Kids Are Tricksters, yes they are they are

Our little fellow was way sick last week and so maybe the return of his energy today has left me ginger about our health and mortality more than usual. Or maybe i'm just a big suck and i'm still learning to live with that. While watching this video with little t on my lap this evening he was giving a running commentary most of which was "that looks like..." comments. But as the stellar nursery shot came up (approx at 2:24) he leaned forward, pointed at the screen and said, "hey, I know that place," (emphasis his). His unhesitating confidence and certainty was amusing. And, granted, i am a credulous person and was touched and impressed. (A few seconds later, to the shuttle launch image, he said, "I have a space ship," to which i said, "yes, yes you do.") But as i listened again to Neil DeGrasse Tyson's fervent description of the universe, i was struck by something with which i am in profound agreement: everything is connected. And when little t said that he 'knew' that place he was, in part, speaking a profound cosmic truth. Did he know what he was saying? He is only three. But does it matter? When my niece at age four responded in the dark to my good night thought of, "you are so lucky," with, "I feel lucky," did she know what a remarkable tricky truth she was sharing?

There are times when the beauty and poignance of the world, the universe simply takes my breath away. The feeling that fills me is neither one of joy nor sorrow. Bittersweet is the closest word i've found to name this emotion. Nor does "emotion" name what is taking place. I am convinced it is something more. But what?

I think of the Stendhal Syndrome - that state of being overcome/overwhelmed by the beauty of art or the beauty of the natural world. I am a sufferer of this syndrome, if it is even proper to qualify this experience as such. Once while viewing an exhibit of Van Gogh's paintings from Arles, France and once while listening to Yo Yo Ma live in concert i was reduced to tears. I was struck by the apparent elusiveness of what evoked this reaction. There was no single image of Van Gogh's that triggered me, nor was there one piece by Yo Yo Ma that stood out. Rather the entirety of the moment affected me. I was neither a viewer nor a listener 'receiving information' - but rather a participant in something in which i was completely immersed and for which i lacked language with which to describe to myself or others what i was feeling.

Some colleagues at York are doing a podcast series - CoHearence - on the "relationship between cultural practices and our environment," the first two of which focus on melancholy and mourning - topics for which i have great affinity. Although it has been my nature to leap - both mind and heart - into engaging this topic, i find myself curiously reluctant at the moment. And, for sure, it has to do with my obligations to a family and, perhaps especially, its three-year-old member. Over the past few years of parenting i have experienced searing moments of awareness of the fragility of life - either when the kids get very sick or when i hear a story of some infant hurt or, as is too often in the news, killed. In those moments, the social distance between what happens to others and what happens to me and my closest loves, is collapsed; my heart literally feels clutched and squeezed - i'm sure my pulse quickens - and i have to assert conscious will to remain calm, reason that there is no need to allow any anxiety to escalate, that things are, at least for the moment, okay. I've learned (and am still learning) the truth in the maxim that "having children is like choosing to live with your heart permanently outside of your body." But, if i am uncharacteristically protective of my heart these days, my mind is (perhaps as a counter to this) all the more eager to engage (and thus these words, i suppose).

Yes, my heart is tender. This past weekend I performed stories at the Royal Ontario Museum for which I had planned to tell The Golden Fly (similar to this version). It is a story that has always moved me to bittersweet emotion. And with Taliesen being sick, my mum unwell (and my dad in step), and while listening to a podcast dialogue on melancholy, and reading Gabor Mate's work on addictions .... Well...  as I mentioned, I am curiously reluctant to embrace that space of sadness, sorrow, bittersweet. With the bright, young soul of a child in my care it seems my ethic is to keep that bittersweetness at bay - at least for a while. For surely the abundance of the bittersweet will have ample attention in the years to come. And, believing as I do (having been persuaded by Alice Miller) in the innocence of children (not that that lasts long, mind you, before it is assaulted by our world of sorrows and contradictions) I feel that part of parenting is to do what we can to prepare our young to encounter these truths. I think we treat blithely what deserves careful, loving attention. For our world - with or without the ubiquity of TV violence - has an overabundance of moments that can damage an innocent and unprepared soul. And we are wrong to think that we can protect our children from the world of hurts as long as they are "under our roof." From the moment we are born we are fully in the world. Fully! And i have learned sadly that there are so many many ways - from passive neglect to active aggression - that we mangle the souls of the young.

As my colleagues wax on, in the podcast, about melancholy and sublimation and Freud i wonder, not for the first time, how my feelings may be rooted in losses i experienced early in life. Is my sense of the bittersweet merely a result/response to what i experienced as a child? This is hard for me to answer since the evidence, for me, lies behind a virtually flawless wall of amnesia of my first ten years. What i know of those years is archaeological. Suffice to say that something in my child self thought it better to forget those years than to live with their recall. So i wonder if i am merely victim of losses which i seek to fulfill as an adult. Or could it be that, as a child, my experiences tuned me to receive particular frequencies of loss and sorrow? My explorations of literature suggest much truth in this latter proposition. From the most ancient of texts to our modern day echoes. I often think of the Bhagavad Gita, that ancient chat between the god Krishna and the prince and archer Arjuna in which Arjuna loses heart in the face of going to war against his cousins. The content of Krishna's advice aside for the moment (lots about yoga and impermanence) what strikes me is that Krishna responds to Arjuna's despair by sharing with him a vision of a grander pattern of life and death than can be seen from the vantage of one life. Not that that visions lessens the tragedy of what is to come in the war. But Krishna's truths are aimed not at the fleshly existence of one life but that of the eternal and abiding life of the soul. And yet it is a work that is imbued with sadness or, more accurately for me, the bittersweet. That these truths were discussed hundreds of generations ago gives me pause and courage that what i feel is not merely the consequences of one life but is rather an ancient discourse in which i, however unwittingly, became a participant. And perhaps this word holds the key to it all: participant. For as Neil DeGrasse Tyson (my favourite geeky enthusiast evangelist of science) says in the video above, "That's really what you want in life. You want to feel connected; you want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you're a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you. That's precisely what we are - just by being alive." Krishna seeks to remind Arjuna of his connectedness. Melancholy is what we feel when our sense of connectedness is under stress. Mourning is a process in which we seek a new arrangement of connectedness. Connected is how we start out. It is where we come from. As Taliesen implies when he says that he "know[s] that place." And as Zora Neale Hurston writes in Their Eyes Were Watching God:

Most humans didn't love one another nohow, and this mis-love was so strong that even common blood couldn't overcome it all the time. She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell. Been set for still-bait. When God had made the Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness of the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mudballs, Janie has tried to show her shine.

There is so much to do in this life - so much reconnecting to do. And it seems so terribly urgent. Will our children have to grow up faster for this? Will there be time to prepare them to bear the sorrows of the world we have treated so grievously while also being able to hold joy? For i believe deeply, as Kahlil Gibran writes of so eloquently in The Prophet, that sorrow and joy are inseparable:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
  And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
  And how else can it be?
  The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
  Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
  And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
  When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given sorrow that is giving you joy.
  When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
  Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
  But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
  Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

I take this as a virtual manifesto obliging us to carry joy. And while i respect the hard truth of which Ecclesiastes writes (1:18), "In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," i feel that if we do not take seriously the obligation to carry joy then what we think is sorrow will be something quite different and deadlier. It will be despair. We need a vocabulary for this. We need to be able to communicate these truths in ways that are beautiful. Over 30 years ago i came across the following poem by Hayden Carruth and it lodged in my soul as one piece of that vocabulary i think we need:

Essay

So many poems about the deaths of animals.
Wilbur's toad, Kinnell's porcupine, Eberhart's squirrel,
and that poem by someone — Hecht? Merrill? —
about cremating a woodchuck. But mostly
I remember the outrageous number of them,
as if every poet, I too, had written at least
one animal elegy; with the result that today
when I came to a good enough poem by Edwin Brock
about finding a dead fox at the edge of the sea
I could not respond; as if permanent shock
had deadened me. And then after a moment
I began to give way to sorrow (watching myself
sorrowlessly the while), not merely because
part of my being had been violated and annulled,
but because all these many poems over the years
have been necessary, — suitable and correct. This
has been the time of the finishing off of the animals.
They are going away — their fur and their wild eyes,
their voices. Deer leap and leap in front
of the screaming snowmobiles until they leap
out of existence. Hawks circle once or twice
around their shattered nests and then they climb
to the stars. I have lived with them fifty years,
we have lived with them fifty million years,
and now they are going, almost gone. I don't know
if the animals are capable of reproach.
But clearly they do not bother to say good-bye.

And one more from Hayden Carruth before concluding this meander:

If you see a child that shivers when it hears
a diminished fifth, nurture and protect him,
for he only in the schoolyard’s fierce abstraction
will know the cry of the lynx, the cry of the hare,
and that of the old man and the young woman.
Shivering is his genius. If he have speech,
he will utter it greatly. If no, he will search
in other ways beyond the ordinarily human,
the hating and angered. He will hear the light,
he will sing the light and the darkness, or will sound
the ideas of them in the concrete nothingness
of tones vibrating in the air that sight
cannot conceive, yet they touch each one of us.
He will hear love where we would behold a wound.

How do we teach this? Or will our children be our teachers?

Joys of Reading

John Berger is one of a handful of author's whose work i buy sight-unseen (others are Eduardo Galeano, Ursula K. Le Guin and Neil Gaiman) and this new book is a gem. Having read Ways of Seeing when in CEGEP in Montreal in 1976 my capacity to "see" in this world is very much influenced by Berger's work. I'm only a third of the way in this one and it reads like one of my favourites of his And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. His observations of art, literature and politics have long since inspired me to see the ever-present connections amongst all these - i.e. art cannot be understood without also understanding the context of politics.

I'm surprised to learn In Bento's Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? that he didn't go to university. He's always struck me as a titan of an intellectual. Something for which a university-education would seem to be an essential. But there was a tradition of public intellectuals in the nineteenth and 20th Centuries that has, unfortunately, been eclipsed (if not supplanted) by the culture of punditry - a pale shadow - if glitzy and glammy - of what public intellectual life could be. Berger represents a kind of public intellectual that we have little of in North America but which seems to thrive still in France (where Berger has lived for 35 years) and where the death of intellectuals is front page news (as when Pierre Bourdieu passed away some years ago).

From Bento's Sketchbook:

Along with many others I sent a small contribution: a little portrait in charcoal of the Subcomandante Marcos which I had made in the Chiapas, southeast Mexico, around Christmas 2007.
He, I, two Zapatista comandantes and two children are taking it easy in a log cabin on the outskirts of the town of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
We’ve written letters to each other, Marcos and I, we’ve spoken together from the same platform, but we’ve never before sat face to face in private. He knows I’d like to draw him. I know he won’t take off his mask. We could talk about the forthcoming Mexican elections or about peasants as a class of survivors and we don’t. A strange quietude affects us both. We smile. I watch him and I have no sense of urgency about drawing him. It’s as if we’ve spent countless days together, as if everything is unremarkably familiar and requires no action.
Finally I open my sketchbook and pick up a stick of charcoal. I see his low brow, his two eyes, the bridge of his nose. The rest is concealed by ski-mask and cap. I let the charcoal, held between my thumb and two fingers, draw, as if reading by touch some kind of braille. The drawing stops. I blow fixative onto it so it won’t smudge. The log cabin smells of the alcohol of the fixative.
In the second drawing his right hand comes up to touch the cheek of his mask, a large hand splayed out, with pain between its fingers. The pain of solitude. The solitude of an entire people over the last half millennium.
Later a third drawing starts. Two eyes examining me. The presumed undulation of a smile. He is smoking his pipe. Smoking a pipe, or watching a companion smoking a pipe, is another way of letting time pass, of doing nothing.
I fix the drawing. The next drawing, the fourth, is about two men looking hard at one another. Each in his own manner.
Maybe the four are not proper drawings but simply sketch maps of an encounter. Maps that may make it less likely to get lost. A question of hope.
It was one of these maps that I gave to the Helen Bamber Foundation.
Apparently the bidding for it was prolonged and fierce. The bidders were competing to give money to a cause in which they believed, and, in exchange, they hoped to get a little closer to a visionary political thinker, sheltering in the mountains of south-east Mexico.
The money the drawing fetched at the auction will help to buy medicines, care, counsellors, nurses, lawyers for Sara or Hamid or Gulsen or Xin . . .
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

A Paris Review interview with John Berger
A Guardian profile of John Berger

Inspiring Words - Fiction and not

Reminded recently of Charlie Chaplin's speech in The Great Dictator (which i wrote about on FB) i have been noting several moving speeches of resistance against oppression which i have read/heard/seen over the years. I want to believe that such language is the powerful and persuasive "speaking truth to power" that Quakers speak of. I am certainly persuaded by them.

I saw the Great Dictator many year's ago and filed away the memory. Now i am struck by how much of what Chaplin says accords with how i see the world. Not so much his appeal to "science and progress," but his talk of kindness, care and love strikes deep into my heart. When he says, "Only the unloved hate," i was powerfully reminded of Alice Miller’s words (from Thou Shalt Not Be Aware):

Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.

These words and all of Alice Miller's work have had a huge impact on me. This short quote is a kind of manifesto to me - one that i both hear and see echoed in Chaplin's speech. The tone of fearful desperation that he strikes, the weary urgency that you see in his hand dragging through his hair as the speech begins all makes me wonder just how much he was acting. His appeal to soldiers not to "give [them]selves to brutes," is an appeal to all children who, being twisted out of shape by violence and neglect, must choose either to resist or collude. The constraint on these choices from the brutality of our society that creates the conditions for such violence and neglect (with the inexorable and heartbreaking pattern of abused children becoming adults who, in turn, abuse children) is immense. I am reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

by Gabor Maté which is challenging my understandings of family violence, attention deficit disorder and addictions. And i thought i knew a great deal. I've certainly been very mindful and sensitive about such things for a long time and i have educated myself constantly. And yet, as i read Maté's work i realize two things: i am more ignorant than i thought; and i, like most people, find it easier not to think about such things - to turn away from the hand raised in need and not ask the questions that are always present, if implicit. Now, in reading Maté's work i find it impossible not to think of the people he describes, people living with addictions, as once having been innocent children who wanted nothing else but to be held, loved, cared for and yet who were neglected, assaulted, abused. Their souls having been shattered, they grow to be adults with shattered souls who, failing to ameliorate that destruction by "acceptable" means (i.e. relatively "acceptable" behaviours like workaholism, compulsive shopping or gambling) turn to even more self-destructive behaviours of any one of several chemical dependencies. And yet, as Maté shows again and again, alongside the self-destructive behaviour there still exists kindness, longing, decency. I feel if we don't pay attention to the poorest, most oppressed in our society the more surely we will bring into existence a world of carelessness and disregard. We either learn to act with kindness or we will see more and more of the contempt that our current government has for the mass of Canadians (something echoed around the world) as those with the most share of earthly wealth seek to ensure that they keep what they have even while their fellow humans suffer. Is it a wonder that there seems a proliferation of post-apocalyptic literature, film and television? I see in this a tricky message of both despair and warning. We worry about apocalypse (from alien invasion, geological/climactic disaster, disease, zombies & vampires, asteroids) almost as if we have a desire for such things. Perhaps it is the same grim behaviour as rubber-necking for traffic accidents. But there is also warning as well. And i wonder if the popularity of such apocalypticism doesn't include a warning to the world's ruling classes: share or else. And thus i am reminded of another (fictive) speech - that of the character V in V for for Vendetta. A post-apocalyptic call to action that should perhaps be heeded even now.

Finally, another speech i am reminded of (and it is no fiction) is that of Salvador Allende prior to his death in the American-backed coup in Chile on that other fateful September 11 date:  Salvador Allende's last speech (english translation). You can listen to it with this video.  It is an appeal to resist oppression like few i have ever heard.
 

Unexpected Uses of the Ordinary and the Music of the World

There is delight (if not a touch of delicious mischief) in using something for a purpose not only not intended by the maker but probably never imagined. This latest exploit by OK Go fills my heart with mischief. As one friend said, "I want to change jobs." Indeed, as i watch our three-year-old spend ALL of his time playing (when he's not sleeping), i think and rethink the world of play and just how incapacitated are so many of us grown-ups. The playfulness of OK Go's work is, to say the least, inspiring. And it's also obviously incredibly hard work. But why do we separate work and play the way we do? Such is one of the building blocks of the current and dominant common sense. I daresay this is one dichotomy that is profoundly BAD sense.

My friend dian marino told me of a visit to her mother's during pickling season. Knowing that she was going to enter a house over-run with pickles she was surprised to see none. She asked about the pickles and her mother's response of "in the basement" was so matter-of-fact that dian was halfway down the stairs before the oddity of the situation hit her. Why would the pickles be in the basement when clearly no pickling had yet been done? Nor were the pickles in evidence once dian reached said basement. Shouting up to her mother she was told to check the washing machine and, sure enough, the pickles were being duly cleaned in the Maytag's gentle rinse cycle. "Not what the manufacturer had in mind," dian thought.

dian was a student of Corita Kent, an artist and educator who taught at Immaculate Heart College (and whom i blogged about previously). While dian made it clear to me that her ingenuity was 'genetic', i am positive that it was her work with Corita that educated that ingenuity and allowed dian to follow in Corita's footsteps and 'teach' that ingenuity to others. Jan Steward, Corita's co-author of Learning By Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit (2nd Ed.: Allworth Press, NY, 2008), writes:

Neighbours around the corner from us have just added a beautiful deck to their house. I was sure when i saw it that it had been made by some Japanese master. Woodgrains were perfectly matched , joints formed and held - not with nails - but by interlocking pieces of wood. I was surprised when I was introduced to the carpenter, a young man of thirty-two. I asked him where he had learned to do such fine work. I went to Immaculate Heart, he said, and was taught by a woman whose teacher had been a student of Corita. Did you ever hear of her? A few months ago I went for a new pair of glasses and told the young woman who helped me how much I liked her cheerful store. There were serigraphs, children's drawings, banners hanging from the ceiling, and a parrot in a cage with his vocabulary written out so visitors could talk to him and get an appropriate reply. I asked who had put it all together. I did, she answered, and I asked her how she knew how to do this. I had a wonderful art teacher,  she said.  She didn't teach us how to draw or paint so much as she taught us to care. She was a student of Sister Corita.

While i do believe there is that about artistic talent that is mysterious, i also believe that far more can be taught about how to create than we allow ourselves to believe. But perhaps artistic talent is mysterious only because we fail to respect the ability to exercise our imagination - something everyone can do and everyone can learn to do but which, unfortunately, though we start life with amazing capacities, we seem to unlearn most of them by the age of ten.

OK Go is a group of people who haven't forgotten how to play. From their rube goldberg machine and marching band versions of This Too Shall Pass to the treadmills of Here It Goes Again and all the others, they play and play and play and, what's more, inspire that play in others (we've been tumbling dominoes in this house for months). But what raises this to another level is that each of these creations is obviously the work of many hands and minds. What we see here is collective, cooperative creative power. And in that lies much hope.

I learned last year about the hindi word jugaad which means "jury-rigged", clever inventiveness, workarounds. It is also the name of a slapped together motorized vehicle. It is a powerful and playful manifestation of creative power.

I can remember this creative power as a child as i recall imagined worlds (notably the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise and the comic book landscapes of Apokalips and New Genesis, Krypton and Gotham City) and see that the memories of such are as vivid as those of "real" places in which i lived.

The ingenious play of Ok Go is something i hope inspires people to connect with their own ingenuity. And then, my deeper hops is that we will apply this wondrous ability to the daunting challenges which confront us now - climate change, species loss, food uncertainty, etc.... Surely we can find ways to live our lives better and more joyfully while also making the sacrifices we have made inevitable by our centuries of exploitation of our precious planet.

A Must for Critical Media Literacy

In the 1980s i was one of an army of volunteers who worked with Peter Watkins on his 14+ hour-long film The Journey which was a stunning examination of both mass media and the nuclear arms industry. I continue to look at the media world through that experience which gave me eyes and ears to see and hear the messages between the lines, in the cracks, underneath the static. Though I haven't actively applied that knowledge to my endless hours of virtual surfing.

Joy Indeed

I"m a little behind in sharing things here. On it now.

Wise Words

If we know that our world is necessarily the world we bring forth with others, every time we are in conflict with another human being with whom we want to remain in co-existence, we cannot affirm what for us is certain (an absolute truth) because that would negate the other person. If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his(sic) certainty - however undesirable it may seem to us - is as legitimate and valid as our own because, like our own, that certainty expresses his(sic) conservation of structural coupling in a domain of existence - however undesirable it may seem to us. Hence, the only possibility for coexistence is to opt for a broader perspective, a domain of existence in which both parties fit in the bringing forth of a common world.

Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

The Right to Rave - El derecho al delirio

Eduardo Galeano is a great hero of mine. I'll spare you my waxing on about his greatness and let you get to listening to him more quickly. Clara sent me this video of an interview done in the context of the current Spanish Revolution. While it is in Spanish, i do recommend that those of you who do not understand spanish nonetheless listen at least to the section of the interview in which Galeano recites, with piano accompaniment, a poem called The Right to Rave or El Derecho Al Delirio. You can follow along with the text below or read the english translation here. Galeano begins the poem at the 31:15 mark.

The following is my imperfect transcription - i apologize in advance for my errors:

¿Qué tal si deliramos, por un ratito? Vamos a clavar los ojos más allá de la infamia, para adivinar otro mundo posible:

el aire estará limpio de todo veneno que no provenga de los miedos humanos y de las humanas pasiones;

en las calles, los automóviles serán aplastados por los perros;

la gente no será manejada por el automóvil, ni será programada por el ordinador, ni sera comprada por el supermercado, ni será tampoco mirada por el televisor;

el televisor dejará de ser el miembro más importante de la familia, y será tratado como la plancha o el lavarropas;

se incorporará a los códigos penales el delito de estupidez, que cometen quienes viven por tener o por ganar, en vez de vivir por vivir no más, como canta el pájaro sin saber que canta y como juega el niño sin saber que juega;

en ningún país irán presos los muchachos que se nieguen a cumplir el servicio militar, sino los que quieran cumplirlo;

nadia de vivida para trabajar, pero todo trabajaremos para vivir;

los economistas no llamarán nivel de vida al nivel de consumo, ni llamarán calidad de vida a la cantidad de cosas;

los cocineros no creerán que a las langostas les encanta que las hiervan vivas;

los historiadores no creerán que a los países les encanta ser invadidos;

los políticos no creerán que a los pobres les encanta comer promesas;

la solemnidad se dejará de creer que es una virtud, y nadie tomará en serio a nadie que no sea capaz de tomarse el pelo;

la muerte y el dinero perderán sus mágicos poderes, y ni por defunción ni por fortuna se convertirá el canalla en virtuoso caballero;

la comida no será una mercancía, ni la comunicación un negocio, porque la comida y la comunicación son derechos humanos;

nadie morirá de hambre, porque nadie morirá de indigestión; los niños de la calle no serán tratados como si fueran basura, porque no habrá niños de la calle;

los niños ricos no serán tratados como si fueran dinero, porque no habrá niños ricos; la educación no será el privilegio de quienes puedan pagarla;

la policía no será la maldición de quienes no puedan comprarla;

la justicia y la libertad, hermanas siamesas condenadas a vivir separadas, volverán a juntarse, bien pegaditas, espalda contra espalda;

en Argentina, las locas de Plaza de Mayo serán un ejemplo de salud mental, porque ellas se negaron a olvidar en los tiempos de la amnesia obligatoria;

la Santa Madre Iglesia corregirá algunos erratas de las tablas de Moisés, y el sexto mandamiento ordenará festejar el cuerpo;

la Iglesia también dictará otro mandamiento, que se le había olvidado a Dios: «Amarás a la naturaleza, de la que formas parte»;

serán reforestados los desiertos del mundo y los desiertos del alma; los desesperados serán esperados y los perdidos serán encontrados, porque ellos son los que se desesperaron de tanto esperar y los que se perdieron por tanto buscar;

seremos compatriotas y contemporáneos de todos los que tengan voluntad de belleza y voluntad de justicia, hayan nacido donde hayan nacido y hayan vivido cuando hayan vivido, sin que importen ni un poquito las fronteras del mapa ni del tiempo;

seremos imperfect, porque la perfección seguirá siendo el aburrido privilegio de los dioses; pero en este mundo chambón y jodido, seremos capace de vivir cada dia como si fuera el primero y cada noche como si fuera la última

The Real Winner: FEAR

Should i be surprised that Harper's ghoulish implication that The Apocalypse would be hastened if he didn't get his majority so that he could "get on with the business" of managing the economy? Is it surprising that in our woeful political culture (and antiquated parliamentary system) that fear is more persuasive and powerful than hope? Our politics is the victim of religion. But i'm not talking about churches. Even though judeo-christian-islamic religions (and so many others) are robust, the most dominant religion in the world is economics. To be more specific: capitalist economics. For more than math and science (long-known to be a dubious claim), economics is first about values and ethics. And the idea that the invisible hand of the unfettered market (read: deregulated capitalist market) is the most effective way to organize an economy is a belief - a religious belief - for which the science is notoriously partisan and contradictory (not to mention arcane).

The religious belief that private, capitalist, profit-making is a natural way to conduct business is a big part of why we face the global environmental crisis that we do. And rather than turn away from this mad course (which included the greed-run-amok that precipitated the most recent global financial crisis) we accelerate: more exploitation of fossil fuels, getting "tougher" on crime, privatizing health care (or pursuing "alternative service delivery"), freeing private corporations of social responsibility and more. This is an economics of greed, fear and war. And, not surprisingly, it gives rise to crime, violence and an always growing machinery of policing and punishment.

But in the absence of a different kind of economics, one that inspires and gives hope to people, is it surprising that people take fearful shelter in what the dominant common sense assures them is completely natural: economic growth, business-as-usual, an elite of super-wealthy, a majority of I-wish-i-was-super-wealthy and always growing underclass of poor, homeless and starving? Oh, but they won't admit that it is fear that compels them. Many will assert bravado, will give voice to the ethics of individual initiative, entrepreneurship and free-market competition. And surely these attitudes, sincerely believed in, require more than fear as a motivation. Indeed, much of the common sense that makes up our lives steers people firmly into this ethical terrain. And it is one that is powerfully forgetful of history - for instance, that Canada remains the home of many indigenous nations with whom we have treaties and obligations.

But what is a different economic/ethical way of looking at the world? What different economics CAN we propose? Can we imagine an economics that is based on compassion, cooperation, collective action and well-being? And i would say, yes, it is already here. Look at the non-profit economy which is about 8% of the GDP. Cooperatives, barter (including the so-called grey market), gift exchange (which, notably, includes blood and organ donation), government supported social programs and even the black market are all economies that are different from the dominant for-profit economy. I would say there is a different economic ethics to be discussed. One that can inspire quite a different world. And this is a project to which i will devote much energy in the coming years.

But for now, the Conservatives have formed this unfortunate majority with barely 40% of the vote. 60% voted for something different. Add to this math that only 61.4% of eligible voters actually voted and this means that six million people (beating nine million) determine the fates of almost 34 million. And, to look even closer, given that Harper formed his minority in 2008 with 5.2 million votes this means that Harper's campaign pulled out only 800,000 new votes while all the other parties drew out only 400,000 new votes. So another way to look at all this is that 400,000 (about 1% of the population or 1.6% of electors) votes made the difference between the government we're now stuck with for at least four years and a government of the true majority. Our ridiculous system of first-past-the-post parliamentary ridings allows for a party who win a minority of votes to rule the majority. Our "majority" government was formed by less than 18% of the population. That's who the Conservatives represent. And it ain't me.

Some post election opinion worth reading:

• The morning after: Where are we and where do we go from here? by Judy Rebick on rabble.ca
• Fair Vote Canada's analysis based on proportional representation
• Harper's majority: What's Left for us By Murray Dobbin on rabble.ca
  
  

Coalitions are Nothing to Fear

We're having an election here in Canada and, while many people (in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Gaza, et al) are currently risking their lives and dying for a more just system of political rule many Canadians treat blithely if not contemptuously their right to vote. The media reports of "annoyance" with "another election" were a discouraging start to our democratic ritual. Nor can i be surprised at this when most people believe democratic participation begins and ends with voting. The current common sense that rules our lives encourages passivity and trains too many of us to respond with irritation to anything that disrupts our shopping and TV-watching. There are signs of hope everywhere for those of us who look. But today i feel like ranting (just a bit) at the dangerous foolishness that abounds. And while i may sound like a pessimist (or even cynic, which i most definitely am not) my words are fueled by discouragement (which, as Eduardo Galeano writes, is evidence that one has courage) and, perhaps more passionately by my deeper desires for hope and love.

My frustration in this political moment is spurred by two things which upset me in equal measure: one is the repetition of lies by Stephen Harper (or call them falsehoods or half-truths if "lies" seems too aggressive). The second is that so many people seem unphased in their support for Stephen Harper's Conservatives. So, what is the link between the lies (of which there are so many) and the docility of supporters for Stephen Harper's Conservatives? And here is where can be found some hope for better public discourse. Watching CBC's Peter Mansbridge interview with Harper in which Harper once again asserted (and alleged) the "threat of a coalition" i was reminded of the work of University of Guelph philosopher John McMurtry who wrote many years ago about the mass media and what he called "unspeakable truths". (If you're interested in his philosophical argument/explanation of these you can find the original 1988 article here.)

While his philosophical reasoning is a tad beyond my capacities (or patience, perhaps) I was deeply moved when, many years ago, i first read McMurtry's list of "unspeakable truths." (i list them all at the end of this post.) They were thirty examples of assertions (of "truths") that are never or very rarely included in the mass media which, supposedly being objective and covering all sides of an issue (or at least the proverbial "both" sides) in a way that allows viewers/readers/listeners to make up their own mind, means that these different "truths" are virtually "unspeakable". For instance, McMurtry's first example is "Taking more out than you put in as a regular practice – as in money profits – is morally wrong." I trust that the "truth" expressed here is neither cryptic nor new. And it is a "truth" (or call it an opinion, a principle, a position, if you prefer) that i know many people believe. And yet, it is one excluded from public discourse except in rare instances where it is firmly framed as a fringe notion and thus ensuring that the common sense remains undisturbed. I am struck on re-reading McMurtry's thirty examples of how firmly i remain in the grip of common sense. While most of his "truths" do, in fact, represent the way i see things (when i stop to think about it), i realize that most of the time, by default, i behave as if their opposites are true.

And so, to Harper's continued fear-mongering around coalitions. I did watch Peter Mansbridge's interview last week with a bit of relief as, for once, someone in the media was pushing the point that our system of parliamentary democracy includes the option of coalitions. There is nothing, procedurally, wrong with them. And for once, Harper came off looking prissy and bratty about his position. (I only hope enough people were watching and listening critically.) That Harper is politically against the notion of coalition is fine. He's entitled to his opinion (even if hypocritical, given his earlier actions well-exposed by Gilles Duceppe). While i am convinced that Harper's denial of his earlier support for a coalition is a lie, this is a peccadillo compared to the lie that he is repeating over and over again in that repeat-a-lie-often-enough-and-it-becomes-true dynamic. Every time Harper makes this assertion and the mass media fails to "correct" him with the truth that coalitions are, in fact, a legitimate option in a parliamentary system, the lie gains more purchase and for more and more people it becomes true. And there is a more insidious "truth" that is piggybacking along for the ride: that somehow coalitions are not the "Canadian way" which, by implication, means that anyone promoting the notion of coalition is being anti-Canadian. This last piece of Harper's truth is contemptuous and hateful. I feel there is more than enough evidence of Harper's contempt for both democracy and the Canadian people: his framing of parliamentary process as "bickering", his assertion that Canadians aren't interested in parliamentary process, his actions on the long-form census and so much more. And yet it seems like people are more prone to being made fearful about economic uncertainty than they are to being angered over being treated like spoiled children who need a disciplinarian father (whose face, when extolling his ideology, is set on perma-smirk).

I am heartened by Jack Layton's rising popularity and i do hope that more Canadians do rise to act more critically and thoughtfully than Harper is counting on. Our choice is between fear-mongered-narrow-self-interest (i.e. cut my taxes, "don't bother me with all this democracy crap") and learning better how to care for each other.

Here are McMurtry's 30 examples of "unspeakable truths" (written in 1988) which you can test for yourself by asking "how many times do i see this "truth" in the mass media:

1. Taking more out than you put in as a regular practice – as in money profits – is morally wrong.
2. The capitalist workplace is anti-democratic.
3. General Motors, Dupont. IT&T, Standard Oil and Ford Corporations all produced military supplies for the Nazi armed forces during World War II while the United States was at war with Germany.
4. Unearned wealth should be abolished as a matter of just public policy.
5. The government needs to regulate the investment of Canadian/U.S. capital abroad to societies with poor human rights and environmental standards, so as to protect these standards in both North America and the developing world.
6. The free market means that those without money to buy what they need do not have the right to live.
7. The major player in the international drug trade since the Second World War, using drug enforcement laws to maintain its monopoly, has been the United States government to finance internationally illegal foreign interventions.
8. Over 70% of eligible U.S. and British voters did not vote for Reagan or Thatcher "landslides".
9. The arms race and international wars are very profitable for most multinational corporations.
10. The long-term pattern of U.S. and Canadian foreign policy in the non-white world has been alliances with fascist-type governments rather than their opponents.
11. The "free world" is not truly free because its citizens do not have the effective right to criticize the capitalist system.
12. The history of Western civilization is largely a history of genocide against nonwhite peoples and cultures.
13. The greatest danger to Canada's freedom and security comes from the United States.
14. There is no Correlation between people's wealth and their merit.
15. In many cases, social ownership of major industries is sound social policy.
16. The very rich ought not to be admired, but rather condemned for their acquisitive self-interest at others' expense.
17. A small minority's monopoly ownership of society's means of production is an issue that needs to be carefully examined.
18. Pollution/poverty are specially advantageous to the major shareholders of private enterprise.
19. Our major social problems are caused by the profit imperative overriding all other values.
20. The belief that God sanctions our social order or our state at war is a superstition.
21. There may be better alternatives for long-term sexual union than the private property structure of state-regulated marriage.
22. The Soviet Union pays significantly more than the world-price for imports from the countries of East Europe, and charges significantly less for its exports.
23. Socialist revolution has been by and large beneficial for the living standards of most citizens in societies where it has occurred.
24. Over 90% of Canadian citizens are not capitalists but members of the working class who depend for their living on wages or salaries.
25. Unions have historically led the struggle for improvements in health care, working conditions and social security for the population as a whole.
26. The business community has excessive political and economic power in our society.
27. Our schools do not train the young to think critically, but to obey corporate or office authority without question.
28. The President and his leading advisors arc provable war criminals.
29. Christianity calls for the redistribution of wealth.
30. The mass media are essentially a joint-stock company of profit and advertising, for major private corporations.

Paper Cranes in Space

Origami has been part of my life since before i can remember. Fortune-tellers, water bombs and, of course, paper airplanes. I'm not sure i knew about origami per se until my best friend Majid, a fellow CEGEP student (an immigrant from Iran) taught me how to make a paper crane - something he's learned in the UK from a fellow language student from Japan. I made hundreds of cranes, perhaps thousands before eventually developing curiosity about what else could be done. It was my good luck to find a book in the Vancouver Public Library (while living in Vancouver one summer in the early 80s) by Akira Yoshizawa. It opened up a world for me. One that has grown and one that dazzles me regularly.

Abuela Grillo

Abuela Grillo from Denis Chapon on Vimeo.

A simply delightful animation by Bolivian artists. Grandmother Cricket is perhaps part of the force behind the famous resistance of the city of Cochabamba to the attempted privatization of water by the World Bank, a consortium of private corporations (including Edison, Becthel Corporation and others) and the Bolivian government of Hugo Banzer. Thanks to Christine at Equitas for passing this on to me.

Neoliberalism as Water Balloon

Just came across this playful presentation on neoliberalism by Tim McCaskell who should be a national treasure. Tim worked for many years for the Toronto District School Board in the anti-racism department. Thousands of Toronto highschool students went through multiculturalism and anti-racism workshops that Tim was instrumental in leading. A leading queer activist and educator in Toronto, Time has also published Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality.

In addition to a persuasive presentation about the flaws of neoliberalism, this video begins with a powerful graphic presentation about the structure of inequality according to class, sex, sexual orientation and "race". This alone makes the video pedagogical gold. I highly recommend this resource (either showing the video or reproducing some of its contents yourself).

My New Favourite Book on Popular Education

A friend just sent me the link to Jugar y Jugarse: 2da edición: Las técnicas y la dimensión lúdica de la educación popular by Mariano Algava (thanks, Josh) and i am wowed. Algava appears to be an Argentinian professor and popular educator. He's one helluva writer, for sure. I read spanish slowly but it was quickly obvious to me that here was a discourse of popular education that is rare in the english-speaking world. He articulates a radical vision of popular education that is very much in keeping with how i have always imagined popular education could become - despite the limitations and resistance of a liberal, hegemonic culture such as Canada. (You can download the whole book on this page or from this link to the 6MB PDF.)

I've worked on a translation of a few paragraphs (see below) from the introduction (with thanks to Clara, Patricia and Olivia) and i would dearly love to have access to a full english translation so i could make wider use of this in my work in Canada and with the Catalyst Centre. Algava is also part of a popular education collective called Pañuelos en Rebeldía (Scarves in Rebellion or Rebellious Scarves). There is some remarkable stuff here as well and i'm working on some translations. Feel free to work on some yourself (i'm starting with the page on Sistematizacion).

A word about the title (thanks to reflections from Patricia and Clara): Jugar y Jugarse can be translated as "Play and Playfulness" but "jugarse" (likely an argentinian idiom based on jugársela) has a different sense than mere playfulness in that it includes a notion of risk taking which, though always a part of successful play, is not often thought of consciously. In english, my best guess for a more accurate translation would be "abandon" as in "to play with abandon" or "to abandon oneself to...". This has provoked for me many thoughts about the role of play in education and i will incorporate this into my ongoing project of articulating a trickster pedagogy.

Thus, by way of concluding this post, my translation of a part of the introduction:

We would like to say something about this delayed re-release of "Play and playfulness." Delayed in the face of the four years of demand for this book during which we have been asked at marches, meetings and assemblies, “don’t you have a copy of ‘Play and playfulness’?” When we’ve discussed this in popular education groups, it gets out of hand quickly: word spreads widely from person to person and we end up exhausted with the "conference presentations" we’re asked to do.

One tendency of paternalist politics regarding "popular education" has been the movement of a watered-down form into teacher training institutes, government programs, courses for volunteers, etc. However it is the “nice” version that moves this way – where popular education is seen as a “nice” way to intervene, a way to "look good" in group work, a “fun” alternative to transfer content, and, what is worse, includes the fatalism of naturalizing poverty and oppression. This is popular education acting within the framework of "the possible", where anything that dares dream beyond the horizon of "the possible" is repressed, jailed, frowned upon. The intent here is to drain Popular Education of its rebellious nature, of its origins in pedagogy of the oppressed, in order to integrate a dumbed-down form that can safely supplement the paternalism of "risk control."

Given this, we affirm once again from our practice, that popular education is not a set of techniques and workshops for use by marginalized groups as remedial education for those who “dropped out”. Popular Education does not replace the "organization" needed to transform reality, nor is it a place for militancy without class consciousness. Popular Education aims to support diverse forms of resistance to capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, imperialism; and for socialism and challenging the commodification of all aspects of life. The construction of popular power (for the individual and the social) subverts and problematizes; this action is joyful, embodied and intellectual at the same time, creating new ways and new forms, is playful.

It is the power of dreams and utopias and a radically liberating Popular Education that cannot be arrested. It is flowing water giving verdant life to the driest of deserts, nurturing seeds of rebellion, making it flower. Play and playfulness is the water that flows through local, popular and activist experience.

Telling Does Not Exist Without Listening

Reflecting on so-called "community arts" in preparation for teaching this Fall, i've been revisiting many texts about arts, creativity and activism. This book, If You Want To Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland was recommended to me over 20 years ago by a friend (thanks, Clara). It remains one of the most inspirational and useful texts i've read in my life. Over and over again Ueland makes the point that everyone is creative, that creativity is hardwired, as it were, into what it takes to be human. She puts it plainly and unequivocally in the first pages: "This is what I learned: that everyone is talented, original and has something important to say." The rest of the book, in one sense, is the persuasive case for this proposition. It is filled with practical advice and it is also one very extended and effective pep talk. Ueland is very good at persuading you that you have it in you to write or create with whatever medium on which you set your hands and eyes and imagination. Strangely, having read this book, i did not think to hunt down other writing by Ueland. This is unlike me; characteristically i "discover" an author i like and then proceed to hunt down everything they ever wrote. As a teen this was almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy writers (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Leinster, LeGuin), later it was politics, pedagogy and spirituality (Starhawk, Freire, Galeano, Alice Miller) and so on. I'm uncertain why i did not apply my usual readerly zeal to Ueland but perhaps it was because i knew it would be years before i had satisfactorily absorbed the lessons i had to learn from her words. And simply exercising my normal fanboy instincts would, ironically, be an act of avoidance. Re-reading Ueland's work after 20 years i can see that i have internalized many of her ideas so effectively that i cannot recall the moment (if there was such a thing) when i did this. And what i'm noticing is a profound similarity between her ideas and those of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Alice Miller, Corita Kent and many others. These are ideas that have shaped my life.

Now i have turned to see what else Brenda Ueland has written and i am eager to read her autobiography and her essays. I have found one essay that i already know will be a core text in my teaching: Tell Me More: On the Fine Art of Listening. I found an HTML version of it here and a PDF here. I often speak of the power of listening in both my popular education and work and storytelling. Ueland again writes plainly about the "powerful thing that listening is" :

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.

It is a strange thing about language or perhaps it's just our use of it that we talk about "writing" as though it were a thing apart from "reading" - first one, then the other. We do the same thing with "telling" (or "speaking") and "listening". I have long been persuaded about the power of listening and i am really excited to find this elegant and persuasive text. If this is what listening meant in our political, pedagogical, economic world, what then?

Art for Social Change

This fall i will be teaching Community Arts Practice Practicum Seminar at York University. It's the culminating course for students of the Community Arts Practice certificate program. This is giving me a chance to revisit much of my own art practice and learning as well as remember fondly a dear friend dian marino who taught at the Faculty of Environmental studies until her death from cancer in 1992 and with whom i worked on mural projects and some important theory of art and social change (see Wild Garden: art, education and the culture of resistance.) As i've mentioned previously, dian had a teacher, Corita Kent, whose work, for me, has also been an inspiration. I was quite excited to learn that Corita's book Learning By Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit has been republished in a second edition. I found the video clip above on the blog Chumpchampion (which has a number of entries featuring Corita's work) - it is an excerpt of a documentary about Corita: Become a Microscope - 90 Statements on Sister Corita “ABC”.

In 1980 or '81 i had a radio show at CKUT (campus-community radio station based at McGill University). My show was from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. which pretty much ensured that no students were listening. But i did have a few listeners who connected through cable. Rooting through the bank of vinyl i looked for anything but pop music and one morning found a record by Willie Dunn that included the song Ballad of Crowfoot. I was immediately struck by it played it that morning (and probably several others after that). I learned about the NFB film and tracked it down. I was very moved. And am delighted to find that it is on the NFB site and available for embedding in other websites. So here it is.

Gil Cardinal, on the NFB site, writes:

Notable for being one of the first films produced by the NFB’s Indian Film Crew, The Ballad of Crowfoot is also remarkable for its haunting archival images set to an impassioned ballad written and performed by director Willie Dunn...

I am moved once again to watch this film and listen to this song. Especially given the context of recent aboriginal activism in Canada (from the work done on the legacy of residential schools to Defenders of the Land). And given the nature of my family, i am more connected to this history than i ever imagined i would be.

The NFB site also notes that this film was made in cooperation with the Company of Young Canadians, a fascinating community development/youth program that started in 1966 and lasted until 1969, 1972 or 1977 depending on who you ask (it lost its autonomy in 1969 when the government felt it had to impose controls; the CYC is, unfortunately, mostly-forgotten community development history but i found a few interesting pages on the internet: excerpts from two books about the CYC; an article Strange Bedfellows: Youth Activists, Government Sponsorship, and the Company of Young Canadians (CYC), 1965-1970; a short entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia).

I tracked down more of Willie's music and have enjoyed his songwriting and his beautiful baritone voice for a long time. And about fifteen years ago i had the pleasure of meeting and working with Willie for a week on a theatre project.

It is interesting to compare this film with the now famous work of american documentarist Ken Burns who has a film process named for him (the Ken Burns Effect) which uses panning and zooming in and out to dynamize the use of (mostly) black and white photographs. This film uses some of this (effect) and, notably, it was made in 1968. The NFB does have a remarkable history of documentary film-making and one that is well-worth exploring. You can do so here: Challenge for Change.

Out of Place - Jumblies Community Arts Writing

This publication includes some excellent articles on community arts practice by Jumblies members - a Toronto, Ontario-based arts group. Ruth Howard introduces the collection:

This publication was conceived in 2007, out of enthusiasm for Jumblies’ new public seminars, which grew, in turn, from our learning and mentorship program – the Jumblies Studio – and the realization that there is a lot of knowledge and experience to share.

There is a groundswell of community arts practice in Toronto, both as a result of the excellent work of several groups that have been creating wonderful work and community for years: Jumblies, Shadowlands, Clay & Paper, Red Pepper Spectacle, Sketch, ArtsStarts, Regent Park Focus, Storytelling Toronto, 1,001 Friday Nights of Storytelling, Carlos Bulosan Theatre and many more. For several years now York University has had a Certificate in Community Arts Practice (CAP), unique in Canada (here's their blog), and a joint program of the Faculties of Environmental Studies and Arts.

Michael Burtt, a friend of many years, in his article Community Art-Making: Where Heaven and Earth Meet shares his thinking and practice connecting his art with his explorations into spiritual contemplation. He shares a term from writer Alan Clements that i loved immediately: "the holy unexpected." Maggie Hutchison, a fellow community artist of many years, in her article The community artist in the Creative City Engaged citizen or‘regeneration bulldozer’? writes critically of the "creative city" phenomenon. She opens the article with what i consider quite the shocker:

[Joe] Berridge [a partner in Urban Strategies] encouraged conference attendees to revitalize our workplaces, our working practices and, ultimately, our cities; transforming them into exemplary hubs of creativity. And he had specific ideas as to how we should do it. In order to revitalize, Berridge suggested that we abolish meetings and other collective processes, and embrace the individuality and inductive thinking that he argued are essential to an artistic modality. “Beauty is not a collective product, it is an individual product...This runs completely counter to the way we have structured all of our institutions, in which the power of the collective suppresses the power of the individual”, Berridge insisted.

I find it rare that advocacy against collective creativity and for an individualistic notion of the artist and art is as brazen as this. I'm sure Joe has some goods ideas about art in the city. But this opinion that Maggie reports is one of those dominant notions that fits so nicely with a capitalist-individualist (even aynrandian) world. And it is one that i think is wrong - but that's a longer discussion than i have time for now.

Here's a few reports of community arts discussions that are worth reading:

• Discussions from 2008 Art at the Hub Symposium - Relationships, Relevance and Responsiveness (1.20 MB)
• A Discussion Paper - A City Creative to its Bones - September 2008 (584.97 kB)

What About Me - CFS/ME Trailers

What About Me? Trailer - USA from Double D Productions on Vimeo.

A good friend who lives with CFS/ME sent me the links to two trailers being used to raise funds to produce a feature length documentary. CFS/ME remains misunderstood, misrepresented, disbelieved in and ignored by medical systems and practitioners around the world. The suffering that people living with CFS/ME is made all the worse by this ignorance. This documentary could help a great deal.

The joy, the joy, the wonder

I learned from my aunt in Bath many years ago that my scottish grandmother's favourite expression was, "and this too shall pass." I learned these words from the story of King Solomon's ring:

King Solomon once commanded his councillors to fashion him a ring and inscribe on it something that, when read, would turn his mood of joy to sorrow and of mood of sorrow to joy. The councillors worried over this conundrum for some time and, after much thought and work, presented Solomon with a ring. Solomon took the ring and was pleased when he read the inscription: and this too shall pass.

The whimsy and wonder of this video fills my heart. And the dedication and hard work it took to pull this off is an inspiration. Mostly, this is simply wicked funny! It's also a brilliant study of the wildness of creativity. Anyone who feels stuck on a creative project should watch this as medicine.

Our World, Our Imagination and the Gods

I picked up John Banville's new novel The Infinities, read the first paragraph and was instantly hooked. Narrated by none other than the ancient winged-helmeted trickster Hermes, the prose packs a poetic wallop that brought tears to my eyes. Here's how the novel opens:

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What a silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora’s charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early-risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia. Yes, all who witness it greet the dawn with joy, more or less, except of course the condemned man, for whom first light will be the last, on earth.

This morning's Astronomy Picture of the Day (above) got me to thinking about terrestrial and celestial phenomena and the fantastic imagination of human culture. Is it any wonder that humans once looked upon such sights and created stories of angry and fearsome superbeings? Do we see here Zeus' or Odin's wrath? And, as we know from geological science (if not simple observation) following such volcanic activity is the formation of new land which, as many know, is what the word lava means. And so we have a piece of the puzzle of wrathful, titanic gods and their equally titanic abilities to destroy and, of course, to create.

Ethics for Activists 20

What are you carrying?

Two monks, one old and one young, were walking through the forest from one monastery to another when they came upon a woman standing beside a river. She was finely dressed in delicate fabrics and was clearly afraid to attempt crossing the river however shallow it might be. The old monk approached the woman and offered to carry her across. The young monk was shocked. Once on the other side the old monk put the woman down and together with his young companion continued through the forest. Many hours later, as the day was drawing to a close the young monk spoke up saying, “Master, I do not understand. It is strictly forbidden in our order to touch women and yet you didn’t hesitate to pick up that woman and carry her across the river.” “Ah, yes,” said the old monk. “I am surprised at you. I put her down many hours ago. You must be very tired from having carried her all day.”

Ethics for Activists 19

Almost
One day, a talmudic student was meditating in the synagogue when the rabbi came in, went to the front of the synagogue, fell down on his knees, shouting, “I am nobody! I am nobody!” The student, so overcome by this display joined his rabbi and also shouted, “I am nobody! I am nobody!” This went on for a while when the caretaker of the synagogue witnessed this strange scene and, also overcome, joined the rabbi and the student shouting, “I am nobody! I am nobody!” It was then that the student nudged the rabbi, saying, “Look who thinks he’s nobody.”

Ethics for Activists 18

Tetsugen was a zen monk in 17th Century Japan and he had a dream to publish the sutras (buddhist teachings) in Japanese for they were only available at that time in Chinese. His plan was to carve wood blocks with which to print the sutras in 7000 copies. And so he began to travel and collect money. He would ask for donations wherever he went. He thanked everyone equally, whether they gave him 100 gold pieces or only a few small coins. After ten years he had the money he needed to begin. But at that moment there was a flood; the Uji River overflowed and many lives were lost and many destroyed. Tetsugen used his money to help the people, to save as many as he could from the starvation that followed. And once again he began to travel and collect money. An epidemic swept the land and many people died and many suffered. Tetsugen used the money he'd collected to help the people. And then he returned to his task. Finally, after twenty years, he'd collected enough to begin carving the wood blocks to print the sutras. The wood blocks that Tetsugen carved can be seen today in Obaku monastery in Kyoto. However, people say that Tetsugen made three sets of the sutras in his lifetime and that the first two are invisible and far surpass the third.

5th Int'l Conference of the Popular Education Network

I've just learned about this 5th Int'l Conference of the Popular Education Network and am urging people to connect with it. If anybody trips across a pot 'o gold and feels like sharing... hint, hint. More likely, if someone from the Toronto-area can make it, please bring back news. Edinburgh, folks! Sweet. (It's my father's land).

I learned about this network a year ago and, despite a number of e-mail attempts to connect, i've not actually connected with anyone. It is volunteer-run and that, no doubt, is a huge limiting factor. It also seems to be exclusively academic - "not that there's anything wrong with that" (some old Seinfeld humour for you fans). And there is some excellent theory emerging from this network some published in Popular Education: Engaging the Academy - International Perspectives (eds. Crowther, Jim et al; NIACE) and some found in some excellent podcasts found here (i particularly recommend the two-part interview of Joyce Canaan by Dr. Gurnam Singh).

It's been a dream of the Catalyst Centre to connect some of the many popular education groups around the world - the Freire Centre in Sao Paulo (and some of the many other Freire Institutes/Centres that have been established in the past ten years), Highlander in Tennessee, Popular Education for People's Empowerment in the Philippines, L'Institut d'Education Populaire outside Bamako, Mali, IMDEC in Guadalajara and more. However, finding the resources for such networking has proven, to date, fruitless. The grassroots nature of many of these groups compared to the somewhat better resourced academic networks, is certainly one limiting factor in doing more than e-mail, website linking and (the rather overly-vaunted) social networking. Still, the dream persists.

Spread the word about this conference. Looks like some excellent connections to be made.

The Power of Puppetry

This music video, featuring the most adorable sock puppets i've seen in a while, tells a very sad story. There's one moment in this puppet performance that is an act of genius. And, overall, this work demonstrates what beauty can be created by simple things. Thanks to Dana for sharing.

TALES Found on This Blog

• And a Horse Came Back
• Cup
• Dance
• Escape
• Faith
• Fate of a Bird
• Fill It
• God in Everything
• Good Friends
• Heaven and Hell
• Listening to the Land
• Nature
• One Wish
• Origin of Writing
• Parable about Dissent
• Parable for Organizers
• Riding Bicycles
• Searching
• Simple Gifts
• Stop Eating Sugar
• Strawberry
• That's Planning
• The 36 Just Men
• The Cure
• The Master Archer
• The New Dog
• The Old Man and the Scorpion
• The Old Woman and the Pot
• The Pickpocket
• The Potato
• The Star
• The Stream & the Desert
• The Turtle's Request
• They Peeked
• What Heaven & Hell Look Like
• What Keeps us Apart

A Solstice Wish