From Word To Word

The opposition between predestination and freewill is a false one. It presumes that God is bound by the same relation to time that binds humanity.  Merely because the human intellect cannot conceive of how God could both have foreknowledge and permit freewill, it presumes that God cannot conceive of such a thing either, as if God was bound by the limits of human logic and understanding.  Any such God would not be a very poor God indeed.

The alternative is to acknowledge the possibility that, for God, foreknowledge and freewill are not exclusive of one another.  If the conjunction of these things is represented to us as a mystery, surely reducing this mystery to the limit of our human logic is a gross presumption, for it assumes that our human understanding, our human experience of being, marks the limit of God.  Any such assumption is the greatest heresy, perhaps the only heresy, even if it is also the heresy of every theology, even the one that I am writing now.

I have been reading about wild edibles lately, as my recent defence of Wild Carrots and my still more recent experiment with Plantain soup will attest, and I have been especially amused by a book called Feasting Free on Wild Edibles by Bradford Angier.  It was first published in 1966, so there are certainly more comprehensive guides now available, but there are few, I suspect, with an author as idiosyncratic as Angier, and his peculiar style has made the book one of my instant favourites.

I will not bother to list his literary mannerisms at length, but will merely let a single example be a figure for the whole: Angier’s peculiar tendency to begin sentences with the adverb ‘too’.  In his entry on Watercress, for example, he writes, “The flavour of nearly every salad can be enhanced by the addition of this edible.  Too, watercress is famous sandwich fodder.”  Another example of this stylistic quirk can be found in his entry on the Willow, where he writes, “Bitterish in many species, in others the inner bark is surprisingly sweet.  Too, this inner bark is sometimes dried and ground into flower.”  I am unashamedly amused by these things.

More to the point, however, the book has helped me to identify the quite surprising number of edibles that already grow wild in my yard.  With a great number of my garden weeds still waiting to be identified, I can already offer a whole range of food for the backyard naturalist, none of which I had to plant myself.

White Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The leaves may be substituted for hops in beer. The leaves and flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Nodding Wild Onion (Allium cernuum) – The bulbs and the young leaves and stems are edible raw or cooked.

Chicory (Cichorium intybus) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots may be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.

Wild Carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) – The leaves are edible cooked and may be used fresh or dried as a seasoning. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. The flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Purple Shiso (Perilla frutescens nankinensis) – The young leaves and shoots are edible raw or cooked. They may also be used dried as a seasoning. The seeds may be used dried or preserved in salt as a seasoning. They may also be eaten cooked. They may also be crushed to produce an edible oil. The whole plant may be used to producee an edible purple dye.

Plantain (Plantago major) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. They may also be dried and used a tea.

Lady’s Thumb (Polygonum persicaria)- The young leaves and the seeds are edible raw or cooked.

Dandelions (Taraxicum officinale) -The flowers may be fermented to make wine. The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. They may also be roasted, ground, and brewed as a coffee substitute.

Purple Clover (Trifolium pratense) – The young leaves and blossoms are edible raw or cooked. The mature blossoms may be used dried as a tea.

Of course, this list does not even include the more standard edibles I have growing in my yard, like walnuts and red currants and wild strawberries and red raspberries.  I almost wonder why I bother to plant vegetables at all rather than just harvest what is there already.

I wrote on the image of the threshold a few months ago, and I have been wanting ever since to supplement this discussion with a few passages from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  There is much that I would like to explore in these passages, but I will not take the space and the time that I would like.  Even so, this post will be much too long.  I apologize in advance.

In a section on the image of the door, Bachelard says this: “Outside and inside are both intimate spaces; they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.”  Though he does not use the word ‘threshold’ explicitly here, his language of the borderline surface between the inside and the outside of the door is clearly linked to this idea, and the connotations of this passage lead me in two directions.

The first and most obvious direction is to the passage that I quoted from Heidegger in my earlier post, or, more exactly, to the passage that I was too lazy to quote in that post but eventually included as a comment at the request of one of my readers.  However, since it is a particularly significant passage for me, and since I will be referring to it very closely here, I will quote it properly this time.

The section comes from an essay called “Language”, which can be found in Poetry, Language, and Thought. In it, Heidegger is discussing a poem by Georg Trakl called “A Winter Evening”, and he is analysing the line where Trakl says, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.”  The larger passage reads as follows:

“The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.”

The relation between this passage and Bachelard’s is in the pain that they both ascribe to the space between the inside and the outside, though their description of this pain is not identical.  Bachelard says that the pain is on both sides of the borderline surface, a pain that derives from the readiness of the inside and the outside to be reversed, from their readiness to have their hostility exchanged.  His interest is in how the inside and the outside of the doorway relate to one another as exchangeable and reversible intimacies, rather than on the between of their exchange itself.  In fact, he is not even willing to say definitively whether there is such a between.  “If,” he says, “there exists a borderline surface,” and only then, under the sign of this hesitation, does he suggest that such a surface must be “painful on both sides.”

In contrast, Heidegger insists absolutely on this space of the between, saying that its dependability is what in fact enables the outside and the inside to relate as such.  While he is like Bachelard in affirming the interchangeability of the outside and the inside, which he describes as penetrating each other, and while he is also like Bachelard in assuming the pain that this interpenetration produces, he does not share Bachelard’s hesitation to name the between of this relation precisely as the between.

Bachelard’s understanding of the between also differs from Heideggers’ in that it seems to be produced by the reversal of the inside and the outside, by the exchange of their hostilities, where Heidegger seems to say that the between precedes the relation of the inside and the outside.  His between is characterized by its dependability, by its injunction not yield in either direction, in its capacity to settle into the threshold.  This between, far from being provisional or dependant on the relation between the inside and the outside, is the dependable space that makes this relation possible.

In fact, in Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard is not describing the threshold at all, but the between which is sustained by the threshold and which settles into the threshold, because it requires the hardness and endurance that it provides.  In Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard has no threshold, only a between, which perhaps explains why Bachelard’s between remains so tentative, marked only by the pain that it suffers on both sides, because his between lacks the ground of a threshold to bear and support it.

The second direction that Bachelard’s passage leads me is to Jacques Derrida and his work on the relation between hostility and hospitality.  Derrida argues that these two things are inseparable, going so far as to join them together with the neologism ‘hostipitality’.  Derrida touches on this idea in several places, including an essay called “Hostipitality” that can be found in Acts of Religion, a chapter on absolute hospitality in The Politics of Friendship, and a short work called On Hospitality.

It is Bachelard’s phrase about the inside and the outside being always ready to exchange their hostility that reminds me of Derrida’s idea of hostipitality.  There is in his words the idea of an openness of the one to the absolutely other, of the inside to the outside, of the outside to the inside, a readiness to be reversed, to be interpenetrated, even though this exchange, this giving of the one to the other, this openness of the one to the other, this hospitality, is also, always, a hostility.  The inside and outside are ready to exchange their unavoidable hostility like the gift of hospitality, there, right there, at the door, on the threshold, in the between.

It is because of these Derridean overtones that I find Bachelard’s words to evocative, I think:  “They are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”  The possibility of a true hospitality finds profound expression here.

There is much more that I would like to say, but I have already written more than enough, so I will just include two further quotations from Bachelard.  Treat them as an envoi.

“How many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of doors, for the door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.”

“There are two beings in a door; a door awakens in us a two-way dream, that is doubly symbolical.”

I like words best when they do not pretend to be adequate, though this means that I am not often a fan of my own writing. This is why I write poetry, I think, to let my words be inadequate, as much as I am able.

In Hesitation

The day hesitates, draws a lover’s breath,
A gasp, poised and waiting, on pleasure’s edge,
And lifts its face to the still coming rain,
To the long-promised rain, coming, still to come,
And it waits, the day, it waits and expects
A dampness on its cheeks, like sudden tears
That wash the stone feet of the door, that kiss
And betray the touch of the threshold’s lips,
And all things come to be, here, in this breath
And in this hesitation, here, alone,
In this gasp that offers and withholds them,
Like a true gift, ungiven, unreceived,
To a lover, whose pleasure comes to be,
But only in the breath that makes it wait.

I experimented with plantain in the soup for this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, not the plantain that looks like a banana, the one that is almost certainly growing as a weed somewhere in your backyard.  It was not the greatest soup that I have ever made, though this was not entirely the fault of the plantain.  I was working from a recipe that actually calls for spinach, and this recipe turned out to be far too bland.  It needed roasted onions and garlic.  It needed bay leaves.  It needed lemon juice.  It needed salt.  None of this was the fault of the plantain.

The plaintain actually tasted quite good, something like spinach only a little more bitter, but its texture was far too tough.  This was partly due, I think, to the lateness of the year, when the plantain has already flowered and toughened.  It was also partly due to my substituting it directly for spinach, assuming that it would wilt in a similar way.  Had I picked the leaves younger, or had I boiled the older leaves separately before adding them to the soup, I think the texture would have been much better.  I will need to experiment further, though not at the next Dinner and a Doc, where I should probably offer something a little more traditional once or twice before I make people into test subjects again.

Where I had reservations about the soup, however, I had none about the film.  The Agronomist was the first documentary that I had seen by Jonathon Demme, though I have seen several of his feature films, and I found it very effective.  The subject itself, the life and death of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station, is powerful, and Demme’s portrait of the man is beautifully rendered.  The film expresses an obvious affection and admiration for Dominique and allows his personality, his gestures and idiom, his passion and emotion, to dominate the screen.

Demme’s editing and cinematography are mostly unobtrusive, so there is little to detract from Dominique himself, and the few obvious editorial interventions are clearly meant to emphasise the person of Domique even further.  At certain points, for example, Demme replays a clip several times in succession, and these clips almost always include something that is characteristic of Dominique: the way that he sniffs the air, or the way that he imitates gunfire, things that recur in other places throughout the film as well, and help give a sense of Dominique’s personality and idiosyncrasies.

This repetition also occurs once on a much larger scale.  The film includes a long segment that record’s Dominique’s first return from exile, where he alights from his airplane to the adulation of a Haitian people who are experiencing their first taste of political freedom.  Dominique is cheered like a pop star, embraced by everyone who can reach him, and carried on the shoulders of the crowd, his hand raised, first in a fist, but only for a moment, and then in the peace symbol.

This whole segment, with much additional footage, is then replayed at the end of the film, after Dominque has been assassinated.  It follows immediately after a segment in which Dominique’s wife and fellow reporter, Michele Montas, returns to the air to proclaim, with a determined irony, that Dominique has not actually died, but lives on to help his people and his country.

The relation of these two scenes is significant, I think.  Dominique was twice forced into exile, and just before his death, he threatened to go into exile again.  Demme’s repetition of Dominique’s first triumphant return to his country, therefore, serves to reinterpret his death as merely another exile, a temporary leavetaking, from which he will return again, just as his wife declared.

The man may have been killed, certainly.  The film shows his body being loaded into an ambulance, shows his face in the casket at his funeral, shows his ashes being spread in the river.  Even so, Demme implies, the man cannot be wholly killed.  He, and the freedom that he sought, can only ever be exiled.  They will return again, triumphantly, even if they must return again and again, endlessly.  This kind of man will always return, to be taken into the arms of his people, whenever they are able to find freedom, even if it is only for a time.

This is the next installment of the Lindy novel.  Those who are new to the story may want to begin with Chapter One.  Also, I am aware that there are some who like to follow the Lindy story but are not really interested in the rest of what I write, so I maintain an email list to alert these readers when I post a new chapter of the novel.  Anyone who would like to be added to this list should free to email me at jeremylukehill@gmail.com.

Chapter Five:
In Which Lindy Finds a Very Long Stairway

When Lindy woke, the house was calm once more, though it still felt watchful, like the rabbits in the park when they are keeping an eye out. Light was coming through a little window above her, but it was too high for her to see through, and it was hard to tell if it the light was from a late afternoon or an early morning sun. She wondered if she had slept straight through the night, though her stomach did not really feel empty enough for that.

Her room was quite small, with only a single bed and a dresser for furniture, both carved with leaves. There was also a mirror above the dresser and a painting of a tree above the bed, but once she had looked in the mirror to make sure that she was presentable and had looked at the painting for a while, there was nothing much for her to do, and she began to feel a little bored. Now, she was not one of those children who must be entertained all the time and who cannot live a moment that is not filled by amusements, but she was all alone in that little room, so she can hardly be blamed if she began to wonder whether it might be alright for her to look around the house a little. She could not remember anyone telling her otherwise, and the house seemed not to object when she tried to ask it, so she opened her door and peeked out into the hallway. Everything was deserted, and she was beginning to feel a little hungry again, so she decided to see if she could find the kitchen and ask Penates whether there was anything for her to eat.

She set off in what she thought was the right direction, but she had to turn one way or another at the end of the hallway, and then to turn again almost immediately afterward, and then again at the next room, and she was soon very lost indeed. There seemed to be more hallways and stairways than rooms, and the hallways were all a little narrow, and there were not really enough lights, so everything seemed a bit cramped and a bit dark and bit mysterious, and Lindy found herself wondering whether she would ever be able to find her way to the kitchen at all.

She was just considering calling for help, when she came into a very wide hallway that was lined with six doors on each side. The doors all had plaques above them with writing in strange black letters that Lindy could not read, but the nearest of the doors was half-open, so she could see that it held a little fieldstone fireplace, and a big oak desk, and a leather chair that was quite worn around its brass nailheads. The whole rest of the room was filled with books. It was not a large room, but its walls were entirely covered with shelves, and there were other shelves standing in the middle of it, and Lindy was quite sure that she had never seen so many books in one room before, not even at the public library. She walked into the room and went slowly along the shelves, running her fingers along the spines. Some of them were very old, with their leather bindings all cracked and broken, but others were almost new, with crisp cloth or paper bindings. Many of the titles were in other languages, and most of the English titles were complicated things like, On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, or Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, or Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, but there were a few books that Lindy could understand. There was one about Charlemagne, who was a knight in some of the stories that she had read, and there was one about birds, which were her favourite animals, and there was one about Shakespeare, who was the writer of a play that she had read in school. The books did not seem to be in any order that she could see. They were not listed by their authors, or by their titles, or even by their subjects, but she still made sure to put them back exactly where she found them, just in case.

Lindy left the door partly open on her way out, just as it had been when she had gone in, and went to the next door along the hallway. It was closed, but she opened it a little and peeked inside. It was almost exactly like the one she had just left, filled with countless books, only it had no fireplace or chair, just a long table against one wall, like a counter. She did not go into this room, but closed it again, and went on to the next and the next. Each one was filled just the same with books, though the furniture was always a bit different from room to room.

Lindy had always loved books. They were easier than people. They were never too loud, and they never asked her for anything, and they always stayed where she put them. She was proud of her own little library of books that people had given her for birthdays and Christmases or that she had bought from garage sales with her allowance, but she had never imagined that someone could own so many books. They made the cozy little rooms feel very safe to Lindy, and she wondered what it would be like to curl up in that old leather chair in front of the fieldstone fireplace and just read forever. If only she could find the way from the library to the kitchen and back, she thought, she would even have someone to feed her, but the thought of food reminded her that she was hungry and that she still had no idea where the kitchen actually was, so she closed the last of the library doors and turned once more to finding her way through the house.

The door at end of the library corridor opened onto a landing with one stairway that led up into the floors above and another that led down below. She was fairly certain that the kitchen was downstairs, and besides, every fairytale that she had ever read had something strange and mysterious living in an attic or an old tower, so she thought it was probably best to follow the stairs downward, but the house seemed to be calling her upward instead. Before she had even decided which way to go, she realized that her foot was already on the lowest upward step, and when she had finished wondering how this had happened exactly, she found that she had gone a few steps higher, so she gave up trying to decide anything and let the house lead her up the stairs. After all, Lindy thought, it only made sense that the house would know best about where she was and about how to get her where she needed to go.

The stairs wound continuously upwards, but not in any regular way. Sometimes they went straight for a while, and sometimes they curved, and sometimes they turned sharply at landings that had windows overlooking the garden or doors that led onto hallways and rooms. Lindy stopped at each of the doors, and opened them, and looked into them, but she never went through them, though they sometimes looked very interesting. One opened into the balcony of a theatre with a stage and rows of chairs. Another led onto a long windowed hallway that ran along the peak of a roof toward a large dome. Another was mostly windows, and it had a long table shaped like a horseshoe that went all around its edges. Another had a glass ceiling like a green house and was filled with plants and birds and a pond with fish.

Lindy soon realized that none of these rooms were really possible. Mister Hat’s house was certainly very large, especially in comparison to her own, but it was not nearly tall enough for such a long staircase, and it was not nearly wide enough to hold such enormous rooms. She also knew that Mister Hat’s house did not have a hallway of windows along any of its roof peaks, or a tower in the middle of it, or a big dome, or any of the other things she saw. The house she was in now was clearly not the same house that she had seen so often from her attic window.

Just as she was thinking this, she turned another corner and saw that the stairway suddenly ended at a small door. She stopped for a moment, but then opened the door and peered through it, just as she had with all the others. Instead of a room or a hallway, this last door opened onto another set of stairs, much narrower and much steeper and much more regular than the ones that she had just climbed. Each flight took Lindy up the same number of stairs, and each turned her exactly to the right at the landings, until she could at last see that they ended above her, not at a regular door in the wall, but at a kind of hole in the floor, like the trapdoor to an attic, only there did not seem to be any door at all.

The stairs had been so dim and so plain and so narrow that Lindy was sure she would find an attic with a low ceiling, full of boxes and chests, something like her own. Instead, she found a room that was the biggest and most beautiful that she had seen in the whole house. It was wider and higher even than the theatre, stretching up like the peak of a church to the stained glass windows that ran around the top of the walls and covered the ceiling. The wood of the paneling and the floors was stained in beautiful patterns and perfectly polished. Huge chandeliers hung from the ceiling, already lit, though the sun was only just now beginning to set.

Despite its great size, however, the room was almost empty. There was a very long fireplace against one wall where a fire was burning low, as if it had been lit several hours before. In front of the fire, though not too close to it, there was also a long wooden table, with carvings on its legs and edges. It stood on a carpet woven of deep blues and bright golds, and it had twelve chairs on either side, with one more chair at the end closest to the fireplace. This chair was turned away from the table toward the fire, and its back was taller than the other chairs, so it took Lindy a moment before she noticed that there was a hand laid on the armrest and a person sitting in the chair.

“Hello Lindy,” said a voice from the chair, a stern and a quiet and a gentle voice. “I am glad that I could return in time to meet you here tonight. Things might have been quite different if you had found this room without me.”

As the voice was speaking, the person in the chair rose and turned toward Lindy. She knew at once that it was Mister Hat, but it was a different Mister Hat altogether from the one she had followed down the street so often. He was younger and stronger, and he was wearing a long robe of green worked with gold embroidery, and he had a crown of golden leaves in his hair. He was, Lindy recognized, the golden king that she had first seen coming through the arch, and she knew right away that he had always been this king, even when he had walked past her house each day. She suddenly felt a strange kind of wondering fear, and she tried to bow like she had seen people do on television, and she stumbled a little, and she fell on her knees right there on the hard floor.

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I know that I will receive much abuse from a certain constituency of my readership when I confess that I just this past week read my first William Gibson novel.  Let me answer the outraged questions in advance.  No, it was not Neuromancer; it was Pattern Recognition.  No, I have never read Neuromancer.  Yes, I know that it popularized the term ‘cyberspace’ and virtually created the cyberpunk genre and whatever else.  Yes, I know that it is a modern science fiction classic.  I know.  Will it help or hinder my cause to mention that I have also never read Philip K. Dick?  I thought not.

Now that I have my confession behind me, I will say that I enjoyed Pattern Recognition very much.  The protagonist’s name is Cayse, and the primary narrative centers around her search for the maker of some film footage that is being anonymously uploaded to the internet in segments.  Cayse is one of many who are obsessed with the footage, and she finds herself becoming manipulated by several parties who are all interested in finding its maker.  When she achieves her goal, however, she discovers a filmmaker who is entirely unconcerned with the attention that the footage is receiving and who is unable even to confirm or deny the many theories that have sprung up around it.  The person of the filmmaker, Cayse realizes, has little relation to the fiction that has been imagined around the film artifacts that she has created.

This primary narrative is paralleled by a secondary one about an excavation that one of Cayse’s friends is documenting in Russia, where otherwise unemployed and adventuresome young people are digging up the buried remnants of the Nazi siege of Saint Petersburg.  The dig is entirely illegal and is conducted, not for any historical reasons, but merely to find valuable World War II relics that might be sold for a profit.  The bones of the soldiers who died there are unceremoniously discarded, while their personal effects become the fetishized  artifacts of an imagined past.  As the dig continues, a German Stuka warplane is discovered, which the director manages to keep shut until it is fully exposed and therefore more visually effective for his documentary.  When it is opened, it contains the corpse of its pilot, who is literally torn limb from limb by the diggers, who are anxious to pocket the relics that he had with him when he died.

I would suggest that both the narrative of the footage and the narrative of the excavation function as a commentary on how our culture relates to its past, where the people and the events of history become symbolized by certain artefacts that we can possess and buy and sell.  The footage and the war relics are equally artefacts of a history that have come to replace the history itself, are equally objects around which a past can be created, imagined, fictionalized, fetishized in order to create value in the present.  History, in other words, has become as commodified as everything else.  It has become subject to the fetishizing and alienating drives of our culture.

The novel provides further examples of this relation to history.  There is the ex-intelligence agent, who collects early mechanical calculators that were developed by a man in a Nazi concentration camp.  There is the young artist, who is creating an exhibit from a huge collection of the first personal computers released in England.  There is the protagonist’s mother, who listens for messages from her dead husband in electronic voice phenomenon.  In each of these cases, historical relics become points around which a past can be imagined in order to provide a value in the present.

This obsessive relation to the artefacts of the past is a function, Gibson implies, of a sense of our disorientation with respect to the future and to the present. “We have no future,” one of his characters says, “not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did.  Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration.  For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on.  We have no future because our present is too volatile.”  Living in this too volatile present, and facing a too unpredictable future, we turn to the past, not as history, but as a source of artefacts around which we can create a fictional value and stability and continuity.  They become talismans that we can hold as proof against an unstable present and an uncertain future.  They are valued and bought and sold like the holy relics of an earlier age.

Cayse is not satisfied with this relation to the past, however.  At least, she does not remain satisfied with it.  Though she too is initially obsessed with the footage as artefact, and though she too turns this obsession into an imagined history of the origin and the maker of the footage, she is eventually forced to confront the fact the footage is not in fact related to its origin and to its maker in a way that can be adequately described or explained.  She is forced to admit, in other words, that every story about the past is a fiction, that every history is imagined, even if the historical archive is as immediate as the internet, even if the past is only a few seconds old.  Even this apparently immediate past is being sifted like the earth of an excavation, is being reinterpreted and reimagined and recreated at every moment, now and into the future.

As Cayse herself says, quite early in the story, “The future is there looking back at us, trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become, and from where they stand, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

The August edition of Dinner and a Doc is upcoming on the 8th, and we will be watching Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist.  Most people will probably be familiar with Demme’s feature films, which include The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he has also directed several very good documentaries, like Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.  The Agronomist explores the life of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station through several of the country’s regime’s, and who was eventually assassinated.

For further information, see the official trailer, an interview with Demme about the film, and a recording of Dominique speaking about his Haitian nationalism.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.