"It's nice
to be important. . . but it's more important to be nice."
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Phone booth in a briefcase!
I keep coming back to this ad over and over again, because of all the wheezy, hoary, creaky, hopelessly out-of-date cell phone ads I've ever seen, this is the Big Kahuna. It's an ad for a cell phone with a cord. Right! A cord, and a big thing like a suitcase that you cart around with you everywhere. The convenience! The innovation! Why not just find a fucking PHONE BOOTH?? But I digress.
It's fun to see people exclaiming over magical inventions that will be worthless piles of shit in a couple of years. The thing is, nobody knows at the time. The next step up from this monstrosity was the "brick" cell, about the size of a shoe box. No cord on this one, and not even a suitcase to lug around, a huge leap in technological sophistication. The ad bragged that it weighed "just thirty ounces", which is just short of TWO POUNDS. Next time you lift a two-pound bag of Ken-L-Ration and put your back out, think on these things.
My own tech development was frozen around 2003, which tells you a lot about this blog, and the fact that my phone, while Smart, can't do too many things. And if it can, I don't know what they are. Because I simply don't care.
I feel the same dismay about people constantly phoning and texting that most other "something-somethings" (my age) do. It seems like an excuse never to talk to anyone. I never text because it's dumb, and hate the phone, only use it if I absolutely have to. I'd use it if I were dying or flat on my back and needed 9-1-1, but with my luck I'd forget how to turn it on. I'm not saying that's good, in fact I realize as I write this that it makes me look seriously backward. But I do wonder about the social skills of the kids who are coming up now. Will they in fact have any? Will they speak, if they speak at all, in tweets (how r u?). Will the vocal cords eventually atrophy and become as useless as the tonsils or the appendix?
(I just had a horrible vision of everyone carrying around those Stephen Hawking synthesizers so they won't have to actually speak. It will truly be an egalitarian society when everyone sounds exactly the same. And who needs emotions, those messy old things? That tinny monotone can sound mighty romantic late at night.)
The other day on Facebook I saw an argument between educators as to whether or not we should bother to teach cursive writing to children in school. They won't be using it, will they? Who uses a pen these days, it's all done on your phone, and even if you have to - what's that called again? Write script with a pen? What's wrong with block capitals anyway? They were good enough for Grade Two, and weren't we all really at our best at age eight? It's beginning to seem it's as smart as most people are ever going to get.
I realize I'm hopelessly out of touch and devolving into some sort of curmudgeonette. But taking away cursive writing while still teaching physics and trigonometry seems somehow wrongheaded. School has never taught kids what they will actually need to know in life, which is how to handle a job interview, how to draw up a budget, how to grocery shop and cook for a family, and (my God!) interpersonal skills like how to hold a marriage together. (Marriage counselling in school? My God! That means they might want sex!)
Whatever tribe of Martians gets to decide what kids will learn in a school curriculum, their chief aim must be to choke a child's brain with so much stultifyingly irrelevant crap that they will stop learning permanently and thus become a more productive, non-thinking member of society. This is extremely useful in that it softens them into the hands of capitalism. Whatever nub or larval stump of intelligence may still be squirming in their numbed cortex, technology will quickly and efficiently exterminate it.
Along with all this, I had the most awful thought. If the movement to extract and exterminate the human soul with technological innovation is taken to its extreme, kids won't even need to learn how to sign their name any more. Some sort of retinal scan will do the job of identification, and can't be forged. Unless someone learns how to fool the system and use someone else's retinas. It's done all the time with urine samples. Hey officer, I didn't do it! It was that guy over there, see? The one with the guilty look in his eyes.
(I won't, WON'T take this a step further, to those microchips they'll soon be implanting so that we can all communicate telepathically. There won't be a way to NOT listen, to block it out, because the messages will be broadcast in a constant, unintelligible babble. Think what that would do for Donald Trump.)
Subdural hematoma
If you can remember this, you're old. Yes, OLD old. But given how dreadfully hackneyed TV dramas could be in the '60s, this one was fairly memorable. It's hard to forget the chalkboard symbols, with Sam Jaffe intoning those five whatdaya-call'ems, the great fundamental truths of Whatever.
And this startling opening, which they changed after the first season (unfortunately!). It gave the whole show a sense of dynamic tension, of emergency, of things happening, a no-nonsense kind of environment echoed in the snarky cynicism of Vincent Edwards: he of the world-weary pronouncements, hairy forearms, sweaty scrubs and shiny Italian greaser hairdo. And the diagnosis of subdural hematoma which he gave every week, to everyone.
Of course I was far too young to Get It about Ben Casey, or Dr. Kildare either, for that matter. Back then, you were either Casey or Kildare: you couldn't be both. To be both was to be gutless, to be sitting on the fence, to be bisexual, or even asexual, and that simply wouldn't do.
There was no doubt in my mind that I was Casey, though I was just a kid when the series began, maybe not even ten years old. I certainly didn't sit there watching it every week. In fact, I only began to watch it attentively about six years later, when a channel in Detroit began to rerun them after school. Then I began to realize that I'd been right all along, Casey was it, he was The One.
I had some idea by then about the hairy forearms and Easter Island impervious mug and smoldering eyes, how that might appeal to someone sexually. Richard Chamberlain had fallen into some sort of void at that time, only to emerge years later in the '80s in The Thorn Birds. And yes, I fell right into it, even though when I tried to watch the series a few years ago on DVD I could not believe how lame it was.
I must have watched Dr. Kildare at some point, though all I can remember is one episode about a brain-damaged man who could only utter one word: "Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn." This was considered extremely provocative for the era. By the end of the show, he could also mutter, "Wife", which must have placated the censors somewhat.
The Kildare show was just too soft. It wasn't just Chamberlain, it wasn't his fault he was beautiful rather than handsome. Like the hyper-romantic theme song, the one with the strings and the chimes, the show just had no dynamism about it. It was too sentimental by half. Raymond Massey did a good job as his mentor, though he was no Sam Jaffe. Sam Jaffe always charmed me, because he looked like something straight out of Dr. Seuss.
So! Casey and Kildare. They stir strange, disparate, completely meaningless memories. For some reason I remember an odd little song from the schoolyard, something about Dr. Kildare sung to the tune of Take me Out to the Ball Game. A girl named Nancy sang it, because nobody else knew the words. As is always the case with these things, I remember about two lines. "It's boo, boo, boo for Ben Casey. . .And it's one, two, three vaccinations with Dr. Kildare!" I haven't heard a trace of this song since, and I now think that Nancy must've made it up.
There was this other thing, oh this one other dumb thing, and I don't even know who the two singers were, I just remember the ONE line: "With Ben Casey and Kildare, you have a PARADOX." Ay. Paradox indeed.
There's just one more little bit and I'll stop. Bill and I seem completely different on the surface - temperament, interests, etc. etc. But I will tell you that underneath that surface, we are identical.
One day, some 40 years after I married him, I looked at him across the dinner table and asked him the question that would determine whether I had married the right man, or made a big mistake.
"Casey or Kildare?"
He looked at me with a surprised expression on his face and said, "Casey."
I think he was a little hurt that I needed to ask.
POST-BLOG BONUS! The facial expressions of Vincent Edwards. Some sort of knockoff of The Method, obviously, but he missed the class called "emotion".
Friday, February 19, 2016
Let's get rid of all the humans!
San Francisco tech worker: 'I don't want to see homeless riff-raff'
In an open letter to the city’s mayor Ed Lee, entrepreneur Justin Keller said he is ‘outraged’ that wealthy workers have to see people in pain and despair
‘They don’t care about nobody but themselves,’ one homeless person told the Guardian. ‘If you got money, you just want to grab anything you can get.’ Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco @juliacarriew
Wednesday 17 February 2016
Super Bowl protests flare up over plight of San Francisco’s homeless residents
In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are “riff raff” whose “pain, struggle and despair” shouldn’t have to be endured by “wealthy” people commuting to work.
It’s a familiar story. A male entrepreneur (some might even call him a “tech bro”) – flush with the sense of self-worth and self-satisfaction that comes from living and working in a city and industry that treats him and his friends as the most important and intelligent human beings ever to grace a metropolitan area with their presence – takes a moment to think about homelessness. Not content to wrinkle his nose and move on with his day, he types those thoughts out. He publishes them on the internet.
And, there, with the click of a button, he enters the pantheon of infamous San Francisco tech bros.
Justin Keller, an entrepreneur, developer and the founder of startup Commando.io, joined those exalted ranks on 15 February when he published an open letter to San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and police chief Greg Suhr:
"I am writing today, to voice my concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem that the city is faced with. I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been. Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town … Worst of all, it is unsafe."
Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco @juliacarriew
Wednesday 17 February 2016
Super Bowl protests flare up over plight of San Francisco’s homeless residents
In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are “riff raff” whose “pain, struggle and despair” shouldn’t have to be endured by “wealthy” people commuting to work.
It’s a familiar story. A male entrepreneur (some might even call him a “tech bro”) – flush with the sense of self-worth and self-satisfaction that comes from living and working in a city and industry that treats him and his friends as the most important and intelligent human beings ever to grace a metropolitan area with their presence – takes a moment to think about homelessness. Not content to wrinkle his nose and move on with his day, he types those thoughts out. He publishes them on the internet.
And, there, with the click of a button, he enters the pantheon of infamous San Francisco tech bros.
Justin Keller, an entrepreneur, developer and the founder of startup Commando.io, joined those exalted ranks on 15 February when he published an open letter to San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and police chief Greg Suhr:
"I am writing today, to voice my concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem that the city is faced with. I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been. Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town … Worst of all, it is unsafe."
Keller explained that he had been moved to action by his experience over the holiday weekend, when his parents and relatives came to visit. Three encounters with “a homeless drunken man” in the street, a “distraught, and high person” outside a restaurant, and a man who “took his shirt off and laid down” in a movie theater left him angry and frustrated with the city’s homelessness “problem”.
While Keller is not alone in his frustration that there are nearly 7,000 people living in San Francisco without homes, his letter is distinctive for its total lack of sympathy for the plight of those in difficult circumstances, focusing instead on the discomfort of the “wealthy”:
"The residents of this amazing city no longer feel safe. I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place."
Keller does not propose a solution to San Francisco’s complex and intractable civic conundrum, though he does seem to cite approvingly the controversial “sweeps” of the homeless during the recent Super Bowl festivities:
"I don’t have a magic solution … It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can."
After facing significant backlash against the post on Twitter, Keller appended an apology for his use of the term “riff-raff”, writing that the word choice was “insensitive and counterproductive”.
As of publication, however, he has not reached the next stage of the tech bro homeless rant cycle. First comes the deletion of the post. In 2013, startup founder Peter Shih deleted his 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition rant from Medium after the backlash reached such a fevered pitch that posters featuring his photograph were posted on telephone poles around the city.
Next comes the apology tour. In 2015, startup CEO Greg Gopman attempted to make amends for his own anti-homeless screed (he described the homeless as “the lower part of society” and “degenerates [who] gather like hyenas” and bemoaned the “burden and liability [of] having them so close to us) by launching a program of his own to “solve” homelessness.
(Gopman’s plan never went anywhere. One city hall official told the Guardian in 2015 that the entrepreneur’s plan to house homeless people in domes “remind me of a dog house”.)
In an email to the Guardian, Keller said that he was writing an additional blog post about the issue.
“The thesis of the post was that inaction by the city and officials is not working. We all as citizens of San Francisco need to figure out how we can improve the city and address the homeless and drug addiction problem straight on,” he said.
“I in no way meant to vilify homeless or drug users, my frustration was that we as citizens don’t feel safe. The amount of violent crime is increasing, and it affects everybody. What specific measures is the city taking to proactively help the homeless and drug addicted?
“Instead of crucifying me, we all as citizens should be crucifying the city and elected government officials for ineptness. The status quo is not working.”
Of course, Keller will likely only be the pariah of the internet for the next few days, while San Francisco’s homeless people are made to feel like the pariahs of the city every day.
“Being homeless is like being the germ of the city. That’s how they treat you,” said Bercé Perry, a homeless resident of San Francisco. Perry was standing outside his tent in an encampment underneath the Highway 101 overpass. The 42-year-old said he had been homeless for about one year, and he has little patience for the distaste some people have for his presence in the city.
“They don’t care about nobody but themselves,” Perry said about the wealthy tech workers who’ve moved into San Francisco. “If you got money, you just want to grab anything you can get.”
A few blocks away, Michael Jones, who has been homeless for about three years, was frustrated that people are homeless and hungry in a city with so much wealth.
“I see all the food that they throw away,” Jones said. Still, asked about how he feels about wealthy tech workers, he would only say, “I don’t judge anyone.”
Madeleine McCann, 27, had some more pointed words for tech bros who disapprove of her. McCann has been living in a tent under the highway for about a month, ever since her van was towed, leaving her without a roof.
“They need to be a little more tolerant”, she said. “It’s not like they’re going to let us come shower at their house.”
While Keller is not alone in his frustration that there are nearly 7,000 people living in San Francisco without homes, his letter is distinctive for its total lack of sympathy for the plight of those in difficult circumstances, focusing instead on the discomfort of the “wealthy”:
"The residents of this amazing city no longer feel safe. I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place."
Keller does not propose a solution to San Francisco’s complex and intractable civic conundrum, though he does seem to cite approvingly the controversial “sweeps” of the homeless during the recent Super Bowl festivities:
"I don’t have a magic solution … It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can."
After facing significant backlash against the post on Twitter, Keller appended an apology for his use of the term “riff-raff”, writing that the word choice was “insensitive and counterproductive”.
As of publication, however, he has not reached the next stage of the tech bro homeless rant cycle. First comes the deletion of the post. In 2013, startup founder Peter Shih deleted his 10 Things I Hate About You: San Francisco Edition rant from Medium after the backlash reached such a fevered pitch that posters featuring his photograph were posted on telephone poles around the city.
Next comes the apology tour. In 2015, startup CEO Greg Gopman attempted to make amends for his own anti-homeless screed (he described the homeless as “the lower part of society” and “degenerates [who] gather like hyenas” and bemoaned the “burden and liability [of] having them so close to us) by launching a program of his own to “solve” homelessness.
(Gopman’s plan never went anywhere. One city hall official told the Guardian in 2015 that the entrepreneur’s plan to house homeless people in domes “remind me of a dog house”.)
In an email to the Guardian, Keller said that he was writing an additional blog post about the issue.
“The thesis of the post was that inaction by the city and officials is not working. We all as citizens of San Francisco need to figure out how we can improve the city and address the homeless and drug addiction problem straight on,” he said.
“I in no way meant to vilify homeless or drug users, my frustration was that we as citizens don’t feel safe. The amount of violent crime is increasing, and it affects everybody. What specific measures is the city taking to proactively help the homeless and drug addicted?
“Instead of crucifying me, we all as citizens should be crucifying the city and elected government officials for ineptness. The status quo is not working.”
Of course, Keller will likely only be the pariah of the internet for the next few days, while San Francisco’s homeless people are made to feel like the pariahs of the city every day.
“Being homeless is like being the germ of the city. That’s how they treat you,” said Bercé Perry, a homeless resident of San Francisco. Perry was standing outside his tent in an encampment underneath the Highway 101 overpass. The 42-year-old said he had been homeless for about one year, and he has little patience for the distaste some people have for his presence in the city.
“They don’t care about nobody but themselves,” Perry said about the wealthy tech workers who’ve moved into San Francisco. “If you got money, you just want to grab anything you can get.”
A few blocks away, Michael Jones, who has been homeless for about three years, was frustrated that people are homeless and hungry in a city with so much wealth.
“I see all the food that they throw away,” Jones said. Still, asked about how he feels about wealthy tech workers, he would only say, “I don’t judge anyone.”
Madeleine McCann, 27, had some more pointed words for tech bros who disapprove of her. McCann has been living in a tent under the highway for about a month, ever since her van was towed, leaving her without a roof.
“They need to be a little more tolerant”, she said. “It’s not like they’re going to let us come shower at their house.”
AFTERTHOUGHTS. As you can probably tell, I am tired as hell after that last meditation on the stone church. It dragged up stuff that I never thought would be dragged up, but why am I here? To conceal myself, NOT say who I am? Why blog, then? For all is artifice and dross without Truth. And all that goes with it.
This piece was the epitome of "let them eat cake" - or not even that. Don't let them eat anything. Just get them out of my sight. Hey, we WORKED to get here. We got an education, made something of ourselves! We're not layabouts, we don't ask for handouts and lie around on the street, useless and unwashed. We are among the Hip and Favoured, a condition which is kind of like the Divine Right of Kings. To the manor born. Those who aren't to the manor born can just get out of the way. Get a big forklift or a bulldozer and heap them up and incinerate 'em, or at least push them off into a corner somewhere.
With no skills, no prospects, no education, no friends; quite likely, with learning disabilities, social handicaps, mental illnesses, drug dependencies, and histories of profound brokenness. Almost certainly, with histories of being kicked in the face, called useless, worthless, beaten, raped, thrown aside for dead. . . but listen. WE earn our keep around here, WE don't have problems like this, WE manage to pull ourselves together every day! If you can't manage to do that, if you can't get it together every day and go to work and keep your nails clean, why then you can just get out of the way because I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU.
It's terrible, tragic, how abusive situations replicate themselves. For it's this attitude, this callously dismissive, casually cruel attitude that creates "homeless" to begin with. It breaks people, wrecks their self-esteem. It's just a little bit hard to get that wonderful education that gives us all these advantages, when every day is a struggle for your life, a battle to keep your old man from screaming abuse, raping you or even killing you. When, for some really baffling, unknown, mysterious reason, all that childhood abuse has just a little bit of an effect on your mental health, who knows why!, so that you end up in an institution - for a while - until they dump you out, alone and unprepared. (And what's the matter with you anyway: you're out of the hospital now, you're free! For God's sake, go get a job, straighten up and fly right.)
And thus begins the downward spiral - or did it really begin generations ago?
Smug entitlement, narcissism, feeling like Daddy and Mommy's Little Wonder Boy - all these sicknesses have been fed and watered by social media and the Cult of the Selfie. As it deepens and broadens, so do social malignancies that force the classes even farther apart. Yes. I said "classes", as in "social classes", as in "I'm upper class and you're a piece of shit".
I don't know what to do about this. I've never been homeless, but I've felt like it, self-esteem-wise. I've had no home deep in myself, and had to try to climb out of that frightening pit again, and again, and again. It has been hard.
Not being understood is part of the human condition, and none of us can hope for unconditional acceptance in this lifetime. OK then: what about tolerance? Tolerance meaning: I won't spit on you, I'll just barely stand your presence and try to keep my mouth shut and be civil.
Tolerance might be enough. At least, it would be a start.
This piece was the epitome of "let them eat cake" - or not even that. Don't let them eat anything. Just get them out of my sight. Hey, we WORKED to get here. We got an education, made something of ourselves! We're not layabouts, we don't ask for handouts and lie around on the street, useless and unwashed. We are among the Hip and Favoured, a condition which is kind of like the Divine Right of Kings. To the manor born. Those who aren't to the manor born can just get out of the way. Get a big forklift or a bulldozer and heap them up and incinerate 'em, or at least push them off into a corner somewhere.
With no skills, no prospects, no education, no friends; quite likely, with learning disabilities, social handicaps, mental illnesses, drug dependencies, and histories of profound brokenness. Almost certainly, with histories of being kicked in the face, called useless, worthless, beaten, raped, thrown aside for dead. . . but listen. WE earn our keep around here, WE don't have problems like this, WE manage to pull ourselves together every day! If you can't manage to do that, if you can't get it together every day and go to work and keep your nails clean, why then you can just get out of the way because I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU.
It's terrible, tragic, how abusive situations replicate themselves. For it's this attitude, this callously dismissive, casually cruel attitude that creates "homeless" to begin with. It breaks people, wrecks their self-esteem. It's just a little bit hard to get that wonderful education that gives us all these advantages, when every day is a struggle for your life, a battle to keep your old man from screaming abuse, raping you or even killing you. When, for some really baffling, unknown, mysterious reason, all that childhood abuse has just a little bit of an effect on your mental health, who knows why!, so that you end up in an institution - for a while - until they dump you out, alone and unprepared. (And what's the matter with you anyway: you're out of the hospital now, you're free! For God's sake, go get a job, straighten up and fly right.)
And thus begins the downward spiral - or did it really begin generations ago?
Smug entitlement, narcissism, feeling like Daddy and Mommy's Little Wonder Boy - all these sicknesses have been fed and watered by social media and the Cult of the Selfie. As it deepens and broadens, so do social malignancies that force the classes even farther apart. Yes. I said "classes", as in "social classes", as in "I'm upper class and you're a piece of shit".
I don't know what to do about this. I've never been homeless, but I've felt like it, self-esteem-wise. I've had no home deep in myself, and had to try to climb out of that frightening pit again, and again, and again. It has been hard.
Not being understood is part of the human condition, and none of us can hope for unconditional acceptance in this lifetime. OK then: what about tolerance? Tolerance meaning: I won't spit on you, I'll just barely stand your presence and try to keep my mouth shut and be civil.
Tolerance might be enough. At least, it would be a start.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Light comes from everywhere: the stone church
I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.
So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.
As orderly as Spring:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach.
Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.
Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.
I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.
I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.
We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there.
But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.
I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.
But then.
Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.
It was a church.
It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.
The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.
What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget
This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.
But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.
But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.
I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.
But I put my HAND on that rock!
It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.
This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.
I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.
Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.
I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more.
So that is that.
This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.
One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.
Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light.
I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.
This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.
The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.
But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "
Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.
So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?
Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?
But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.
As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.
Project description
The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
So begins another spring
THE LULLABY OF SPRING
Donovan
Rain has showered far her drip
Splash and trickle running
Plant has flowered in the sand
Shell and pebble sunning
So begins another spring
Green leaves and of berries
Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by
Mother bird eating cherries
In the misty tangled sky
Fast a wind is blowing
In the new-born rabbit's heart
River life is flowing
So begins another spring
Green leaves and of berries
Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by
Mother bird eating cherries
From the dark and wetted soil
Petals are unfolding
From the stony village kirk
Easter bells of old ring
So begins another spring
Green leaves and of berries
Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by
Mother bird eating cherries
Rain has showered far her drip
Splash and trickle running
Plant has flowered in the sand
Shell and pebble sunning
So begins another spring
Green leaves and of berries
Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by
Mother bird eating cherries
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)