Saturday 29 August 2020

RANT: AS I WENT 'A WALKING DOWN BY THE LAKE

 

THE OTHER DAY I WENT WALKING along the lakeshore. I hadn’t been down there in a while and I decided to take the new pathways and boardwalk they had put up earlier this year. There were boats and people about, sunbathers and swimmers, newly sod grass along the cement and tiled walkways with a couple of new footbridges arcing over creeks that flowed into the lake. It was quiet, orderly, with families and strollers, bicyclists and so on. The sun was out and the air was fresh. It was around four in the afternoon, and during that three kilometer walk, I saw three people being attended to by paramedics or police; three separate events, at three different places, during the course of a half-hour walk! I’d never seen that before. And these weren’t seniors having heart attacks or accident victims or whatever; these were young people collapsed by the path due to what looked like drugs or alcohol. Down, depressed, dirty and desperate, they’re like exhibits at a poorly-run zoo.  Of course I walk by thinking, like most everyone does, ‘Thank God that’s not me!’

"It's downhill from now on, baby!"
But where will they go? What opportunities, hopes, dreams, and visions for a future will they have? Good question. And I guess my point in mentioning all this is because this is just the beginning.

I was listening to a podcast, The KunstlerCast, on my headphones that day, and JHK (James Howard Kunstler) was interviewing the American economist Jack Rasmus. Toward the end of the interview, the economist discussed the trend toward financialization of economies in recent times (particularly the United States), and how wealth was being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people; how more and more jobs are slated to be eliminated because it is more profitable, and because new technologies will make certain job categories redundant:  

 

JR: “…I think that’s why a lot of millennials are out in the street and really pissed-off, because they're indentured; they're trapped. But what’s coming is even worse; AI is going to eliminate even a lot of those contingent, low-paid jobs, simple decision-making jobs.”

JHK: “Who then will be the customers for the businesses that do this?”

JR: “Well, the customers are everybody else, except those people who are going to lose their jobs.”

JHK: “Well, that’s mostly or a large segment of everybody else.”

JR: “Yeah, at least half [of the workforce].”

JHK: “It doesn’t look like a good picture.”

JR: “No, it looks like we’re going to have more and more inequality. Those workers who are connected into this new development, this new technology are going to do okay….”

JHK: “But that doesn’t bode well for social order…”

JR: “No. No it doesn’t. They’re [government] going to have to come up with some way of giving half of the populace, particularly the young, you know the GenZrs and young Millennials, some hope…”

I don’t know if I agree that AI is going to be as widespread or viable as Rasmus predicts, but I do agree that young people need to see a light at the end of the tunnel, or quite frankly, they’ll start dynamiting the hell out of it! And who could blame them?

 

          Cheers, Jake

 


 

 

Thursday 27 August 2020

RANT: THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

I'M FEEDING A STRAY THESE DAYS, a small, really sweet-tempered cat with gorgeous, glossy black fur. She (the young girl next door has named her “Princess”, but I can’t quite bring myself to use that moniker so, privately, I call her “Maya”. (It’s a nice name, I think.) She goes between the two houses (and my neighbours downstairs) so “Princess”/”Maya”/”Blackie” (downstairs calls her “Blackie”) probably gets a good feed, though she’s still slim and agile as a cat! Sometimes she comes over when I’m on my porch, has a snack and a cat nap on the sunny windowsill in my living room, and then leaves—a real outdoors-type that one!  Anyway, I hope my Christian Charity bona fides are secure after my outlay of cat food….

Maya After Finding the Catnip Toy

So, kindness to a kitty; kindness to a stranger, kindness to the ones you love. And especially to the ones you don’t. Maybe this strange time of Covid will help us learn to be kinder to each other because, when we emerge from our bunkers and toss away our masks, there will be a need for a whole lot of that virtue in the coming years.

I’ve mentioned this before, but a better time to be alive might have been just after the last ice age, a time when the great glaciers were retreating, and it was warming up ever so nicely. I’ve read a bit about that era in our prehistory—before agriculture and cities, before almost everything—when our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopted new ways of living as the world changed around them. Our world is changing, too. Perhaps not as dramatically as an ice age, but climate change may bring with it far warmer temperatures than we’ve been used to for the last several millennia. We all know this, of course. Are we prepared? Will we prepare? And what can we learn from our ancient ancestors who were confronted with such an upturning of the world?

I’ll again recommend Christopher Ryan’s excellent Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, for his helpful examination of the lifestyles of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, as well as his speculations on their social, psychological and spiritual makeup. We can say with confidence they were people in touch with the land because they had to be in order to survive. Today, we think we’ve left the land and its concern’s behind with our science and technology and complex social orderings, but we haven’t, really—we’ve dug ourselves a really big hole and only now we realize we’re at the bottom of it.

Jim Kunstler, in his new book Living in the Long Emergency quotes entrepreneur Elon Musk as he speculates on the future: “The future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space-faring civilization and a multi-planetary species than if we’re not.” (Emergency, 21)

Dryly, Kunstler rebuts:


 “Well, I’m not so sure. Unless, that is, we’re tired of the possibilities for joy, meaning, and excitement on a planet (this one: Earth) that we are superbly fitted to thrive on—and which, sadly, were in the process of damaging quite recklessly with our current activities, including shooting a lot of junk* into orbit around it.” (21)

How we engage with others, what are expectations are, what we expect from them and, in turn, what they can expect from us, will all be critical factors in how stable and how civil our societies will be, going forward. As Ryan and JHK and others have pointed out civility, decorum, social norms and etiquette, ways of communicating, ‘rules of engagement’ will all be part of the package when it comes to how we act with others in a public arena, and how successful and acceptable those actions will be. For today, I’ll leave a bowl of milk out, and start with being kind to a little critter that understands kindness far better than I ever have.

 

Cheers, Jake.  

 

(I’m still reading JHK’s new book, and hope to have a book report ready soon.)

 

 

 

 * The brash billionaire had in 2018 launched into space a rocket-ship with a mannequin seated in roadster convertible; it was a publicity stunt to garner attention for his new SpaceX company, or “junk” as JHK rightly points out. (Musk is also making ‘plans’ to colonize Mars. Well, aren’t we all?)

 

 

Wednesday 26 August 2020

POEM: HOW TO AVOID FACE-PLANTING: A POETIC AID

 

 

Three Small Lies in Spring                               

In the park, a father leads his daughter

into a garden. Her name is Alice.

By the path, a shy man plays an accordion

under a tree.

In a arbour, a girl laughs as she tap dances

for her grandparents.

Later, a coyote pads across

the old golf-course lane

like a hole-in-one.

 

Lenses

At the edge of a frame, a flash

from some antique event is captured

on a photographic plate:

A blur, a passing,  a ghostly presence.

Then with chemical alchemy

photons are transformed

into light and dark,

and ghosts walk past a wedding tent.

They appear to be waving.

 

Later, light through the iris

of an unhuman lens

reveals a blur on the surface

of another plate:

A  starry  pyre

passing through the galaxy long ago,

made from another alchemy

when light and matter

became one in an instant.

It, too, appears to be waving.

 

Red Sky

I know this feeling,

I know it well.

I feel it often

this side of hell.

 

I know this feeling.

It’s there when  I lie.

It’s at the beginning

and under red sky.

 

I know what I’m feeling,

so never you mind!

It’s the kind of feeling

no one should find.

 

I know when it started

and where it will end.

It’s somewhere between

a foe and a friend

 

I know this thing,

awake or asleep.

It’s mine alone—

and mine to keep!

 

I’ll tell you clearly,

once and for all,

between a rock and a hard place,

you surely will fall,

if, when judging what’s best,

feeling born or bred,

the first you ignore

while the other you dread.

 

Lament

In these former lands,

strange farmers till the soil.

With sharp sticks they scratch earth

too ancient to recall.

In the orchards and gardens

harsh fruit falls untaken from the trees,

and seeds ripen mostly wayward grasses.

In the marketplace, traders curse and spit

as they bargain dirt for coin.

Their teeth grind like pestles.

 

O me woes th’ day! O me woes th’ night!

O me woes, my dally dame sal!

O me woes, me woes!

 

This is a sunset land,

dry and forgiven now by time’s passing,

and changed beyond recognizing.

Weariness hangs in the air

like desperate crows,

and I fear there is but one season left

to conjure in.

In this nameless land,

sorrow roosts on scoured limbs.

It lines the faces of red-cheeked lovers:

Young men dowse dusty vaults

searching for yesterday’s treasures.

Young women, their once bright eyes

now red-rimmed and clouded,

look to distant skies for memories

unremembered.

 

Wet were the hillsides. Wet was the land.

Wet was the graveyard

where the weeping willow stands.

 

I remember how it began—well enough,

and on fair plains. Wise children grew

like sweet grass between the dogwood.

Their laughter camped along river banks,

and fires burned without sacrifice.

All was as it could be—was all it could be.

Until that terrible day when the gates opened

and I was forced to ride.

After me came the winds and time.

They blew over the newly-trod paths

choking the air with footprints

that stamped a different seal upon the land.

And so, in this graveyard land,

with kings and queens long gone or passing,

priests busy themselves in dusty fields,

and all the signposts have been torn away.

 

Wet were the hillsides. Wet was the land.

Wet was the graveyard

where the weeping willow stands.

 

Jeopardy

Drinking blood

with a Latin tag,

this antique creature

is decidedly modern.

 

 

 

For me, poems are like guideposts or markers of thoughts, feelings, sensations or unexpected discoveries I run across in my comings and goings. I note them as I’m experiencing them, then generally face-plant trying to find words to express them so that the reader might have a similar reaction. These words, that are mere marks on paper—signifiers, communications, placements, recordings of life-events, are often vague and the devil to pin down; they are like dreams fading from your conscious mind as you wake.

I re-read poems I’ve written years ago, and at least with some of them, I still take pleasure in their composition and imbedded questions and (maybe?) answers. They’re kind of like cogs in a machine I’m building; they have a place in my life is what I’m trying to say, and I hope some of them will have a place in the life of anyone reading them as they go about building their own machines.


THREE SMALL—I was out for a walk in my favourite park one day and happened on these three (or four?) events. With a bit of literary embellishment I’m asking how we determine the true facts of things. Is there a “complete” truth—to anything? Currently, I’m reading an Agatha Christie* and the storyline concerns a retired couple, recently moved to a small town on the coast. It’s idyllic and cozy for their autumn years, and they set about to fix it up. By happenstance they run across a cryptic message in an old book stored in the attic. Gradually they begin to unearth the truth around a decades-old mystery. Through archives and found letters, documents and photographs, as well as conducting several interviews, they slowly dig down to the truth surrounding a young woman’s disappearance in the years leading up to World War One. Who was she? There’s some evidence she was a spy working for England. If so, what was her role? When and how did she die? And where is she buried? And why is a decades-old mystery ringing alarm bells in the present? An old man who knew something of the matter, and who did some gardening for our inquisitive couple is found murdered in their backyard! Why was he killed? Was his death related to their search? Who killed Old Isaac? Have Tommy and Tuppance got more than they bargained for when they moved into The Laurels, their new home in the not-so-peaceful English countryside?

In the end, all is well in the village of Hollowquay. Through Tommy’s contacts in the intelligence service, the goings-on at The Laurels are revealed and the murderer captured. It seems the village was once a centre for proto-fascist activities of the “Mussolini-type” before WWI, and British authorities long had it and its residents under surveillance. In the end, we don’t learn the truth surrounding the long-ago death of “Mary Jordan”, nor do we learn much about the current threat posed from Hollowquay, which housed a decades-old fascist cadre, composed “particularly [of] young people”, that was given to violent activity. (Christie was concerned with the rising social unrest of the 60s and 70s in her later years. See my review of Passenger to Frankfurt.) The authorities move in, and in a very circumspect and polite manner (so English!) eliminated the threat to Tuppance and her husband. By the end we learn—or don’t learn is more like it—what the head of the counter-espionage force tells the couple: that there are some secrets they will never know. It seems we, like Tuppance and Tommy, are supposed to trust those in charge that everything is under control and being taken care of. And the couple, far from being disturbed by the secret activity of both the new generation of fascists and of their own government's extensive spy network, are instead relieved. Let others deal with such knowledge, they say, and let us get back to tending our garden.

Secrets, and secrets within secrets. You’d think in a secure and open society, groups like the one found in Hollowquay would be exposed and their philosophy vigorously rebutted in the court of public opinion, not kept hidden in the files of “Special Branch” to be “dealt with” from time to time. Even Christie doesn’t give us the whole truth in the end.

My digression through Christie (and this was the final book she wrote, incidentally) suggests to me that “truth” isn’t simple or straightforward, black or white. It requires digging and soul-searching, and it may not always please us, or benefit us, when it is revealed.

And while not everything may come up into the light of day, we all know where we may need to dig someday. 

 

LENSES—I was watching a show on TV about a family of nineteenth century photographers and it was kind of fun. They took pictures of dead people—“post-mortem photography”—that strange (by our standards), Victorian custom in which the recently departed were photographed, posed and dressed as if they were still alive. (Presumably those who’d had a peaceful passing, and not mangled or disfigured in some giant, steam-belching infernal contraption of the Industrial Age.) They took singles, as well as group portraits and the dead relative, poor Uncle Fairfax or whoever, is propped up, stiff as a board and rapidly cooling, surrounded by his family and friends.

At one point one of the photographers starts a discussion on how they could capture pictures of souls or spirits of the recently dead, and was this not something that practitioners of the new art of photography might achieve? We’ve all seen old photographs with those ghostly figures that are inexplicably found on the developed print with no rational explanation for their appearance.

Maybe the new technology of photography, back then, working as it did to capture moments of Time and freeze them, somehow acted as a bridge or doorway to another dimension? They say there are other dimensions all around us. Who’s to say that nineteenth century photography, then a new, almost magical technology, didn’t somehow brush against a barrier between our dimension and another, and that sometimes, something would come across.

The magical, almost mystical discipline of photography, with its not-yet fully explored range of possibilities, lasted until our modern times (when even a Polaroid Instamatic gave us that moment of anticipation and drama while the film we held in our hands slowly developed an image). Today, everyone and their dead Uncle Fairfax captures Time with their “smart” phone cameras, catching one moment after another, on and on at an insane pace. If you pull an elastic-band too far, it either snaps, or snaps back. Perhaps Time does not like being captured so much and is starting to fight back—who knows? Could it be there is a reckoning ‘a comin' from the Space-Time Continuum?

So, in the poem there are two sets of lenses and eyes, and two brains (presumably), and great swaths of Time and Space between them. Maybe they are connected by more than the processes their machines allow them to see?

RED SKY—is pretty bleak and angry. The speaker seems ready to pounce on the reader and assumes the worst in them. But it’s a truism that hectoring and preaching are not the best ways to bring anyone around to your way of thinking. Of course the speaker may be venting all this bile because they are angry at themselves. There is the sense that the speaker is burdened by the choice they made—perhaps not the specific choice but rather how they arrived at it. They also say ignoring one and dreading the other has consequences. Why?

LAMENT—is a fun romp through a land that is currently under a red sun, but the sun is also an angry one. It’s a time of endurance and pain. What comes after is unclear. What’s come before is soon lost in the blowing sands.

JEOPARDY—for Jeopardy fans: No matter how we label things, no matter how far back those labels go, there will always be demons among our angels.

Cheers, Jake.


 

 

* Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1973. [Title taken from a poem “Gates of Damascus”, by James Elroy Flecker.]