Those Damn Binaries

 Hot/Cold. Good/Bad. Light/Dark. Masculine/Feminine. Yin/Yang. Everywhere. Everything. All the time.

We persist in binary thinking, even when it doesn't serve us very well. Sometimes we might do well to think outside or away from binaries. People, especially - are they all one way or the other, always, completely?

Artists steer us towards other ways of thinking about many things and binaries are no different.

In her poem "The Swimmer's Moment," Margaret Avison writes of people who refuse binary thinking, those who refuse to even name the whirlpool, the moment of decision. To be sure, the refusal does not result in happiness - an allusion to Dante's Paulo and Francesca endlessly going round and round in Dante's second circle of the Inferno -  but the introduction of a third term instead of only choice between binary opposites shows that there are ways of thinking outside the norm.

The Swimmer's Moment

 For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

'This is the whirlpool, then.'

By their refusal they are saved

From the black pit, and also from contesting

The deadly rapids, and emerging in
The mysterious, and more ample, further waters.
And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn
Pale and forever on the rim of suction
They will not recognize.
Of those who dare the knowledge
Many are whirled into the ominous centre
That, gaping vertical, seals up
For them an eternal boon of privacy,
So that we turn away from their defeat
With a despair, not for their deaths, but for
Ourselves, who cannot penetrate their secret
Nor even guess at the anonymous breadth
Where one or two have won:
(The silver reaches of the estuary).
--
Margaret Avison



W.B. Yeats in "The Second Coming" also demonstrates a position outside binaries. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer" (2). It is not the case that the falcon either obeys or disobeys the falconer's commands; it cannot hear the commands - thus Yeats introduces a third term.

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I am not argiung that bad is good and good is bad - that's just more of the same kind of thinking. Most things are nuanced, gray, and have complexity that we refuse when we think in binaries. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it well: "...the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?"

Or put another more humourous way in an old joke: At a hotdog stand in NYC, the vendor asks the Dalai Lama what he wants on his hotdog and the Dalai Lama answers that he'll have "One with Everything."

Binaries and being "One with Everything" don't go well together.

Metta.


(The title is an excerpt from an interview with Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch.)

Hot Kool Klezmer

Klezmer music is unique and wonderful. It makes me want to sing, laugh, dance and cry, often all at the same time. I love klezmer!

The liner notes of my favourite klezmer CD (The Rough Guide to Klezmer) liken the music to the paintings of Marc Chagall, himself a product of the Eastern European shtetls.

It is music that is often deeply soulful, often wildly exuberant and sometimes, like Chagall's pictures, slightly surreal.

This music for celebration originates in Eastern Europe, the tradition of the Ashkenazic Jews and was transplanted to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Initially, the violin was the main instrument of klezmer, although the origins are not well known. In America, the clarinet partially usurped the position of the violin, possibly because it's soulful notes were better for recording. Still, both instruments symbolize klezmer music.

Some well-known klezmer musicians include The Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Klezmokum, and The Flying Bulgars. There are many more keeping the tradition alive and re-inventing/re-translating it.

Fiddler on the Roof, 1964-Broadway musical and 1971 movie, is a reasonable, if romanticized, depiction of the traditions and lives of Ashkenazic Jews in Russia. It was named after another of Chagall's paintings, The Fiddler.

Whatever its history and origins, whatever the main instrument, whomever the band playing, I love klezmer. It has life and heart.

The video features Itzhak Perlman playing klezmer with several well-known bands.

Literary Cafes, Pubs, and Taverns

While attending the University of London, a friend sublet a flat in Fitzrovia, right across from the Fitzroy Tavern, and, during a trans-Atlantic phone call, held the phone out the window for me to hear the Fitzroy's patrons at their leisure.

It was a moment feebly akin to celebrity-spotting at famous clubs and eateries - a moment probably appreciated most by those with a literary bent.

Fitzrovia is a small area in London bounded by Tottenham Court Rd., Oxford St., Euston Rd., and Great Poerland St. - and Bloomsbury and Soho.

Fitzrovia, Fitzroy St., Fitzroy Rd. (in nearby Regent's Park), Fitzroy Square housed, entertained, and nourished (gastronomically and intellectually) many literary elite, especially, but not only, in the years immediately following WWI - the height of English Modernism.

In no particular order - Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas (pictured at left), Wyndham Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Anthony Burgess, Arthur Rimbaud, and Patrick Kavanagh. The area was also a favourite of Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and, later, Sylvia Plath and Pink Floyd.

Fitzrovia represents for me a time when writers gathered frequently in pubs, restaurants, and cafes to discuss their work, but also to discuss writing, poetry, literaure, art, meaning, philosophy, the writer's life - a whole literary way of being in the world.

I feel a nostalgia for this time before my existence! To be sure, there are still poetry readings and writers meeting in public establishments, as well as a million or more internet sites with poetry, book reviews and literary forums.

But, love it or hate it, the Modernist period in England had a special flavour that we just don't or can no longer do. And Fitzrovia was right in the thick of it all.

Dancing with (and on) Trees

Along with hockey and maple syrup, the culture of forestry, in all its aspects, is classic Canada. We dance with trees, cut trees, hug trees in Canada. If there's a tree, we can do something with it. One of our visitors from England, overwhelmed by the vast number of trees, kept repeating throughout his entire time here - "All those trees!" His comment pretty much sums it up.

The first video is a National Film Board of Canada short, an animation with folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle singing Wade Hemsworth's wonderful song "The Log Driver's Waltz." Sadly, Kate (Rufus Wainwright's mother) McGarrigle passed away this year, but the McGarrigle sisters' music will live on, itself classic Canada.




The second video - "The Tree Planter's Waltz" -  is produced by Baba Brinkman and captures another part of the woods culture precisely - especially where I live. I can't remember how I came across Brinkman, except that he wrote the rap Canterbury Tales, which I have and which students find appealing after struggling with Chaucer in the original.

It's well worth watching the whole video. It includes some awesome rap, spectacular scenery, a real tree planter's site, and probably the only mohawk mullet you'll ever see, as the video edits together clips from the late seventies with the main 2009 tree planters doing their waltz.


The Tree Planter's Waltz from http://vimeo.com/user2337309 on Vimeo.


Believe me, this tune will stick in your brain for awhile. Enjoy!

Twinkies and the Stanley Cup

On April 16, 1961, I was having a sleepover at my house with one of my friends. No, I don't have such a good memory that I actually remember the date. But that was the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs between the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks. The Hawks won.

I know this because for some reason, amidst the Twinkies and chocolate bars of the usual sleepover, my friend and I stumbled onto the radio broadcast of the final game and somehow got hooked on it. My friend rooted for Detroit and I for Chicago. We cheered; we screamed; we plunged to disappointed depths when one of "our" teams was behind. There probably were no more passionate hockey fans than us on that one night.

Oddly, neither of us previously had any great interest in hockey or in those particular teams. It is quite likely that neither of us even knew until that moment just who was in that playoff season at all.

But like most Canadian kids of a certain age, I had a pretty good acquaintance with NHL hockey. In those days, the CBC was the only television channel in Canada. And every Saturday night we watched the CBC's Hockey Night in Canada, literally the only game in town - at least in TV land. It wasn't really that much of a stretch for two young girls to fall in love with a hockey game.

Now, it's that time again - NHL playoffs - with a much greater number of teams and a much longer season (imagine having the final game of the playoffs on April 16!).

I am rooting for my favourite team of many years - the Vancouver Canucks - but have to admit that I will probably not engage with the same fervour that two little girls experienced all those years ago. It was one of those moments with a life of its own. Maybe some Twinkies and chocolate bars would help!

Boutique Simplicity

During the mid-nineties, in another milder recession, a colleague asked me if I would be downsizing - the term for an earlier version of what we call "simplicity" these days. I had been struggling to make a career change to academia, with only part-time and contract work for a few years - after the years of having even less as a student.

I was poor, not making enough to save anything to support myself through the summers with no work (and being overqualified for anyone to hire me for anything else).

I responded to the question, saying that I would have to "upsize" first in order to fully embrace the experience of downsizing. I wouldn't be enjoying the simplicity of giving up a European vacation, driving instead to a rented cabin on a lake for a week. I had no car and was worried about paying the rent on my tiny apartment for the summer.

Only the privileged and comfortable people can ask such questions. When people are truly "downsized," they have not much to give up.

Charlotte Allen writes about simplicity in an article in In Character - "Not Really Simple" - in which she is funny, frustrated and satirical about the designer simplicity movement and some of the nonsense that occurs.

Hunting wild boar in the hills above San Francisco in order to have a primal connection with one's food is one such bit of nonsense; any other type of hunting would make the simplicity set shudder:

Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns (hated by the professionally simple) and exploitation of animals (ditto). However, if you're hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a "locally grown" boar paté, as does Berkeley professor and simplicity movement guru Michael (The Omnivore's Dilemma) Pollan, or perhaps to experience an "epiphany," as another well-fixed Bay Area boar hunter recently told the New York Times, you're doing a fine job of returning to the simple life...But if you're a laid-off lumber mill worker bagging possums in Eutaw Springs, S.C., because your main primal connection with food is that you don't have much money to spend on it, you're an unsophisticated redneck.

Allen takes potshots at this kind of simplicity that calls for not a little wealth in its afficionados.

One anecdote is particularly telling. Walmart has recently introduced a line of organic produce which has drawn the ire of some shoppers at small markets. They worry that by making organic produce more readily available to those with lower incomes, Walmart may drive their boutique markets out of business - specifically THEIR boutique markets.

I don't know any specs on the Walmart produce - where it comes from or its carbon footprint, etc. - so there may well be room for criticism , but the point of the story highlights for Allen the main problem with what I call boutique simplicity:

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves...For humble people, their own happiness or other personal feelings are secondary.

Simplicity as Allen points out is an aesthetic lifestyle choice for cool rich people. Real simplicity practiced by the truly humble involves everyone on the planet and the planet, too.

What a simple idea - everyone should have enough healthful food to eat. Methinks boar pate is not the answer!

The Recipe Box

I wonder how many people still have and use a recipe box. Especially for those under a certain age, the internet has most likely replaced the trusty box with carefully, or hurriedly, copied cards.

My recipe box is now a bit of a relic that I use more for odd notes to myself than for storing recipes I still make. I no longer even remember where the box itself came from - it's too far in the dim past.

Like most recipe boxes, mine has marked categories - cookies, cakes, sauces, casseroles - but the papers jammed in behind and in front of this section have taken over with a ragtag of clippings and notes.

There are recipes from both my mother and my grandmother - lovingly handwritten - recipes for shortbread,  homemade mayonnaise, Chinese chicken wings and orange cupcakes. There is a recipe for Clever Judy Icing (very tasty) - it would be fun to trace the history of the name.

A random pull brings up a recipe for nasal spray. I remember initially refusing this recipe offered by a friend in favour of purchased nasal spray. The purchased spray turned out to be expensive French seawater; the very cheap homemade version was water and French sea salt. Live and learn!

Amongst the papers and clippings are recipes for rose hip tea, "elegant" cream "cheese" (no dairy), and vegan caramel sauce. Also chickpea nibbles, faux parmesan and something called "bean muck," in my ex's now indecipherable handwriting (name aside, I remember this as being quite tasty!).

My most recent addition to the recipe box is a note indicating that my summer tires are on the left in the shed (my husband's identical ones are on the right). Why we didn't just label the tires, I don't know.

From time to time, I clean out the recipe box, but I just can't throw it out. It's great fun to look through for the many memories, and every once in awhile, I make a great meal from a long-forgotten recipe.