Short Fiction: Sisters, sisters. . .

(Author's Note: believe it or not, this whole story poured out in one blurt this morning. I have no idea how long it is, but it looks kind of like a novella. Did any of this really happen? I'm not sure where anyone would get that idea. But only one person knows for sure.)

My name is Myra, and for a very long time I felt “mired”. Rocking out of the mud ruts of my past has been a long and very gruelling process, and sometimes I’ve come to the point where I didn’t think I could bear to go on.

But I went on.

I have found my authentic life, but had to walk through the hellfire of being silenced, talked out of my truth. It happens all too often. Then others wonder, why does that person drink? Why is that person depressed? – when they should more properly be wondering, Why is that person alive at all?


There is a towering figure in my life, awful as some grinning totem. At this point, I don’t know whether she is alive or dead, so she remains crouched in the shadows. When I was born, I think she was a giant about seven feet tall. I was surrounded by giants. Later I would see them differently, and eventually even grow taller than she was. Photographic records show her as looking very pleased about my birth, even excited.


Of course I didn’t know much about her then. I was too busy being a kid. I see pictures of a little girl in grubby boys’ clothing, passed down twice through two rough boyhoods. When I outgrew my shorts and pants, my mother took a pair of scissors and cut the elastic in several places so they would still fasten. Length was not a consideration.

This not only didn’t bother me, I didn’t even think about it, it didn’t register at all until I had grandkids and saw the way the girls were dressed, sparkly little butterfly tops, slim-fitting jeans with stitched hearts and sequins, leggings with candy-cane stripes, their hair pulled sweetly up in a way that makes their lovely faces nothing short of stunning. And sparkly little ballet shoes, and runners with little lights in them so they blink like fireflies when they run.

I guess it didn’t occur to me. You can’t miss what you never had.


I do remember my older brother Garth who was insane, so we got along well, but he was still five years older, still one of the giants. I had a normal brother Harold who was ten years older. My mother seemed to favour him, while being somewhat oblivious of me. When a sibling is that many years older than you are, they are practically an adult. And if my big, big sister held me and played with me for a while, then dumped me like some sort of animated rag doll, who could blame her? She was thirteen, and not my keeper.

When I was born, a sign that said “OUTSIDER” was plastered on my forehead, and you know something? – here, let me check – I think it’s still there, though with one or two brave strips peeled off. I was a smart kid who was given a battery of tests in Grade 2, then put on an educational fast-track that lasted until high school.

It seems to me that as soon as she could, my sister got as far away from us as possible, literally travelling to the other side of the world. She studied German and wrote her Master’s thesis about Mahagonny, a caustic work of social criticism by Brecht and Weill. When I’d come home from school, from my special classes for smart kids, Mahagonny would be on the stereo, dissonant, dysphoric, bizarre. If I brought a friend home from school, they’d say, “What’s THAT?”

There were German books in the den, Goethe, Schiller. Books by Freud. I tried to make sense of these and couldn’t. But I should backtrack here and mention her brief career as a singer. She did seriously train, had a good instrument, as they say, but something happened. I do remember as a small child seeing her play the lead in a university production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and being so thrilled and proud of her that I wanted to see it all over again.

And I remember the vocalizing, swooping up by thirds, then coming down like stairsteps. I remember some of the songs she sang, Go ‘Way from my Window being a favourite. (Later in the ‘60s, during the folk craze, she sang such pleasant ditties as Amanda of the Lake, about a crazy old woman wandering around in a yellow wedding gown 50 years after the Civil War ended, Poor Old Horse which was about a cart horse that dropped dead and was eaten by crows, and Gordon Lightfoot’s sour and sardonic That’s What you Get for Loving Me.) Oh, and Down by the Greenwood Side-ee-oh (“She wiped the blade against her shoe/The more she wiped the redder it grew” – this after the mother murdered her two children for no apparent reason).

She played the guitar in the same primitive way I did, plucking awkwardly at the same three chords, but with a difference: she held the guitar between her spread knees like a cello, the neck of it sticking out at a 45-degree angle. I’ve never seen anyone hold a guitar like that before or since. For some weird reason, she named it "The Girl".


The singing career didn't happen, then she went to Europe for mysterious reasons that were never explained, though she must have been studying, talking in German, a mystery to me since no one in our family has the remotest connection to Germany or German culture. The homecoming was not good, for reasons I don't feel I should recount. For many years she lived in a tiny apartment, really just one room in an old house on Roxborough Street in Toronto, a tony area with a shabby underside.

At this point, my story gets interesting. It thickens, it even coagulates. When I review the facts of it, I sometimes feel a sense of disbelief, except that I know it all happened.

I didn’t have a good adolescence, by anyone’s reckoning. I was hypersensitive and depressed and didn’t think I was attractive. I had a few friends, but not many, and no doubt I was hard to be with.

Meantime, everyone in my sister’s crowd was vastly older than me. Mid-‘20s, even 30s. She gave parties. Oh, it wasn’t the first time I’d tasted alcohol: after completing a long and gruelling walk for Oxfam at age thirteen, I was crying with exhaustion in my bedroom when my father appeared in the doorway with a glassful of something. It was dark and muddy. “Drink this, you’ll feel better,” he said. It was orange juice with a couple ounces of hooch in it. I gagged it down, and felt so much better.

This hooch cure came up more than once. One time, summering at the cottage in glorious Lost Lake Resort in Muskoka, something upset me, don’t remember what, and I ran crying to my room and slammed the door. My sister came in with a glass of hooch and said, “Drink this, it will relax your insides.” I think I was fourteen years old.


By fifteen, there were those parties, with friends of my much-older brother Harold as well as my sister. My crazy brother Garth sometimes attended, and entertained everyone with his surreal monologues full of characters that predated the jazzlike riffs of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams.

People floated in and out of these parties. Some of them were married men. It was a kind of sport to get me drunk, though no doubt today they would claim that I wanted to get drunk, that it was my responsibility at fifteen how much alcohol I should drink. All I can say is, I drank a lot, as much as any of the adults, and woke up with horrendous hangovers that sometimes made me puke and sob with wretchedness and guilt.

But there were other things. My sister’s boy friend had a friend that for some reason liked me, but he was creepy. He was also in his early 30s, and married. I knew all this. One night he “borrowed” me and took me to see MASH, which he had seen 15 times or something (he used to be in the military and still owned guns, like my sister’s boy friend). At the end of the evening we made out, and it was tremendously arousing, but I felt terrible guilt. I finally went to my sister to tell her, and she said, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt to have a smooch and a snuggle after a date.”


A smooch and a snuggle. A few days later this same guy sent me two dozen roses, I mean right to my house with my parents watching, which were placed on the dining room table. No one asked where they had come from. It was as if they were invisible. The card on them said, “Thanks for a lovely evening.”


But the thing is, the thing is, the same thing happened with Harold's best friend, his married best friend, while his wife was asleep upstairs. No one found out. He hit on me, as they say. He didn’t fuck me, but it was definitely sexual, not something you’d do to your sister. Nothing his wife could ever watch.

For years I felt I should have been grateful for all this attention. My parents knew exactly what was going on at those parties, including the drinking, but felt my older siblings were taking good care of me. Besides, drinking was fun, wasn’t it? No harm done.

Stuff happened much later that I can’t even get into, but the gist of it is, the general feeling in my family seems to be that my memories of it are somehow distorted and wrong, even fabricated. No one laid a hand on me, and no one could know it better than my sister! My Dad who gave me hooch when I was thirteen and kept my wine glass filled at fifteen and crossed every boundary I ever had: but then, by that time my sister was so far away from the whole scene that she had no idea what was really going on.

So she kind of made something up that she could live with. SHE never saw that kind of behaviour from my Dad, no not ever. I was to learn much later that alcoholism is a progressive disease, as is mental illness. It’s quite possible he wasn’t like that when she grew up in the early 1940s - incredibly, it seems now, during World War II. Thirteen years is a very long time, and a lot can happen. But by this time her distance from the family was less geographical and more existential, meaning she created her own particular legend and stuck to it.

 She said a very odd thing to me once: “The most successful person I know is my mother.” My Mum was a housewife who helped my Dad in his grocery store, not out of choice but because it was simply expected of her. She seemed to have some pretty warm feelings towards my sister and once told me she was the only baby of hers that she breast-fed.


Being one of those embarrassing midlife accidents, I sort of had a blank for a mother. But I can hear the protests now: oh no, it wasn’t like that at all! I wasn’t there, I guess, and she was. My sister never experienced the oblivion of her indifference. Which is, after all, the opposite of love.

Yes, there were at least two realities competing with each other, and guess what: the older horse (poor old horse?) always wins because, being older, she knows much, much more than you do. So even if she wasn’t there, even if she was in fact on the other side of the world, she knew exactly what was happening, and not happening.

Still, there were cracks, later hastily filled in. “I don't like to be around him. I find him sort of oppressive,” she once said of my Dad, and in a letter much later on referred to “his alcoholism” (which conveniently disappeared many years later when I tried to tell her what had happened to me).

I have to confess that once I made a rather pathetic, failed attempt to impress her. While I was living in Alberta, I was in community theatre and played the lead in My Fair Lady, one of the biggest thrills and challenges of my life. And my sister was coming from Toronto to see me perform. It was going to be Iolanthe in reverse: surely she would be proud of me now! I had waited for this for so long.

So imagine what she said when my husband took her backstage. Said in that gelled, coolly indifferent voice with that poisonous little eyebrow of a lilt in it:

“Well, you weren’t boring.”

“Weren’t boring.” And that’s all. That’s all.

This could be War and Peace, and it is starting to resemble it. Anyway, getting off alcohol was bloody hard, and my siblings were kind of embarrassed for me to hear that I actually had a “problem”. My Dad wrote to me, “I guess I was lucky that it never happened to me.” I remember receiving a manifesto from my sister, eight single-spaced typewritten pages like the kind of records they kept in the Third Reich, refuting every single thing that I had told her about my childhood, point by bloody point. She originally had planned to show up on my doorstep, I guess to literally strongarm me into her version of reality.

The thing is, when your whole childhood is basically discounted to be replaced by someone else’s far-more-wholesome-and-palatable version, it leaves you with a sense of nothingness. Unfortunately, at about this time there was a very fashionable horror called False Memory Syndrome being blasted all over the pages of magazines and newspapers and on TV. It was simple physics: the equal and opposite reaction to the “action” of sexual abuse memories erupting from survivors’ minds. Things got into a terrible muddle, people began to claim they had been molested by giraffes, and no doubt some people were coerced by therapists (I wasn’t) and made distorted claims to get custody of kids (which they still do).


Some people took this to mean sexual abuse either didn’t exist, or had been blown so far out of proportion that it was nearly unheard-of, the one in 10,000 that was the accepted statistic for incest since records were kept. This dilemma was never really resolved, but just dropped out of sight and went underground again. The public was tired of it, apparently, or it had just gotten too contentious and uncomfortable. (Meaning “legal”). The remnants of it pop up today on reality shows: people who abuse drugs or stuff themselves with food or live in squalid mountains of garbage almost all say they were sexually abused by someone in their childhood.


That is, if we want to believe such histrionic distortions.

It amazed me to learn from a psychologist many years later that, even apart from anything my Dad either did or did not do, there had been sexual trauma in my adolescence, very serious trauma. I told her about going to MASH (and by the way, my “date” committed suicide a few years later with one of his guns), and about my brother’s friend with his wife upstairs, as if I were sharing some pleasant adventures of adolescence, when she stopped me in my tracks by saying, “They abused you.”


“Oh no. It wasn’t like that.”


”How old were they? Twice your age? And married? And drunk on top of that, and – worse – getting you drunk. It’s no contest. They held all the power. It’s a miracle you didn’t get pregnant.”

I sat stunned.

“Not only that. Why wasn’t anyone protecting you? They were so much older than you, and they were your siblings! It was their responsibility to keep you safe.”


Safe?


Oh dear. Safe? What is that supposed to mean? That people a decade or more older than you should somehow feel a sense of responsibility towards you? But that’s just the thing, the twisted, sick, distorted thing. They DID think they were being responsible, even showing me a good time. Everyone, especially my sister, seemed to think all this making out with drunken married men was good for me, that she was sharing her bounty, her popularity, especially her sexual popularity, with this miserable depressed girl who wasn’t welcome anywhere else. It was generosity on her part to include me in all those wonderful things, all that fun. Not one of them thought that keeping my drinks topped up all night was a bad thing, even when I was ripped out of my skull and puking my guts out. I think they found it entertaining: I was a sort of mascot. My sister used to “imitate” me saying (though I never said this, not once, and never lisped): “I’m tho pitthed I can’t even thee thtraight.”

I guess I’m sounding like a victim, eh? Maybe in some ways I do feel like one, but I had to step away, way away, to really take my life back. Try: the other side of the country. When I told my sister I was moving to Vancouver and wondered what would happen if I couldn’t adjust, she shrugged her little shoulders and said in her best indifferent, coolly lilting tone, “Oh, I guess you’ll just self-destruct.”

There were several things she liked to say to me. She said them often, and either denied she said them or insisted they were compliments. (Obviously by this time I was making a few sad attempts to dig myself out from under the avalanche of wet cement that passed for her sisterly influence.)

“Myra, you’re weird.”

“Myra, you’re crazy.”


(and): “God, I’m sure glad I’m on your side, Myra, because if I wasn’t. . . “

She went through a period of rampant promiscuity, empty sex with a lot of married men. Married was better, fewer messy attachments. At one point she had a lover about fifteen years younger than she was and bragged to my sister-in-law about how sore she was all the time, because he had such a . . . The two of them mailed me a joint when I was living in New Brunswick, which I smoked alone, listening to the original cast version of A Chorus Line and blubbering.

I remember one scene – God, where is this all coming from? – I was standing in the kitchen with a drink in my hand, heading into the darkened living room, where her boy friend was sitting by himself on the sofa (with a drink in his hand). She turned around, her eyes incandescent with fury, and snarled, “So, what do you think you’re going to do? Are you going to go in there and sit down beside Jack and flirt with him and romance him?”

I was learning the bizarre dynamics of a family system as twisted as a defective strand of DNA: Jack could “romance” me, but I could not “romance” him, was not even allowed to think about it.

Then she did one of her famous 180s. Suddenly she didn’t need sex at all, and anyone who did was subject to her famous contempt. (She was also contemptuous of people who drove cars, because she had never learned how.) By this time she was Queen of the Sardonic Jibe: she had honed a certain technique of toxic sting to the point of sheer genius. Disdain mixed with contempt. She lashed out like a cobra, stung viciously, then turned it around on you and insisted that YOU were the one who was being cruel.

My God, this is like an archaeological dig of pain! One time I made another fatal mistake in trying to reach her and really be her sister: I went to visit her in Toronto, and by this time she was living in a high rise and doing some sort of work that involved computers. When she got home, she started in on me, saying “boy, are you ever wired!” because I was excited about something, and this time I called her on it. I don’t know what I said, but it was pretty mild compared to her “weird” and “insane” comments.

She ran into her bedroom, slammed the door like she used to do when she was in high school, flung herself on the bed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

I was really afraid the cops would come and she’d say I assaulted her or something. I was afraid, and when she finally came out I placated her and apologized profusely for – what?

It occurs to me now that no matter what I had said to her, if I had told her to fuck off and die (which perhaps I should have), it did not justify the massive temper tantrum she had just thrown in order to make me feel really bad. I did not allow my children to act like that when they were toddlers. It was inexcusable and completely insane. I had never done anything like that in front of her, ever. After that I had to be careful, careful. Look what I did to her – look what I made her do!

Just how awful and heartless can a human being be?  

There were layers of pain building up, layers she insisted either didn’t exist or had nothing to do with her, because I was, after all, “crazy”. My attempts to make her understand anything of what I was going through were doomed from the start, but I kept on trying. She never married, see, and there are certain other details I won’t reveal here. I do remember one of the rare times I went to my mother claiming she had said something vindictive and horrible to me, and she said, “Oh, she’s just talking about herself.” (My mother had an older sister too, a sometimes-vibrant alcoholic who later committed suicide. Though the family said “she just lost track of how many pills she took”. It takes a couple hundred pills to die, which is kind of a lot to lose track of: but I digress.)

My sister not only does not acknowledge the elephant in the living room: she IS the elephant in the living room. The tomb has been sealed, and as far as I am concerned, she is in it. I have made a life for myself with husband and children, and she didn’t, or couldn’t, because she never found the courage to try. I find I can’t spare much mercy for her. People say “you should forgive her”, because the intensity of my feelings makes them uncomfortable. They really don’t want to hear about it. If I forgave her, perhaps I would shut up.

I suppose I shouldn’t make any of this public or even write it down, because someone might actually read it and it will make THEM uncomfortable, or perhaps they will recognize themselves. I wonder what happened to the drunken gang at my sister’s house, apart from the man who shot himself. The other guy, the guy whose wife was sleeping upstairs, was getting divorced last time I saw him, and very deep into alcoholism. I don’t drink, not at all, because I see that it isn’t good for me. I do the best I can, sometimes better, sometimes worse. There was a tiny bit of communication with my brother Harold a few years ago, just a couple of emails, and I had the thought that my sister might be trying to find out how I was, mainly to confirm her suspicion that I was either hopelessly insane, or dead.

But I didn’t die, see. Myra is no longer mired. People call me My now, which is sort of nice. My meaning “mine”. My house, My grandchildren, My world. I am a published author now, two novels, a dream come true. And even though part of me still has fantasies of throwing her over the edge of the balcony in her mingy little apartment, I realize now she isn’t worth it. You see, you can outlive your enemies just by taking a closer look at them, and thus diminishing them into the very small people that they always were.

My, my.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Emily Carr: bold strokes, mutilated treasures

The above video is just a snippet of the most superb documentary I have ever seen: Winds of Heaven, a fresh approach to the life and work of the brilliant West Coast Canadian artist, Emily Carr. Fresh because it dares to throw off the shackles of those dusty, crusty old National Film Board movies that we had to sit through in school.The narration is riveting in its sense of presence, in the eerie feeling that Carr is in the room with you.

But when I recently watched this treasure on Knowledge Network in Vancouver, I had a sense that it ended rather abruptly. I did some research on the net and found one reference after another to this "90-minute film".

Wait a minute. 90-minute?

Then why was it shown in a one-hour time slot? And why were there 10 or 15 minutes left over, at that?

I was horrified, and began to fire off emails to Knowledge Network (which is forever yammering on and on about the significance of Canadian culture, not to mention trying to get my money to support such efforts) and White Pine Pictures which released the film.

Below is my correspondence with the director of the film, Michael Ostroff. I was stunned to discover that my worst fears were true: the film had indeed been mutilated, with 40% of the original material excised. But it got worse. I discovered which part of the film had been put on the chopping block: all the material about Carr's legendary relationship with First Nations people.

But this is the soul of Emily Carr, one of the main reasons her work is so celebrated! The comfortable myth is that she cozied up to Indian chiefs and was given an "Indian name", but the reality was much more complex. Carr never quite lost her Victorian perspective which was closer to the "noble savage" beliefs that dominated the early 20th century.

Was this too contentious, or did it disturb the myth we have always taught our school children? Did it overturn the traditional sanitized version deemed more palatable to the good people who open their eyes and their wallets to the Knowledge Network?

Before I run on all day, I will include my initial email to White Pine Pictures, director Michael Ostroff's response, MY response to his response, and a snippet from the web site lamenting the casual mutilation of this masterwork.

In the meantime. . .

DO NOT GIVE MONEY TO KNOWLEDGE NETWORK IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. You will be throwing it away. You will be allowing these idiots to go on slashing and burning films that celebrate irreplaceable Canadian icons and their work.

Ignore their ludicrous pledge drives. Don't listen to excuses from them. What they did was evil. It never should have been allowed. Would someone take a Carr original and hack off 40% of it? What part of it is dispensible? Maybe this picture of a totem pole? We've seen lots of totem poles, haven't we?

To:    White Pine Pictures
From: Margaret Gunning

Your Emily Carr documentary is riveting, the best thing I've seen on the subject. Knowledge Network in BC ran it in a one-hour time slot, and it ended after 45 minutes. Then I found out this is a 90-minute film! Knowledge Network does this sort of thing all the time. There is no indication whatsoever that it is a "Part I" or "Part II". It's just run the way it is, I would assume a badly truncated version left in mid-air. I have tried to inquire about this kind of policy before and have been brushed off, or else they tell me they'll show the second part whenever they can find a slot in the schedule. I just do not understand it. If I'm wrong about this, and I hope I am, please set me straight. This film was so significant that I felt it was nothing less than a spiritual experience for me, as if Carr was in the room speaking to me. Something this sacred should not be tampered with!

From: Michael Ostroff
To: magunning@shaw.ca


Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 6:19 AM


Subject: Winds of Heaven


Dear Margaret;


Thank you for taking the time to send me your thoughts on Winds of Heaven.


You are correct – the version broadcast on Knowledge Network is a travesty. We were forced to provide the Network with a 52 minute cut; more than 40% of the original version was deleted to meet their demand. Removing that much out of a film destroys its integrity. I did everything I could to reason and argue with Knowledge to reverse this decision. In the end I removed my name from the credits. If you wish to register your complaint you might contact Murray Battle at Knowledge.


The full-length version in dvd format is available for purchase at the RBCM, the AGGV, Carr House, the VAG and several locations on Haida Gwaii. If none of these are convenient for you can purchase the dvd through our internet store.


Again thank you for your kind words. This year - Dec 13 - is the 140th anniversary of the birth of Emily Carr - and there is a possibility of special screenings of the film in Victoria and Vancouver to mark the occasion.


Best, Michael Ostroff


Cine Metu


613.237.0618 cell
613.237.9687 landline


Winds of Heaven
blog: http://carrdoc.wordpress.com/


From: Margaret Gunning
To:     Michael Ostroff

Why is this legal? Why aren't those people facing major fines or worse? Why do they claim to promote Canadian culture? Why do they constantly ask for my money (and if they do answer my complaint at all, it'll probably be with their hands out). I did think it ended rather abruptly, with her dates of birth and death suddenly flashed on the screen. But it wasn't until the next day, doing a little research (and by the way, I have already ordered two DVDs, one for me and one for my best friend: in truth, I wanted to order one for everyone I knew because I felt like they HAD to see this) that I saw "90 minute film" and all the info on the premiere.


90 minute - ??

I will say, however, that I was STILL mesmerised by this film. It was nothing short of enthralling. The music had a fey supernatural quality which perfectly matched the narration, which was spookily spot-on and made me feel Carr was in my living room talking to me. I remember all the horrid old NFB things about her in which some narrator droned on and on about the monkey in the baby carriage. We all know that stuff, so it was delightful to see the monkey screeching into the phone, a great way to convey the information without dropping it on us like a cement block.

Yes, come to think of it. . . I wondered why there were relatively few of her works shown, why I still felt hungry. Oh God, more comes back. A while back they showed a documentary on WWII - I wish I remembered more about it. It was left hanging. There was a Part II, missing. I contacted them and they said it would be on, but they didn't know when just yet, they weren't sure it would fit into the schedule. (To my knowledge, it was never shown, nor was there any indication at all that there was a Part II: for all the public knew, this was the whole film.)


So. Knowledge Network is a bastion of the uniquely Canadian, of national treasures and art at its finest, and we should all be watching it instead of some cheap reality show because it's CULTURE, folks, so get with it! We should also be opening our wallets when they have those chintzy pledge drives with people trying to look busy talking to imaginary contributors. But it's OK to pare those Canadian treasures down, isn't it? If we only have an hour to spare, for God's sake. . . For after all, we have to show that program on sperm whales for the 47th time this year, don't we? It's educational and doesn't cost us anything.

An hour and a half, for God's sake! How much can there be on this wacky old woman who was a landlady most of her life and kept a monkey? Besides, this film had the effrontery to say she wasn't all buddy-buddy and cosy with the "Indians" all the time, but often felt a typically Victorian sense of superiority to them. Heresy! Artists can't be that complicated, it just confuses people, and she spent most of her time crashing around in the bush and was crazy anyway. And she wasn't one of the Group of Seven so she isn't included in those calendars we buy half-price after Christmas.

I don't like to rant, but I am truly incensed by this. I am, to be honest, horrified that a film of this quality was slashed like that, that they were allowed to do it. I am very sorry now that I sent them a rave review of it before it dawned on me that I hadn't really seen it. Then I sent a follow-up email lambasting them for what they did to it (which I couldn't quite believe - surely there would be a Part II sometime?. . . No?).

When I look at the crap they show, and their habit of repeating the stuff ad nauseam, I am tempted to stop watching them altogether. Unfortunately, I wouldn't have been aware of this extraordinary film because things like this tend to get buried. "Art" is ghettoized and treated like some rarefied, white-gloves thing that most of us can't be bothered with.

I would like to know whose decision it was to do this, why someone must have felt it was OK and acceptable and even good to cut a leg off it and show it mutilated. Someone did, someone with the power to decide. I will try to forward this letter to the good folks at Knowledge Network if I can, but I have no illusions it will do anything but draw criticism (of me) from them. Meantime, having ordered the DVD from White Pine Pictures, I look forward to seeing a truly outstanding film in its entirety.

Thank you for enlightening me on this, distressing as it is!

Margaret Gunning


(From Winds of Heaven web site, White Pine Pictures)
January 30, 2011


The 87-minute theatrical version of Winds of Heaven is now for sale in DVD format. Order Winds of Heaven from the White Pine Pictures online store.


If you were disappointed by the version recently shown on television – it’s not surprising. That version – 52 minutes – is missing forty percent of the content of the original film. Missing was the entire parallel story of Carr’s interactions with the First Nations people of BC.


(AFTERWORD: Everyone should see this film. Order a copy of the DVD.  Don't trust any TV network to show it without it being truncated or interrupted by ads. Do not allow the kind of casual censorship which obviously gutted the film and will no doubt be vigorously denied by the networks. AND DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY! Do not believe for one instant that anything you give them will be used in the service of Canadian culture. It will go to some insensitive idiot with a large pair of scissors and no conscience.)

Very hard to watch: a transformation comes undone

In researching and digging around to find an update for David Smith, the 650 lb. Virgin of TLC fame, I found a whole bunch of videos for something called Reshape the Nation. None of them are more recent than 2009. I think Chris Powell and David started this fitness business in partnership, but it became extremely awkward when he began to regain the weight.

This is one of the worst, when someone seems to have told them to goof around more and be "loose". The first 99 "State of the Nation" videos are a bit scary: Chris Powell does all the talking, and he seems to come from the Jack LaLanne School of Predatory Sales Aggression. David kind of sits beside him silently, looking either bored, glazed, or medicated, sometimes almost schizophrenic in his lack of affect.

In my last piece I quoted that autobiographical passage in which he described his horrific plan to commit suicide in a plastic swimming pool full of gasoline. You don't escape fantasies of self-immolation by losing a whole bunch of weight. Meantime, Powell  assumed the role of David's personal saviour, eventually bagging the trophy of his own show and dumping David unceremoniously by the side of the road.

The Earth Day one, well, what can I say? He's reading off a card, obviously, and looking fat, his face blown up, those sexy cheekbones buried. Personally I think he has shown some real guts in posting his current stats on two different sites:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Elmore-Smith/207608272410?v=info

http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/David630lbs/more.php?section=progress

I sense a coverup here, probably instigated by Powell. If you've made your name and landed your own show by succeeding in "transforming" someone, well, if that person "un-transforms", it's just embarrassing and makes you both look like failures.

But here is an opportunity that is not being taken. David Smith represents the vast majority of people who experience massive regain after major weight loss, but it's being dumped on his own head. The pressure to keep up his "transformed" image has obviously been crushing, but no one is acknowledging that or helping him carry it. 

I get this pervasive sense of shame hanging over the whole thing, but David has put the truth out there, I think courageously. The YouTube comments are weird: people keep saying he looks great, not acknowledging the obvious regain, as if they either don't want to see it or literally CAN'T see it, the elephant in the living room, so to speak.

I hope this guy will be OK. Enormous changes in weight will eventually take their toll. This is not to mention the huge amount of skin that was removed: I don't even want to go there, do you?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Chapters/Indigo
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State of the Nation - Operation Earth Day

Thin? Fat? GOOD!

I don't know what got me going on this subject today: frustration over my own endless shape-shifting, the fact that my body or spirit can't quite decide what I should weigh so I veer incessantly back and forth between thin-clothes and fat-clothes? Or something like that. And I do confess I watch those weight loss "reality" shows, most recently Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition with that smarmily obnoxious cheerleader of fitness, Chris Powell.

It seems there's been a long history of flesh-creeping fitness guys, from Jack LaLanne onward. We won't even get into Richard Simmons, a being so strange we wonder if he's the same species as the rest of us.  But we're hooked on extreme weight loss stories, for sure.

A few years back there was a very bizarre reality show about an obesity clinic - damned if I remember the name of it, but what sticks in my mind was the fact that there were no rules in this place at all. Patients could, and did, order pizza delivered to their rooms (not even having to get up to pay for it) at any time of the day or night.

Hardly anyone lost weight, and no one kept it off. The patients spent most of their time whining about how crappy the food was (and such small portions!). It's true, the meals looked wretched, limp and colorless, like they had been put through the deflavorizing machine. One man stood out, a real whiner among whiners: he had become famous years ago for losing a tremendous amount of weight under Richard Simmons' squealy guidance. Over several years, all the weight came back again, and then some. There was an excruciating scene where Simmons came back to visit his "friend" and badgered and nagged him about what he should be doing to lose the weight. When Simmons left, the man felt completely abandoned and full of rage.

Why do I link all this to Chris Powell? The obnoxious, musclebound, smarmy-voiced, sometimes stampy-footed and petulant gym lizard who almost literally whips massively obese people into submission on his show? Well, he wouldn't have a show at all without one particular person. This was one David Smith, a young man completely immobilized in flesh and so sucked dry of hope that he looked almost catatonic.  What happened was, somehow or other Our Lady of the Fat Guys must've intervened and called Chris over.

A very strange relationship ensued. These two guys, well. . . they seemed to have an unnaturally close relationship. Lived together, trained together, ate together, and constantly slapped each other on the back with face-hidden-in-the-neck, soulful hugs.

And thus a TV phenomenon was born: 650 lb. Virgin. This was a blow-by-blow account (don't read too much into that) of David's spectacular transformation from a man shipwrecked in his own body to a, hey, not-bad-looking-sort-of guy, a guy who now got emails from real babes and who only weighed something over 200 pounds.

I can't go into it all, it would take all night, but the point I am working up to is, David Smith is shown right at the beginning of Extreme Makeover: but only for a second. I hadn't heard anything about Smith in ages, so I tried to find some updated information about  his life, two years or so after the massive and very public weight loss that made him a reality TV star.

Woops. There was nothing.

I had heard murmurings about him "gaining back 30 pounds". But nothing to hold on to. A former personal web site was "down", with a nice sign saying it had "stepped out" for a while.

Then I found it: a tiny notation on his Facebook page that seemed to speak volumes.

"I went from 650 lbs. to 229 lbs. to 455 lbs. . .My quality of life right now is deplorable. I feel I have let down many people. . . I can blame my weight gain on many factors, but in the end I am still 455 lbs. and I need to do something about it. Wish me luck, but all I need is to prepare and conquer and be a role model again."

One can hear the weariness, the crushing sadness in this man who had such a heavy load to carry in terms of people's expectations. One web site described David's triumph as "the epitome of the great American Success Story. For a nation in midst of struggles, confusion, and a loss of identity, the story of David Smith inspires us to be better than we are! It all just goes to show that changing our ways as well as our words can lead to a better future."

Jesus, who in hell could ever live up to that??!

I once read the statistic that 95% of people who lose weight gain it back, and then some. This applies equally to those who have lost massive amounts, whipped on by opportunistic parasites like Chris Powell who has somehow, mysteriously, we don't know how, but somehow-or-other, lost touch with David Smith.

No more back-slapping, carb-obsessing, and wiping each other's sweat off the gym equipment. The guy has abandoned ship. Meantime, he's got his own show now! Who needs David Smith when every week he can roll a new behemoth onstage and begin to badger and scream at them until they shape up. I wonder if anyone realizes that Chris Powell has become a reality TV superstar in his own right by climbing on his former colleague's back. Without David Smith, he'd still be leading aerobics classes in a high school gym.

I don't really want to get into the jaw-dropping extremes Powell goes to, including some really dangerous stunts like forcing a hugely obese woman to put on a 75-pound fireman's outfit and climb about 300 stairs in a cement tower on a day when the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. When she collapses halfway up, Powell lets her take the uniform off before she finishes the job.

I don't know, it's all this transformation stuff. This myth of one, two, three, you're different, a different person in fact, with none of the sludge of your old personality adhering to you to slow you down. You're a whole new man or woman. Reborn! And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What's that? Do I hear singing?: "The hills are alive with the sound of bullshit."

The fact that David Smith has had a massive regain is not surprising, nor is the fact that he seems to have gone underground. I am surprised he was that candid on his Facebook page. I can only imagine the loneliness and shame that must be following him around, particularly since he has become so recognizable, such a celebrity. God help him if he has gone back to hiding in the house again: anything but that. Though on one site he says he has a girl friend, she "grocery shops for me, helps me write out my meal plans and frequently preps food for me. We also work out together on a regular basis." Sounds like a substitute for Chris Powell (or Mom).

People change, yes, they do, but some core of them remains the same. Emotionally broken people do not become whole by suppressing the symptoms of their anguish. When I first saw David Smith on the 650 lb. Virgin show, he told a horrifying story of how he had reached the very bottom of his endurance and decided to commit suicide. This is a transcript from one of the many web sites touting David as a sort of Second Coming of weight reduction.

"My social disorder got a hundred times worse. I could not go out in public without feeling like the elephant man. When I went out in public everybody stared, pointed, made comments to each other, and even laughed behind my back. Sometimes, they even laughed in my face. I felt ashamed every time I stepped outside my door, just like the shame I felt when I was molested. I felt anger for people, like I felt anger for my abusive friend. I hated you all. I felt that everybody thought of me as a joke, that I was put on this earth to entertain you all. My soul was in agony every time I would try to sleep I could hear it moan. My heart was turning evil and I was going insane. I started talking to myself because I had no one to talk to. I could go a week and only speak once or twice to a family member.

I couldn’t go on living anymore, so I felt that suicide was my only option. This is where my social disorder kept me from killing myself. At this point in my life I couldn’t even step outside in my backyard until it was dark out. I was so afraid of being made funof, I thought that if I did kill myself, maybe the police and mortuary people would make fun of my body. I didn’t want to be a joke in death as I was in life. I postponed it until I came up with a way to kill myself and not leave a body. I thought of many ways to end it but, I picked fire. It was a perfect plan. I would buy a plastic swimming pool and some gasoline. My death would be painful because that is what I thought I deserved. I even picked a spot on the map - a dry lake bed called the Painted Rock Reservoir. I wanted to be as far away as possible from my home because I didn’t want my ghost to haunt my house...I had already haunted it for twenty years. Instead, I wanted to haunt the desert. When I lit myself on fire as planned, maybe my screams could be heard in the city, maybe my screams would let me be free from my pain, maybe I would be like a phoenix and be reborn in my flames and ashes."

This was one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. It would trivialize this kind of horrific emotional pain to blame it on the humiliation of being too fat (even THAT much too fat). I think this howl of rage and abandonment has its roots in the extreme trauma of sexual violation, which I know from personal experience can be completely soul-destroying. And it doesn't go away, just as your self doesn't: everywhere you go, there you are. It's the essential human dilemma, the burden we all must carry no matter what size we are.

People heal, they change, they go on to live, to experience new things. But humans evolved to remember. We carry hurts within us, and they make us do things we don't understand, like eat gargantuan amounts of food and become afraid to leave the house.

But my point (and hey, were you thinking there wasn't one?) is that society grabs on to bodily transformation as a quick fix and a great myth to latch on to. We love "triumphs" and "conquests", not the daily, daily, daily grind of maintaining a fundamental, extremely difficult change of lifestyle. But we need heroes, mythic figures who have slain the dragon once and for all. David Smith didn't just lose a whole bunch of weight: people were saying he would somehow turn the entire country around.

This is such collossal bullshit that I think in a funny sort of way, it was healthy of him to take some of that weight back on-board. Maybe he's saying - it's just possible, I think - hey, people - assholes! - I'm more than some TLC freak or minion of Chris Powell and his evil cheerleading squad. I am ME, and I'm me whether I weigh 200 or 300 or 400 or 500 or 9,000 pounds. I am me whether I am thinner than a transparent stringbean, or fatter than a supernova. I am me whether I fall off the wagon or get back on the wagon, or blow up the wagon with dynamite.

Before he lost all that weight, David Smith was a ticking time bomb ready to detonate, to literally explode into flames. And he's still that way, and will be until he can get at some of the buried horror in his past and begin to approach it with a flame-retardant suit on, along with the guidance of someone who can lead him through his emotional wilderness into some sort of authentic breakthrough in personal identity.

And you know what?  It won't be Chris Powell.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

A song of lost causes

I heard this song on an ad for St. Jude's Children's Hospital (St. Jude being the patron saint of lost causes). Nearly unbearable to watch, full of images of small children being treated for cancer. This is so otherworldly it takes me right out of myself. Just exquisite, and heartbreaking.

My little four-year-old granddaughter Lauren has Type 1 diabetes - the serious kind - and was just diagnosed with celiac disease, which means she cannot tolerate gluten in her diet. That means the tight restrictions on what she can and cannot eat have become even tighter. Fortunately she is a sunny child with a great appetite and a willingness to try just about anything.

Yesterday she had to be taken in to the doctor's (again) for a scary infection that just seemed to come out of nowhere. It was an abscess on her abdomen that had to be drained with a long needle, with no anaesthetic. The doctor said Lauren was a lot braver than a grown man who had just had the same procedure. When he told Lauren "he was so scared he peed the bed", she laughed with her usual delighted abandon.

But oh, WHY? I know it is a futile question. Why can't I take this diabetes and celiac and whatever else these kids must endure on myself and just handle them as an adult must handle them? I do not want one iota of pleasure and excitement taken from Lauren's childhood because she has two chronic illnesses that NO ONE should have to live with, let alone a flaxen-haired, laughing little girl who loves nothing better than to run around the yard with sticks.

I  don't get it, but there is so much I don't get: how people can be so cheerful, so immune to the horrors that just seem to be escalating in the world. Don't tell me they're just being reported more often, because that is NOT it. There's something happening here, as the song says, more ominous than I can even describe.

Yeats envisioned the Second Coming of Christ with an apocalyptic vision of complete nihilistic destruction: "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. . ." I wonder if things are starting to fall apart: the environment is beginning to hit back, unleashing floods, droughts, wild storms, tsunamis and tornados that weather experts say begin with the upsetting of nature's delicate balance by human beings' insistence on relentlessly pouring toxic crap into the air and water just so they can get around in comfort. Like the Ray Bradbury story about the guy stepping on the butterfly, all it takes is one flicked domino to bring the whole thing down.

Aside from the climate's Biblical catastrophes, there are other things, things I can't even bring myself to write about, and "little" things such as the fact that half the population has become too damn fat, waddling around and wondering why their health is declining. They drive everywhere, park as close to the mall as possible so they don't have to walk more than a few steps, sit all day eating crap, then wonder why they're fat: "it must be genetic".

I saw a great cartoon once: a couple stands in a department store. The woman says, "The exercise equipment is on the other side of the store." He replies, "Oh, let's skip it then." No one sees the irony in this sort of thinking.

I hate it, hate to think I'm bequeathing such a damaged world and such an unhealthy population to my four precious little grandkids, but this is the sort of world they will inherit (except, of course, much worse). In general terms, I guess I haven't done so well. I haven't done anything significant, at least, but with one shining exception.

It often seems like all I can do is love those kids unconditionally, to reflect back to them how wonderful they are without having to jump through any hoops, pass any tests or even do anything at all. I had a cold mother who pretty much ignored me, though she lavishly favored my older brother.

The opposite of love isn't hate: it's indifference. And I experienced it, and it left a hole in my soul. The psychologists would probably relegate me to the trash bin, too damaged to ever really love another person (unless, of course, I learn to "love myself", to which I'd reply, "Why?").

Something has been boiling around in my head like a storm front, and it will take one of several forms if I ever allow myself to write it. I suffered appalling damage at the hands of one particular family member, and it's not who you'd think. I need to tell this story, but I don't know when or how. Another one is a possible idea for a novel that deals with some of the excruciating ordeals my family went through because of my brother's schizophrenia. But this is pretty dark stuff, isn't it? Isn't life meant to be celebrated, aren't we supposed to pin ribbons on every tragedy and insist that "everything happens for a reason"?

It could be, it could be. If the environment really does fall apart, if this rise of casual evil isn't just in my imagination, then yes, it will happen for a reason. And the reason will be us.

Grandma's Revenge: unlock that bathroom, you bastards!

Toilet closure puts lid on long weekend fun

Well, they could've come up with a title that is less tee-hee. But at least they ran this, and only 2 days after it happened! We'll see if this changes anything. I can envision buck-passing even as I read it: someone is inevitably going to go after me for MY insensitivity and lack of awareness of the "real" issues (i.e., the right of park staff to goof off on a holiday Monday and not have to go through the agony of unlocking a door). It'll be a while 'til I take the kids to that park again, and I'll likely have to scout it out first to see if they can get changed and pee in privacy. A pretty disgusting situation.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

On the Waterfront: it's a crucifixion

OK, this time I wasn't really going to watch it. It just came on Turner Classics (supposedly: though I knew it was coming on) while I was knitting or working on something else, so I thought I'd just have it on in the background for old time's sake.


For old time's sake. . . The first time I saw On the Waterfront, I was 13 years old and sleeping downstairs in the den on the pullout bed. This was a rare treat because my Mum knew I'd spend most of the night watching monster movies on TV. But this time it was different.


I fell not deeply, but profoundly in love with this movie and everything and everyone in it. It is the most nearly perfect thing I have ever seen. Brando's performance as a shuffling, inarticulate dock worker, a washed-up prize fighter whose one chance at glory was stolen from him, slowly gains focus and fire until, by the end, he is a blazing hero, battered and bruised but still able to walk: to lead his brothers back to work, demonstrating the only real integrity they have ever seen.

This is the very definition of "walking the walk", and powerful beyond measure. All this, and Leonard Bernstein's melancholy, majestic score, so married to the material that they are inseparable.

Every performer, from Rod Steiger to Eva Marie Saint to Lee J. Cobb, and even to bit-players like Fred Gwynne (and Martin Balsam! Blink and you'll miss him) are at the top of their form, doing a little better than they know how. The "cab scene" is the best-known, even with those ludicrous hand-cut venetian blinds in the back window (since the rear-projecting machine was lost or broken or something: this was a low-budget film, like Psycho, lean and spare, so that not a thing was wasted, particularly not the energies of those brilliant actors).

Terry's brother Charlie the Gent is guiding his brother into a trap: either take a cushy, nothing job on the waterfront and keep your mouth shut, or. . . get out of the cab at 437 River Street, a place you emerge from feet-first. When Charlie pulls a gun on his brother, Brando gives the now-classic reaction that is so totally unexpected, even shocking.

The script just says, "Wow, Charlie." Instead of shock, fear, disgust, dismay, what he registers is. . . disappointment. And pity. He gently pushes the gun away, shaking his head, for the first time seeing his brother as he is, completely poisoned by evil. All the crusted layers of a lifetime of denial have fallen down at once.


Wow.

This video clip is a favorite scene of mine, in which legendary character actor Karl Malden (whom I never saw give a bad performance) plays Father Barry, a sheltered waterfront priest who steps out of the sanctuary and into the fire. Any man who even thinks of informing on Johnny Friendly and the mob is immediately killed, and when Kayo Dugan dies under a crushing load of crates full of Irish whiskey, Father Barry delivers a eulogy that would peel the skin off the most hardened criminal.

There is not a false second in this speech: it is hair-raising, and, as always, as has happened every time I've seen this, every time for maybe 15 or 20 times, or maybe more, I cried. I cried because his character has managed to utter that which I cannot utter, or even clarify in my mind. It is so far down in me I didn't think it could even be felt, let alone expressed. 

I too have had to step out of a church that was once a womb, then slowly became a tomb. Father Barry smokes cigarettes like a tough guy, orders beer in saloons, and even decks Terry when he basically tells the Father to fuck off. It's a dizzying performance. Watch it: you'll see.