The Creative Act

Here is a speech I read at the closing of my grandfather’s casket. I sat between my mother and grandmother and cried along with them as I did.

I am Christopher, Gerry’s youngest son Paul’s eldest. I would like to thank you all for being here with us today to celebrate the life of my grandfather. I spent many nights with my grandparents and I would like to share a few thoughts about him that I have had since his passing. Most of you knew him as a young man, or an active man with his whole life ahead of him but when I was born he was already 57, just five years away from retirement and Florida winters.

My relation to him was as a grandchild, which means I grew over time and came to appreciate him in new ways and for a few years he actually got younger in my eyes. For instance as a child I found it annoying that I had soo many aunts, uncles and cousins that I had a hard time remembering all their names. As an adult I see the size of the family tree and the love found within its branches as his ultimate accomplishment. During the photo shoots grandma orchestrated he seemed like a young man, the father of a gaggle of people rather than an old man. The tree recently grew as my wife and I welcomed our first child into the family. Oliver arrived just in time to meet Gerry. When we all met for a photo shoot featuring 4 generations of men. Gerry, whose time with us was clearly running out, turned to my two month old and very matter of factually said “You’ve got a lot of living to do.” This sort of hope in reaction to life is the story of my grandfather.

I can’t count how many nights I slept on his couch, or ate poached eggs or played cards at his table, or fed the ducks on the Rideau with him, but it was certainly enough times to get to know he had done a lot of living. Maybe it is because he was so much taller than me but I always looked up to him. On one of our many walks together we stumbled upon a sidewalk being built, being a child I was fascinated by the machines involved and the hole that could easily have swallowed me up. Grandpa dutifully explained everything I was seeing and explained how a sidewalk would be the result. He really knew the details and I was very impressed, even as an 8 year old I knew this was weird knowledge for an economist to have.

But Gerry was full of surprises. Imagine my level of admiration when I learned that he had built his own house in the evenings and weekends after work when I could barely construct a snow fort that wouldn’t cave in. As if I was not impressed enough I later discovered the old photo of him in a military uniform and learned that he had been in airplanes during World War Two. Airplanes! Imagine! I am sure you can see how my 8-year-old eyes would have shone with pride as he explained he could tell me where we were based on the stars while I could not read a map.

I will remember a man who danced with my grandmother every chance he got, who could swing a club as well as any grandpa I ever heard of (I’ve seen the old hole in on trophy that proves his talent), had a den, and was king of the mixed tape. He was a man who when he learned he had Alzheimer’s wrote the most beautiful letter I’ve ever heard of and never tired of the Lawrence Welk show.

I was but a small part of the living he did, but he was and remains a large part of the living I have done. He was a man with the inside scoop on how to live the good life I hope today can be a celebration of that and also a reminder that we all have a lot of living to do.

The Orange Trees of Baghdad. In Search of My Lost Family. Leilah Nadir

This is the story of a woman whose father left Iraq at the age of 16 and never managed to return because wars and Saddam Hussein made a return unsafe. Leilah always wanted to visit her homeland, and possibly move there with her family. This book is her story about the recent wars and sanctions and their effects on her family. I thought this book would be angry and galvanizing; I thought it would be a poetic memoir that was extremely critical of the American occupation or Iraq; I thought wrong.

Her impressions are more balanced than I expected. As a person that has always lived in the West (spending time in Vancouver, Montreal and the U.K.) she has a pretty clear idea of what life is like here. The upshot is that while critical of the occupation (not being sure what the purpose of it is nor what good it will lead to and angry at the waste involved in both lives and cultural works) she has never been willing to even visit Iraq let alone move there despite having many heartfelt reasons to do so.  She wants the country to go through massive changes to become livable and so it is hard for her to be completely against the war. She wants a peaceful Iraq so that she can live there but she concedes it was not peaceful prior to the occupation. She does not think war is the answer but she does not forward a better option for changing the country.

The writing in the book is only mediocre and the story is dramatic but the tragic elements are not well harnessed by Nadir. She does pick up speed and power near the end of the book. Her discussion of Farah Nosh’s photographs of injured Iraqis is powerful. It made me want to see the photos, perhaps try to get a showing of them here in Montreal. The writing is elegant when some of her women relatives from Baghdad manage to make it to London and there is a gathering in the kitchen. The women  talk about their life experiences and the Iraqis women’s impressions of the West while the recipe of what they are cooking is slowly revealed. Passages like this one make me want to read a later book by her, she seems to have learned a lot about writing over the course of this book.

This is a book worth reading if you are interested in the history of the Middle-East or the impact of modern warfare on the “little people” or “everyman/woman.” This is not a book for readers that see the world in black and white and refuse to accept the gray sides of our complicated world. If you are someone that was compelled by Sergio de Mello’s attempts at diplomacy with genocidal rulers then you will like this book. If it was about Afghanistan and the impacts of war on its people I would suggest all Canadians read it, as it stands I suspect there is a lot of crossover between the two topics.

Anne Michaels. Winter Vault.

This is the best book I have read in a long time. The author of the best-selling Fugitive Pieces took her sweet time (more than 10years) in writing her next novel. It shows. This is a polished book where every single sentence feels like it has been crafted with extreme care and patience. I ran out of ink underlining passages I wanted to remember. Michaels has the ability to put ideas so clearly and emotions so precisely that that I was engrossed into the admittedly slow moving book. This is not a narrative driven page turner but rather a book to mull in a book that you can take your time with, a reader’s book.

The Winter Vault the reader learns is where dead bodies are places during the winter, when the ground is too frozen to accept them. Elsewhere Michaels refers to the part of the skull containing the brain as a vault. A place of limbo. The ground like our experiences are impenetrable to each other, at least some of the time. Our ability to express, describe and vocalize our experiences so that they are as original to others as they are to ourselves is questioned in the book with much success. I will not tell you what Michaels believes is our potential for such transfers because you should really read the book for yourself, suffice it to say: she weaves a magnificent tale trying to understand exactly this.

The story itself is a more compelling one than it has been given credit for in other reviews. With characters falling in and out of love, children being born and elders dying, it travels from the goals of ancient Egyptians and their pyramid building to us and our cemeteries and gardens. The number of facets of western culture and history that Michaels touches upon is very impressive, more impressive is the interweaving of them. From Gilles Villeneuve to Facebook (not directly mentioned but I think alluded to) it is all there. I could have spent hours just trying to make a list of all the cultural reference points that popped up organically in the work but that would have been a waste of time, better to just sit back and enjoy.

I have been listening to a lot of Bach lately. I have been really excited by the Cello Suites and the Goldberg Variations. I am new to the world of Classical music, I spent my youth jumping up and down to everything from Nirvana, Green Day, I mother earth to Wu Tang and John Lee Hooker. Enter a new part of my life.

As a father-to-be I have spent a lot of time thinking about things that I cannot do that I wish I could. The main two that pop into my mind are 1: when looking at a painting know what I am looking at and where it fits in. 2: when hearing music being able to recognize at least who the composer is, if not the actual piece.

The painting thing I will have to deal with later when I have money and time to go and see more of the works in person. The music one feels more pressing because music is all around us all the time and for me a more fulfilling aspect of artistic life (I love to write poetry and essays with blaring classical music in the background). It seems time to learn about the music behind the writing. For that reason, and the fact that I stumbled upon the two previously mentioned pieces, I have been immersing myself into the world of Bach, the so-called father of music.

I read two books that were very very fast reads. I literally could not put them down. Evening at the Palace of Reason by Gaines and The Cello Suites by Siblin were both easy to understand books that lived up to my excitement. They are books that help you to maintain the excitement and interest that made you pick them up in the first place. They make you want to listen to the music, go to the concerts, enter the chat rooms, learn to play Cello etc. I strongly recommend both of them.

The thing about books on artistic subjects is that they almost always contain a contagious energy and regard for the subject. A book about Kerouac will be fast paced and exciting, the writing will be strong and enjoyable. The same can be said about books by music aficionados, they are passionate about their topics and their passion rubs off.

Both these books sort of reminded me of Simon Winchester’s books on the Oxford English Dictionary. History that is incredible readable and interesting. They are a great entry level read for people that want to expand their horizons. You need to know little about music or history to enjoy these, and if you are interested in either then they may fill in some gaps and be some of the better written works (from an aesthetic perspective) you delve into.

Have you read these books? Are you a Bach enthusiast? Then leave a note behind, tell me what you think.

In the heat of the sun I was pacing around, searching for something to dullen the sound of the one who had kept me the one who I am and who I’ll always call on when patience runs thin in the dark, dwindling hours of the grass where I stand with an outlook of karma to fall on the land; and though I am the keeper of that which I hide, there’s little to come of these words that I write.

The divisions and pressence of spirt and flesh are at ease in the comfort of my shallowness as espoused by the way that I hollowly stare through the faces around me surrounded by fair and wholehearted dimples to warm one’s cold stone of a heart in the body of one who has died, so often, so often upon this long ride; and the key to the way that he’s come to survive is his willing acceptance of all of the lies bestowed upon him when he longed to undo the injustice around him, escaped by so few of the strong and resilient who still soldier on in pursuit of the gods whom they call their own.

And the challenge of finding the way to return to the truths, now forgotten, by one who has earned so little of that which he’s stumbled upon, is the premise that he has become so far gone that the altar upon which he longed to be placed has risen above the constraints of his taste; and the timing of running from where he once lay is but only a function of his will to say that the things that he said were not born out of harm, but of pain he was feeling within his slim arm; and the virtues of seeing the fog in the air are the answers inside his dispasionate stare.

Rebecca Solnit. A paradise Built in Hell.

This is a compelling book about the ways communities react to natural disasters. Solnit got the idea for the book while interviewing survivors of the  hurricane that hit Halifax in 2005. Many got a particular look in their eyes in discussing the events. Their was a fondness in the memories of what transpired in the wake of the disaster. Solnit decided to study this fondness, because she herself had experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake and her memories were similar.

Personally I remember the Ice Storm of 98, and the blackout of 2003. I look back on them as having been exciting times, and good ones as well (bbqs, cards with grandparents, quie and stillness) . This book compares the accounts of people in such situations with media reports and finds the media to be serving us very poorly. It also studies the effects of government on the situations and tends to find them negative. This is a book that reminds us of the power of spirit and community, even if it lays dormant most of the time. (An ad-hoc soup kitchen in in the wake of the 1904 S.F. Quake had a sign proclaiming “Eat, Drink, And be Merry because tomorrow they might make us move to Oakland,” and with that we know the meaning of perseverance.

While the argument may at times become a little too straight forward and simple, a little too anti-government for my tastes, it is compelling in its admiration of the human soul. It counters tales of mass raping and pilaging with stories of people giving away food, shelter and services, like the plumbers of San Fran that offered their service free around the clock for two weeks trying to fix the city’s broken piping system. It leaves you wondering how generous you would be in such a moment, and knowing how good you would like to be.

This book would make an excellent christmas gift for many readers, especially because you can read it before wrapping.

The Fix is in.
I’ve not a chance.
I’ll rot away before I dance.
The Sphinx, she’s there
Upon the hill,
On top of which resides my Will.

I’ll make my way
Much further on,
Until I fail
To greet the gun.

And then I’ll know
That what I said
Was what I’d meant
When all was Bent.

And Bent I am,
Though straight she goes—
Depart from me,
Thy troubled woes.

And speaking now, inside myself
I’ve stifled what had held my wealth
Within the tongs
Upon the hearth,
Where Burning was
My frail Earth.

Adalbert Stifter. Rock Crystal. NYRB

This is a 76 page book that reflects upon events familiar to just about everyone. Two children set out on Christmas eve from their grandparents to their home. The path is over a small mountain, one they have traversed many times. The boy is young, the girl younger (perhaps 4 or 5).

A very short while after they leave it starts to snow.

Local communities form several valleys set up search parties when they realize what has happened. The children hideout in a cave for the night and see something akin to the northern lights, which they associate with the Christ child they had expected to arrive that night in their village. This is a tear jerking story for those who have been lost or lost someone.  It is about a community coming together, being defined by a moment that will go down in their village history an change the way they see the mountains around them.

I highly suggest you read this book, assuming you have encountered either, estrangement from a community or loss in your life. You want regret it.

July 2009 – Stanley Park

Fuji Finepix

July 2009 – Stanley Park

Fuji Finepix