On ex boyfriends

I dreamed I ran into my ex-boyfriend, who had sought me out to smile tightly and say, "The doctors tell me I'd be fine if only you had loved me and understood me."

On dictatoriship living

I went to an art exhibit last week called the Biennale. Their virtually incoherent website piqued my interest.

Crossing the threshold of the former Fine Arts Academy, a grand classical building on the corner of Saint-Urbain and Sherbrooke, I had no idea what to expect. Turns out it's a sprawling selection of contemporary Montreal visual artists. Works ranged from
: eyebrow-raisingly terrible (reproduction of a squalid apartment, the hyper-realism uncomfortably torn by the ten pieces of buttered toast lying on the counter),
: to stimulating (a white room, with white sheets covering all the furniture, and careful piles of confetti created out of the accumulated works the artist read for her museum studies masters degree)
: to sublime (a video piece about Turkmenistan)

Let's elaborate on the last one shall we? It's clearly the heart of the posting, as your knowledge of Central Asian republics' recent history probably has alerted you.

Truly, I have no idea of the artist's intent with the fairly long video featuring a soothingly repetitive, sonorous ringing soundtrack and long still shots of statues, empty boulevards, and meticulous grocery stores. The video intersperses quotes from a book written by a Turkmenistani civilian expressing her love, admiration and devotion towards the great leader with adjective-free quotes about Turkmenistan and some of the dictator's nuttier decrees.  

I was entranced. I sat through the entire loop (no-one else did). It wasn't til walking down the stairs that I realized why. That must be what it's like to live in a dictatorship, I said to my friend Olivia. When we hear about dictatorship living it sounds truly awful. Mostly we hear about repression, fear, and horrible treatment of dissidents. But the day-to-day, as a regular Joe, life must feel overwhelmingly stable, calm, predictable, quiet. Reports of North Korea note this. It is civil wars, well any war but particularly civil ones, that are chaotically awful. With a dictatorship, you do know what you're getting. It's suburbia, to the max.

The theme recurred tonight as I'm listening to -- nay, devouring -- a series of podcasts of the CBC radio show Writers and Company on contemporary Spanish writers. It's called Franco's Ghosts. Finally, I learn, Spain is facing its demonic past.

The podcast I'm currently listening to features acclaimed Spanish writer Javier Cercas. It's about a botched coup, which occurred after the handover of power from the King to a democracy (shortly after Franco's death). Francoists stormed into the Parliament and were going to kill the new democracy's leaders. Cercas' most recent novel is entirely about the coup, about the Francoists' desire for a return to order and tradition and the population's horror and fear at the resurfacing bile from their past.

I think you know I love Spanish history for its inspiring transition to democracy. Spain's shift is an interesting counter-point to the North African spring, as Cercas notes, because it was not the result of a revolution. Spain's revolution yielded, well, Franco (let's hope the North African and Arab states do better, although I doubt all of them will). Rather, it was a solemn handing over, a noble King actually going back on his word to a dying tyrant and putting his faith entirely in the hands of his people despite their bloody and undemocratic history. It is about choosing uncertainty and the belief that it can, indeed will, yield a better stability, a dynamic instead of a stifling one.

On Easter

This Easter, my take-away thought was: if I were Jesus, I sure as shit wouldn't have come back for you lot.

On truth

I love my job at the strangest moments. For example: the moment a member who works at a farm sent me a picture of her prize cow.  Or, seeing the darted, warm, confident smile the ladies at the HR front desk (all members) shoot me when we show up for a negotiations meeting. I can practically hear them whisper, Don't tell THEM I said so, but GO GET EM!

Another such moment arose today, driving down the highway in the pouring rain with a new colleague who used to work in sales and is currently finishing a Masters on Greek tragedy. He's studying how to use art, such as Greek plays, as a tool for teaching. He says, it's because you can say things through art that you can't (daren't) in other social fora. His point is refreshingly radical, I realize, when he elaborates, "For example, you don't question democracy in a parliament. By participating you are already saying you believe in it. But in art, you can explore such questions."

You can imagine I'm getting excited, and not just for the thrill of discussing Greek tragedy with someone who really loves the stuff. It's that he's bringing together two thoughts that have been bobbing around inside my head for awhile. First is a frustration, really. I've been feeling this frustration with work. I try to articulate. "My work is mostly about rhetoric," I say, "about saying something in a way that will make it appealing to people, and I change what I say depending on whether it's HR or a worker, or a rep, and so on. But sometimes, I get frustrated because I can't tell the truth. With art, you can tell the truth." This brings us to the second thought. "The older I get, the more I realize that the art I value most is art that's truthful," I go on. I can identify it most easily in literature, my natural element, but I get glimpses in other media too. 


Because he's a regular conversationalist, he catches the ball I've tossed and tosses it back with an easy underhand. A superb conversationalist, like you, catches the baseball and transforms it into a little puffball of a white bird that flits over and perches on my shoulder and pecks my ear, waiting for me to take it and fashion something equally intriguing.


In other words, he says "Well it's still true, everything you're saying. You're just saying it differently. And lots of art is subject to limitations of various sorts. For example, in the 15th Century if you wanted to criticize Christianity in painting you had to do it through a Christian painting." 


He is correct, of course. I fall silent a bit. Our exit shows up. It is barred and we have to take a detour. The conversation shifts. It's when we arrive at the sodden campus that my thoughts click. My frustration is not that I feel I have to lie. It's that I feel unable to tell the whole truth. I noticed it during the federal election, when in the leader's debate each leader spent most of his time repeating the same catchphrases. You can't be subtle. You have to come up with a version that's simple, direct, clean. A version like an Ikea table. I don't usually have trouble doing this, even enjoy it mostly. Sometimes, though, I wish we could take a moment to explore the gray areas. These are areas I simply cannot ignore. The most successful people in my line of work, however, are those who live in an Apollonian world of bright, directed confidence. They reassure people; their beaming self-assuredness scares away the grays and confusions.


Sure, I have a few fire brands of confidence I can wave aloft. And I do so. But I see lots of grays. I have questions about the entire system, some basic assumptions that underlie this work, even a few dearly-held beliefs. But there is no space to pursue these, not in my work. It taxes the energy and mind, and no-one can afford to seem unsure for fear of undermining the entire project. Instead, I wrap them away inside me and grab my torch. 

I suppose this is why people return to school to undertake Masters degrees, or become artists. In a book, you can explore intricacies. You can let contradictions and confusions stand, breathe. You can take the time to examine them from various angles. You don't need pat answers or slogans. 


So maybe this is what I'll say to my colleague tomorrow: I like your thesis a lot. I like it because I feel we've given up on convincing people through art. And by art, I mean the kinds of pursuits that show an uncomfortable, or uncomfortably whole, or oft-overlooked and complex, truth. We go for the quick answers, for whatever image or sound or phrase gets the gut reaction we want. Yet, for all that these gut reactions win elections and sell millions of shampoos, mustn't they be less powerful than truthful expressions? Surely, deep down, despite our insecurities, we all thrill when we see the flashing multi-faceted diamond that evokes how things actually are and not how we wish they were or feel most comfortable seeing them. Surely, this is why in this age of bloated capitalist utilitarianism we still pay to hear Johnny Cash sing, to see Ed Burtynsky's photos.


In conclusion, I wish I were an artist. I wish I were brave enough to step from the well-ordered world of rhetoric into a canoe of my own fashioning and launch into the sea of unflinching honesty.

 A really good conversation

On softness

It is a grey day. Rainy. It’s been raining a lot lately. A desert climate hangover I never quite shake is my love of rain, mist, clouds. It’s the softness, the world plumped through with cushions. Back home, mist is rare and precious. A rainy day is uncommon. When it does come, it comes in a downpour: forceful, with thunderclouds and claps. All this is a fact of living in a severe climate, bone dry crisp cold in winter, bone dry crisp hot in summer, and no cushion seasons of spring or fall to speak of. I used to like hot summer days a lot, but a stint in central Mexico--four months without a cloud and so parched the laundry would dry in twenty minutes--cured me of that passion. Now, I don’t even think about the climate back home, or any other climate, except to shiver and be glad I’m not there. Now, I whole-heartedly welcome the gentle mist, the light rain, the dignified cloud.

A few exceptions to this mentality glimmer through, though, like winking nuggets in a gold miner’s pan. This winter, I had a sudden memory of sharp frosted mornings, where a twinkling line of white traces every tree limb. As a child, I imagined Jack Frost sprinting along each branch with his wand, leaving a perfect sparkling outline. Snow mixed with fairy dust. Winter here is mounds of snow, puffy as cotton wool, a heavy load on houses and trees, more the work of a mythical fat farmer’s wife, generous and jolly, tossing bucketloads from the sky like feed for chickens.

Today was another such instance, an exceptional yearning for the harsh dryness. I’m reading a book set in Libya. The story, and to a certain extent the characters, are nothing startling. But the author is so loving an understanding towards all his complex characters, and he describes in aching detail Mediterranean life: the baked white houses, mulberry and lemon trees, the sea breeze intoxicating the scorched air.

I bought a photograph in New York. It’s a series of photographs, actually, of horizon and ocean. I love the simple lines, the fact that although each of the 8 shots depicts the same span of (Mediterranean) ocean and sky, the colours vary from sage green to teal to royal blue to lavender. On a break from my book, just when the mother stands on the roof of their white flat-topped home in her silk billowing robe looking out to sea, I stared at the photos. And I yearned for the Mediterranean.

It’s funny how some landscapes stick with you. There’s a hilly, scrubby stretch of land between Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta that makes me cry it seems so to call to me. And the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited is Corsica, a teardrop in the Mediterranean closer to Italy than its motherland France. The rough cliffs and crashing blue sea, the splashes of bold bougainvillea, the rugged baked-dry mountains and coarse sand beaches. It seemed to me to take the best of the harsh climate, but not the worst. Seemed a version of that climate in which people could be reasonably expected to live for 12 consecutive months (which no-one ever did in Saskatchewan until the white folk showed up).

I think of you in that hot, sticky land. I remember the mugginess of Hong Kong, the searing heavy heat of Colombo, and think of you in that, and wonder if it has worked its way under your BC skin.