Great neighbourhoods

Yesterday afternoon, a chance encounter with a neighbour quickly coalesced into the notion of a community cookout. Two hours later, five long tables, set up across two front yards, were groaning with salads, delicious main courses, meats, fish, pasta, breads, wine, and cookies. About 20 adults sat eating in the breezy sunshine, while at least as many children ran, biked, scootered, and wagoned up and down the sidewalk, grabbing an occasional bite (and a stealthy gulp of beer from time to time). Nobody was quite sure how it happened so quickly, successfully, and happily. There was no prime organizer, no plan, no marketing, no permits from the city, no committee. We all just fell down a jolly little non-linearity into a chaos of delight and then, some time later, when the sun went down and the wind picked up, cleaned everything up just as quickly and went back to the regular Sunday bathtime and school prep routine.

I drove my 20 year old daughter home. She sat beside me, splayed out in stomach full pleasure and relaxed idleness.

"That was fun." was all she said.
"What causes stuff like that?" I asked.
"Just a great neighbourhood," she replied.

In my work, my writing, my thoughts, I talk about things like the width of a street, the proximity of house to sidewalk, the syntax of movement and lingering. But can such things alone hold such power? At times, it's hard not to believe there's some prepotent force beyond the shape of grass and asphalt, transcending time, gluing us all together like a small band of intrepid sailors in a boundless sea of broken promises, battered dreams, harbingers of doom. It makes it a little harder not to have hope. It made it much easier to come to work today.

When to laugh

More late night experimental music last night. Barnyard Drama. One word: Ooohhhmygooddddd..... We showed up early with friends and so were able to snag a set of centre seats in second row. We'd been promised a diva with a five octave range backed up by three fine jazz musicians. The diva arrived on stage wearing a big pink fuzzy hat of the kind my mom used to wear, knee high white boots, shocking lime green stockings, and some kind of woolly dress. Silence descended. Then some kind of reverberating very low intensity static. All the musicians looked down. I thought they were trying to trace a source of feedback, but the performance had begun. There was a very light kind of ticking sound which I eventually realized was coming from the diva. Then some squawks, chirps and grunts.

I had had a conversation with my friend just before the performance began about laughter. She had never seen experimental music before, and I had one night of this under my belt already. I jokingly advised her to only laugh when people around her were laughing. But at this point in the performance, I detected a little snort from her. I couldn't look, but I knew what was happening. I convulsed. My wife collapsed. The four of us, feeling for a few minutes like cultural boors sat, tears streaming from our eyes as this fantastic woman strutted the stage emitting a wondrous rainbow of sounds. Every time we settled, some new strangeness assaulted us. A guitar played using steel wool. A banjo played by dropping marbles on it.

At the end of it all, I felt cleansed. Some of the sounds we heard were fantastic, complex, moving, angry, and even lush. But what I'll remember most of all is that, eventually, I realized that laughter was the honest reaction of shock and surprise at the completely unexpected. A woman using a fantastic voice to make sound rather than to sing. A group of musicians, all obviously very highly technically skilled, bending and stretching our very definitions of music. When I surrendered myself to it, it reached me in a way I couldn't put into words, which of course is what all music is supposed to do and little of it actually does.

Psychogeography of souls

I avoided the office today in a desperate effort to wring some kind of creative approach to the material of Chapter 6 from my brain. At the halfway point of the day I had more or less given up all pretense of working when my perfect wife brought home some really great sushi to try to bring me back to life. She left again soon after, watching me moan with wasabi-soaked pleasure, suggesting that I blow off the afternoon, get out my djembe drum and do some pounding. I'm one lucky guy. Palms tingling with kuku base rhythms, I plopped into a comfy chair to finish off the psychogeography primer I'd been reading. Psychogeography is, kinda, a strange multidisciplinary endeavour, mostly started up by raving lunatics as far as I can tell, but founded on the idea that cities (London and Paris in particular) shape feeling and behaviour. What we do in a city is shaped by its organization, structure, history, in ways that are not well-understood but which can be studied by carrying out what is called a derive -- wandering around in a city, letting it 'take' you in a way that's related to the automatism of the surrealists. It's an old tradition, seen first described in the literature of people like Dafoe, De Quincey, even William Blake before being taken up by these madmen in Paris in the 1930s. I really wanted to know about this because of my interests in how architecture and city planning affects feeling and movement.

Hang in there, I'm going somewhere with all this and it's not an undergraduate cultural studies essay.

I found some parts of the book pretty funny, especially as the author described the fact that the practice of psychogeography never really got off the ground because the small circle of French academics who founded it spent all their time arguing over theory and definition and never actually got down to doing anything. It conjured an image of some of the opening scenes of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. If you've seen the movie, you'll know exactly what I mean. Towards the end of the book, the author began talking about more recent psychogeographic efforts, and this is where I really became quite interested. Though I've seen Crash (not the recent movie, which is quite good, but the older, much more controversial Cronenberg effort), I hadn't really understood what the writer on whose work the movie was based, JG Ballard, was really getting at until I saw it through the lens of psychogeography. But then I became even more engaged by discussion of the work of Peter Ackroyd, who had written a novel called Hawksmoor which contains much psychogeography mixed in with some occultism -- that there are peculiar arrangements of buildings (churches in particular) that set into motion certain kinds of resonances that act in defiance of time to keep causing certain types of events to take place. The configuration of places, in other words, influences feeling and movement in a way that defies explanation by current science. As if that wasn't enough to reel me in and send me to the bookstore, I then discovered that Ackroyd had written a very long book called London: A biography, which was a kind of psychogeographical romp through the city, run through with the same kinds of ideas about time, space, behaviour in cities as he'd covered in the novel.

Now. What's most interesting about this is that I was able to wander over to the next room and pluck a copy of Ackroyd's biography of London off of my bookshelf. It was, in fact, the last book that my father ever purchased. He bought it with a birthday gift certificate given to him by my eldest brother (on the same certificate he also picked up a couple of books for me for my birthday -- my brother never loses a chance to chuckle over this). He never read it, but I remember that for many days he rumbled around my house muttering about having to read this 'biography of London' and I remember feeling a bit irked that someone had written what must actually be a history of London and had used this affectation to snag hapless readers like my dad into reading gigantic books that they might not want to read at all if they knew what they really were. Little did I know.... Well, I'm not sure I'll have a chance to read it, but it is actually a biography. London is portrayed as a living, breathing, organic entity composed of equal parts brick and flesh.

All of this delights me because I can think of it as one more small indication that my father has been able to somehow reach forward in time to help me write a book he didn't really know I planned to write. It reminds me of the Minerva map measure that was once one of my father's work tools. It now sits in my desk drawer and I pull it out when I need inspiration to write what, strangely, my contract refers to as a book on, among other things, the 'psychology of length'.

I'm collaborating with an architect who believes there might really be something to this Jung fellow's ideas about synchronicity, causality, and the collective unconscious. That frightens me sometimes but there are moments, like those today, when I have to admit to myself that I'm a little bit intrigued.

Defacing facebook

I just deactivated after looking at this. My kids will be very pleased with me.

I have eaten the city

One of the great things about living in a small city with two universities is that there's a vibrant cultural 'underground' with all kinds of amusements on offer. Though too often we're too preoccupied with simply getting all of our children to the end of the day without killing any of them, we do still manage to get out. Last night, we went to a late night improv session with these guys. I consider myself to be fairly in tune with musical currents, but I don't think I've ever sat and listened to anything like this. It was a fitting end to a day spent mostly trying to figure out how to stretch the definition of a 'map' to include certain mysterious old petroglyphs I'd seen. Now I can spend some chunk of today trying to do some stretching of musical definitions. I suspect the stretching exercises will intensify, as I have a season pass to this, and will spend as much time as possible using my ears from now through Sunday. I'll report back on any new sound mappings, of course.

Sadly, I missed some part of the intermezzo of last night's concert while on a short visit to the sandman. I blame the second glass of rum that I was driven to when, on arriving home from work, I discovered about nine children, not all of them mine, busily painting the front lawn and sidewalk in a dazzling array of colours. My first reaction was to be upset with them. My second reaction was to be annoyed with my unwarranted first reaction. My third reaction was to wish that rather than have any reactions at all, I'd been able to see what they saw and enjoy it. I think it was the fact that this took work and trying that bothered me the most and made me feel old, too insulated by multiple shells of deeply instilled responses to things. Those oven mitts again, perhaps. Alcohol sometimes helps to get them off, but last night it just made me sleepy. So I missed the part where Brandon did the cool trick with the end of his drumstick on the bottom of a cymbal.

Late tonight I'm going to something called "Barnyard Drama" which is described as "Sophia Loren meets Leadbelly in the dark, covered with Cornhusker's Hand Lotion." And if I don't soon make progress on this map thing, I'm going to duck out to go hear some Farsi improv at lunchtime.

Weighing life III

When we travel, my wife is the photographer. Sometimes I chide her for missing out on the immediacy of life because she sees too much of it through a viewfinder and doesn't let enough of it bump up against her face. I can tell from her behaviour and know from my own that one can start looking at the world as if through a viewfinder. Once that nonsense starts, then you're really using someone else's eyes to see and not your own.

I was reminded of all of this a few minutes ago while walking through our Uptown, surrounded by a small bustle of people heading to stores, waiting for buses, painting fresh new storefronts, delivering loads of veggies to our little organic market. My thoughts drifted towards the sad notion of the futility of all of this activity in a world hurtling towards some kind of apocalypse. None of the activities I witnessed, including my own, made any sense at all. None of it meant anything. None of the past meant anything. None of what I had done meant anything. All that mattered was this current moment, the air I breathed, the feeling in my chest, the nice tightness in my legs, the pretty tink-tink sound of my steel thermos sitting in the backpack behind me. Oh, so very mindful of me, except that at the same time that something, if not profound, then at least enjoyable was trying to burble up to the surface through my workaday thoughts, the whole experience was overshadowed by my hulking, ponderous self-awareness, hovering, peeking, prodding, wondering how I would write all of this down.

So I guess that's what this blog is. It's my camera. It's my way of mediating reality. It's my way of keeping my distance. It's a giant pair of oven mitts so that if I ever feel like taking the cookies out of the oven, my fingers won't be singed.

I walked on, thinking about the report that I'd just read this morning describing China's escalating economic growth, her dizzying output of greenhouse gases, destined to overtake US output in just a very few short years, quicker than anyone had thought possible. Not long after that, Chinese industrial effluence will equal that of all other industrialized nations put together. Chinese authorities recognize the environmental impact of this, but express a desire to catch up to the West first and THEN tackle the environment. A small part of me wanted to have faith that such a thing was possible -- that the combination of a massive population, legendary Chinese drive and ambition, and downright cleverness would somehow solve this problem, perhaps even for all of us. But the greater, more sensible reaction, was to realize that there is already no shortage of cleverness in the world. Among our billions, we have IQ points to spare. It's not being smart enough to save ourselves that we should aspire to, it's wanting to save ourselves, our children, our grandchildren.

I came across another Facebook entry yesterday (my children object strenuously to my use of Facebook, by the way. I argue that if people decide to email one another publicly, then they are really inviting the public to read what they say. They look at me like I'm the creepy middle-aged guy who hangs out at the video arcade to ogle teenagers in crop tops). There was an entry by a young man whom I know to be very intelligent and technically gifted. Suddenly, he said, as the last two generations realized what a mess they had made of things, they were screeching about nano-this and quantum-that and sustainable-something-else, hoping that the bright young sparks of the upcoming generation could fix all the problems caused by greed and laziness. Not him, he said. He planned to sit back, smile in the sunshine, and welcome the coming apocalypse with open arms. That, I suspect, is an attitude that we'll see more and more of, and it's a nice illustration of my point. Our species won't die because we're too stupid to figure out how to live. It will die because we're too stupid to figure out why we should want to.

In the end, it has nothing to do with buying that summer cottage, saving for a happy retirement, building a pyramid, or writing a book. It's much simpler than all of those things. Just as so many times before, I had it in my grasp for a half-second this morning before the monkey of self-reflection climbed on my back.

Post-Earth Day

I really wanted to write something upbeat and encouraging about Earth Day. Then, on the walk to work this morning, I went through Waterloo Park, our own little city oasis of greenspace. Thanks to a spectacular weather weekend, the citizenry had made wonderful use of the space. 21 empty plastic water bottles, five hugely overflowing garbage cans filled with plastic bags, Big Mac cartons, huge stacks of stuff that even the squirrels didn't want (and believe me, the squirrels want everything). Why does a visit to the park have to consist of sitting down and eating an enormous amount of really shitty fast food? The Canada geese who are usually strutting around scaring the locals at this time of year, as breeding season approaches, were just sitting glumly by the side of the creek, surveying the carnage. The ducks didn't even bother moving off the path as I walked past them.

Sad, sad, sad. I walked into my lab, grumbling to my assistant that I'd lost all faith in humanity. When I explained, she expressed surprise that 'they' hadn't come to clean everything up. We're still waiting for 'they'. I don't think they're coming.

Weighing life II

I went to see Ishmael Beah a couple of days ago. My goodness. Get the book. This young man, after losing his family, was recruited as a soldier at the age of 13, drugged, indoctrinated, and convinced to commit "heinous acts". Trust me on that without further description- I can't imagine anyone pulling himself back together after what he was convinced to do. Some years later, Beah was rescued by an NGO, rehabilitated, and now, at the age of 26, lives in NYC. He's bright, articulate, passionate, and seems remarkably relaxed in front of a large audience. I was proud of my small town that we filled a decent hall to overflowing to hear his words. The reading was about 20 minutes late because of an effort to accommodate everyone who wanted to crowd into the space.

I'd feel like a cheat to say much more than I already have, other than to mention the two reactions to this that continue to ricochet through my head as I think back on his words. First, I'm amazed that it is possible to bring someone back from the place that Beah went to -- there's some astonishing resilience here. Moral compasses twisted into corkscrews are somehow capable of being repaired, and some people seem to know how to get the job done. That's reason for optimism. Second, for all of the Beahs that are brought back, how many aren't? How much human potential is lost? It's estimated that there are 300,000 child warriors on the planet who are being molded (without too much trouble) into killing automatons. Apparently, it's a battle strategy that works very well. Coincidentally, I watched Gallipoli last night. The strategy, it seems, is nothing new. And children come in all ages.

Grading and facebook

It's once again that time of year when blood starts shooting from my eyeballs as I grind through another set of term papers. It hasn't been a good teaching term for me. Too much of the time, my thoughts have been outside the classroom walls. At several crucial moments, my mind has been pulled out of the room. The course that is normally my favourite one to teach turned into pure drudgery -- it needs a complete overhaul. These are the sad thoughts that preoccupy me as I try to find of a hundred different ways to say 'I know you could have done better, but I understand how small a part of your life this paper was....' All of these feelings have been reinforced this term by my recent, very timid, entry into the world of Facebook. This is an online social network that is most popular with high school and university students. As I browse through profiles, I notice that I am the oldest member I've found so far. Interestingly, it is a world populated by many of my students. I look them up to see what they've been doing while they've been claiming to be too busy to turn in assignments on time. There's a thundering amount of drinking going on. There's also, from time to time, a nasty comment about me, my teaching style, my course. My ego is small enough that this doesn't hurt, but it's far more useful than any course evaluation has ever been -- I've already figured out what the structural problems are in the course I've just finished, and I really don't mind all the little epithets.

On Facebook itself, I won't even try to add to the din. It's obviously a dangerous thing for many. Imagine writing email to friends, but allowing anybody who stumbles along to read the mail. Interestingly, you can make conversations private, but most people seem to choose not to. It's like overhearing interesting gossip in an elevator, but the elevator is globe-sized. It strikes me as one more step along the long road to our not really being anywhere, but that's a post for another day. At present, my brain is slowly turning to a mound of soft cheese curds as I peruse the limpid prose of a group of students who, with a few nice exceptions, would rather have been anywhere else than in my class this past semester.

Weighing life

An old student from my department returned to the area yesterday to give a talk about the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. I would have gone to it if the alternative hadn't been to have a nice pub lunch with my bereaved brother on the first day since his wife passed away on which I saw a brief smile pass across his face. I gave up invasive research a couple of years ago, and I don't plan to return to it, but it isn't so much because of a moral absolute and more because I recognized that such work was only morally justified if it was helping someone's life. I could find a way to justify my work on grant and ethics applications (and it's a justification that has some merit) but I had fallen in with a lovely group of Buddhists who really made me think hard about my ethical choices. Without exerting any pressure on me to do anything other than sit quietly and breathe, they helped me to see the shaky moral ground of parts of my professional life and to to re-think how I spent my days.

All of this is, in a way, an aside.....but the argument of the yesterday's talk was that we now know enough about the mental lives of animals to know that there is some degree of continuity between what they think about, feel, and know and what happens in our own minds. Given this, he said, we were holding to a moral double standard if we placed a different value on their lives and on ours.

I've had much cause to think about the value of life over the past few days. I lost a loved one who, although I may have only had a chance to talk to her once or twice a year, was deeply stitched into my life. I cried when she went. I miss her. I ache for the man she left to find some way to reconstruct a life after 40 years with her. I placed great value on her life. In fact, I can think of very few people whose lives mean more to me than Jan's did. And that's the flaw in the argument of the old student. We do place value on human life, but we place a separate value on every single life. I'd rather my neighbour die than my wife. I'd rather all the laboratory rats in the world die than my son. The 30 year old heart patient is placed closer to the top of the transplant list than the 90 year old heart patient. When ships sink, women and children (theoretically) get first go at the lifeboats. These are moral decisions that make sense in most cases -- not only are we biologically disposed to value our kin more than anyone else, but we feel their absence more, so we are willing to sacrifice more (including other lives) to preserve them. The business of life (and much of it is business) consists of careful measurement of risks, costs, and benefits to decide who must live and who must die. Every hospital in the world makes such decisions every day. If I had been at this talk, that's the argument I would have made. I'm sure my colleague would have had some kind of a reply -- he's a smart fellow. I just don't know what it would have been. But, as I said, I wasn't there. I was at lunch with my brother.

Above our heads as we sipped our fine local brew was a television showing bodies being carried out of Virginia Tech. Today, the news media blare headlines detailing the horrific logistics of this systematic slaughter of students and professors by an apparently deranged young man. As a university professor, I can't help but be moved to tears by this coverage. Having spent half my life in classrooms just like the one that ran rivers of blood yesterday, I can perhaps imagine more vividly than many how it might feel to be so trapped, fixed in gunsights, and blown to pieces. And like every other professor I've ever spoken to about any of this and similar killings in the past, I have stories to tell about students who have worried me. I've had sullen students in trenchcoats slump into backrow seats in my classroom and glare down at me with hatred in their faces. I've met students one on one to discuss grades and policies and their disagreements with my views have been acute enough to erupt in shouting matches and slammed doors. I've had irrational and frightening emails from students, one actually threatening violence to me, his classmates, his employers. So I feel for those who were touched, lost lives, loved ones, friends in what looks like a senseless massacre. But when it comes to simple questions about valuing lives, there is, of course, another view, pointed out first to me by my friend Richard.

What we're witnessing unfold in Virginia is a pale reflection of what we're told is happening in Iraq, but which we hold to a different kind of standard of pain. The Virginia story impales our heart. The Iraq stories bounce off our eyes. In fact, I would bet cold, hard cash that 75% of those who read this (all 3 of you) will be tempted to stop here. "Oh, another Iraq comparison. Time to hit the 'next' button." But here's the thing. In Iraq, there's a systematic slaughter of intellectuals going on. Here's a list of names. It isn't just some madman going off his rocker and waving an automatic weapon around, but uniformed squads of hitmen with a list of targets, finding professors in their offices, their homes, their beds, shooting them, cutting their heads off, destroying not just families but an entire generation of scholars -- what's left of a culture. The UN estimates that over 80% of the institutions of higher learning in Iraq are gone, and the teachers and students are quickly following along. Bombs destroy the infrastructure and a good number of the students, assassins move in to do the detail work, and those still alive who have the wit and the wherewithall get the hell out of the country as quickly as they can. I don't have time to do the proper research to find out why this is happening -- I have 26 papers to grade before students begin to get upset with me. But there are all kinds of reasons I can think of, none of them pleasant, for wanting to bump off everyone in a culture who makes a living out of their intelligence, reasoning, and their ability to teach.

Now, thanks to Richard, I've educated myself a little bit about another aspect of the hell created in Iraq by a set of governments that will do anything -- anything at all, up to and including putting a madman into power and then destroying a country, a region, a culture to get him back out of power again -- to maintain hegemony in a part of the world that has lots of oil. But even despite that, I suspect that when my head hits the pillow tonight, I'll think first of my wife and kids, then Jan, then the kids in Virginia and then, maybe, if I'm not already asleep, some of the other innocent deaths that surround us. We weigh life every day.

So it goes.

Eulogies

There's an old joke that most people fear public speaking more than they fear death, so they'd rather be the one in the coffin than the one delivering the eulogy. I'm not delivering a eulogy tomorrow, but I am going to speak a few words about a wonderful woman whom I've known since I was 13. When I was first asked to do this, my first jolting thought was that I had no idea what I could say....about a woman I had known well, spent weeks with, gotten blindingly drunk with, argued with, walked away from, laughed at, missed, held in my arms, carried her tiny body aloft, danced with, thrown things at, cried with, cooked for, and picked up from the floor. How preposterous to think that if we're suddenly stopped in mid moment and asked if we could put together three paragraphs about a loved one, we feel as though we have nothing to say. Maybe it's just me, but I find it altogether too easy to clunk through life like an automaton, understanding on a very superficial level how different people fit into our lives, the roles they play, when we will next see them and what we will say to them, do with them but not really reflecting on who they are. And then, maddeningly, at a moment like this when you lose someone, you suddenly find yourself not even understanding what you've lost until somebody asks you to verbalize it. And then in the verbalizing, you discover that you've lost far more than you knew -- that you failed to appreciate what you had when you had it. And you're left clutching at straws, clawing at the side of the drain, trying to console yourself by convincing yourself that this person will alway live on in your mind and your memory -- the throaty laugh, the glinting eye, the barbed wit. But no matter how hard I try to convince myself that only a body has been lost, that all of its effects still exist, that this woman, for example, helped to shape my brother into the magnificent and fascinating human being that he is, I know that it's a bit like the rock dropping in the pond. She's still sending out ripples, but they become shallower, more dispersed, more difficult to discern with every passing moment. Soon, no matter how hard I strain, I won't be able to fully convince myself that I can really sense them -- that they're real to me. When I was much younger, I used to play a game with a friend of mine -- best accompanied by hallucinogens of some kind -- in which we played music but slowly turned down the volume until it was just barely audible. Pick the threshold just right and you can no longer be sure whether you're hearing music or imagining it. My head's still full of Jan, but the volume's ratcheting downward and there's nothing I can do about it.

Virtual shmirtual. No matter how much fun I have with my new toys, we're built to press flesh against flesh, feel the warm wetness of each other's skin, let our living breath raise tiny follicles of tingling pleasure. That all stops when we die, no matter what high thoughts we conjure to convince ourselves otherwise.

While I'm remembering Jan tomorrow, looking out across a sea of mourners, not one thing I could possibly say, no matter what high thoughts of consolation I might be able to mutter (if I can get a single squeak of remembrance past the throat lumps), we'll all really be paying attention to those ripples and wishing for the real thing.

Hell week

Last week was tough. In fact, I think one of the toughest I've had in a decade. Not only was I under a crippling workload, but a crippling personal loss fell right in the middle of it -- I lost a cherished member of my extended family. I won't write about her, because she was deeply private -- in the end not even wanting to share her deathbed with any but those whom she felt absolutely needed to see her close her eyes for the last time in order for them to be able to carry on. But I will note that I spent a couple of days last week not only struggling to meet a more complex series of deadlines than I've had to face for quite some time while also forcing back tears. It's funny how, with practice, I've learned a little about controlling strong emotions, venting them in measured quantities, learning how to push them into the recesses of my mind until I have the opportunity to face them. I spent some time last week alternating between getting on with things and closing my door to cry. That's something I don't think I could have managed ten years ago, and I'm not sure whether my being able to do it now is a good or a bad thing. It seems on balance to be a good thing to understand how one's emotions can take a grip on one's actions and to prevent that when necessary, but it also feels as though something has been lost. Even if it represents a maturity I never had before, a self-restraint bred of a deeper understanding of how the different parts of my mind are put together, it is an understanding that has been honed through many years of loss and disappointment. It may be a kind of progress, but it is also a reminder of how far along the path I've travelled, with the end now more closely in sight than the beginning -- though hopefully only slightly. Now if I could just bend that path into a different shape, a circle perhaps, I'd be in even better shape. I wonder if that's how my beloved Jan, lying in the caress of my brother, saw things last week. I hope so.