Whenever I walk in a London street

Whenever I walk in a London street,

I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

And I keep in the squares,

And the masses of bears,

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat

The sillies who tread on the lines of the street

Go back to their lairs,

And I say to them, "Bears,

Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"


 
 
 
 
 

Christopher Robin Milne

The Wolf and the Little Nun: a Faery Tale

That Hieronymus Bosch, what a kidder. In trying to find images for my last post (which, by the way, I photographed myself, so don't make any stupid comments), I found this. I can only look at Bosch a little piece at a time, for the horror of his dark world disturbs me too much. I remember reading a remarkable book called Leap by Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon writer who decided to analyze and decipher the hidden meanings in Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Delights. When I first saw it, I thought, OK then, if this is delight, I'd like to see purgatory!

This little detail of one of his paintings, I don't know which one, just caught me. I isolated the figure of the nun (for surely that's a nun) who might be doing one of several things: holding her hands up in surrender, keeping the wolf at bay, or gesturing it forward.

In the foreground, a wolf ravages a figure that I at first thought was female, but upon closer inspection is a man. He appears to be offering little resistance (i.e. he is either caressing the wolf, or half-heartedly pushing it away, though his hand looks red and mangled.) The wolf has a knife weirdly stuck through the skin on its back. 

But this other bit, the wolf and the little nun: I had to isolate her and do my usual color invert and see what happened. Most of the time this doesn't do anything but make a picture look weird, but once in a while (as with my very ordinary amateur paintings), something unexpected pops out.

Bosch was a subtle fellow, and he may have known something about the negative of a picture, even if such a thing did not remotely exist in his time. For who do we see when the painting is inverted?

It's all too strange, too strange to be comprehended. I'm glad I didn't know the fellow.

(Postscript, from the next day: Jesus! If this really is supposed to be The Man, he's in the classic pose of crucifixion. All that's missing is the cross. That Bosch. Such a kidder.)

The bridge on the grass

This has been boiling around inside of me for this whole day, and I have no idea why. I tried to write about it once before, in a blog I abandoned after an attack by a so-called blog-mate. It was the day I took off into the woods.


I remember the date, May 1, 2005, because my father-in-law had just died and I had just returned from a soul-shredding trip back east for his funeral. I had nothing left in me, but was in that wild, I've-got-to-get-out-of-here state that always makes me slam the door behind me and travel.

On foot. I went off into the woods, and around here that means I went down the street and turned left, but these were public spaces, dog paths, old-lady-jogging places, and I needed far more surcease, more refuge. I needed to get away from the whole damn human race.


I kept walking, and once more turned left.


I was on a bridge. I was aware that a year or so ago, there was no bridge here, never had been. I had a vague memory of someone building one. Why? It led to nowhere.


Or had I tried it once, and found the rough path over the bumpety old tree-roots just too creepy and uncomfortable? I was on that path, and soon borne up by the rushing of streams.


These were hissing, shisshing, fish-and-glitter streams that rushed through my ear canals and rattled the tiny tympani behind them as if gushing through my skull. Suddenly I had the sense of smell of a horse, and, snorting, lifted my head.

The path led ever on. It twisted and wrenched. I was aware of civilization not far away, as if I could even see houses and hear lawnmowers through the cedars. But it couldn't be so, for these woods were primeval, pulling me deeper in. My feet were in a state of hypnosis. I could not refuse.


I went over bridge after bridge. Where had this path been all my life, I wondered  -  inaccessible to the dogwalkers, the granny-runners. Sealed off, yet here. One stream roared like traffic in a tunnel. It was awful, and I sped on.


As if pursued. But look. Here was the place I always turned back. Or not? I had never been on this path, so how could I remember turning back?  My scalp was electric. Beyond this twist lay the place of the faeries.

I can't describe how each tree seemed inhabited, not by a human or a squirrel but by its own fleshwood-spirit. I can't explain how each tree seethed, how burls swelled like pregnancies, wood cancer that somehow popped out of the symmetry of the trunk and made it look hideously deformed.

Then I stopped at the sight of a massive, salmon-coloured stump, the fleshy remains of a huge fallen cedar. It seemed to hum and swarm with life. I wondered where the tree had fallen, and when. And the sound it must have made, and what pushed it over. The tree-flesh seemed vital yet, not grey but livid red, full of ant-tunnels and probably housing one of those termite queens the size of a rat.

I walked beside a huge gully. I have always hated the word gully, it's ugly and hollow and hellish. I remember when I was about two or three, it could be my first memory, falling down into a gully in Delhi where my grandmother lived, and my sister, who was about 15 at the time, bending over me and saying, "Are you wounded?"


My feet slipped in spongy moss and slime. It was a pleasant day, but I was menaced. Something veered and eered. I could not see it. I turned around quickly, and it vanished.

Now strong cords pulled me, whipcords snaking out from under the ground to yank my feet out from under me. I burst into a clearing, and -


I stopped, then stepped, as cautiously as Pocohontas. The ground sank and groaned under me, giving way with each step and leaving a dark depression.  I stopped uncertainly and looked up and all around me.


I stood in an exact circle of tall cedars. I lifted my head and felt a crackling charge of energy whizzing clockwise around and around me. I chanted some sort of prayer that I wish I could remember now, something about my father-in-law. My temporal awareness had burned away like fog.

As I stood in the electrocharged circle I noticed a squirrel violently frisking its tail, jerkily making its way toward me. But it did not stop. It crept and stopped, crept and stopped until it was only a foot away from me. Then another squirrel appeared, and began to creep towards me. They sat up on their hind legs with their tails jerking and their beady eyes glistening in the sun, waiting.


I walked. Huge fallen logs, roots of trees just jutting up in the air: how had they been uprooted? Why were all these trees laughing at me? Then I saw or felt with my foot the weathered slat of an old ladder. Or something like it.

But it wasn't a ladder. It was a bridge. It was a bridge that lay flat on the grass. And it went on and on. I stepped on it and began to walk.


Perhaps the ground wasn't level here. But it was. Perhaps the ground was marshy here. But it wasn't. This thing was, it just was. I wobbled along on the rickety old slats, cursing the fucking little gnome who had put this bizarre useless thing here just to freak me out and make my hair stand on end.

Then. Then I did see something, a minor gully ahead of me where the ground fell away. But the rickety little bridge remained level. Like a horse stepping on a live power line, I jumped back.


Had I walked on it, I surely would have tumbled in.

This was some booby-trap set by a vindictive fairy tale witch, some Tenniel nightmare ink-drawing designed to scare the living shit out of innocent children. I wheeled and ran. And ran and ran, and it was a good thing that no bear ran after me. Everything unspooled and unreeled and unhappened, so that by the time I got home again, I was not even sure any of it had been real.





But I went back a few days later. I had to know. Yes. It was all there. I noticed a humming and a cracking. A subtle sizzling in the air, something that I picked up with the tip of my nose.


This was once a place deep, deep in the black-green uterine core of British Columbia, before the white man came and ripped the hell out of it, as he continues to do. It was a place where you had better not go, not even if you were indigenous and knew the danger. The place of Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and the Handless Maiden and all those other sweet children who started out innocent, but ended up lost and devoured.

Don't go there. Don't go there, my girl. This is a place of enchantment, but in the archaic sense, the faerie chant seducing you with coils of magic that will never set you free.


All is changed, changed utterly. I go to that place sometimes still, and like a soft drink left out too long in the sun, most of the fizz has gone out of it. But the trees are still murmuring to themselves, nasty little things they don't want me to hear
.

One day I realized the weird wooden bridge on the grass was gone: just gone, and then I wondered if I had imagined it. So I decided to go a little farther, clambered down and up that gully, and kept going.


A few minutes later, I had no idea where I was.


This was a profound disorientation. I couldn't turn in any direction. The view behind me was even more unfamiliar than the view in front of me. Panic crept up my scalp and I started running, desperately running. Like a hunger, like a thirst, like a stab of unbearable desire, I needed something, anything that looked familiar.

I ran until my lungs ached, and then: I burst out. Burst out of the forest, as if the forest had an actual door. I found myself on a road, a main road, paved, travelled, but completely unfamiliar. I had no idea how I would ever get home.


I walked and walked. I didn't have the nerve to flag a car down. Then I saw something. A bus stop. But I had nothing with me. I wriggled my hands into the pockets of my jeans and came up with a frayed yellow bus ticket that had probably gone through the wash.


I waited and waited. A bus came, a bus I had never heard of before, but it had to take me somewhere, somewhere familiar, somewhere in the civilized world! I made myself look normal, or hoped I did, and got on. I had the thought that I should have some sort of passport, to take me from one mode of being to the next.

I went home to recover, then as I was getting ready for bed I discovered a small bulge in my jeans pocket. I took it out and turned it over. It was a small stone in the exact size and shape of a cat's paw: neat toes and pads on one side, smooth elegance on the other. I didn't remember picking it up. For some reason I put several coats of nail polish on it. I have it still in a case with my jewelry, a bizarre trinket that wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else.

What I don't like about. . .

This is what I don't like about Canada Post. I can't help it, it's frustrating to be in this knot. I can't use Canada Post, and I haven't been able to use it for seemingly months on end, and the strike still isn't settled and likely will not be settled now until September or October. And I hafta mail things, guys - there are still publishers who require manuscripts to be mailed, tedious and expensive as that is. And I ordered four books from Amazon.ca, and I have a Harold Lloyd book I'm spozed-ta be reviewing but I can't review it because I DON'T HAVE IT, and a Paul Winter CD and a cheque from the Edmonton Journal and and and. Whatever else. Anyway, they're not coming. They're in that no-man's-land that mailables end up in whenever there is a labour dispute. Which is a genteel way of saying the two sides are smiting each other with socks full of dung, and may just do so until eternity freezes over.

Then there's this. I love to knit. I love to knit for my grandkids, but every once in a while I knit for somebody else. In this case, it's someone my daughter knows, someone whose pregnancy was so wildly unlikely, such an out-and-out miracle, that I just had to commemorate it with one of my famous blankies.

Right. So I go to Michaels and buy eight balls of soft pink yarn (the selfsame yarn that I made Lauren's blankie out of) that says NO DYE LOT on it. A dye lot is a number on each ball band, and it indicates subtle differences in the dye. It's recommended to buy all your yarn with the same dye lot, or you may end up with noticeable colour differences.

But since the yarn said NO DYE LOT on the ball bands, I just grabbed. And I started to knit. Oh my I was enjoying this, an easy pattern, soft silvery-pink yarn. I whizzed away, and the wool felt soft and fat under my fingers, flexible and a bit shiny like silk.

But at a certain point, as the blankie grew and grew, I noticed the end of it seemed to have been bleached. It was faded out, somehow. I knew it couldn't be possible, unless I was letting it drag on the floor or something. Then I spread my blankie out, and: HORRORS!

It was two different colours! I mean, radically different, a silvery baby-pink and a much brighter, almost carnation pink. I freaked. I jumped up and down. I checked all the ball bands on all the balls I had bought, and they all said NO DYE LOT, but the numbers that appeared on them (in spite of their being no dye lots) were all different. Not consistent.

I was horrified, and ripped the entire thing out, about 30" of blankie. I couldn't do anything with the yarn but save it, great vast useless balls of it. I returned the rest of the yarn to Michaels, who had none of that colour left, then found the same yarn, exactly the same according to the ball band, at Zellers. So I bought eight balls.

Then started working. Yoops! It was the darker, carnation pink, all of it. At least they looked like they were all the same. But the the thickness, the weight of it was totally different. That soft, fat texture was completely gone. Though it was still labelled "worsted weight", the wool felt like what we call "sport yarn", a thinner, usually inferior yarn with a lot of knots, fuzzballs and other imperfections in it. 

I hate this. Hate it hate it hate it. I hate it because I've had similar things happen over and over and over again, and it is never addressed or even acknowledged. I've seen wild differences between balls of yarn, as in Paton's Astra, where your yarn can vary from thin sport yarn to thick stuff you'd make into a fisherman sweater. Same information on the label, though. Exactly.

This wild lack of quality control has lead me to contact manufacturers at least three times. Hasn't anyone else noticed that these products do not match, that they are not the same at all, that they have been radically changed with no notice? That they are all being shoved into the same bin in the stores because they say NO DYE LOT, and sold to unwitting customers who end up with projects in six different colours, not to mention textures that don't even match?

After each complaint, the "response" was the same. Zilch. No one bothers to answer me, because I guess we're just not spozed-ta notice, or if we do, to complain.

But I notice. I can't do anything about this. This is all I have, so I keep knitting, missing that sensuous soft, fat, pliable feel between my fingers, to be substituted with something more like hard, tightly-twisted string.

I guess it'll look OK, but it won't be baby-soft and cuddly. But I am NOTNOTNOT going back to that bloody store again. Just not. I hate being told by Michaels, "oh, it has no dye lot so there shouldn't be a problem matching them", or, "it's the same product, see, look at the label, it hasn't been changed at all."

I guess I have a personality which is not very flexible or forgiving. I just hate it when things not only go wrong, but STAY WRONG. I am solution-oriented, which means I will be miserable most of the time in this world which is so full of loose ends and flimsy commitments. I hate situations where people make weak attempts, if any, to fulfill promises made. We pay goddamn enough for things without slipshod quality control and mean tricks played on consumers by dishonest manufacturers only interested in downgrading the quality of their products to save them money.

This product is called BERNAT SATIN. Do NOT buy it. It's shit. It used to be lovely, and I loved it and used it for many projects. But when a yarn suddenly changes to half its former thickness and softness, and the colour is so inconsistent it's impossible to match, you don't want to waste any more money on it. This is an important project, probably the most important I will ever produce. And you guys have pretty much fucked it up. Thanks a lot, and I hope your company sinks without a trace.

And let's not get into the rain, the rain, the rain. It thuds down on my roof in golf-ball-sized blobs. Tomorrow is my little granddaughter Lauren's fourth birthday, and the kids wanted to frolic around in the back yard, but now they can't go outside at all unless they want to be up to their knees in bloody mud.


(Why Tony Perkins? Because "age did not wither, nor custom stale/His exquisite androgyny". And, like God, he was never slipshod in his work. This song, so bittersweet it makes me weep, is from his one musical, Greenwillow, in which he was much more brilliant than anyone seemed to know at the time.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7ynH1Jw_0

Meow, meow, meow, meow - close encounters of the cat kind

I think this is my favorite ad of all time. For some reason, cat food ads are particularly ludicrous (see Baxter). It took me years to find this, because it was misnamed "ET" when it was actually based on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

A kind of hangover

Almost a week has passed since the ugliest day in Vancouver history, a scene far surpassing in shock and horror the post-Cup riots of ’94. Downtown merchants are literally picking up the pieces. Citizens have purged themselves of their shock and grief by signing the plywood that temporarily shielded smashed-in storefronts. The perpetrators are engaged in a frenzy of ass-covering to seduce a naive public into believing how sorry they are.

I want to just push the whole thing aside. At this moment, I don't feel anything, and I don’t want to. That disturbs me. I wonder if I am getting hardened, which seems like the way we're supposed to be.


Everyone is crying for justice, saying we know who you are, we've seen your faces on videos and your idiotic gloating on Facebook and Twitter. But I have a sickened feeling that very few of these louts will be brought to justice. Why? Because they almost never are. Not to real justice, the kind that might make them actually feel some remorse.

As I struggle to make sense of this madness, some of the comments I’m hearing are disturbing. The word “anarchist” is bandied about, though no one seems to know quite what it means. Social critics claim these hooligans are predominantly young, white, middle-class kids (one can hardly call them men) from the suburbs, bored, dehumanized by too many video games and too much porn and violence and Tweeting instead of talking, and just waiting for an opportunity to practice their gleeful ugliness.


For that was the thing that horrified me: how jubilant they were. This was NOT an angry mob scene triggered by a hockey defeat, not by a long shot, but a pathetically narcissistic parade, a twisted celebration of themselves and their miserable lack of moral values. These guys were jumping around and mugging for the hundreds of cameras the gawkers were holding up, sneering and swaggering as they smashed plate glass and ran off with high-end loot that soon appeared on Craigslist. They wanted their appalling destruction posted on YouTube so they could be famous, wanted it to "go viral", that disturbing phrase that no one seems to notice or mind.


And those “bystanders”: hadn’t the cops repeatedly ordered them to disperse? What where they doing standing around blocking police access? This was a great photo-op, a one-of-a-kind experience, a chance to watch history in the making. Many of them openly cheered the rioters on. In fact, in some cases it was hard to tell the thugs from the “audience”. It was one big ugly fracas without boundaries. The few who tried to stop the smashing and burning were taking their lives into their hands: no police officer would condone that kind of vigilante justice, yet now these people are being praised as heroes.


I hate to sound like an old crank who's out of touch. Perhaps my boomer mentality is beginning to seem creaky. In the 1950s, the beatniks rebelled against the dehumanization of society. Then came the hippies, an explosion of social protest followed by the appalling polyester retreat of the '70s. Looking back at it now, even in times of revolution and ferment the culture seemed cozy and tame. Kids at least saw their parents once in a while. They weren't permanently parked with electronic babysitters that would eventually become a substitute for human contact.


I'm not against technology, in fact resistence is impossible in a totally-mechanized society, but a whole generation has been swept into a whitewater current that they don't understand. It's moving so fast that no one even knows what it's about. There is no context for the Facebook revolution, nor the skin-creeping sight of thousands of gawkers clicking photos and taking videos of the hideous circus being played out before their eyes.

"It was like a movie," people said of the apocalypse on 9-11. In other words, it wasn't real. My daughter is a TV reporter, and for several hours she was at ground zero. For her it was real enough: screams and flames and fumes, and hooting, grandstanding bastards jumping around like apes and having the time of their lives.

How did they end up this way? Is anyone born like that? Will they eventually go from petty crime (if this can be called petty) to something more serious? Or will they go on to become the kind of sociopathic lawyer or corporate mogul that invariably makes it to the top?

(Note. I had hoped to publish this in the Vancouver Sun, but, as always, the Fates relegated it to obscurity and I am shouting into a vacuum.)

Linus 1 - 8 (the horses)

Things fall apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart.

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

        A terrible beauty is born.

(Excerpts from poetry by W. B. Yeats)

I don't know how to feel

And yet, I do. It's a stepped-on, violated feeling. It's as if the city has been raped. And I'm not even in the heart of the damage. In the core of the heartbreak, small businesses are contemplating the possibility of permanently going under. Suddenly, a flood of high-end goods has appeared on Craigslist, Louis Vuitton bags and Manolo Blahniks and such, at bargain prices as the thugs seek to quickly unload their "hot" goods for a profit.

My only consolation is that these people are incredibly stupid, which means they will eventually be caught. Or so I hope. They ruined Vancouver's "moment", our chance to prove once and for all that 1994 was an unrepeatable fluke, and forever tainted the world's view of our beautiful city.

The foreign press has referred to us as a "backwater fishing village". Rioting over an "ice hockey game" has turned us into a laughingstock. I feel heavy, as if I weigh about 500 pounds. There is something like a stone sitting on my heart.

There is something I must write about before that stone crushes me, and I want to preface it by saying that this represents strictly my own perceptions of a situation I was not directly involved in. Last night I talked to my daughter, an intrepid, multi-award-winning reporter who was in the thick of the riot, smelled the smoke and heard the screams.

For several hours I lost touch with her, and as it turned out, she was indeed stuck in the worst of it, walking along alone without even a cameraman for protection. Since she's an attractive blonde who weighs 104 pounds, she could have been raped or killed.

I talked to her on the phone yesterday and heard her desperate disillusionment. Even as the game started and the thousands of spectators mobbed in the downtown, she felt the hairs on her neck stand up. She went back to the office and said, "We've got to get ready, guys. There's going to be a riot." Everyone was sure she was crazy. They brushed her off, even felt offended.

But she read the crowd correctly. She believes this would have happened, win or lose. Those thugs were just waiting for an opportunity. They were not even watching the screen. The air was electric, the crowd tensed for an explosion such as we've never seen.

Now she feels vindicated. But (and this is strictly my own opinion, not anything she told me: if anyone tries to get her in trouble over this I will scream blue murder) what happens in situations like this is that the other person, the person who refused to believe in the possibility of horrific damage, is embarrassed. So that means SHE embarrassed THEM by being correct! This kind of rare gift, not just of perception but of individual courage, does not lead to rewards, but to ostracism and humiliated silence.

What sort of world is it where such unusual, invaluable sensitivity is shunted aside and ignored, then swept under the rug like a source of embarrassment? She cried, "Fire! Fire!" and everyone said, "Chill out, there's no fire. You're just a killjoy."

Even the cops missed it. I don't care what anyone says: the cops bungled it.  They made a hash of it and won't even admit it! My daughter alone knew exactly what was coming, and everyone told her she was crazy. 

I don't know how to feel. Or perhaps I do. Every time I think of the situation I get a sick feeling. This has added a new layer to the shock and disgust. Who knows how much of this hell could have been prevented, but it wasn't. It wasn't, because they told her she was crazy. Crazy for being able to perceive and understand the enormity of the coming storm.