From Word To Word

The clouds on Tuesday evening were divided over me, gray to the north, then a sharp line, then darker to the south, with rain trailing behind the sharpness in the sky like smoke from the edge of a grassfire. In the earth, between the green of grass and the darkness of dirt, I was making my own line, but its slow progression was followed neither by rain nor by smoke, only by upended clods of soil. Between earth and sky, I was doubly divided, by the sharp-lined clouds and by the sharp-lined soil, and the wind troubled this divided place, drove the clouds steadily above and the dry dirt in little gusts below, joining them to each other across a vast chasm of air.

The rain fell suddenly, the rolling line in the clouds passing over and beyond me, the air full with the sound of rushing droplets, rushing in wind-driven waves, as if the sea had come and submerged me, though I was motionless, as if the clouds had become a vast and encompassing ocean. The darkness of the storm submerged me also, and I seemed to be working in the twilight of an ocean floor, no longer between places, but beneath all places, the lowermost of things, the depths where primordial creatures are born, the darkness over which there is only the sound of hovering wings.

The dry, brown earth on my spade became moistly and darkly edged. The channel through the soil filled to its sudden end, a river against its dam. With every spadeful, the water surged forward, a little further, in frantic bursts, convulsively. The mud clung to the blade. The channel washed over my feet. The darkness and the water and the wet earth all but erased the line from sight, and my digging became wholly tactile, the smooth curve of the channel, the abrupt hardness at its end, the steel under my foot, the water and earth filling my sandals and covering my legs. The division of the clouds had passed and hidden the division of the earth from me also, but I clung to the divided soil by the feel of caked mud and by the smell of wet grass and by the taste of sweat mingled with rain.

I have just finished my first reading of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and have just begun my second, so I will probably be posting on it frequently over the next few weeks. Debord published the text, one of the seminal works in the study of media, in 1967, and it came to prominence during the now almost mythical events of 1968, when student protests in Paris instigated a general strike and eventually toppled the governing party of Charles de Gaulle.

The text is organized into numbered sections, some very short, almost aphorisms, and some considerably longer. The sections are grouped together into chapters that circulate around larger themes or arguments, and the sections are arranged such that a chain of argumentation can usually be reconstructed, though this chain is not always explicit. The first few chapters deal almost exclusively with the function of spectacle in society. The later ones are more concerned with analyzing certain trends in Marxist theory and with defining an alternative perspective that has become associated with a movement called Situationism.

There is little in the later chapters that interests me. In my limited experience, any discussion that begins to analyze the relative merits of the various Marxisms leads nowhere, or, more accurately, leads almost everywhere but to nowhere useful, to an endless list of parties, theories, figureheads, congresses, manifestos, and splinter groups. While the analysis of this mess seems to be the favourite occupation of every imaginable brand of Marxist intellectual, it only bores everyone else.

The first few chapters of the text, however, explore the questions of social visuality, mediation, and specularity in ways that are interesting and provocative. There is something blunt, almost aggressive about Debord’s thinking. Though I have reservations about some of his conclusions, many of his observations strike me as true and worth reexamining in the context of our contemporary culture. It seems to me that his ideas about how the spectacle mediates social relationships have perhaps never been more relevant, and I intend to discuss some of these ideas as I have the opportunity.

I have had a strange pre-history with Moomins. Several years ago, Dave Humphrey and Cyril Geurette and I ran a series of lectures called The Underground Canon. We invited various speakers to introduce the texts that they had found influential but that were not widely read or recognized. One of the speakers proposed to speak on Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, which he characterized as one of the great children’s stories. I was teaching a Children’s Literature course at the time, so I was looking forward to Moomins, but the weather intervened, and that particular lecture had to be cancelled. I promptly forgot about Moomins altogether.

In a recent email exchange, however, TC also recommended the Moomin stories, even correcting my longstanding unwarranted assumption about their author’s gender. While a single recommendation can, in certain circumstances, be safely declined, I have an unofficial policy of not declining a book that has been recommended to me twice, so I went to my local library, only to be disappointed, as I often am. Of the many Moomin books that Jansson wrote, the library carried only two, one of which was on loan. I signed out Finn Family Moomintroll, sternly rebuked the librarian, who promised to see what he could do, and read the whole way home.

I was delighted. The Moomin stories are alternately comic and grave, fanciful and serious, fantastic and commonplace. They are both accessible to a child and interesting to an adult, which is my first criterion for any children’s literature, and they manage to avoid being merely didactic, which is my second. They do not consistently have the mystical quality that characterizes my very favourite works for children, touching this mood only on occasion, but they are beautiful nevertheless, and I will add them to the ever growing list of books that I need to acquire. More significantly, I will add them to the much smaller list of books that I will share with my children.

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the garden with my eldest son. We were staking tomatos mostly. I was holding the twine for him; he was cutting. I was tying up the tomatos; he was clipping random plants. I was weeding; he was adding specimens to the snail house that he has constructed out of an old planter.

As we were working, a neighbour of ours, who used to play the piano at the church where I attended as I child, and who taught music lessons to my wife for several years, wandered by on his way to the library. He stopped to talk, and I noticed that he was holding several critical commentaries on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is often issued separately from the text that it is supposed to preface, and which is one of the very few works of criticism that I can say I actually enjoyed reading. We talked very briefly about the commentaries, most of which he disparaged, and about Milton’s poem itself, which he praised very highly.

When he had resumed his walk and I had resumed my gardening, I was left thinking about how strange a thing it was to find someone who was actually reading Paradise Lost, not to teach a class, not to complete an assignment, not to pass an exam, but just to read it. The same observation could be made of just about any canonical literary work more than a few decades old, of course. It would have been just as strange if my neighbour had been reading Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene or Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. What was disconcerting about this observation, however, was that it revealed how much I had myself begun to regard these texts as confined to the realm of the classroom. It was not only my cultural expectations that had been surprised by his reading practise but my personal expectations as well. I suddenly recalled how powerfully I had experienced Paradise Lost myself, and I was alarmed to see the extent to which I had allowed myself to confine it to an artificial role in an artificial curriculum. I had forgotten why I had read Paradise Lost in the first place, forgotten why I still believe that others should read it, but I have remembered now, so let the next few paragraphs stand as the beginning of a self-correction.

To read Paradise Lost is to experience words as force and as power. I am awed by its pompous, thunderous, resonant, grandiloquent voice with the same kind of awe that I have for Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Blake’s illustrated mythopoetic creations. It is not necessary to like these works only to experience them. They hold something audacious and fearful. They do not hesitate to speak on behalf of gods and devils, to claim the place of the prophet and the seer. They place themselves apart, in the space between heaven and hell, earth and sky, good and evil. They speak a language that others fear to speak, a language of angels and demons and spirits and heros and immortals.

To write and speak and create and compose like this is presumptive in the last degree. It is to assume the role that all creators secretly desire and yet fear to hold. It is to be as like to God as God will allow. It is to invite adulation and ridicule. It is to be called a prophet and a heretic. It is to be consigned to the space between spaces that is opened up by their creations, to inhabit this space that is nowhere, to be considered a little lower than angels and a little higher than fiends.

When I read Paradise Lost, whatever its literary successes and failures, it is because it allows me to stand in this place too, even if only for a moment. It is because it can make me recall this place, years later, in the heat of the sun, standing among the tomato stakes of my garden. It is because Milton’s garden of poetry and myth makes my own garden somehow wilder and stranger, somehow truer and richer. It makes this garden of mine, for an instant, strain beyond itself toward the space that separates it from the divine.

I was speaking with an old university friend of mine, and she asked me why I seemed to be so interested in media lately. She noted, accurately, that this subject had never been of interest to me during my time as a student, that I had, in point of fact, steadfastly refused to take any more courses than necessary in areas like media studies, post-colonialism, gender studies, or anything else that was considered current and popular in the literature department at the time. Why, she wanted to know, was I now seemingly so determined to make myself an expert on the subject.

Let me be clear. I am by no means an expert on media, and I have no intention of becoming one, but the question was a good one. I had never really reflected on these changes in my interests, never even fully realized the degree of these changes, until she forced me to think in these directions. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with me, I did not have a satisfying answer for her at the time. My best answers always come to me far after the questions that instigated them have been withdrawn. Upon later reflection, however, I think I now understand both why I have become so much more interested in media issues and why I did not really notice this development in me as it was occurring.

What I realized is that my interest in media is not in media as such but in media as an extension of my interest in the nature of ethics, family, friendship, community, and the home. I have not been dedicating increasing amounts of time to the study of media as an end in itself, but to media as an unavoidable fact of our contemporary culture and, therefore, of that culture’s understanding of the questions that do matter to me in and of themselves. What I have been recognizing unconsciously is that our culture cannot be understood apart from the media that increasingly construct and constitute it, that I cannot understand the nature of family and the home in our culture without understanding the media through which these things are formed. It would be nonsensical to talk about friendship or community in our current culture without reference to the function of social media sites, text messaging, and cell phones. It would be ridiculous to talk about family and the home without reference to television, computers, and game consoles.

It is the effects of these media that interest me, as I use them and as I see others using them, as they develop and as I see us develop to use them. The influence of these media and these technologies, the speed with which they change and with which they change us, constitutes the most significant constitutive factor on our culture of family and home, friendship and community, ethics and theology. We need to understand these things if we are to understand ourselves in the culture they create. This is why I find myself thinking media, more and more.

Today being Canada Day and a holiday here in Canada, my wife had a chance to sleep in while I made pancakes for the boys. Most often I make pancakes from a kind of informal recipe I have from memory. They are never quite the same from occasion to occasion, which is how I like them.

This morning, however, I decided to use a recipe from a cookbook called The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Lewis organizes the cookbook around the major family and community events of the seasons as she recalls them from her childhood on a Virginia farm in the 20’s and 30’s. She presents a typical meal for each of these events, and prefaces each meal with some recollections of these foods and events. She offers, for example, “An Early Spring Dinner After Sheep-Shearing”, and a “Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast”, and “A Dinner Celebrating the Last of the Barnyard Fowl”. In all of these recipes, she emphasizes ingredients that are grown locally and in season, and she prefers recipes that are traditional and made in traditional ways, even if they take a bit more time and labour.

As I was looking through the table of contents for something that might resemble a pancake, eventually settling on Sour-Milk Griddle Cakes from “Breakfast Before Leaving for Race Day”, I came upon a reference to “A Note on Baking Powder”, which was in the appendix. I will admit at this point that I am an easy sell for an interesting appendix, reference, annotation, index, or other marginalia. I have been known to photocopy the index and leave the rest of the book. It is a sickness, but a sickness that have no intention of curing, so, of course, I immediately flipped to the back of the book. The note on baking powder is short, so I will quote it in full:

“I have discovered recently that Royal Baking Powder, which I call for throughout the book, is no longer being made because of the rising cost of cream of tartar. I would hope that the fact that it will no longer be available will stimulate an interest in searching for other forms of leavening. For my tastes, double-acting baking powder - the only kind you’ll be able to buy now - contains so many chemicals that it gives a bitter aftertaste to baked goods, and even more if the product is held over a day or so.

“The women of Freetown used to make lovely cakes and breads that rose by the power of beaten egg whites, which were folded in at the last minute. For biscuits and corn breads they relied upon sour milk and baking soda as the raising agent, and, of course, yeast can be utilized in many types of cakes as well as breads. If cream of tartar is available, good results can be achieved by mixing 2 parts cream of tartar with 1 part baking soda, and using this in place of baking powder in the same amount the recipe calls for.”

This is the reason I read notes and appendices, for the little things I would never find otherwise. I had never really thought about what baking powder was until I read these two short paragraphs, and I had no idea that there was anything except the double-acting stuff that I bought in the can. I was intrigued, which means I did a little searching online. I did not find a brand of baking powder that still includes cream of tartar, though I have not entirely given up on this possibility. I did find that there are actually two kinds of single-acting baking powder. One mixes cream of tartar or a phosphate with baking soda to create a chemical reaction before heating, producing a powerful but short-lived rising action, useful for pancakes and other quick cooking batters. The other mixes alum with baking soda to create a chemical reaction during heating, producing a less powerful but more sustained rising action, useful for breads and cakes. Double-acting baking powder, as you might expect, contains both tartaric/phosphate and alum, and so can be used in all sorts of recipes.

I also learned that the bitterness Lewis tastes in the commercial double-acting powders is not only from a greater amount of chemicals but from the presence of alum, which is also a primary ingredient in the second kind of single-acting baking powder. What Lewis really wants is the first kind of single-acting baking powder that has only cream of tartar, because this kind does not have the bitterness of the alum. As her own two-ingredient recipe indicates, it is not difficult to make this powder on your own. I did so this morning, and the results were very nice. Because this homemade baking powder is alum-free, however, it should probably not be used in breads and cakes that rise slowly during long baking, not without a willingness to fail in the experiment. On the other hand, the homemade powder should do very well for making cookies and other quickly baked recipes without any residual bitterness. I can hardly wait to try this experiment on my favourite recipes.