From Word To Word

It was a cold, cloudy, sleety day today, one of those days that will consent neither to be truly nice nor to be truly horrible, settling for meteorological mediocrity, which is the worst of all weather.

I decided that the day called for nesting. The kids and I made a pact not to leave the house for anything short of an emergency. We made hot chocolate. We brought our blankets down to the livingroom and watched a movie. We made a tent around one of the radiators and read some stories. We nested.

It reminded me of what Gaston Bachelard has to say about nests in The Poetics of Space.  With nests, he says, “we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world; we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.”  It was just this confidence that we built today in the face of a February day in Canada: the confidence of the nest.

I just thought that I should write and express my deep relief that Canada has been winning a few more medals lately. There were a few days there when I was deciding whether to move to the United States, or maybe to Germany, because their much higher medal counts were clearly indicative of an essentially superior way of life. Sure, I thought, we have universal health care; sure, we have a standard of living that consistently ranks among the highest in the world; but what good are these things without Olympic medals. A good country, a really good country, it has Olympic medals, lots of them. This is how you know the good countries from the bad ones.

So I am feeling a little better now that our medal total is growing. Now our ambassadors and peacekeepers and tourists can go to other places in the world without feeling deep shame for the next four years, especially if we win Gold in men’s hockey, which would make our foreign policy so much simpler, at least until the next Olympics. I mean, who is really going to have the guts to stand up against the reigning Olympic Ice Hockey Champions, both men and women. Nobody. We could probably finish up with the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq in a few days, maybe even throw in Israel and Palestine for good measure. I just hope the men do win, for the sake of world peace I mean.

This is why I am so glad that I live in a country that has spent, oh, something like 10 or 12 billion dollars to bring the Olympic Games home, and I am honoured to pay my part of the 3 to 6 billion dollars of the total that will have to come from the tax payers. Honestly, what better way could there have been to spend that money than on the purity of sport and the honour of Canada and the peace of the world? Sure, I know that the whole thing looks like it is driven by advertizing dollars and national hubris, but the essential ideals make it all worthwhile, in the end, I swear.

This coming Monday, March 1st, Michael Hardt will be giving the School of English and Theatre Studies and The TransCanada Institute’s annual lecture at the University of Guelph.  Hardt is a political theorist who has collaborated with Antonio Negri to write several very interesting books, including Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.  The lecture should be well worth your time, though I will not be able to attend it myself, unfortunately.   Details can be found on the University of Guelph Campuis Events Site.

I wrote last week about making a seed table, and I must admit that the post did deem to imply that I was starting tomatoes in my seed table as of this past weekend, which horrified several of my gardening friends.  Now, I am new to the gardening game, but even I know that it is still early for tomatoes, and I plan to plant red peppers in two weeks or so and then tomatoes one or two weeks after that.  Though it was the tomatoes that made the table necessary, the seeds that I put in the dirt this past weekend were of a very different sort.  They were the tree seeds that I had been stratifying in the refrigerator this winter, and they were technically no longer even seeds.

This was the reason, actually, for my hurry in making the table in the first place.  I had not expected to need the tables for a week or two yet, but I went last week to check the moisture levels of my stratifying seeds and discovered that they had all germinated, every one of them.  I no longer had little bags of dirt and hibernating seeds.  I had little bags of dirt and tangled masses of germinated seedlings, all pale and straggly and searching for light.  So, my first task was to build the table a little ahead of schedule, and my second task, accomplished this past Saturday, was to detangle and plant in seed trays the still very delicate seedlings.

The plum and cherry plants were fairly simple.  There were fewer of them, and they were stronger, and only a few of them had germinated in the first place.  The roses were a little more difficult, but there were still only a couple of dozen of them, so I planted them out without too  much trouble.  The Saskatoon seedlings, however, were a nightmare.  There were something like a hundred of them, all very delicate, and all woven together like a mat.  I was forced to pick through them one by one and to use a toothpick to help place them in the soil without breaking their roots.  This is definitely not how the manuals recommend that you plant seeds, and after several hours of tedium I would also second their judgment, but the results seem good.  I had relatively few of the seedlings die off from shock or breakage, and the cherries and plums are responding very quickly to the light.  It was good just to see the rows of little plants, and I was motivated to plant several trays of perennial herbs that can stay in the table until spring.

As our first real snowstorm of the year rolled in yesterday, it was good to have a little bit of spring growing in my basement.

I have written before about how much I love the strange, dream-like, mystical novels of Charles Williams, but they are hard to come by now. They can be purchased new, of course, though they are never in stock and are often “unavailable to order a this time,” and I do not often buy books new in any case. My local library is even less helpful, as it usually is, so I am reduced to looking in used bookstores and thrift shops, which has so far met with only very limited success.

Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.

In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.

The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.

In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.

Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.

I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours.  This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:

“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

My friend Sandy Clipsham had a few of his guy friends over last night, to sing, of course, which is what guys most often do when they get together, or so I hear. I had never met any of the others, but they were an eclectic and interesting group, and we spent as much time talking about new media and alternative publishing and movies as we did singing.  There were also homemade brownies, which is never a bad thing. The singing was good too, by which I mean that it was good to sing rather than that the singing was of any great quality, and it made me reflect on the diminishing opportunities to sing with one another in our culture and on the loss that I think this.

I have no data to support this supposition, but I would say that people in our culture listen to music more than those of any previous culture, but that they actually sing and play music with each other less and less. They have an insatiable appetite for professional music, for popular music, for music that accompanies and defines certain mediatized and commercialized lifestyles, but they are increasingly uncomfortable with making music together informally, as amateurs, as communities.  They no longer sing along with one another.  This phenomenon, I think, is partially to do with the diminishment of a certain kind of church culture, and also with the diminishment of things like summer camps and school choirs, all places where people once sung together regularly, but I it also has something to do with a culture that understands music as something to be produced and consumed like any other product rather than as something to be shared within a community.  Although people who call themselves musicians, either by profession or by vocation, are often willing to do music with one another informally, the greater part of our culture is content to consume music, and so it never learns what it is to make music as a community, as amateurs, simply as an expression of community.

Yet, the cost of this inability to sing with each other is considerable.  Anyone who has sung around a campfire, or in a church service, or even in a car with some friends and the radio, knows that there is something immensely cathartic about this kind of singing.  It does not require us to be musicians.  It does not require us to be vocalists.  It does not require is to be songwriters.  It requires us only to sing along with each other, and this singing produces an intimacy between us.  There is a social risk in this kind of singing, certainly, because it is a breach of normal social decorum and because it creates a space in which different rules apply, but it is this very risk, shared between us, that opens us to each other.

So, last night, the five of us took this risk.  We sang along with one another, informally, unprofessionally, without the benefit of practice, without really knowing each other, and we risked looking foolish, or at least sounding foolish, and we got through a few tunes that were none of our favourites but that were recognizable and easy to sing, and it was good. We sang “Cotton Fields“,” I’ll Fly Away“, “Five Hundred Miles“, “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother“, “If I Had a Hammer“, and “Down by the Riverside“, and I went home thinking that I need to sing along with people in this way more often.

Cotton Fields by Creedence Clearwater Revival

• Album

Loading…

• Buy MP3

  I’ll Fly Away by The Blind Boys Of Alabama (on tour)
  • Album

  

  Loading…

• Karaoke: Five Hundred Miles… by Peter, Paul & Mary
  • Album

  

  Loading…

• Buy MP3

  He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Bro… by The Hollies (on tour)
  • Album

  

  Loading…

• Buy MP3

  If I Had A Hammer by Peter, Paul & Mary
  • Album

  

  Loading…

• Buy MP3

  Down By The Riverside by Patsy Cline
  • Album

  

  Loading…

My friend Dawn Matheson has just sent me a link to the newly launched HotDocs Doc Library, which contains hundreds of documentaries by Canadian filmmakers that users can stream free of charge.  Along with many films that I have not seen, the site has several of my favourites, including How to Eat a Cat by Michael Connolly, The Take by Avi Lewis, and Thai Girls by John Haslett Cuff.  There are many films here worth seeing, and when they are combined with those that are available through The National Film Board of Canada, all free and legal, you are now officially without excuse to do away with cable forever.

There are three principal reasons that I have not been writing over the last few days.

Two of these reasons are of the sort that I am a little ashamed to confess: first, I have been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess with  my eldest son, since he is old enough to be interested in the game but is still too young to work his way through it by himself; second, my wife and I have been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica in the evenings.  I do not often indulge in these kinds of things, and I have been getting much less done because of them, but I remain entirely unrepentant.

The third reason is at least a productive one: I have been making a seed table to start my seedlings for the garden this spring.  Last year’s experiment with putting the seed trays in the window sills was mostly a disaster.  There was too little heat and too little light in the front windoew, and there are really no better places in the house.  A seed table was necessary, and so a seed table has been made.  The photos are perhaps not entirely clear, but the table has two levels, each of which is divided into six sections that are the same dimensions as a standard seed try, so I will be able to start twelve trays of seeds at a time, which should meet all of my foreseeable needs.  I still have to add the plastic cover and buy the grow bulbs, but it is otherwise ready to go.  Best of all, the thing cost me only the price of the light fixtures.  The frame was constructed from some wood that I salvaged from my brother-in-law’s futon, and the cover will be cut from some poly that was left over from insulating the attic of our previous home.

I hope to have seeds in dirt by saturday.

I have been watching far too many films lately, and I have far too much that I want to write about them, so I have not been able to write anything at all, and my list only gets longer.  This post is a an attempt to catch myself up, though at the expense of doing some of these films justice.  I have written similar posts before about my reading, and I may just make a habit of posting something like this every few months, just to keep myself on top of things.

Avatar by James Cameron (2009) – The best thing that I can say about this script is that it remains mostly inconspicuous.  If I was to say more, I would be forced to call the plot cliche and the story racially stereotypical and the character development both shallow and predictable.  The acting is generally of a similar caliber:  good enough not to distract but otherwise uninspired and uninspiring, even from some of the more established names from whom something more might have been expected.

Even so,  despite all of these criticisms, I would not hesitate to list Avatar among the most impressive film experiences of my life.  Too much has been written already about the 3D and the special effects and the visual scope of the film, so I will not go over these things again, but the greatest testament to the power of these elements is probably the fact that they are able to make a mediocre script and barely passable acting into the highest grossing film of all time.

Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954) – This was my second Kurosawa film, but it may as well have been my first, since I saw Yojimbo so long ago that it is only a very hazy memory for me now.  I will not make the vain attempt to describe the film or the director for those who are unfamiliar with them, but I do want to discuss two scenes that I liked particularly.  They both centre around a peasant girl and the youngest of the seven samurai who have have been hired by her village to protect it from bandits.  The two fall in love, as might be expected, but they are separated both by class and by the ambiguous relationship that the peasants have with the samurai, both relying on their strength to maintain the social order and also fearing that their strength might be used to undermined that social order, to take the peasants’ food and daughters by force.

In one scene, the two lovers are sitting in a meadow of flowers, a place that has already been visually associated with the young samurai.  The peasant girl basically offers herself to the samurai, but he hesitates, and she becomes angry, questioning his manhood and his status as a samurai.  During this scene, there is a shot of the two lovers sitting, turned toward each other, face to face, and the camera pans behind the samurai, so that the girl’s face is increasingly occluded and eventually eclipsed by his head. It is as if the girl’s beauty is being obscured by the many questions that the samurai has to consider or as if the girl herself is being eclipsed by her lover.

In a later scene, the two face each other once again, but now across a huge bonfire in the village square.  The girl is  at the door of a hut, and her invitation is clear to the samurai, but he hesitates again, and the camera alternates between their two gazes as they look at each other across the fire, the symbol both of their passion but also of the considerations that separate them.  The scene culminates with the samurai crossing to the other side of the fire to consummate their perhaps ill considered love.

These two sequences are fabulous.  They are so tightly blocked and filmed, so symbolically suggestive on various levels, that they almost stand as stories unto themselves.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog  (2009) – If I was forced to describe this film in a single sentence, I would say that it is a colossal practical joke being played by the director and the principal actor on the audience and the rest of the cast.  It is as though Herzog took the script of a completely conventional cop film and told most of the cast to take it ever so seriously.  Then, letting only Nicholas Cage and maybe Val Kilmer in on his intentions, he set about shooting the film as a systematic mockery of both the Hollywood cop flick and the culture that produces it.  There are three highlights for me.

First, there is the scene where Nicholas Cage, high on cocaine, enters the apartment where his team is staking out a suspect.  He sees two lizards on the table and asks why they are there.  Of course, nobody else sees the lizards, so Cage turns and looks out the window for what seems like two minutes, all the while, in the foreground, the two lizards are climbing over each other.  The scene closes with Cage, at long last, turning back to glance at the lizards once again.

Second, there is the scene where a car has crashed after hitting an alligator.  The shot that closes the scene is filmed from the perspective of another alligator and looks very much like handicam footage.  The shot lasts for perhaps a minute, and there are some indications that the alligator is being prodded with a stick so that it will move.

Third, there is the scene where one set of gangsters is gunned down by another.  Cage, high once again, tells a gunman to shoot one of the corpses again.  “Why?” the gunman asks.  “Because his soul’s still dancing,” Cage replies, and the camera shows the corpse’s doppelganger breakdancing in the middle of the floor until the body is indeed shot again and the soul drops awkwardly to the floor.

This film is a must see, I think, but only if you are prepared to watch it from the same ironic perspective that it was directed.

Watchmen by Zack Snyder (2009) – I did not love this film.  I did not even like it as much as the graphic novel, which I liked less than many others told me I would.  The narrative of the pirates, which is my favourite part of the book, is cut entirely from the film, though there are for obvious filmic reasons for this.  The music, which seems appropriate where it is mentioned in the book, seems often jarring and awkward when it is actually played in the film.  The narrative, which is pleasantly complex in the book, appears only hurried and shallow in the film.  I am thankful, in short, that I paid nothing to see it.

Sanjuro by Akira Kurosawa (1962) – This film is a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo, and it might be summarized by the phrase, repeated several times in the course of the story, that the best sword remains sheathed.  The hero, a grizzled samurai, is told this first by the noblewoman whom he rescues near the beginning of the film, and he repeats the phrase to himself in the final scene, but much of the film reinforces this idea less obviously, showing how most violence is unnecessary, and how it is the stupidity of some that makes violence necessary for others.

The final scene recapitulates this theme succinctly.  Sanjuro is confronted by a samurai whom he has tricked and defeated throughout the course of the film.  Sanjuru has removed his hands from his sleaves and has tucked them against his body under his kimono, and though I am not certain whether there are the cultural connotations for this stance, it is certainly a passive one, with his hands far from his sword and encumbered by his clothing.  He remains in this position even once confronted, telling his opponent that he does not want to fight, that enough blood has been spilled already.  He is, visually and symbolically, sheathed, but his opponent is persistent, as movie villains so often are, and he is forced to unsheathe himself and slay his enemy.  He is, as he says himself a moment later, a sword that cannot remain sheathed.

This blend of symbolism and reflection with what remains essentially an action film, all very beautifully shot, is what makes Kurosawa’s films so appealing.

49th Parallel by Michael Powell (1941) – As a Canadian, I find 49th Parallel often amusing, since it portrays Canada as a nation of trappers and natives and Hutterites and dillettant democrats, which most Canadians would have recognized only as a stereotype even at the time the film was made.  The propgandist elements of the film are also enetrtaining at a remove of some seventy years, sounding mostly forced and mostly unnatural.  The story, however, still remains compelling, and the pacing is superb, creating a thriller that builds in intensity without having to resort to cliche plot techniques.  The score, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is also very good.  I would recommned it very highly for a February evening with a glass of scotch.

I am in a vast building, a shopping mall, but built from medieval stone, massive, oppressive.  The shops are all closed, barred by steel grates, but I would not know which to choose in any case, because they have no signs.  They are just an endless series of metal bars set into the gaping, darkened archways of the shops, like prison cells for the beasts of some prehistoric past or some still unimagined future.

There are people here, a few, but they are timid and slinking, keeping to the edges of things, appearing and disappearing from the recesses of the shop doors, where they cling to the bars in the shadows at the bottom of the doors, looking at something I cannot quite make out, even when I go to the bars also and peer into the unlit stores, jostling now and again with the others who are coming and looking too, coming and looking and sighing and going again, to the next grate in the next door down the broad and echoing concourse.

I fear, suddenly, though I do not know what I fear, and I see a smaller grate against the floor, and it is hanging open.  It leads me to a tunnel, and I follow it, though I have to crouch, and then there is a ladder downward, and then more tunnels, some tall enough to walk and some small enough that I must wriggle on my belly, and more ladders, always downward, and even the tunnels sometimes angle downward, so that I find myself at the roots and the foundations of the world, and there is a door.

The door is ajar, and there is light, warm and flickering, from behind it.  When I open it, the room is smaller, much smaller than I had imagined it would be.  There is only a fireplace on one side, burning strongly, and a small bed on the other.  There is also a table between them, pushed against the wall.  It has a single chair.  On the table is a bottle of red wine, a pitcher of what I know already will be clear water, a large loaf of dark bread, a small wheel of some hard cheese, and a dozen or so books standing against the wall.