From Word To Word

My family and I have just returned from Manitoulin Island, where both my parents were raised and where both sets of my grandparents still live.  We stayed at my Mother’s place in Providence Bay, an old family house that she purchased a few years ago as a kind of cottage and will now be using as a full time residence and a place to run art workshops and summer programs.  She calls the place Providence House, and she was gracious enough to let us use it for a week and to bring along our friends the Humphreys.

Manitoulin is a deeply significant place for me.  I spent almost every summer there as I child, either at the farm of my Grandparents Hill, which is just outside of Mindemoya, or at the hunting camp of my Grandparents Gordon at Carter Bay, which is on the south shore of the Island east of Providence Bay.  I am by no means a farm boy, but it was during my summers on the island that I learned to ride the workhorses by leaping onto their bare backs from the apple trees, to drive a tractor poorly, to help birth a breach position calf, and to mow more hay than I care to remember.  I am no more a naturalist than I am a farmer, but the island was also the place where I learned to identify some animal sign, to distinguish one tree from another, to cut trails, and to fish.  My most vivid memories are of picking raspberries from along the dirt roads, of fishing in the little Mindemoya river, of wandering among the dunes at Carter Bay, and of reading in the old stuffed arm chair at the camp, the night already black, the moon hidden by the trees, the only light coming from the coals of the open wood stove.  It is into these memories that I always return when I come to Manitoulin.

It has been meaningful to bring others, first my friends, then my wife, then my children, and now my friends’ children, as I have returned to these memories over the years.  The island that I can introduce to them is not the same as the one of my childhood, of course, but it connects to that childhood in strange ways, and it connects to the person I am now as well.  It is no longer possible to get fresh fish from the dock at Providence Bay, for example, because there are no boats that still fish from there.  It is no longer possible to get icecream at the dairy in Mindemoya, because the dairy has now been demolished.  It is still possible, however, to find fresh fish, even if it is now sold from a truck in the grocery store parking lot, and it is still possible to get icecream made by the local dairy, even if it is no longer quite as local.  These things are still important to me now, though perhaps for other reasons, and it was a real pleasure to share them with the Humphreys.

It was also a pleasure to begin building some entirely new memories with my family.  I returned to Carter Bay to take some photos with my eldest son after the Humphreys had left.  While we were photographing, we met a woman on the beach who was able to confirm my uncertain identification of the sandcherries.  We collected several handfuls of them, my son biting into them, making faces, spitting them out, then biting them again, while I filled my shirt pockets.  We also caught crayfish.  We threw rocks from the tall stones into the water.  We found a stick that looked like a sword.  We saw a bear on the road.  Most importantly, when we returned home, we turned the sandcherries into a startlingly red syrup that went beautifully on icecream before bed and only slightly less beautifully on pancakes in the morning.

It is these kinds of memories that have made Manitoulin so important to me.  I feel it most strongly now, just after I have left it.

I enjoyed Dave Humphrey’s most recent post on reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to his daughters. Perhaps it is only one of our strange synchronicities, but I identify very strongly with him when he puts himself in the place of Mole, gliding ever further down a stream that he has never seen before, putting himself completely in the hands of his new friend Rat. I have imagined myself in Mole’s place also, as I have imagined myself in the place of Rat and Badger, though never in the place of Toad, whose encounters with the human world always seem to disrupt the unity of the novel for me. There is a quality to these characters that causes me to identify with them and with their world.

I especially appreciated the notice that Dave takes of the hospitality shown by Badger to Rat and Mole when they become lost and beset by weasels in the woods. I have already made mention, in a previous post on open homes, of an earlier episode in which Rat provides hospitality to Mole, but Dave’s reflection reminds me of the other places where Grahame’s story is deeply about hospitality and friendship, the home and the hearth, the table and the meal. There is something beautiful about this world that Grahame creates, something that reaches its fullness in the scene where the nature god appears during the search for the lost otter pup. I love this story, and I envy Dave the few years headstart he has in sharing it with his children.

I need to preface this post by saying that cheese is something of a religion in my family. My paternal grandfather was a dairy farmer. My father is a professor of food science specializing in dairy and in cheese making. I was weaned on yoghurt and buttermilk and cheese, most of it made by students, much of it made with questionable quality, some of it made to be intentionally odd, either coloured green or pink or flavoured with strange spices. When I was young, we made our own yoghurt. We hung around the university labs, stealing cheese curds and watching milk be pasteurized. We wandered through the rooms where the cheese was aged, all filled with the singular smell of mould and ripening cheese. Even today, we treat cheese like some people treat wine or scotch. Cheese is a passion.

So, this past weekend, when my family attended my step-brother’s wedding in Toronto, it should come as no surprise that we gathered early and long around the cheese platters, tasting what there was to taste. Most of it was good, if unspectacular, but there was one cheese that was in my opinion both good and spectacular. It was a gouda, but unlike most of the Dutch goudas I have eaten, which are firm with a nutty kind of taste, this gouda was textured much more like a crumbly old chedder, and its nuttiness had the intensity of an old chedder’s flavour as well. When I saw it on the plate, I assumed it was a gouda, After I had eaten it, I actually had to ask my father to confirm what it was, so different was it in both texture and flavour from what I was expecting.

Later, I located the label from one of the trays. It was indeed a gouda, and the only gouda that is made in Ontario, at Thunder Oak Cheese Farm near Thunder Bay. Apparently it is possible to go there, have a coffee, and watch them make the cheese on certain days of the week. I will certainly do so if I am ever that far North, but for the time being, I will have to content myself by ordering their gouda from afar.

My late father-in-law’s peonies bloomed this morning. They were his favourite flower. His front lawn was always centred by a tremendously large speciman that was famous in the neighbourhood. After he died and my mother-in-law came to live with us, she took two clumps of the legendary front lawn peony with her and planted them in my back yard. This was their first spring at our place, and we were warned that, though they transplant well, they do not often bloom for the first year or two in their new location. I was worried that they would not even survive, but very early on in the spring we saw shoots, and several days ago we saw some blossoms, and today there were blooms.

I am tempted to say something here about the work of mourning and of memorial, but everything seems a little inadequate. I will only say that we miss Willie, and we are glad for the reminder of him.

I appreciate TC’s comments on Walking Suburbia and On Being at Home. I hope to address some of these comments more generally in later posts, but I thought that I would at least do TC the immediate courtesy of responding to the question of what exactly I mean by a social holocaust.

The phrase does not only serve my penchant for rhetorical excess, though it certainly does this too. It names accurately, at least in my opinion, what is happening to social relations in the cultures I inhabit; that is, it describes the systematic and systemic elimination of relational encounter in favour of technical connectivity. The symptoms of this displacement are everywhere. They can be seen in the replacement of cooking and eating together with the consumption of fastfood and preprocessed dinners, often in isolation; the replacement of walkable neighbourhoods with suburbs that can only be driven, usually in isolation; the replacement of mixed housing with mass produced developments that reinforce class distinction, sometimes gated for protection, and for isolation. This list could be made almost endless, and it would include everything from how we are employed, educated, entertained, medicated, and buried.

The impetus for this annihilation of encounter with the other is a fear of the other as such, a fear of anything that I cannot reduce to my self, a suspicion of anything that is not in my own image. It is not the logic of a genocide, which would eliminate only others of a particular race or culture. It is not the logic of a crusade, which would eliminate only others of a particular religion. It is not the logic of a political pogrom, which would eliminate only others of a particular politics. It is the logic of a holocaust, which eliminates anyone who is other to my idealized self, on whatever basis whatsoever.

The Nazi atrocities were a holocaust for precisely this reason. The final solution was not just a genocide directed at the Jews. It was several genocides, directed at Jews, and Slavs, and Gypsies. It was also a moral pogrom, directed at the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unacceptable. It was also a religious crusade, directed at Judaism and Islam. It was, in short, the means by which Nazi Germany defined and eliminated what was other to its ideal self: a final solution: a holocaust. This is precisely the logic of our culture’s elimination of relational encounter, only we have taken it much nearer to its limits, where anyone who is other, for any reason, is to be feared, where the other as such is to be feared, and where encounter with the other is always to be avoided.

Our holocaust is social rather than physical, obviously. We understand ourselves to be too civilized for the physical extinction of others. We are, in fact, quite proud of the tolerance that we show to others in the ideal, regardless of their race or gender or sexuality or whatever. What we fail to realize, however, is that our increasing tolerance for others in the abstract is being accompanied by a decreasing openness to encounter with the particular persons around us. We refuse to discriminate on the basis of age or religion, but we also refuse to actually know anyone, whatever their age and religion. The fabric of social relation, and therefore of ethics also, which is based upon encounter with the other, is annihilated. We kill no one, but treat everyone as if they are dead. This is our holocaust. This is our final solution.

Now, it could be objected that I go too far here, that we do still encounter others, sharing our homes with family, our cubicles with coworkers, our pubs with friends. This is undoubtedly true. It is never possible entirely to eliminate encounter with others, not on this side of death and sanity. Even so, long work hours, full schedules, job turnover, cubicle farms, technical gadgetry, frequent moves, all produce estrangement among families, coworkers, and friends, all permit us to be among each other without really encountering each other. This is partly why, in an era where connectivity is easier than ever before, counsellors and psychologists are treating ever growing numbers of patients who describe themselves as lonely, depressed, and disconnected. They have become isolated by a fear of encountering the other, by a refusal to be open to the possibility of encountering the other, by a rejection of the intimacy that is only possible through encounter with the other. This is our social holocaust.

The reasons for this fear of the other in our culture are complex, and I do not have the space here to discuss them adequately. I would suggest, however, that they have to do with a certain political expediency and with a certain economic efficiency, not to mention the various individualisms, religious, political, philosophical, economic, and otherwise, that have characterized modernism and those of us who are its heirs. There is much that could be said in this direction, but it must wait for another occasion.

I am going on vacation very shortly, a matter of hours actually, and I was reflecting on the fact that this will probably not be much of a vacation for anyone. It will involve me driving with two small children and two other adults in a minivan from Guelph, Ontario to Savannah, Georgia, stopping to celebrate a family reunion with people I mostly do not know, then driving back to Guelph. I figure to spend roughly the same amount of time in the car as out of it, to eat vast amounts of bad restaurant food, and to sleep only as much as my children will sleep in unfamiliar surroundings. Suffice it to say that this may be my last post for a few days.

This got me thinking about what the word ‘vacation’ means. Because it involves the vacating of one space in order to occupy another, hopefully nicer place, it necessarily implies travel and distance, even if this distance is only small, and it implies that the space being left is somehow worse than the one being approached. The assumption is that the home and its worries need to be escaped in favour of some ideal place of relaxation and rejuvenation.

For me, however, the idea of vacation, even a more ideal vacation, is not attractive, both because it involves travel, which I generally do not like, and also because it involves vacating the space that I have painstakingly constructed to make me feel at home. I have to leave behind my library, my kitchen, my garden, and my neighbourhood, not to mention the friends who occupy those spaces with me. To vacate my home, therefore, is to remove myself from precisely the things I most enjoy, and all for the purpose of travelling uncomfortably, eating terribly, sleeping poorly, and conversing frivolously with people I hardly know.

I do not want vacations. I want holidays. I want holy-days, days that are set apart from the kinds of activities that consume my time and my energy, days that are devoted to the family, to the home, to reflection, to relaxation. I want, not to leave my home, but to inhabit my home more fully, to be more fully at home. Where a vacation tries to escape the things that trouble the personal and familial spheres, the holy-day consecrates these spheres anew, sets them apart once again, by purifying them for a time of the things that trouble them. I need fewer vacations and more holidays.