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September 11

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Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle
Of light on the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means
Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,
Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,
And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this
Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.”
Mark Strand, from “The Next Time” [Blizzard of One; Knopf, 1998.]

 

[The picture posted here, an image showing the New York city skyline, with the absent towers reflected in the ocean, originally appeared on the excellent but long ago deleted blog of a New York literary agent pseudonymously named Miss Snark. The original may have appeared in a New York-local magazine—I will happily credit its creator if pointed in the right direction.]

First edition hardcover copy of Canadian writer Margaret Laurence's 1974 novel The Diviners.

Currently Reading: The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence (1974)

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[Note: as social media as we’ve known it goes through its prolonged and probably overdue death throes — Cory Doctorow aptly calls this the inevitable result of the ‘enshittification‘ of online platforms — I’m trying out posting things here I might ordinarily have consigned to social media, including provisional and fully-formed thoughts, reviews, recommendations, image galleries and editorialized links. The decline of the relatively open internet ‘out here’ is a real problem, compounded by secretive and coercive algorithms, ossified social networks, the active throttling of news and information, and the manifest decline of social discourse. One of the things I miss most about the open internet (that is, online environments accessible to anyone online, not closed within subscription-based social media platforms designed to hold users hostage to their social networks and keep them scrolling and clicking material they didn’t choose and may not even want to see) is the joy of discovery and the opportunity to pause over something — a ‘long read’ essay, an arresting set of images — and actually think. As a researcher I have a deep love for discovery, but it’s increasingly hard to remember a time when I regularly learned new things or had my mind changed on social media — other than developing an increasingly clear conviction that the social media platforms where many of us interact ‘in public’ have become bad places — and here I am reminded of the excellent work of moral geographer Robert Sack, about whom I will write more soon — that do real harm to their users and to public discourse more generally.]

When I was in high school, Margaret Laurence was required reading in upper-year English classes, usually alternating between The Stone Angel (1964) and The Diviners (19974). Oddly enough, I am not sure either book was assigned reading in any of the classes I took, although I did read The Stone Angel (and the linked stories in A Bird in the House, 1970) and thought for many years that I’d also read The Diviners. It turns out I had not, although I would have preferred it vastly to Susanna Moodie’s tedious, complaint-filled memoir Roughing it in the Bush.

The other night, while casting about for something to read on my shelves of Canadian literature, The Diviners practically leapt into my hands. I have meant to dig into Laurence for a while, but have so little time for purely leisure reading that I’ve put it off. I settled in with the book, and very soon felt a poignant sort of sorrow that I hadn’t read this book when I was still young enough to get completely lost in Laurence’s story (and oh, wow: it would have been an excellent accompaniment to the months I spent binge-reading Alice Munro in my early twenties). The Diviners is written in Laurence’s inimitable voice, which is plain-spoken (even crude, some would say) and irascible. A characteristic line:

I WAS born bloody-minded. It’s cost me. I’ve paid through the nose. As they say. Also, one might add, through the head, heart and cunt.

At the moment I’m just under 100 pages in, and the thing that strikes me most strongly about this novel is Laurence’s keen and forgiving sense of humanity. Some of the characters in The Diviners are short-sighted and self-destructive; others strain against the bounds of their ‘place’ in their families and communities. Still, Laurence emphasizes their vulnerable humanity, and their struggles to function and relate to one another despite the environments into which they have been thrown. I find this refreshing and, these days, increasingly rare. It’s hard to think of other books I’ve read recently whose protagonists are handled with such care. Barbara Kingsolver definitely does this: I’ve just finished reading Kingsolver’s remarkable 2012 novel Flight Behaviour, in which backwoods Tennessee sheep farmers are treated with as much sensitivity and depth as the Harvard-educated scientist who might at first glimpse seem brought in to serve as their as their narrative contrast.

I also love Laurence’s vivid descriptions of her characters’ activities, whether they are scavenging in the local dump, daydreaming, worrying or dowsing. I have, as always while reading an especially excellent book, gotten out the Post-It Notes and started marking passages. Here’s one great example. Morag’s adoptive father Christie, a war veteran with shell shock, frequents the local Nuisance Grounds regularly enough to have developed what he calls “the gift of the garbage-telling.” Pointing at a spill of waste steaming in the afternoon heat, he tells her:

Now you see these bones here, and you know what they mean? They mean Simon Pearl the lawyer’s got the money for steak. Yep, not so often, maybe, but one day a week. So although he’s letting on he’s as hard up as the next —he ain’t, though it’s troubling to him, too. By their christly bloody garbage shall ye know them in their glory, is what I’m saying to you, every saintly mother’s son. [….] Now the paint tins from the Connors’ means the old man’s on the rampage and he’s painting like a devil all the kitchen chairs and suchlike, showing all of them around him that they’re lazy worthless sinners, but he’s painting out his anger, for he thinks his life is shit.

Christie goes on to tell Morag about having once found a dead baby wrapped in newspaper, which he buried in the Nuisance Grounds, retorting, “To hell with their consecrated ground.”

I’ll post more about The Diviners as I work through it. In the meantime, I am enjoying the novel tremendously. It’s no wonder the book won the Governor General’s Award (her second, after winning the GG for A Jest of God in 1966).

One more note: in the 1970s multiple efforts were made to ban The Diviners from some schools in Ontario; the organizer of one such campaign claimed the book “reeked of sordidness.” These efforts, led mainly by Christian fundamentalists, did not succeed greatly but caused harm to Laurence and were forerunners, in some ways, of contemporary censorship campaigns organized by ideologues on both the right and left. By the late 1980s it was still considered a tiny bit boundary-pushing to assign The Diviners; which is, I am sure, one of the main reasons it was required reading most years at the high schools I attended. In my  parents’ home,  Laurence’s writing was viewed with distaste, although I have little doubt that, were my mother to have revisited The Diviners later in her life, she would have appreciated the author’s realism and perhaps especially Morag’s hope-tinged cynicism.

Over and out for now. Summer grows a little long in the tooth, but it’s a gorgeous sultry afternoon and I will shortly go out to bask in the light and warmth.

All of Their Faces and All of Their Names

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I don’t remember where I was on 6 December 1989. I do remember following the massacre on the news, and struggling to grasp its implications. At 17 my relationship with feminism was complicated; it is even more complicated now. But what struck me then, and strikes me even more strongly now, is that by “feminists” the shooter really meant “women.” That is what I remember, and that is what I think of 33 years later, in a year in which women’s lives and bodies and basic rights seem as much under threat as ever.

Twelve of the fourteen women murdered that day—Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, and Annie Turcotte—were engineering students. The thirteenth woman, Maryse Laganière, worked for the university. The fourteenth woman, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, was a nursing student.

The women were young; the youngest twenty; the oldest 31. All were vibrant, accomplished, hard-working women, and as the years pass I find myself thinking, more and more, about what kinds of lives they would be living today. By now they would be in their fifties; two just past sixty; all likely at the peak of their careers; thinking about retirement, hoped-for grandchildren, ailing parents, new winter boots, vacation plans, the state of the planet. The kind of women one might encounter breezing into a smart café, shrugging the snow from their coats before sitting down to share gossip over lunch and a latte. Greying hair; a cancer scare; someone’s new love; variable rate mortgages; the fluctuating price of gas.

One of the women turns to another and asks if she has heard from Maryse lately, or Annie, or Helene, or Genevieve. A pause; a shaken head; a look of confusion. Oh; do you mean— I’m not sure; I don’t …

All at once the film recoils in its cylinder, stuttering briefly before rolling backward in a chaotic rewind. The projector shudders, lights flashing wildly; suddenly something rattles and pops and the whole thing derails. Metal shrieks, the reels rip loose from their casing, and in the background there is disembodied shouting. The film unspools into wild coils, frames snapping apart, stills spilling across the gritty floor.

Soon—but far too late for any hope of repair—all this tangle of metal and celluloid comes to rest, and in the profound, echoing silence punctuated by lights pulsing intermittently against the gloom, the only discernible images are those of the fourteen faces in an endless sequence of frames, eerily soundless and still.

Morning Ritual (and a short aside on the Education Workers’ Strike)

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I wake every morning before dawn–sometimes hours before dawn, especially in this dark season–and rise to perform the morning rituals. Sit on the toilet, greet the cats (this morning Milo was sleeping rather sweetly in the bathtub), read a few pages (currently Margaret Christakos’ book Her Paraphernalia, but at other times it might be a decor magazine, Erazim Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars or an old cookbook found in the little library down the street), refresh the water dishes and clean the litter box on the third floor, and descend to the second to do the same (later, my husband will deal with litter box on the ground floor, because hunting for nuggets in all three litter boxes first thing in the morning is beyond my tolerance). Feed the cats (really, there are only two of them, but they are very spoiled), put away last night’s dishes, wake our daughter, nag her again to get up, and then, twelve minutes later, make dire pronouncements about the time and remind her she cannot blame the subway for her lateness more than once a week.

[If luck is with me, there will be a moment to glance out at the dawn, and to glean the day’s weather from it. This morning’s dawn: clear, cool, the trees stark against the pale sky, peach fading into pale blue; finches at the feeder; a squirrel rustling in the nest it has built in the Juliet balcony outside the third floor front window—tolerated because it cannot do any structural damage and entertains the cats.]

See our daughter off to school, greet my husband, discuss morning schedules, help with caregiving downstairs (early in the pandemic we moved my mother-in-law into the ground floor of our home—fortunate to have dedicated space in our formerly apartmentized house—cleaned out and sold her condo, dealt with the difficult transition, began learning how to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth of Ontario’s eldercare system), walk the cats —

A year ago, at this point I would have disappeared into my office to organize a lecture, mark papers, respond to the deluge of student emails, deal with departmental bureaucracy, and, during the term last year when I ran an 8:30 Zoom class, teach for three hours before stopping to catch my breath and notice the patterns of light and shadow in the cedars.

A friend asked me recently what it is like to retire. I don’t really know, I said: it’s not as if things are any less busy.

And yet: the ceaseless stress, the tightness in my chest; the compounding urgencies; the roller-coaster of term; the steady string of heating or plumbing emergencies downtown—these I have almost forgotten to miss.

Our days are still very busy. Last week my husband had to take his mother to the hospital after a fall, and caregiving for someone with dementia is a 24/7 challenge; parenting our bright, creative, athletic, socially active kid is itself a full-time job; I still have publishing deadlines; we still have business affairs to attend to.

I have the project I’ve returned to, about which I will say little except that hopefully you will see it in print before too long.

And I have rowing, about more anon. Nearly every day, preferably in the morning, I go down to the basement to row for up to an hour (or sometimes, when I have foolishly committed to a half marathon, close to two). During the pandemic when the gyms were closed, we bought a Concept2 Rowerg, and it has been life-changing. After using the rower on and off for a year, I took seriously to rowing in March of this year, and in that time I’ve rowed well over a million metres, joined an international virtual team (which placed 59th out of 746 teams in the Fall Team Challenge and 8th out of 167 teams in our size category), rowed two half marathons, and lost 30 pounds. I work hard at rowing, and my top ranked workouts are in the 80th percentile in my category (not the half marathon, though, where I’m ranked 29th out of 76 bad fifty-something bitches who also like to row hard core).

Yesterday morning I rowed for an hour (while watching Man on the Moon), and then went out to put the gardens to bed. I didn’t finish everything before dark, but did manage to get the Hallowe’en decorations packed carefully away, put pumpkins into the compost, raked leaves, swept the front porch, put the hoses away, brought out the (shudder) snow shovels, and emptied the rain barrel. Today I hope to finish raking and sweeping, plant next year’s garlic, empty planters, and tuck the gardening décor and equipment carefully away in the garage.

Complicating today’s plans is the Education Workers’ labour action, a volatile situation that has closed schools in the Toronto District School Board and left students doing so-called asynchronous learning, with uncertainty about whether, when and how learning will resume later this week. This morning my daughter is finishing off some assignments and a couple of art pieces, while we keep checking the news for updates.

A Short Aside on the Education Workers’ Strike

My own view about the situation? In summary: (1) I believe in the principles that govern trade unionism and wholly support the collective bargaining process laid out in the Ontario Labour Relations Act. (2) I had some issues with OSBCU (Ontario School Board Council of Unions, representing over 50,000 Ontario education workers, including administrative and custodial staff, educational assistants, early childhood educators, and library technicians)’s approach to bargaining, namely the significant wage demands (yes, declining real wages and yes, inflation, but tell that to private sector workers earning minimum wage) and what seemed, from the outside, as its brinkmanship approach to conciliation and the strike vote process (the Province’s subsequent moves make OSBCU’s approach a lot more understandable). To be clear, I support the Union’s aims, but have found some of its moves seemed (again, from the outside) tone-deaf and short-sighted. (3) At the same time, nothing could be more tone-deaf than the Province pushing through legislation last week to impose a collective agreement and declare any OSBCU labour action ‘illegal’–ordinarily this would itself be an illegal act, given that labour rights are Constitutionally protected in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but the government has indicated it will invoke the Notwithstanding Clause, which it appears to see as offering it a free pass from democratic accountability.

I see this not only as an idiotic move on the part of the Provincial government, but also as an authoritarian, deeply undemocratic action. Not only does it abrogate the statutory basis of labour relations in Ontario, it directly undermines the democratic process in Canada. Worse still, it wasn’t even necessary. The Province could have waited a few days and easily passed back to work legislation that would have sent unresolved contract issues to binding arbitration. Premier Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce could have presented themselves as heroes standing up for public education, and the Notwithstanding Clause could have been kept in its box. Instead, most Ontarians blame Ford for the debacle, and labour advocates are now calling for a general strike.

Already this morning I see evidence the Premier might be backing down, and ‘walking back’ his threat to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause. If this actually happens, labour advocates will claim it was the threat of a general strike that did it, but it is almost certain that constitutional law experts within his own party have told Ford to back the eff down unless he wants to spend the rest of his term in office fighting a myriad of constitutional issues all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In the meantime, however this travesty ends, it will mean that public support for the Ford government (returned to office in June 2022 with a stronger majority than it initially secured in 2017) will be deeply and likely irretrievably eroded, that public sector unions will be further on edge, that families with children in school will have terminally lost faith in the Province, and that the Notwithstanding Clause–even if not invoked this time–will have been firmly and disastrously let out of its Pandora’s Box. The winners: public sector education unions, who will be able to assert, somewhat accurately, that they are standing up not only for public education but also basic labour rights.

As my mother would say: Oh, the unmitigated idiocy of it all.

And Now For Something Completely Different

 

Well. At least it is a gorgeous November day. My pineapple sage are blooming, and with some luck I will be able to plant the garlic. The garlic are the last thing I plant every fall, in faith that spring will come and things will bloom again.

[Note: I’ve posted an update and a few more thoughts in the next post.]

Summer’s End

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On Friday we made the longish drive from Toronto to Cardiff ON to pick up our daughter from summer camp. After having missed out on so many ordinary things during the pandemic — months of in-person school, over a year of swim training, art classes, time with friends — she was eager to return to Camp Can-Aqua for another summer. In 2020, like all sleepaway camps in Ontario, her camp was closed, but this year it reopened with pandemic-era protocols, a welcome return to normalcy for campers.

All the way up highway 28 we breathed in the sweet smells of late summer: the aromatic air of hemlock and pine forests; the cool fresh water of trout streams. Near Burleigh Falls the Canadian Shield announced itself in the form of rock cuts rich with spectacular granitic and gneissic intrusions, a striking contrast to the slow spirals of hawks and the steady drone of cars on the highway.

On the way up the road there were also a few suggestions of the approaching fall: maples showing just a hint of colour; crickets loud in the tall dry grass. A row of aspens, their leaves in continual motion, whispering like running water or the onrushing currents of a storm.

In a cloud of dust we pulled up the graded gravel road into camp and waited, part of a long line of cars in the cool dusk of the woods, before emerging into the bright sunlight of the camp, and then it was all happy reunions, final farewells, a last look at the lake, and then off for the long drive back home, through forest and lake, then farmland and, finally, suburb and city. In the car our daughter told us stories about camp. Cabin hijinks. Canoe trips. A fish that ate a frog. Diving off the high board. Canoe swampings, waterskiing mishaps, lake muck, counsellor romances. After an hour of excited storytelling she drifted off and slept until we had nearly reached the city, awakening disoriented somewhere on the 401, still on Haliburton time.

Some parents send their kids to the same camps they went to because it is (or they hope it will become) family tradition to do so. I didn’t go to camp as a child (although I have treasured memories of family trips to provincial parks when I was very young). My husband (whose forbears went to very different kinds of camps) spent his childhood being displaced from continent to continent before, as a new Canadian, getting to know the country by spending his adolescent summers attending wilderness canoe camp. By sending our child to a classic Canadian summer camp, we made a very conscious decision to give her something we never had.

Our daughter takes going to camp for granted. She is grateful, of course, in the way all good kids are grateful, but has no context for the alternative. Her life is about openings and opportunities, a perpetual present lit brightly by plans for the near future: fun with friends, schoolwork, swim meets, adding to her art portfolio, booking cat-sitting gigs, learning to skateboard. Today, still only half unpacked from camp, she has taken the subway downtown with friends to go back-to-school shopping.

All the pent-up feelings of nostalgia are mine. Watching country roads unspool in the rearview mirror, the trees recede, all those lakes vanishing into their thickets. The sun’s azimuth a little lower each day; summer fruit hanging heavy in the trees, propelling me to dig out the canner to preserve in jars as much of the summer as possible. Downloading all the photos shared by my daughter’s camp: all those cabins, canoes, cliffs; the loons; woodsmoke; lake water.

Looking at these pictures makes me feel so much longing: for these summers to never end; for my daughter’s future to remain brightly lit; for my dead mother to be able to see her beautiful granddaughter, so long and so graceful, so much like her, even down to the curve of her eyebrows and the roguish gleam in her wicked grin.

Amid the jumble of clothes tangled in my daughter’s duffle bags are souvenirs from camp. Camp crafts, skills badges, interesting rocks, a clay shooting target retrieved from the bottom of the lake, drawings from friends, notes. Her camp walking stick, bark peeled back to expose the pale pine cambium. After sorting all the laundry and finding homes for her camp treasures we take the duffle bag outside and turn it over, grit and bits of leaves falling out, tumbling over the side of the front porch, spangled in the golden light of summer’s end.