A Searching Sonnet

I found my journal from 2010, and I got a lovely surprise in the form of a number of sonnets that I had written - now almost two years ago - and had completely forgotten. So many questions...

Is wisdom found just in the fear of God?
In learned obedience? In what is heard?
In small moments of grace when we are awed?
In what we read in life: the Living Word?

Can it be found without action or sound,
When life takes a quick second to be still?
When I have shut my eyes to all around,
Is that when I with wisdom will be filled?

Or should I leave the stillness far behind?
To not just be, but now also to do?
To act with love along the paths that wind,
And thus to search and learn all that is true?

But as these questions through my mind do flow
A message comes from God:"I'm here to know."

I am Vertical

This month for book club we wanted to try something new, so we challenged ourselves to each memorize a poem or two to present to the group, along with some prepared discussion of these poems. Although I have a good number of poems memorized that I teach again and again (especially Emily Dickinson), I thought I should rather challenge myself by memorizing a poem that does not have a rhythm/rhyme structure, so I can't just rely on that. Thus, here it is, my poem recitation, by Sylvia Plath:

I am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing that I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them -
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once,
And the flowers have time for me.

Translating Nostalgia

I just finished reading I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago, by Hans Peter Kerkeling, a German comic. When I walked the camino - now two full years ago - I again and again met Germans who were doing the pilgrimage because of this book, so when it was recently translated into English, I had to add it to my Camino Library.

I read many books that are not originally in English: I love Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, and I just finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I am reading these, I seldom think about the fact that they were translated, yet with Kerkeling's book I couldn't think about anything else. If I hadn't felt so incredibly personally connected to his topic I wouldn't have made it past page 10, since the translation is so awful (I felt like I was reading the simple sentences of an elementary student). By the second half of the memoir, though, I was so engrossed in his story - he was so often telling my story - that I was able to mostly ignore his sudden stops and awkward phrases. The story worked in spite of the language, rather than through the language.

Tomorrow marks two years exactly that I walked into Santiago de Compostela, thus finishing my 800-kilometre pilgrimage. It's hard to let that experience go: I feel this strange tension between wanting to hold on to this nostalgia and wanting to move on. I guess in essence, though, the camino is about holding on, letting go, and moving forward all at the same time, so I'm okay for now.

(Next camino-text adventure = going to see Martin Sheen's The Way, which he was filming alongside of us as we walked.)

Shostakovich & Svengali

I have been lucky enough to go to the Concert Hall twice recently: once to see the RWB's new production of Svengali, and then once to hear the WSO do an evening of Shostakovich. I had high expectations for both, and I was not disappointed. (Aside: Sometimes I wonder about this "cultured" side of me. Can I really love the classical world while also thinking the Joss Whedon is the best thing that has ever happened to television?)

Mark Godden's Svengali was a new ballet, and although it was based on Georges du Maurier's novel Trilby, it didn't really follow the story, and wasn't really a story ballet at all. Though some were disappointed by that, I, personally, was thrilled. I don't care if a ballet tells me a story, as long as it takes me on a physical and emotional and visual and musical roller coaster - that's what makes the ballet my favourite thing in the world. I got to see amazingly creative movement set to everything from Rachmaninoff to a Klezmer band, and my eyes and heart followed everything, even when I didn't know what I was supposed to be following.

Although I have loved Shostakovich - both his music and his story - since taking Russian history in university, I was not anticipating the symphony to be as amazing as the ballet. But it was. It was more than amazing; it was like hearing a language I'd never heard before but instantly understanding every word. (That may be a lame simile, but I like lame, just like Joss Whedon.) Although we got to hear his music for Hamlet and his symphony in response to the end of World War II, it was Shostakovich's violin concerto which really enthralled us, since it featured a violin soloist who seemed to know his music instinctively. He didn't follow a score, and instead moved through his music/through his violin as though this was also a dance. Like the ballet, it was mesmerizing.

I have been to many great shows over the last fifteen years, including everyone from Arcade Fire to Arlo Guthrie to Alanis Morrisette and Justin Timberlake, but nothing compares to what I get to experience when I go to the Concert Hall.

Franny and Zooey and Seymour and Jesus

I have just finished reading Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger, for the umpteenth time. Lukas led me to this book about 10 years ago, and although I no longer feel as connected to Franny as I felt in my early 20s, she is still one of the most relatable and empathetic characters I have ever read. I feel her.

Somehow, every time I come back to this book I have forgotten how heavily Jesus-themed it is. I remember Franny's feelings of disillusion and confusion with the world, yet somehow Zooey's beautiful Jesus rant comes as a surprise every time - a wonderful, joyful, Jesus-surprise. So, I thought that I should more permanently take this rant into myself, the way I have consumed Franny, and thus I am sharing it with you. As Zooey Glass says,
       "My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls - but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that - but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.... Oh, my God, what a mind!"

Thanks for that, Zooey. And thank-you, Franny, for introducing the Russian pilgrim's prayer book to me - I just ordered it off Amazon, and am looking forward to my upcoming existential crisis.

Nuit Blanche @ the WAG

The first nuit blanche I ever went to was in Paris - i.e. the real nuit blanche. Julia and I were spending a few days there together before we took the train down to Spain for the camino, and our time happened to overlap with Paris' all-night party. We took this as an opportunity to visit the Orangerie Gallerie (for free, of course), which houses 4 of Monet's wall-sized waterlilies. Because we were starting to save up on sleep for the camino we didn't stay out all night, but did enjoy walking the Champs de l'Elysee with so many other Parisians way past our bed time. There was such an ado about the whole night, and I felt so alive.

Yesterday I participated in Winnipeg's version of nuit blanche for the first time. Julia and I went to the WAG quite early, so we got in without having to line up. We spent a good while in the galleries, enjoying the lone Chagall, the 2 Emily Carrs, and all the William Kureleks, before it started filling up so much that we could hardly see the art. By the time it was dark outside, our twosome had grown to a dozen hippie/hipster/art-lover/west-enders just hanging out together at the WAG. The art bled into the music, which bled into the movies, which bled into the dance - all taking place in this strange, triangular building.

As I walked home from the gallery, through Osborne, and then down Corydon - and past many, many people on their way to partake in their own nuit blanche activities - I realized how much an experience like this makes me love everything. I love my friends. I love art. I love finding joy in expected and unexpected places. I love the city of Winnipeg.

John K. Samson: I think you need to rewrite your song. The colours of this city are painting over the shades of gray.

A Musical Memoir

Right now I'm having my grade 12 students each write a memoir, taking an important memory/event from their lives and telling me about themselves through that memory. For exemplars, I wrote one about my tattoos and one about Jack Layton's funeral, to tell them about myself and to show two very different ways of writing memoir.  Tomorrow, though, I'm going to challenge them to go a bit further, and to tell me about themselves through three songs, so I thought I'd better first challenge myself with the same assignment.

To say who I am through three songs is no easy task. I know what my three favourite songs are right now quite easily: Prison Girls, by Neko Case; Rococo, by Arcade Fire; and Dog Days are Over, by Florence and the Machine. Yet, these songs have nothing to do with me, besides the fact that I love repetitive, unrelenting songs that make me want to sing along at the top of my lungs. So, what are my three songs?

As lame as it may be, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, by U2, has to be one of my choices. I have found a lot of things in my life - I've reached goals, I've explored the world, I have a full life - yet existentially I always feel as if there is more out there. An appropriate metaphor for my life would not be me walking down a path, but instead, me avidly, passionately, and sometimes frantically searching for something more, something greater, or maybe just something else.

For my second lame entry I'll choose All You Need is Love, by the Beatles. This is my motto, as simple and childish and black and white as it is, though I usually think of myself as a complex, mature, and gray-area person. I believe in love, compassion, agape above all else, and I hope that's what I'm trying to live. Sometimes it feels like no matter how much I keep learning and questioning and exploring, everything really boils down to love, whether it be "Jesus loves me, this I know," or "All you need is love."

I feel like to counter-balance these lame songs I should choose something darker, like Radiohead's Where I am and You begin, yet as much as that song seems to haunt my soul, it does not add to who I am. Neko Case, on the other hand, seems to not just visit my soul, but has perhaps moved in and taken residence within my being. I do not go a day without listening to her or singing her, and the song that speaks to me most is Vengeance is Sleeping, which includes the line "I'm not the man you thought I was." However tame I may have become on the outside over the last decade (and that just means tamer than before, and not tamer as compared to others), is not reflected on how passionately I feel things inside, including my feminism.

So that's me, I guess. At least for now.