with a half-moon window. It could be any blue house, and any half-moon window, anywhere. In Winnipeg, in Vancouver, in any place I have loved. The sun is filtering itself through persistent grey clouds, too bright to look at, too dull to fully cheer.

A week and a half into my continent-trotting parade, and I have seen many states that look exactly the same as the provinces north of them. I have seen many freeways, the bloodveins of a restless nation, where people drive too fast and where there are too many greasy roadside distractions. Another week and a half and I’ll be looking out upon more of this state, from the window of a bus where I’ll sit, alone, in motion. Another week and a half and I’ll be heading towards Times Square: time to the power of two. Time, multiplied upon itself in the center of one of the world’s largest cities. And then I’ll wait for a plane to take me to another place, for awhile.

America, Germany, Canada, and back again. Loved, left, alone, embraced, family, community, alone, rejected, healed. The cycle of looking for home and leaving it behind, finding it in sounds and tastes and textures: The crunch of toast in the morning, the voices of friends by day, the softness of companionship in the evening. These are the things that are my shelter. In spite of the white walls, needing warmth. In spite of the scattered furniture and unpacked boxes. No matter what small messes I pile around me I find the lead weight in my heart and mind that binds me to

this ground

this home

this permanency

Prose that slowly burns off its skins of usefulness, exposing the raw stuff of beauty

that lies embedded in the poetry’s subtle gestures.

This is how we live; observing, accomplishing tasks,

carrying out our various modes of survival.

All the while pushing for the thing that makes it all worth carrying on at all.

The thing that for many of us is nameless, but stronger and louder than

anything we’ve heretofore been able to name.

Poetry, force your way through the mundane flurry of words I write.
Redeem this language. Brighten this day. Amen.

eclectic tomatoes

Poetry inspired by rainy days. Photos from here and there. Preaching about good music and bad theology (both in my opinion, of course). Turns out the purpose of this blog has outgrown its original hat: as an update about "the Vancouver chapter" of my life. Yeah, it's become a bit of a catch-all. A little scattered, perhaps. Lacking focus, maybe. Eclecticism might be prettier as a decorating style than a writing one. Eclectic is one of those words that is so satisfying to feel in your mouth. Like a particularly cripsy piece of tempura, or perfectly roasted nut.

I'm slowly inching my way toward writer-dom, with the excitement of the month being my first internship! As a writer, this is pretty big news. Cahoots Magazine is a Canadian women's magazine focussed on art, politics, and womens' issues. I'll be compiling events, dates, and news from women across the country for a calendar. Harper's here I come! (ha ha)

I don't have much to say tonight,
either than that I've been staying up far too late
ripping duct tape with my teeth to tie around cardboard boxes
of journals and essays, coin collections and stuffed sheep.

No, not so much to say, but the knowledge of an early morning arising
to meet me, where I will be living again between lives
on the periphery, where interstates meet fields of sunflowers
and I go to greet another home.

Tonight is silent, as the grass at midnight
as the tomatoes clutching the sun's old rays
turning them to red flesh.

Tonight holds the summer and all its warmth,
words, ashes, cut grass, distance
we travelled to meet the day we will call new.

glimpses and digressions

I took the "Make Poverty History" advertisement off my blog. In my latest copy of Geez I read about a new one: Make Affluence History. It's funny how a simply parody can open your eyes. Mass assumption: less is bad, more is good.

Speaking of more, what do changes in your surroundings do to you? I am housesitting a type of house I am not accustomed to. Sometimes it is like wearing someone else's clothes. I am very far away from downtown. I have two options: spending my savings on gas, or putting in long days in the (bike) saddle.

Speaking of bikes, I just got my first two (significant) articles published in Momentum: a Vancouver cycling magazine. I'm feeling like a tire: pretty pumped. (If I still have readers after that double serving of cheese, thanks be to God!)

Speaking of readers. I think I'm almost over the fact that I don't get very many comments on this thing. I'm more thankful in fact for the verbal feedback. I've been at two gatherings lately where people have come up to me and told me how much they enjoy it. It's nice to be able to see their eyes and not just their words.

Speaking of words, I just finished my first Iris Murdoch book. I am wondering if the next book I choose will be about betrayal. This has been a random, unexpected trend. My last--The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and this one The Sacred and Profane Love Machine both have been.

Speaking of Love: I think I might be getting it this time.

muddy waters

The cloak of familiarity is heavy
my shoulders droop
with its weight and warmth.

Every turn the old haunts,
faces I know or recognize
and have forgotten (me).

At a bright cafe on the corner of the dusty intersection
of Ellice and Sherbrook
I am mopping floors again.

Not forgotten: Re-placed.
Dis-placed.
Missed. Gone.

I can't find you, Great Prairie City.
Isolated, plain, caracature of ice and fire.
I am lost among thousands of my own footprints.

I trace my nostalgia in yours.
Shoes, frames, books, sweaters, receipts.
Pawn shops a testament to our constant "too much."

I am back and I am dragging my feet.
finding my place,
Trying not to be afraid in a house too big for one.

The skin of the places I've been is peeling from my heels.
There is movement latent in my bones.
Orbit and Axis meet in a confused dance.

For now I'll just keep sending out homing devices
like Noah's dove
hoping for a handful of soil from the solid earth I've heard so much about.

a message to the future

I write, and in my writing is both truth-making and lie telling.
Fiction: to fabricate. To weave, to make up. To lie, with a willing audience.
To find truth through the portals of the false.
Why do I write? Why do I publish it for all to see, in this way?
Maybe because I want to be known. Maybe because I want to be trusted. Maybe because you’ve chosen to trust me.

Choosing to trust is possibly the most important decision we will make in our entire life. It renders us smaller, more incomplete, and a hell of a lot more vulnerable. Choosing trust makes skies possible when we live in a world of beginnings and endings.

I was at a wedding on Saturday night and sat with strangers. Strangers have a way of making a night magical. Beginning in anonymity and ending in a finale of future familiar faces. They were curious about me, why I liked to blog, why I blog at all. I proceeded to convince them that it’s not blogging. It’s writing. Actual, real live writing. Just in a different form. We talked about how it is like permissible voyeurism. We talked about how people try to communicate via their blogs, and whether or not that is a good thing or just a neutral bi-product of our technological age. Somehow it seems cheap or stifled to say things this way that you wouldn’t say straight to someone’s face. As in all our most impassioned declarations of the baseness of people in general, I am probably guilty of this too. I’m just glad that I have no major vendettas right now. It’s just these musings, and my new bike blog.

We throw these words to nowhere, not to be caught by pages or clasped in boxes . . .
Where will these pixels find their beauty, how will they be remembered if not bound?

I left a message to the future
Call it futile, call it vain
Call it tryin’ to cheat the hangman
Call it ego, call it aim
Left a message to the future
Maybe they’ll find it, maybe not
Past is past, past is present
Tomorrow's when it’s all and gone (-James Keelaghan)

Maybe this is all just trying to leave messages to the future. Trying to do justice to our epic lives, to our sense of being special, being set apart.In a conversation today about the psychology of journaling, a friend suggested that this writing business is really us just wanting to write ourselves into our own story. This seems plausible to me. Surrounding ourselves with those who can tell us who we are. Building up that edifice with words generated from the chaos of our experience. And on and on and on.

(In)Dependent

I wanted to share this painting, given to me by my friend Christyn Hall. She is a Vancouver-based artist who paints with make-up; nailpolish, mascara, eyeshadow, you name it. This piece is entitled (In)Dependent.

Because it's Lent I've been thinking a lot about materiality. All of my attempts at renunciation failed miserably, not so much for lack of intent as for lack of discipline. I've realized what dedication is required not only to acquire things (such as knowledge), but also to shed them as well. It is interesting that this time in the Christian calendar, this time of scarity and leanness, is the time where the natural world begins to swell and overflow with colour and abundance. As if the earth is mirroring the resurrection that is to come, in the Christian year. The cherry blossom-infused spring air gets into my skin. It crawls into my mouth and nostrils, filling my body, turning my blood pink.

The way God (or Spirit or Wholeness or Being or Mystery or whatever we choose to call Him/Her) chose to come to earth, via the body of a regular joe-carpenter, reveals some important things about this God. Ours is not purely a religion of spirit. Jesus was not blinked into existence. He worked wood and had cousins, he had a belly button, ate and drank, cut his feet on broken glass, and felt tears clear the dust from his face. Christ teaches us, among other moral and spiritual things, that our bodies matter. Our desires, our pain, and our ecstasy are the hands and breath and skin of God [him]self. We were made in the Image of an Invisible God. Look around you, God walks in the litter-strewn rocky paths of strangers. When we feed a stranger, we feed God. Maybe today God would've come as a dishwasher or construction worker. Perhaps, perhaps.

I think that Christians often let themselves get too weighed down with "spiritual" matters. "How's your relationship with God?" "Do you pray every day?" "How are you doing spiritually?" This is important of course, as we are so much more than just bodies. However, I tend to think that if we could learn to balance the spiritual with the material a little more, our planet and our time on this earth would be a whole lot more just. When we take the bread and the wine, we are reminded that God is substance, too. Church isn't just about blessings and prayers, it is about touching others, and about giving and receiving the physical nourishment of the substance of God. St. Paul said "In Him we live and move and have our Being." Our relationship with the Divine isn't (entirely) like our earthly relationships. It isn't simply a matter of "spending more time" with God. It is, I tend to think, as Annie Dillard writes, "all a matter of keeping our eyes open." And that can be hard enough.

One of my favourite novels, the Victorian Utopia, News from Nowhere, contains this quote:
"The spirit of our days was to delight in the life of the world; in an intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells." I want to learn to love the earth like this.

and a poem of mine:

I am etched on a thousand walls.
Memory, like cave-paintings, hieroglyphs,
flicker across oak thresholds and stuccoed ceilings.
Beauty is the soul's materialism;
innocent, honestly
silvering the edges around us.

My palm on the wall beside the bed,
Tunnels imagined, escape
or just plaster and wire
Walls like skin, cracking
from exposure to light,
breathing the constant breath
of heat and cool.

Notes from the 19th century

Today I found a poet's words on the street. A poet I studied years ago, but today, whose words made more sense than ever. I give you these words from Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memorium. Just lying there, abandoned and dirty around the edges, perhaps lost in a moment of hurried frenzy. Why was I the one to notice them, to stumble upon them? I give you these words, words that have, undoubtedly, brought comfort to many others. Is this not the soul of poetry?

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope...
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds...
That which we dare invoke to bless;
Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess--
...No, like a child in doubt and fear;
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach through nature, molding men.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memorium

Hyperthymestic for a day?

I read on Al Daily tonight that someone has the opposite disorder as me, with my inveterate forgetfulness. A woman has been discovered who claims she can remember everything, in astonishing detail, down to the weather, day of the week, and events of random previous dates throughout history. I have often coveted this ability, or at least some scaled-down version of it. I begun to wonder what it would be like to live this way, neck-deep in the floods of past images, conversations and thoughts.

I am often frustrated at my lack of ability to recall learned data. I am sometimes left feeling like my education was a waste of time and money, yielding a vague set of proclivities and the rough sketch of character, but no actual, reliable, cold, hard facts. Why don't we come with instruction manuals? Fig. 1: How the memory card functions. For optimal performance . . . blah blah blah. Oh to hear a theory or notable historical figure referenced and not have to say "Yeah, I wrote a paper on that once." Which is to say: A previous me knew something substantial about that there thing. But if I've learned it, shouldn't it be in there somewhere? I just can't seem to get to know the little elf inside my head, the one with the the tag on his desk: RECALL DEPARTMENT. He runs around at will, dragging in things I thought I'd left stuck securely under my desk in grade four. He's a stubborn little bastard, refusing to comply when I want access to something of beauty or meaning, beckoning me from eight years ago . . .

But then I got to thinking, would I want to remember everything? My late grandfather had this compulsion for labelling. I think we still have a couple of those old labellers lying around our family cottage up in Gimil, with their thick orange-brown plastic and the companion letter puncher, leaving a white indent. He had everything labelled, from his clothing drawers, to every tool in the old shed, perfumed by the gas from the derelict mower. How was his memory, I wonder. But I do not remember anymore. I too have labelled my life, in meticulously-kept journals. (My beloved storage locker on Higgens Avenue can testify to this, bursting with words behind her plywood walls.) My years have been documented like my grandfather's things, and still, my memory suffers to find footholds. What makes us remember, what makes our memory serve us well?

Perhaps I should be more grateful for my selective memory. For the filter that keeps back the sludge of past hurts, old and stale regrets, dusty days and mangled intentions. But I think I could survive those, if only allowed past the NO TRESPASSING signs into all the good stuff, into the smell of the rolled-up slide show screen, and hot oil-popped popcorn on the stove.

I think I'd like to live one day with a case of this woman's hyperthymestic disorder. Just one day would be all I'd need. Just one adventure into a saturated past. Clear, bright memory, like columns of light piercing the thick blankets of forgeting, making them like transluscent rags. Moments dripping with joy and laughter, like honey. But then maybe I'd be too sad that those moments were not here with me now. Maybe that is why I do not remember well, because I am already far too nostalgic. Perhaps the things we think flaws are the very things that keep us alive.

Maybe I'd go crazy if I remembered everything. Maybe forgetfulness is a little fortress that's been built around my heart.