bio journal vitamins

Journal Archives

2009 Journal Entries

RWANDA PART 6

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Have I forgotten to tell you about Daniel? Our tall, dark and handsome local expert and official link to a wealth of Rwandan talent?  Not surprisingly, he is a very popular actor on a well-loved local TV show - and in some places women actually pointed, giggled and downright blushed when they recognized him (in some cases, approaching him to gush and blink their eyelashes a lot...)  He possesses an irresistible mischievous charm, and it was hard for all of us to say goodbye to him.  He made some of our most difficult moments into joyous fits - I recall, on one particularly long and grueling van ride, Daniel attempting to teach Steve the Kinyarwandan for every filthy phrase imaginable, and laughing himself silly - to the point of tears.  I'm laughing right now just thinking about it. With such a disarmingly elegant accented English! And in a great suit! O Daniel... If ever there's a casting call for an African James Bond, absolutely no contest.    

 

Daniel's role in this project was ambassadorial, much like Ayub's, but their styles couldn't have been more different.  Daniel's youthful mock-cockiness was both endearing and hilarious.  (While his sister Queen was recording vocals he kept insisting that HIS voice was really quite special, and wouldn't we like to record a real singer?) He was the much-needed levity, creator of the easy camaraderie that sustained us -  he was that rare and special substance -  social glue.  Wise Ayub on the other hand, carried the 'old-soul' gravitas of a revered monk.  He provided the needed seriousness of an elder whose very presence reminded us of the moment's sanctity - life's sanctity, love's sanctity. Daniel's smile flashed - but Ayub's smile arose, like dawn, like the filaments in a toaster slowly becoming brilliant glowing orange.  When he spoke to you, he spoke softly and looked at you deeply, with his total attention.  I had the sense that Ayuub had made his peace with life, and that that was a long and harrowing journey fraught with agonizing loss and brushes with the darkest, most terrifying aspects of humankind. When I first met him, I knew I was in the presence of a great man.

(from Part 1) "... I was immediately struck by the warmth and wisdom in his eyes.  Later in the week he left a message for me with one of the assistants - his instructions were "tell her the old man wants to make sure she goes outside tonight to look at the moon and stars." Ah. Ayub is going to teach me something powerful, I am certain of it."
 

We've had almost two weeks to emotionally prepare for this last excursion to the Nyarubuye Church. This will be the site of our music video for Amazing Grace, featuring Queen, the choir, and local singers and dancers.

 

We had already seen and heard so much on the trip thus far, so I thought I would be able to handle this.  But nothing could have prepared me for our tour guide.  He was very little -  just shy of  5 years old - when the church massacre occurred, and I don't think any of his family survived.  In my experience most teenage boys, no matter how surly or tough or cool they try to seem, will always yield to humour when pressed - there is a threshold, and the really great high school teachers can get them to cross it.  But all traces of levity had vanished in this young man.  He seemed (and this is the only word that seems to come close) empty. Something about him was just absent.  There was a distance - a remote-ness in his eyes.  I realized I was looking at someone who never got to be a boy. His childhood had been wrenched from him so brutally that something in his spirit had just snapped. 

For weeks prior to the explosion of killing, the orchestrators of the genocide were recruiting and training militia. Everyone knew what was unfolding - apparently it was all over the radio and in the newspapers.  Keep in mind this is a densely populated country - so this militia consisted of neighbours, friends, relatives.  How could the people have believed that their countrymen would soon turn into such savage, merciless killers?  Frightened Tutsis were already fleeing into the forests and to the borders. When some of them pleaded with a local mayor for help, he suggested they seek refuge in the Nyarubuye church.  Shortly thereafter, the mayor brought soldiers and henchmen to that very church, armed them, and told them to kill everyone.  First they ordered the terrified group to separate into Tutsis and Hutus - commanding one group to take their shirts off.  Then they gave weapons to the non-Tutsi side and told them to kill the others - their friends, with whom they had been hiding and praying - or be killed.  Sick and sadistic games like these were commonplace.  In the chaos that erupted, Tutsis were identifiable because they had been forced to take off their shirts.  But it didn't matter - no one in the church was spared.  Before the killers rested in the evening from the day's slaughter, they were said to have cut the Achilles tendons of any survivors so that they could not escape.   They would then feast on cows stolen from their murdered victims, and drink all night - a hellish, orgiastic wallowing in evil reminiscent of Apocalypse Now.  From some of the stories our guide relayed, I think it's safe to say that these men had gone completely insane.  And the following day, they would begin anew.  For several days, this madness ensued.  At this church alone, just over 25,000 people were tortured, brutalized and murdered.  Thousands of bodies that were later discovered in the outlying areas are also buried here.

Our guide spoke of the unfathomable atrocities that happened there with the kind of resigned, blunted, horror I have seen in interviews with Viet Nam vets and Holocaust survivors.  He held up the various weapons and described them:  "these poles they used to rape the women in front of their husbands and children until they bled to death". 
 

He showed us things that we couldn't even begin to comprehend:  "this is an outdoor wood-burning oven where one of the leaders cooked the hearts of his victims".  Sentences like these were coming out of this teenager's mouth, and he had probably said them a hundred times on a hundred other tours. He then took us past the most horrible sight I have ever beheld - long tables with rows and rows of neatly aligned human skulls. Some were bashed and cracked, others had gaping holes. There were tables full of leg bones, small children's skulls with evidence of extreme trauma. Seeing those little delicate, miraculous things - with perfect eye holes and rows for teeth - and thinking about the sheer complexity and wonder that is a human body, it made my very soul shudder to think of someone striking the head of a three-year old so hard as to crush it.  Never mind my soul - it's the soul of the world we are feeling when empathy wounds us like this.  Collectively we are something, and brutality and hatred are most certainly contrary to it...

We were led outside the halls of bones and artifacts to the grounds where the guide described more horror : any stragglers from the forests or those fleeing the city who thought the church might be a safe haven, were drawn into the slaughter.   Ayuub spoke "I was at a similar church with a group of others keeping vigil, looking among the dead for the bodies of our loved ones." He was looking for his mother - he said he knew he could recognize his mother by her unmistakable feet. "There were three pits - one of skeletons, one of miscellaneous bones, and one of just dust and ashes.  They were looking at the skeletons when suddenly they heard the militia coming.  They leapt into the bushes and Ayuub said he saw them take out their machine guns and open fire on the pits of corpses. 

"I thought, my God - how many times can you kill a person? It was blood-chilling, the hatred."  I was so startled to hear this from him - I hadn't even considered that Ayuub could have witnessed something like that, or had come so close to death.  Darcy tells me he has even scarier stories, and yet, there was never any bitterness or torment in his voice. He was so gentle and kind and soft-spoken.

At the end we stood around our guide in the baking late afternoon sun. He did not smile. The tour was finished, and did we have any questions for him? After a long silence I asked Ayuub what had been in my throat for the last two hours - I couldn't construct the sentence carefully or think about it at all, I just genuinely needed to know -  "How does he deal with this?"

He scratched his head and looked down.  Ayuub listened compassionately to his words and translated for us: "He says 'It's something that requires a lot of strength.  And simply, I have no choice.' "

At the end of the day, I felt that this young man was the tragedy of the genocide.  He was the trampled innocence, the drowned joy, and the ruined faith in human goodness.  He was the giant hole left.  He had seen pure evil, and the vacancy in his voice was proof enough that because of that glimpse, something had been irretrievably lost.

I should also mention that Ayuub is a father of three.  He was visibly moved by this young man's demeanor.  Darcy told me later that in addition to working on films that have brought the story of the genocide to the world (including Hotel Rwanda) Ayuub works with an organization that connects orphaned children with their surviving relatives.  He takes hundreds of photographs of scared little kids' faces, and finds the families to take them in.  Sainthood... yes.

RWANDA PART 5

Monday, January 04, 2010

A choir - a choir! I woke up that morning like a kid at Christmas. Don't care what kind of choir! Don't even care if they're good! Multiple voices raised in song will give me whole-body goosebumps every time.

A day before, the gorgeous soul singer Queen came in to sing some verses on Amazing Grace. She was a bit nervous to be recorded, and her first few tries were tentative, but when Pro-Tools wasn't running, she really let loose - singing a hymn of her own with palpable religious rapture.  We were stunned.  When the final members of the choir arrived and started warming up in the studio I just couldn't keep it together.... The sound was so beautiful and the words so simple and true - I was welling up.  After our experiences thus far, it's no wonder I'm a wee bit raw. 

There are also a few geckos living behind the curtains in my room, so I'm a little sleep-deprived. Later that evening Damhnait and I added rich blankets of "Mmm"s and "Ooo"s  to their chorus. My sleep that night under the mosquito net was deep and dreamless. 

Jonny, my epidemiologist friend, arrived the next afternoon. Fate would have it that he was working in Congo, a three hour bus ride away.  Isn't it eerie how some people seem sent to you? And seemingly against all odds, they'll reappear until the lesson of their presence is learned?  It was so surreal to see him standing there, bearded and smiling, after almost three years.  I tried to ask bluntly "How does one process all of this? How is it possible to return to life in the comfortable west?" but all I could muster was a discussion of the last novel I'd read - which, coincidentally, was the last novel he had read, Steinbeck's East of Eden (crrrreeeepy).   Something about discussing this novel answered the questions I wanted to ask him, in a way that no direct answer could have... He then proceeded to show me computer programs he has written for malnutrition and mortality statistics. (eyebrow raise) Yep. I know.

 He quickly befriended the entire brood, thankfully, because I had to get back upstairs to the studio for some organ tracks.  Could there be two more disparate professions in the universe? How are we pals? Strange...

After a long session six of us took a walk, under the twinkling stars, to a nearby restaurant.  We ate delicious thin-crust pizza on the terrace with a spectacular view of Kigali.  After only being able to stomach a banana for the last three days I had to restrain myself from moaning aloud with pleasure.  In those hours I said millions, definitely millions, of thank yous - for the stars, the food, the life inside my cells, my precious companions and their clear, sincere eyes - each pair, an exquisite puzzle.

The next day I wanted to jump for joy.  Oh health, never again shall you be invisible to me! I shall feel you, appreciate you, thank you!  

Our producer and recording engineer David Bottrill and I have bonded over morning coffee. The man is working so extremely hard! He's pooped, you can tell, but he'd never say so.  When everyone is out of patience, he's upstairs, headphones on, sifting through drum loops.  And in Kigali, every day there are numerous power outages.  We could be mid-way through a great take and - ... out.  The poor guy - this recording owes much to Rwandan cigarettes.  David mixed my last record The Baroness, and I've a sneaking suspicion that his recommendation has landed me here in this incredible opportunity, but back then we didn't really get to know each other.  14 days in Africa making music on a deadline between gut-churning, culture-shocking exposure to humanitarian projects? If that doesn't make you fast friends, I don't know what will.  It's a privilege to actually see behind a few layers of your fellow man... I'm starting to know and appreciate each shining, unique personality in the rest of the crew as well -  the marvelous intellect behind Derek's goofy, gregarious exterior, the vast knowledge and love of music behind Scott's quiet poker face... Humans - at least from North American culture - kind of circle around each other in the beginning, slightly hidden, guarded and suspicious, until a few cards are laid and each player takes another little gamble...

I'm off to sing my verse of "Amazing Grace"...

RWANDA PART 4

Thursday, December 10, 2009

More studio lunacy! The momentum of music-making has given me energy and strength - even though for the past two days I've been running on coffee and oranges... which reminds me of that exquisite, biting Wallace Stevens poem. 

I was never interested in co-writing.  Making songs was always a private exercise for me, an archive of my spiritual progress (... or decline for that matter), something born in silence as a way to excavate/study/chew on my internal storms and, in so doing, set them free. Sitting down with "other minds" and trying to build, brick by random brick, something called 'music' always felt forced - false. How wrong I can be...

Life is always teaching me - the fiercer your grip, the more suffering you create. Think Bruce Lee... ;)
I feel as though everything important I have ever learned has in some way involved letting go. Life knows what it's doing, Slean, trust! Flow with it. Resistance to life is not only futile, it's a complete waste of time and energy...

So we are gathered around the kitchen table, me and my three new best friends Steve, Damhnait and Tim, shouting out verses - some great, some awful, switching chords and tweaking melodies.  It is refreshing and thrilling for all of us to abandon our firm ideas about who we think are 'musically' and just be conduits. The present moment twinkles around us.  The cameras are rolling but do not intrude.  I have such affection for everyone here now.  I am genuinely delighted to see them in the morning.  Wedging this heart open another blessed inch...

R&B queen Miss JoJo arrives to put some of her silky vocals on our dance-hall track.  She told us that the Rwandan music scene is exploding.  She's been making videos and recordings with her friends using new, easy-to-use technology... For our song she whips up a whole lyric and numerous killer melodies within an hour.  Amazing. 

Rwanda's best live reggae band also stopped by - Patrick, the bass-player, patiently waded through our busy tune with numerous chords.  The chart I made up for him was a full page.  When I sat in on their tune (yeehoo, playing the organ part in a real Rastafari band!) he wrote four chords at the top of the page.  Oh.  I hung my conservatory-head in shame. 

Our next field trip is to visit a successful farming cooperative situated on the sloping, spectacularly beautiful terrain of the lush eastern districts. Nope. Still not over it.



Lovely Claire will be our guide again, and the male members of our company aren't complaining.  After a ledge-hugging, heart-stopping ride through banana fields and hillside forests, we arrived at the village hub where 20 or so community members were working away shelling peanuts. 

Without a beat, Damhnait jumped in to help, and the people were delighted by this gesture.  Dahmnait is uniquely gifted this way - perhaps it's the Newfie laid-back openness - but in every single situation, she would effortlessly break the cultural ice between our group and the Rwandans we were visiting.  Despite an almost impenetrable language barrier, she was always able to make people laugh.  Without words, you can't do that with jokes or witticisms - she did it with her body language, her smile and her willingness to share their personal space without fear or hesitation.  She put people at ease.  I learned a lot from just being around her.  Here the women are chuckling at the slowness of her peanut-shelling technique - when she accidentally dropped a few shelled peanuts, well, that produced a much louder eruption.

It was not unusual to see teenage boys holding hands and hugging in public.  Friendship in Rwanda is a different, deeper thing than in Canada.

They are not conservative about affection, loyalty or physical bonding.  Our breakfast chef Betty routinely held my hands and told me she loved me! It made me ask myself what we're so afraid of in the west.

Germs? Betrayal? Honestly - how sad!

The children in this village were positively magical. 

Their eyes - the depthless love, the universes of potential in their eyes! - will forever haunt me.  They stood in a close circle around me, giggling and marveling at my weird skin and hair and features.  I wanted so desperately to talk to them.  A teenage boy, in heavily accented English blurted out "Good morning? Nice to meet you!" Gales of laughter.  I decided to use the language-barrier trick I learned in Cuba while filming the video for Sweet Ones with an all-Spanish crew -  I pointed to my nose.  For a few minutes, they stared at me like "What is UP with this crazy muzungu?"

I was persistent, until one child finally screamed out the word for nose in Kinyarwandan. Then I mimicked, as best I could.  Hilarious!  And that set us off on a bilingual tour of the human body.  (Of course they wanted to try the English words too.) The whole thing was fantastically side-splitting to them.  Such easy JOY! So pure and so immediately available! They smiled and clapped so generously! I was humbled beyond recognition - like I'd burst into a vapour and was now hovering in my form, light as a feather.  Just look at this little girl. 

Later, the whole group decided they would sing their national anthem for us.  They harmonised and sang out, richly, without reservation.  We returned the favour, although our song seemed a little stiffer and, mmm, a tad too formal? 

I did feel a whole-body tingle though - and it wasn't exactly patriotism per se, it was more an intense surge of gratitude.  The word 'Canada'  caused a flood of strong, conflicting emotions.  I was confronting the bald, random fact of geography - 'this anthem I am singing is the reason that I can drink clean water (hell, I bathe in it whenever the mood strikes me), that I can make a living dreaming up art, that I can always easily access nutritious food and I can walk around (even fly around) my country without fear of violence'...  How brutally causeless, this fact of my birthplace.  Canada - free and safe and plentiful.  Why should I receive this bounty and not her? What did these children do to deserve what they are facing? It wasn't guilt I was feeling - guilt never served anyone or any cause. It was the injustice of it.  It's not right, and we all know that deeply. I want, in some way, to be one of the people in the world who are trying to remedy injustice.  I've got to figure out a way to do this.

That beautiful little girl ran after our departing vehicle...

The light vapour-feeling I experienced in their presence turned into a crushing heaviness as we were driving home.  All along the road, people were carrying (or tying to their bikes) big yellow containers of water from the closest well.  Most of their day is spent fetching water. Every day.  Fetching water, carrying wood, growing food. If all of the real wealth of human potential in the world - and by that I mean ideas, innovation, invention, cooperative action - was developed and harnessed, I can't help but think that this world would rapidly transform itself for the better.  When humans are completely and solely occupied with the business of survival, how will we face the challenges of a growing population on a limited planet?  What if that man carrying a mattress on his head down the highway - what if he could be a pioneer in developing-world health care? that woman digging potatoes - what if she could have taught all the village girls how to sew, midwife, read, start businesses? Most will never know because they have to work tirelessly to feed themselves and their children.  Though I agree with Tolstoy that to live off the land is indeed a noble way of life (the only one in his view), it seems to me,  in this place where so many are suffering, that this kind of existence is such a waste of human endeavour.  How many genii lay dormant here? I know there are repetitive, robot-replaceable jobs in North America - someone has to put the car parts together, pick up the garbage, clean the windows etc.  Hey, I was a bartender at Swiss Chalet.  Are these a waste of human endeavour? Debatable, but the difference is, we have so many opportunities and ways to become educated, to train and acquire skills of all kinds - so North Americans, for the most part, are freely making choices in this regard.  In Rwanda, those choices are drastically limited or just plain non-existent.  And I think the world pays dearly for this wasted potential...  The door to betterment - the chance to develop the mind - should be freely accessible to all that seek it...

As I'm video-skyping with my fella that evening, I ask him - how is it that I can see and hear you, from thousands of miles away, over the internet, for free, in real time - and there are people who don't have clean water ?!

Perplexing and troubling. Perhaps a naive way of framing the question, but valid nonetheless.  Video-skyping is pure Star-Trek to me.  It is the living future.  I experience a "Jetsons"-style oddness, every time.  My friend (an epidemiologist I met in France) just happened to be working in Congo this month, and he's coming for a visit.  It will be good to talk about all of these thoughts with a seasoned veteran aid-worker.  

RWANDA PART 3

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Ugh... I've been sleeping so heavily I don't know what day it is... feeling fragile...

I wake to the sound of glorious voices and hypnotic rhythms... this is the Rwandan soundtrack - life, the celebration of life, rejoicing!

Just watch this seven-year old Batwa child cut a rug.  Man.  He will have his pick of the ladies one day.  Behind him his mom, in the colourful wrap skirt, beams with pride.

She's playing a traditional umuduri... the "Oh my God" at the end of this video is, er, me. I couldn't help myself.

Notice the interchange between 4+2 and 3+3 beat groups... all underneath the umuduri's consistent eighth note... Music nerds, indulge.

I still can't get over the energy these musicians created in the room, in fact, the entire house.  It was pure, selfless joy.  You can see it in their faces, hear it in their voices. The singers were smiling and laughing through the whole thing. I had no idea what words they were singing and it didn't matter.  I forgot myself and my sore belly. 

The man in the baseball cap was the first and possibly the only elderly Rwandan I saw on the trip - and we've seen rivers of people along the highways and in the towns - there are just under 10 million people living in Rwanda.  Its population density is one of the highest in the world.  After meeting this man, it occurred to me that everyone we've laid eyes on has been under 30.  There are a number of reasons, but the most glaringly obvious is that people just don't live very long here.  What effects must this have on the culture?

I could eat that kid he's so cute.

Next up was dance hall reggae growler Rafiki.  This guy was born to perform - every chance that presented itself he was playing to the cameras. (Exhibit A, this photo) Dave and Steve cooked up a suitable loop and off he went.



For the second song we worked on figuring out the implied chords in his vocal line and started to track some guitars... The result was wild and I can't wait to see what our other collaborators will do with it.  

I'm still falling asleep a lot ... sadly, I missed rapper K8 write and perform an elaborate lyric in Kinyarwandan...  but the recording is fantastic.

It is a comfort (of sorts!) to hear that most of the crew are grappling with intestinal revolt as well, and not just the fair-skinned, vegetarian, hypochondriac Mademoiselle la Baronne...

The next day we are traveling east again to visit staff from FACEAids.  We've been invited to a school for kids who have been orphaned by AIDS or are living with the disease themselves. Twenty-something Claire, an angelic, sweet-voiced Seattle native greeted us at the site wearing a vibrant print dress and a magazine smile.  How on earth did this girl end up here? we all wondered... The students we were about to meet, she said, were very excited to perform for "real musicians".  They had all prepared songs for us dealing with AIDS issues, and when we walked into the one-room classroom, they burst into applause.  Gracious, to put it mildly.  They each held a sheet of paper with a creation on it, waiting to be sung. One by one, they all stood up in front of the microphones, facing their classmates, and performed their music.  Some rapped, some screamed, some had choreographed dance moves, and some were accompanied by beat tracks on an 80's keyboard.  It was incredible to see the resourcefulness and creativity.  SO little to work with - and yet they all created something informative, passionate, beautiful and unique. The lesson I took was this - when you have nothing, you still have your voice.  And that makes all the difference. The voice, the story in that voice, is where all the power to change the world lies. 

Alright, I'm not the new spokeswoman for Unicef, but it really affected me.



This guy was a firecracker - you should have seen him sing and dance! He was a one-man show. Thrilling to behold.

And Miss Claire, I had to ask her the elephant-in-the-room question at lunch.  How did you end up here?



She wasn't gushy about it, and I didn't manage to pry out any awe-inspiring tales of blinding epiphanies or divine instructions.  She just told me that she had a French degree, and the opportunity to work in Tanzania came up and she decided to go for it.  And like a lot of people in humanitarian work, the experience felt purposeful, meaningful, and just, well, right.  So she continued, and now she's living in a rural community in Rwanda, far from friends and family, trying to change the lives of total strangers for the better. It's hard not to be totally, humbly, floored. She did just buy a puppy, so she's not made of steel.  However, the cuteness factor in her little dwelling is now well beyond recommended levels. 

RWANDA PART 2 - CARE Canada - Savings and Loan Programs

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Man down, man down! Steve has fallen ill. Who will make me laugh until I cry now? Alas! We soldier on without him. Boo.

I am a tad concerned about the enthusiasm and confidence with which I ate last night's dinner...
We pile into a van and head to the eastern districts to learn about the remarkable progress that CARE Canada and local communities have been making.  Their latest project - helping people organize themselves into savings and loan groups - is making an incredible difference in Rwanda and other rural populations in the developing world.  The model is loosely that of a credit union - entirely self-governed, members contribute to the overall available capital and share borrowing rights.  There are penalties for late payments, strict repayment guidelines, and diligently observed (downright ceremonial) procedures that ensure transparency and the honesty of all involved. With the community's help, CARE first identifies and targets "the poorest of the poor".  Once they have attracted enough people who have saved the requisite amount for admittance, they then train the group to essentially run their own bank.  Using a small start-up loan, participants launch micro-business ventures that have been discussed and approved by the group. Immediately encouraged by their progress, enthusiasm quickly catches on, more and more capital is raised.  The group becomes 'big news' in the village and this usually produces new members, which in turn increases its stability and lending power. 

The first group we met was just beginning to take off in such a manner.  The leader told us that their very first objective was to get a mattress for every member.  'We all recognized', he said, 'the importance of a good night's sleep'. Wo. The shock to my heart was almost audible. A mattress.  Once they had achieved that goal, they set their sights a little bit higher each time, and now they are working towards cell phones and hydro, but again - for everyone. This is what kills me about the way these people have adopted the model.  There is absolutely no sense of competition whatsoever.  Success is measured by whether the objective has benefited ALL.  I had an opportunity to speak at length with one of the women doing exceptionally well in the program.  (The woman in the printed dress in the background below) 



She took us to her 'pub' - a property other than her home out of which she sells beverages and small meals. With unmistakable pride she showed us the yard where she prepares meat and the well-swept room where she welcomes customers.  When I asked about what her life was like before, her expression darkened. She explained that before joining the group, she never knew when she was going to be able to eat. She was literally always hungry. Her eyes were full of pain when she spoke of those times.  But it wasn't the suffering of hunger she was remembering with sorrow, it was the blow to her dignity.  Desperation does something to the soul, and it was hard to see it still written there, in her face.  While we were talking her husband stood quietly by her side.  When I asked him if success had changed their relationship he nodded vigorously and they both laughed.  The pressure on men in these impoverished areas to provide for their wives and children is overwhelming. CARE told me that domestic violence is extremely widespread, but they are finding that when women are given the tools to contribute - or in this case, surpass their husband's earnings - the pressure on men is greatly relieved and sometimes the relationships heal, or at least the abuse stops. They've also found that when capital is generated by women, that capital tends to stay in the community.  Strong women equals strong children, families, and villages (an excellent article in the recent Scientific American by Lawrence M. Krauss makes this point hard to refute). I get the sense though, that not all of the men here are 100% comfortable with their wives succeeding or getting a lot of attention for that success.  While I was asking a different woman (from the same group) about the substantial wealth she had accumulated through raising and selling goats - perhaps in an overly congratulatory tone - she kept glancing over at her husband and replacing the word "I" with "we".  He seemed uncomfortable and she seemed, frankly, a little afraid.  I wondered for a moment, who or what could disempowerment and ignorance ever truly serve? In whose long-term interest is blindness, weakness, dependence, really?  

This fascinating article sums up the argument for CARE's work.  Read the whole thing if you've got 10 minutes, it's amazing. A taste: "There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution."

Now that's a thesis if I've ever heard one.  Alright, where was I...

Our hotel looked out onto the postcard-perfect Nyabarongo River


 
We returned from the field just after dusk. Imagine, in this view, a great navy blue swath of night spread regally overhead, speckled with sparkling points of light. The moon was incandescent, shining fiercely in the tranquil river and casting sharp, silvery shadows over the path to my room.  I stood and gazed at it for a while.  This is the same moon I have stared at in wonder for all of my thirty-two years. 

Countless creatures are breathing under it right now, simultaneously, with me.  How many billions upon billions of eyes have looked up at that sky in a similar moment of spellbound awe...  Earth, existence, life - how feeble and pale, our words!

It's raining in my bathroom, but the hotel keepers aren't too bothered. I am moved to a different room where soon I'm drifting in and out of consciousness to the dreamy murmurs of tree frogs. I feel like I'm experiencing my own existence with sort of detached, infatuated fascination. Is this what Kundera was getting at with his 'unbearable lightness of being'?  When we feel our aliveness so acutely but it is depersonalized, not grounded in the idea of "I", and the resulting sensation is, well, a kind of weird ecstasy? Sleep Sarah.  The anti-malarials are making you wiggy.

The next morning we are off to meet veteran graduates of the CARE program.  Sustained success is the calling card of these sorts of initiatives, and CARE is eager for us to see it first hand. We are deep into the eastern districts now. Long treacherous jeep rides up precarious mountain ridges, red dust clouds trailing... Sprawling vistas on all sides - thousands of rolling hills echo into the distance, their green skins fading into an indistinct blue mist of space.  The sky is crowded with towers of cottony clouds.  Everything in sight is vibrantly alive.


 
The group has already assembled and are taking attendance. They move through their procedures like a well-oiled machine.  All of them have little passbooks for keeping a detailed transaction record. They welcome (and are somewhat amused by) our questions - I've had a day to think about our experience with the first group, so I have about a million things to ask. Here you can see the committee seated at the table - they have been chosen for these specific roles because they are the most educated of all the members.  Interestingly, these privileged positions come with heavier penalties for late payments or missed meetings.  The committee bears the most responsibility and is granted the most trust.  Just watching the treasurer counting the money was enough to communicate how seriously they view their roles. The box in the centre has three locks on three sides - and three different members hold the keys. 


 
When telling us the story of their group's beginnings, they mentioned that the CARE worker, Richard, had gone door to door trying to drum up interest in the program, and apparently it took him more than a few tries.  I was perplexed by this and asked them why.

They smiled as the translation met their ears and one woman quickly stood up (everyone stood before they spoke).

She told us that people were skeptical, doubtful, and just plain busy with surviving - but "then we started to open our minds" and she said these last three words emphatically.  I was taken by her use of this "opening" metaphor, and the strong gestures she employed to emphasize it... as though the darkness of a closed mind must be plunged through with sheer will and determination.  I also got the sense that she was describing the moment she began to consider her own mind in a new way - as a place where something could be called forth - a hope, a dream, an idea - and actually be brought to fruition.  She had a joy about her that emanated from that vital source - faith in the future.
We walked up the road to visit another household, but I was feeling queasy... tried to rest in the van... and woke up to the disorienting spectacle of Dave Bottrill teaching a  a whole group of children "Do Wa Ditty, Ditty Dum Ditty Do"...

Ah, my digestive fortitude had come to an end.  Add a dash of heat stroke and you've got yourself a hospital visit! (White girls near the equator, sheesh.) Hey - we can check up on Steve! The next two hours were a fog of deep breathing and reckless driving... 

Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum

Monday, December 07, 2009

It's fitting that the memorial is our first excursion of the trip.  Before we can fully understand how remarkable these people are, we must attempt to know the immeasurable suffering they've endured. 
So after breakfast, off we go, straight into the fire.

In the 1994 genocide, roughly 20% of Rwanda's population was brutally murdered - 800,000 people, in about 100 days, were just... gone.  I remember reading about this in the news as a teenager - it was the first time I had ever heard of Rwanda, and I think for most North Americans, the genocide is the only thing we know about the country. Rwandans would like to change that, but they are also adamant about remembering and studying their tragedy - this vigilance has allowed them to foster a forgiveness that, in my opinion, is nothing short of miraculous.

With the aid of a disarmingly articulate museum guide, we discovered the origins of ethnic tension between Tutsis and Hutus:  basically the arrogance of meddling colonialists.  Prior to European intervention, these groups inter-married and lived peacefully together - such racial distinctions were not in use and did not even exist in the language.   The pattern is eerily familiar -  an external authority steps in under the guise of bringing helpful technology, education and infrastructure (or in some cases, that slippery one,  'democracy').  It then divides the population, gives one side the resources and power, and then sells weapons to the disenfranchised side.  This may sound oversimplified, but that's the gist.  It is so chilling how humans can elect to stare directly into their moral blind spot ... and not blink.

These and several other factors eventually led to neighbours turning against each other and a kind of mass hysteria unlike anything the country had ever seen. With machetes, guns, clubs and sticks, people by the thousands were raped and slaughtered in the streets, and left to the dogs. Mass refugee camps sprang up along the borders - many fled to the unforgiving bush only to die of starvation. Those that sought refuge in the churches were eventually found and murdered en masse.  Nowhere was safe. 
I cannot even begin to fathom experiencing that kind of terror as an adult, so it was utterly wrenching to imagine what it must have been like for a small child.  In the next wing of the museum, we were forced to imagine just that.  All over the walls, brown beaming faces smiled down at us, photos donated by survivors of the beloved children they lost.  Little plaques underneath large wall-sized portraits listed the child's likes and dislikes, its name and age : "A happy, affectionate child - liked playing with his cousins the best - favourite foods: egg, rice -  cause of death: crushed against a wall".

With eloquence and a solemn compassion, our guide then took us to the final wing of the memorial - other genocides in human history. I was struck by how many correlations there were - the desperation of poverty, scape-goating, propaganda and brainwashing, sexual violence, divisive and manipulative foreign influence. And how recent many of them were.  The former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, the Holocaust.  Why is this still happening?  I will never forget the photo of  a teenage Cambodian boy snapped in prison, shortly before his torture and death.  He looked crazed with fear, just crazed. It made me ache. 

Outside, the museum is surrounded by lush gardens brimming with roses and flowering vines. It is an explosion of colour and life.  All this was lovingly planted atop mass graves.  This was my first real taste of the Rwandan spirit.  They don't erect giant somber stone sculptures or etch names into concrete. They have honoured their loved ones with life - a living memorial that changes with the seasons, that requires care and tending, that grows and brings forth new life.  This is how they mourn - affirming that life is beautiful and worthwhile.  Impressive to say the least. 

Toronto to Brussels to Kigali

Monday, December 07, 2009

I'm going to AFRICA! Fabled blind spot in the western imagination!

"Have a look out the window..." producer Ian Fingland surprises me - I'm half-reading and half-sleeping in a jet-lag daze. 

To my left, under a brilliant blue sky, the vast north-African desert stretches in all directions, an awe-inspiring ocean of sand.

A little shock wave goes through me - much like when I first saw Paris or a gorilla at the zoo... The mind-pictures I have of these things seem so standard and known - Africa, the Eiffel Tower, primates, yes yes, of course. I know some facts about them, they are part of my understanding of the world.  But mind-pictures and experience-in-real-time couldn't be more different.  It's that kid-like sensation of realizing that no, it's not just something you've read about or seen pictures of, it exists!  And this thing you're newly experiencing, for a blessed interval, retains some of that magical aura of having previously only existed in your imagination - as strange as if you'd stumbled across living Muppets in the wild. 

So much of our consciousness is "by invitation only" - when the mind decides to think about a given thing, it does.  Gorillas, let's say. There, we're both envisioning them.  This is an amazing ability to possess, but it also gets us into quite the net of illusions and false presumptions.  The mind doesn't get to make such choices when we are next to the gorilla, being with it. Realizing the concurrence of our being and its being startles us into the Now. This is what I love about travel. 

It's the last leg of our journey to Kigali, Rwanda's capital.  Many blurry hours ago the eight of us met at Pearson airport, hauling a band and film crew's worth of excess baggage and drawing more than a few dirty looks at check-in.  In tow: Derek, the cheerful, inexhaustible director, Randy, the good-natured camera man, Scott, the Buster Keaton-esque audio expert, David Bottrill, the producer and engineer extraordinaire, Dahmnait Doyle, the singer/songwriter and all-round amazing gal, Timothy Edwards, the extremely likeable front man of Crash Parallel and Steve Bays, the hilarious creative wellspring of Hot Hot Heat.  Quelle groupe! After a sappy in-flight movie (couldn't they just leave The Time Traveler's Wife a great book? Hollywood!) a delicious curry (thank you Jet Airways, please send recipe to Air Canada) and a 12 dollar cappuccino in Brussels (?!)  I'm truly feeling the excitement.  Looking at the map I feel the great mystery of this continent nearing, preparing to unfold a little for me, its lucky visitor. 

Touching down in Kigali, we emerge from the airplane into a supple, warm twilight. Stars are twinkling. I walk across the tarmac, almost wading through the silky, different air. I can feel the altitude...

We arrived at the beautiful house around 8pm to a dinner of traditional Rwandan dishes followed by local fruits and African tea.  This was when I first met Ayub, our Rwandan guide and go-to translator, the executive director's crucial partner.  He sat next to me at the dinner table and I was immediately struck by the warmth and wisdom in his eyes.  Later in the week he left a message for me with one of the assistants - his instructions were "tell her the old man wants to make sure she goes outside tonight to look at the moon and stars." Ah. Ayub is going to teach me something powerful, I am certain of it.

I could hardly believe the countryside, and in the full brightness of the next day, it was breathtaking. During the night I heard cries of unfamiliar birds, beasts and insects, and opening my eyes in the morning from under a mosquito net was like waking from a tropical dream…

Art of Time

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

October's dwindling currents blow us to Kitchener. 
There are eight of us in total, all such different creatures, such unique expertise in each pair of hands.
The leaves are bright gold and coat the wet sidewalks, making slick the soles of my Mary Jane shoes.
The dark theatre waits patiently. A new, strange hour or so of music is within us, about to wake.

After the show I spot a woman wearing one of the auctioned Recessionista dresses. Magnifique!

Toronto's newest concert hall is up next.  That morning, butterflies join me for breakfast, unsettling
the oatmeal. Hmmm.  Playing on conservatory territory.... kind of like sleeping with the enemy!
Kidding..... sorta. Koerner Hall is glorious... the Beethoven piece soars. I'm dancing...
Entering the stage for our encore Andrew steps on my dress and almost tears it off me...

Belleville beckons and by now we're getting to the point where we breathe and sway together as an ensemble.
It is so thrilling to sing without playing an instrument... the music gets inside my blood and rings...
Peterborough and Ottawa rush by in a flash and then we're waiting at Pearson for a flight westward.

Prince Albert is home to a glorious Arts Centre and the friendliest folks you'll ever meet. Breakfast at the
Travelodge was - yes - good. Really good!.... shocker. 

A six hour drive later we're in Sherwood Park, Alberta, which, I must admit,  broke my heart into tiny pieces. Imagine vast fields
of oil refineries lit up like macabre Disneylands, spewing smoke into a sprawling grey mass above the city. I jogged in the morning
and am thankfully still alive... The people though, were warm and welcoming... it was my favourite show of the tour.
After a bottle of bubbly and some tom-foolery, it was time for sleep... swirling string lines and sax solos rolling in my ears...
I think I woke up counting rests...

x
SS

A Fall Update

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Hello Creatures,

Something wonderful is afoot.

I asked the universe to help me make art without sinking into a bog - without dismantling myself and then making music out of the painful longing to be put back together.

I earnestly worked on my own mind so that I could truly believe such a thing was possible.

There is a kind of light - a kind of clarity and piercing brightness to the "source", or whatever it is that supplies us with ideas, inspiration, new creations.

Before, I was only able to reach it after a long bitter war with myself.  But I cannot accept that this wondrous energy would demand such a heavy price of those that seek it.

Seems kind of, well, nasty.  So I surrendered to the idea that if music was not going to spring from my happy soul, then I would let the world show me how else I could be of use.

No more bogs. It hurt to say this in my heart, because I love music so much....   I wondered, if it's gone, what will I be without it?

My revelation was that the war is not necessary, and never has been.  The source is here, now, always.

When Tolstoy and Gandhi quote "the kingdom of God is within you" this is what I hear. (troublesome word "God" aside)

In the silence of our minds is the eternity from which everything springs.

I've just come home from 6 days alone in a remote Northern Ontario cottage. I swam alone (sorry Ma), slept alone and made fires.

And I also sang and played as though I was plugged in the universe's outlet. WOW!

I resisted the urge to retreat.  I faced it. I gasped at the glorious colour of the sky and watched as wind currents raced across the lake to come and hear me.

There is a moment when you realize that everything in the world is just different combinations of the same stuff.

In this way, I am the birdsong that wakes me up.

New music is coming - allow me to stroke it and carve it and wrap it up just right for you.

Thank you....
x
SS

Track by Track - "Dress Rehearsal Rag"

Thursday, May 28, 2009

We recorded this song first - about three takes or so.  John then advised us to move on... which was wise.  I can't get too far into this mentality or it starts to swallow me.
The lyrics lean heavily on a very deep, old bruise in the human psyche.  Anyone who barely made it out of their twenties can relate. I think this arrangement is particularly strong (and I'm happy to have met Jim McGrath, humble and brilliant man that he is).  The text stanzas alternate moods:  between wistful reverie and the agony of regret and self-loathing. You can feel these changes musically.  The cold hard "reality" stanzas get tougher and more unbearable as the song goes on...

Track by Track - "Monarch"

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I love the pictures in this song. When the monarch lays down her "jeweled head" I see the twinkling gems in her crown and brocade garments - her closing eyelids amidst a field of poppies and the bright fuschias of sunset.  When the tempo reappears we are suddenly swooping and diving above those fields -  skipping, mythically large, a folk tale come to life! ... The arrangement captures this wonderfully with sparkling piano and a hovering mist of string harmonics.

Track by Track - "Eyes Are the Flowers"

Thursday, May 21, 2009

It was hard to pick just one song from John Southworth's latest album.  This one captures what I think is his greatest strength - his very particular narrative take. John tells a story on such a different plane than most other songwriters. It's gentle and whimsical and image-filled, like a bed time story, but has the cryptic, mythological potency of an ancient religious text... 

Track by Track - "Dandelion Wine"

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

When I toured Canada and Europe with Ron Sexsmith and his band in 2004, I learned this album in intimate detail. This song in particular stood out... the casual treatment of such a painful regret. Bravo to Andrew for some very fluid and musical scale passages on the piano.  And Bravo also to Rob Piltch, whose sense of time I have not yet seen equalled in another musician.  Bravo again to Johnny Johnson whose ease and spontaneity made one think HE was the instrument...

Track by Track - "To Cry About"

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The opening cello kills me.  It sounds like forced nonchalance - a sloppy, slightly drunk effort to convince the ex-lover that you've moved on.

Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Miss America" is a favourite in my vinyl collection.  "You're in my heart, I'm in your hand"... Such a perfect little couplet. The inequality  of it!  Something we all must feel in order to become fully human. Oh! I remember this sting - when I was 13 watching Les Miserables on stage aching for poor Eponine and the unrequited love she sang of -  I knew, somehow knew, what this pain was all about even at 13... This knowledge makes you beautiful, makes you holy. Treasure it.

The space in this arrangement, the  broken-ness, the chromatic melting, it all makes this character three dimensional. And Johnny's saxophone solo... such delicious dirt!  The dissolution, the weary desire!  And eventually, the unravelling.  And then there is the beauty and perfection of the last chord. Sigh.

Track by Track - "Lode Star"

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

In the last year of the 1990s, I remember being in some crappy bar in Kelowna BC (or was it somewhere in Massachusetts? Ah, it's all a blur) with Sarah Harmer and Oh Susanna - and when Sarah played this song the whole lousy beer-smelling room was transformed into a navy blue lake with a dome of stars overhead.  Oh Susanna's "Alabaster" and other  tunes from Johnstown had similar transformational powers (perhaps for the next Art of Time Songbook?) The Ensemble really becomes a living breathing animal in this arrangement... chunky growls from the bass and thick, bow-heavy strings make for a meaty, thrusting chorus... Its open, spacious moments are particularly beautiful - reminiscent of Talk Talk's better days.

Track by Track - "I'll Never Tear You Apart"

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Snow-covered field full of skeleton trees. Winter twilight.  A crow's flight. The vast frozen lake.  Crisp, silent cold.... and....

GO!

This song is a jewel.  I was itching to sing it - and I could sing it a thousand times and never be happy with the take ... Martin Tielli's songs are very much his, and exist most fully in his voice. Minds like Martin Tielli's and Jonathan Goldsmith's should combine more often. The rhythm of this arrangement is pure genius to my ear. Like Radiohead's "Backdrifts", there is something about it that leaps out of reality and into timelessness - something that speaks to the body in a way that consciousness won't ever understand.  It speaks to the cells, and the cells obey.  I'm speed-skating across dark space...  the moon is reflected in the sweat of my brow, the fireflies are watching expectantly...
 
The soprano sax solo in this arrangement has redeemed the instrument for me. In the effervescent instrumental sections I see wind yanking a young tree --graceful, intense, flowing, wild, seemingly random yet disturbingly beautiful...The lowest bass note falling on beat four was difficult to feel at first (so contrary to my Mozartian inheritance) but once I entered the world of this trembling, frothy rhythmic idea, the whole ensemble came to life... Now it hijacks me... Surges and soars...  The end of this song - a still point on the tonic - is a sudden revelation every time.

Track by Track - "Black Flowers"

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

I don't remember when I first heard this song, but it was a very long time ago.  It was a full four minutes of goosebumps - and after probably ten years, never once hearing it performed again -  I could still remember the entire tune.  If THAT isn't the sign of a good song I don't know what is.  Picture a coal miner's widow rocking her child to sleep on the night of a violent storm, thinking on the terrible irony of the undertaker's "clean blue shirt and soft pink hands"  And this song is just the tip of the Lynn Miles iceberg.  She is so, so good.

Initially we all felt like this take was too slow, but when we compared the character of this narrator with others, the voice in this take was more real and alive, fragile, and laden with weariness.  I found it difficult to sing the whole thing without falling apart - it gets right inside my heart and brings tears to my eyes.  Ben's violin positively weeps in this opening. In the instrumental part, I see a small band of gypsy musicians following a coffin on a country road, mid-winter... the widow carries her baby and the wind blows... Blue, white and black.

Track by Track - "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye"

Thursday, April 30, 2009

I first heard this song on Roberta Flack's "First Take" - one of my top twenty albums of all time.
I discovered many Cohen songs this way - through other performers -  but no matter who is at the microphone the brutal truthfulness of his poetic voice shines through.  That voice was irresistible to me in my youth - the way that Radiohead's aesthetic was - a kind of Promethean flame that simultaneously thrills and burns - inspires and yet crushes a new artist.  It's tough to continue writing when you know there is a man like Leonard Cohen sitting around in his backyard, smoking and thinking.  But you go on because so much of what he writes about you feel so vividly in your own heart, and that must mean that we're all each other in some fundamental way. "In city and in forest, they smiled like me and you."  Gavin Bryars' arrangement sighs and lolls like lovers in morning-warmed bedsheets....

The Art of Time Ensemble featuring Sarah Slean, Black Flowers

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Recording this album was a new approach for me - a freeing and frightening experiment with trust.  For the arrangements to really soar everyone needed to hear everyone else in real time, so we had to record full takes together in one room, instead of building separate layers on top of a bed drum or piano track (the method I'm used to).  And because we were recording to two-inch tape there was no chance of fixing flaws in Pro-Tools land - an uncomfortable fact  for my ear, which detects every flat/sharp deviation and cringes... Only my vocal and the guitar were isolated in booths, but a significant amount of sound leakage meant that editing those tracks was also not an option.  Every performance must be its own bald truth, no erasies.  No added plug ins, extras or effects.  Just air through lungs and strings vibrating. Wow. Scary.

Plus - no click track was used, so tempo had to come from whence it originally sprang - our pumping hearts.  How contrary to the music-making of today's mainstream!  Naturally, recording this way means some of the best performances are lost, and none of the chosen are perfect.  But it also means that magical and moving real-time synchronicities can be captured - moments that would never have occurred had we not been in such charged, time-dependent proximity to each other. 

This experiment forced me to love inaccuracy.  We can forget this kind of beauty when chasing the dangling carrot of perfection.... But isn't "perfection" merely an abstract idea? I myself have been hypnotized by the pursuit the Ideal, and not just in the art-making realm... 

This, if I may wax philosophical, is due to the way human brains work, and is our tragic (albeit fruitful) burden to bear.  Our cognitive machines are designed to manage chaos into tidy generalizations. Thus the abundant, unordered information of life is organized into "categories" and "concepts" - neither of which exist in any real sense.  What follows from that though, is that everything here and now is considered just a shadow, a mere approximation of the pure, ideal categories.  What's sad about this generalizing tendency is that it devalues the messy, staggering diversity of the Real, constantly reaching beyond here, beyond now - beyond a flawed vocal take to some "vocal-take-in-the-sky"... the world of Ideals.  That's why we dream of forevers - God, love, meaning, etc.,  - we are always skirting or failing to meet the fact - the pure fact! - of existence: ceaseless change.   I suspect this is why the lives of thinking human beings have that ever-present undercurrent of longing... Ahhh. I know it well. 

“A darkened theatre, sumptuous costumes, beautiful voices and an age-old tale of ambition, lust and murder? I’m in.”

Friday, April 24, 2009

Take some Shakespearian themes, a lusty Roman emperor, and an ambitious fox - add a misunderstood philosopher, a comic Nurse and of course a hapless, conflicted macho buffoon. Sounds like a party!

Michael Maniaci, whose every gesture aptly displayed the arrogance and pride of his character, sang so marvelously that at times I believed I was back in the era of Farinelli swooning in awe at the real thing. No wonder those male sopranos were superstars - truly faint-worthy, breath-taking heights!

Dizzying indeed, and countered by the stirring lows of Reason itself, the philosopher Seneca. Seneca O Seneca. If only virtue were sufficient for happiness! In the land of opera, the just and wise always get the axe. Sigh. Also delightful was Cynthia Smithers, the spritely, Love god of clear and pure voice, whose first descent from the heavens made my jaw drop-”Hey, isn’t that girl in my Harmonic Analysis class?”

While Poppea was lovely in the first half, her voice became even warmer and more agile in the second half and her closing duet with Nero was absolutely exquisite.

Bravo to Tafelmusik and a superb men’s choir for so skillfully completing the illusion…

Sarah Slean

Visit Opera Atelie now.

Do I hear a chorus of angels?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

How can there be any clearly discernible music in this head of mine, jammed as it is with the cacophony of a whole term's worth of  3rd year Harmonic Analysis? But I can indeed hear them - glorious celestial voices rising together in heavenly chorus... I AM DONE! Last exam completed at 12pm today.  Having resisted the urge to moon the Faculty of Music, I am officially, totally done! The proud owner of a university degree that took ten years to earn, bit by teeny bit! Hallelujah!  The sunshine, the new flowers, the delicious pain of the breaking buds! If you're looking for me, I'll be weeping in a Toronto park, drunk and high on life, O life!

xx
S

Hello Blogosphere.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Ground

It's here - the mud smell. Soccer fields, trees shuddering and shaking off a deep fog.  "April is the cruelest month" Eliot wrote.
Stuffy old codger! Life surges forth, despite everything.  The clean rooms of his mind might object to all the gooiness, the muck, the birthing slime, but I must remind him, there is more wisdom in one teaspoon of amniotic fluid than there is in the whole of his oeuvre.
 
And speaking of which, so much is new...
After much deliberation, I made some major decisions over the past month.
I am officially an independent artist again, in several ways.
I feel.... new. And slightly crazy.

In the middle of the maelstrom, someone sent me this Anais Nin quote:
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
That was the clincher. I cried and paced and couldn't sleep. Then I wrote some long emails.

I now feel as though, for the first time in a truly authentic way, I am the master of my own destiny.
No one to blame or require or lean on. Freedom and the awesome responsibility it demands...
Fighting the urge to run away to the woods...

The Green Party

After listening to the joke-of-a-federal-budget I moped to class in a stupour. Seriously - nuclear power? Rrrright. That sounds pretty eco-friendly. Let's see, what else, how about some roads? Yea, infrastructure, roads! Lots of cars need lots of roads!  I wish I was oversimplifying.  To pour salt on the wound, Ignatieff, with much blustery fanfare, says he will demand to see the books every few months! Take that Stephen!

Wasn't the plan a few months earlier to kick the Conservatives out? It's like Coronation Street for crying out loud, I can't keep track anymore!
Instead of getting my skirts in a knot I went to the Green Party web site for some inspiration. And lo and behold, inspiration was found!
With all the shenanigans in Parliament and the grim state of our environment I'm amazed these people have such a sense of humour.
And hope! Hope is far and away our most precious resource.  Sometimes I feel like I've got to plant some of mine in various places so it won't die - and today I planted some in the Green Party. Take my little monthly contribution Elizabeth! Run with it!So much is changing...

In its magnificent choreography, the universe masterfully aligned all of this change with "Canada Reads"...

Shut up about the Book Already!

Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards found me, sliced my heart open and begged me to hear its burning questions.

Yes. I wrote a long entry on the public Canada Reads site forum. I decorated my copy of the book with dozens of sticky flags and laboured over quotes and passages and points. Ugh. Will it matter? - probably not. It is not a pleasant read. It's infuriating and tragic and painful. Why did it change me? Because it forced me to acknowledge that our lives are hilariously meaningless unless we consider them in terms beyond our individual selves. T. S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent and Tolstoy's Confession, say the same thing - that for a temporal existence to escape absurdity, it must consider and define its relation to the infinite. We can't ignore this consideration - it's impossible, it is our burden and blessing as conscious organisms. (I'm reminded of Camus' notion that the only relevant philosophical problem is suicide...)

But what does that really mean, to consider our relation to the infinite? This puzzle has gripped me for a decade. In Mercy, the main character Sydney chooses to define his relationship to the infinite and lives by this definition, even when it becomes unbearably difficult to do so.  In that alone I see such tremendous nobility! Most of us continually refine our sense of truth to accommodate the situation we're in!  It was the strength of Sydney's faith in a truth that moved me - in fact I felt a kind of envy... I must stop here because you're going to run out to read the book, right? But allow me to mention that T. S. Eliot, while writing The Waste Land, seriously considered becoming a Buddhist... He later converted to Anglo-Catholicism... (Also useful to note: Nietszche, as you know, went mad.) I digress. Anyway. Why Sydney as a character stuck with me is because although the meaning of life, if there is one, is likely unknowable, I think everyone believes deeply that it has something to do with our mysterious power to feel empathy and compassionate love . It has something to do with fully grasping your transience and mortality in a way that expands and frees these capacities.

I'm not exactly looking forward to the debate, because I feel like what this novel has to say is something that can only be felt. (What was it Elvis Costello said? "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.") I'm also thinking that everyone is going to attack the book.  Someone said to me that Mercy Among the Children had "the least delight" of all the selections, which I thought was blatantly untrue on a textual level, but also quite a dangerous statement to make on another all-too-important level - pertaining to the function of art. Since when is art a vacation? I'm not saying great literature has to be dark and depressing, but it should at least make you think - and think about human existence - no?

I really believe that art is not fantasy or a place to hide. It must not distract us from the world. Sheesh, we have drugs and booze if blindness is what we willfully seek. And that's just the chemical shortlist - we are all familiar with the myriad time-filling mind-numbing opiates that the modern world offers.  But art is supposed to penetrate our despair and confusion and deliver us to some kind of truth - a kind of beauty (I'm as unclear as Keats on a distinction here!). How then is it different than journalism in one sense or religion in the other, you ask? Because art's magic trick is its use of wonderment, that special sight that we were all born with but sort of falls asleep as we age - a sight beyond consciousness and the self, or perhaps before them. A sight that is never clogged with words or labels.  That's why the truth that art delivers can't be written down in factual statements, it has to be experienced, journeyed through. It's a knowing that knowing can't grasp.  You can't say "this novel means this," "this symphony means this" - you have to read it, you have to hear it, you have to  be a living, struggling, truth-hungry human. And then, as Helen Keller said, it is "felt with the heart".

Sigh. It's late.
I baked a carrot cake tonight.
Ah, they were precious, those minutes outside of my head, stirring batter!

Sleep well, good reader.
Night is with us.
The rain sighs and dwindles. The trains rattle.
My fingers... typing... this page.

But wait!

JUNOS

So thrilled, so honoured, so shocked.
Thank you...(cursty)

xxx
S