Reflection

 

Mollie Panter-Downes became well known for her column in the New Yorker on life in London during World War II (republished as London War Notes). Her fifth novel, One Fine Day, came out in 1947. Its title might have been One Day, because that’s what it is: a day in the life of a family who live in an aging house, somewhere south-west of London, one year after the end of the War. 

 

Here's the plot. Eight o’clock in the morning, the sun is shining. Laura and Stephen Marshall at breakfast. Stephen leaves the house, drives to the station to go up on the train to London, where he works. Their twelve-year old daughter Victoria goes to school. Laura, age 38, the main protagonist, goes on a bus to do some shopping in a nearby town. Provisions in short supply, coupons needed. She returns; does some stuff around the house, and in the garden, then in the afternoon rides on her bicycle to collect the family dog who has wandered off. Having collected him from where he sometimes goes, to a gypsy who lives with several dogs in an abandoned railway carriage, she climbs a small hill, and looks out over the countryside. She lies on the grass, falls asleep, with the dog on a lead beside her. It’s early evening when Victoria returns, having had tea with her friend Mouse Watson. Her mother isn’t home. Later, Stephen comes back from work. Laura still not home. Victoria finds some fish and cooks it. She and her father eat it for dinner. Both of them worried. Where can she be? Laura is woken by a noise. It’s a hiker whom she’d seen on the bus that morning. She sees how late it is; thinks of something she was going to tell her husband but can’t remember what. Thinks she’d better hurry home. That’s it. 

 

The middle of the novel is taken up with episodes, Laura’s meetings with people such as a working class family one of whom, George, is extraordinarily handsome, and might be able to do a bit of gardening but can’t because he’s going off elsewhere, and the Vicar, “a saint who had the misfortune to sound like a bore.” Incidents occur. And memories: Laura remembers a man she might have married but feels relieved that she did not. She sees huts that Canadian soldiers had lived in, sees holes in a wall where army trucks had bashed through. She has thoughts about this house and that one. It’s hard to imagine anything more redolent—I think that’s the word—of South-of-England upper-middle-class life in the aftermath of World War II. One could re-arrange some of the episodes and meetings without making much difference, because the sequence—morning, afternoon, evening—is not what this novel is about. At a deeper level it’s reflection: by Mollie, by Laura (with smaller pieces by Victoria and Stephen), and by us readers, on what it is to be human, on what our relationships within ourselves and with each other are all about.

 

For me the novel succeeded in prompting reflection, but with some parts that didn’t quite work. And it is so very, very, English. But the inwardness did work, somewhat like Virginia Woolf, but warmer, more interpersonal.

 

In his obituary of Mollie Panter-Downes, in the third of February 1997 issue of The Independent, Anthony Bailey reported her as saying, "I'm a reporter. I can't invent." What she was doing however was something that poets of the Tang Era in China did. Not invention, but perception of episodes in the world that are reflected in inner consciousness and writing (see OnFiction: “Patterns in the World and in the Mind,’ 9 January 2012; you can reach it by doing a search for “Tang” on the OnFiction home page). In Mollie Panter-Downes’s case, although some of her world is to do with nature, predominately it’s people.

 

Panter-Downes, M. (1947). One fine day. Current edition: London: Virago, 1985).

Panter-Downes, M. (2004). London war notes. London: Persephone.

 

Prime Suspect

To follow up from posts on 24 March and 1 April, here’s another one about a television series: Prime Suspect. Its protagonist, Jane Tennison, is one of the first women to reach the rank of Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) in the London Metropolitan Police. 

A frequent idea of detective stories, especially police procedurals, is to follow a trail of clues, eventually to discover whodunnit, and have them put away, or as a judge might say, “sent down.” More deeply, however, as happens here, this kind of story is really about character and relationship.

In character Jane Tennison, has intelligence, thoughtfulness, determination ... These have contributed to her ability to have risen in the hierarchy of the police. For eighteen months, since she achieved her present rank, she has been going into the police station each work-day, mainly to attend to paperwork, and waiting, waiting. 

The first episode of Season One of Prime Suspect starts with a bunch of police cars arriving, summoned to a flat, to see the dead body of a woman, thought to be Della Mornay. A pathologist attends, and amongst his findings is a spot of blood believed to be that of the perp (perpetrator). At the time of this series, before the days of DNA analyses, there were, however, blood groups. This spot of blood is of a very rare type. A man with this blood group is found on the police computer system, so Detective Chief Inspector John Shefford, an amiable man with a round face, goes with his men to visit him: the suspect, who immediately becomes prime, and is arrested. At the station Shefford questions this man who admits to having picked up Della, in order to have sex with her. In Shefford’s team, everyone’s pleased with themselves for having solved the case so quickly. Then as DCI Shefford begins to give his report on the case to his superior, Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) Hernan, he suffers a terrible pain in his left arm, is taken off in an ambulance, and dies of a heart attack. 

Jane Tennison asks DCS Kernan if she can take over the case and head up the enquiry. He says he’ll think about it. She tells him she’s been waiting a long time for an opportunity of this kind but has always been sidelined. Kernan goes another step up the hierarchy, to talk to his boss, Commander Traynor, who tells him he’s had a word with Tennison’s previous chief, in the Flying Squad. Traynor then tells Kernan that the Flying Squad chief reckons Tennison needs a break. Because of where this series was made (England), there need to be jokes; otherwise one cannot have any kind of proper relationship with anybody. So here’s the next bit.

“Female murder squad officer. Are you prepared to take the risk?” asks Commander Traynor.

“Ball’s in my court, is it?” says DCS Kernan.

“Flying Squad reckons she’s got ‘em.”

“What?” 

“Balls.”

So Tennison is appointed to head up the investigation into the murder of Della Mornay, much to the annoyance of almost everyone in the murder team. Then comes a video shot of about a dozen police in the incident room, all of them blokes. One of them, Detective Sergeant Ottly, starts plotting against Tennison, to try and sabotage her, because she’s a woman. Then as Tennison gets quickly onto the case, she turns up new evidence that the team had previously missed. Then, to members of the male-team’s chagrin, she orders the suspect to be released.

So not just character, relationships: Tennison’s with her boss, her boss with the boss above him. Tennison with all the members of the murder squad, Ottly’s with Tennison. Tennison’s with her live-in boyfriend (under the stress of her new and often perplexing work-life). 

Another thing, not always mentioned in discussions of detective stories, is the nature of the enquiries into what this person and that person (suspects, witnesses) were doing at this time and that time. People are interviewed in ways that rely on certain kinds of relationship—sometimes sympathetic, sometimes threatening—between detective and interviewee, which offer further insights, which we may not always be able to obtain in everyday conversation, into the character of different kinds of people who live in our societies.

Prime Suspect (1991-2006, seven seasons) Written by Lynda La Plante.  (Available on BritBox.)

In the Mind of Another

One of the lovely aspects of fiction is to be able to enter other minds, and this occurs in an especially touching way when the character in whose mind one finds oneself lives in a society different from one's own.

For Western readers, a novel by the Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami has this effect. The novel is translated as Strange Weather in Tokyo. It's about a woman, Tsukiko, who at the start of the story is age 37, who works in an office. Although she has had boyfriends, they seem not to have lasted long, and she doesn't seem to have close women friends. One evening she is in a bar, near the station, and happens to see, there, a man who is perhaps in his seventies, who recognizes her. He was her teacher of Japanese in secondary school. They keep running into each other, in this bar, and they chat. She calls him Sensei, "Teacher." They don't seem to have much in common. He remembers that, at school, she wasn't very good at Japanese. She remembers, too, that she wasn't very interested in it.

Sensei is a widower. After the meet several times in the bar, he invites her, after a good deal of sake drinking, to his home, which is nearby. Although reluctant, she goes along. The house is cluttered. It's full of things that other people would have thrown away. He gives her something to drink, and some crackers to eat.

Then Sensei starts to read a newspaper. It's not that day's newspaper, but one that has been discarded, which he has picked up from somewhere. He seems to have forgotten that Tsukiko is there. She speaks to him, and he replies: "Would you like to read the newspaper?" he asks.

Sensei goes into the next room and brings back some things: several old clay tea-pots that he has saved from railway take-out meals he had bought many years previously, and a collection of electric batteries that have long since lost their charge. He talks about them a bit. The chapter ends with him reciting three lines of a poem, and with him closing his eyes, nodding off, perhaps asleep. In the pale light of the moon, Tsukiko gazes at the batteries.

An effect the book had on me is that which one is supposed to attain though mindfulness. I would read a chapter—the chapters are short—then look up, and notice what I saw. On one occasion it was a pepper pot, which had been left on a wooden table. I looked at the small glass pot, which was octagonal, and had a silver-coloured metal top, pierced with thirteen small holes in a star pattern. I noticed the relation of the pot to the table, and to the window sill, and to the top of a straight-back chair, the seat of which was under the table. I saw the relation of these objects to each other.

Is this, I thought, a Japanese way? A way of being able to see and experience such spatial layouts and arrangements. A nineteenth-century Western way is quite different. The essayist and art critic John Ruskin, for instance, might have recommended that I look at the salt-cellar, and reflect that someone who had a training in art had drawn it, that someone else had made a model of it, someone else had arranged for it to be moulded in glass, and for the metal lid, with its holes in it, to be manufactured. Each of these people would have got up in the morning, eaten something for breakfast, gone to work, chatted with their work mates, as they made these things for us to use.

Kawakami's book continues with Tsukiko and Sensei getting along with one another, then falling out because he likes the Giants baseball team, whereas she does not. This is followed by a period when they notice each other but refuse to talk. Then they start to talk again. They go on expeditions of several kinds. They chat, sometimes quite a bit, sometimes not much at all. As readers we are within Tsukiko's mind. It is a mind that is uncertain, thoughtful but confused, wondering, lonely. And, as one may imagine, the novel is a love story.

Kawakami, H. (2012). Strange Weather in Tokyo (A. M. Powell, Trans.). London: Portobello Books.

Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

Taking Up Space: Embodying Formations of Visionary Fiction

As I have noted in the past, I study with an organization that provides yoga training in the context of disability, and every year, they hold a month-long "Kiss My Asana" yogathon, which I take as an opportunity to explore embodied experience more deeply, particularly how every body can access the most experience. Following the lead of Matt Sanford, who runs MindBody Solutions, I'm organizing my yogathon practice around creating context where it is possible to try to take up as much space as possible -- a feeling I think can be easiest to access through poses that encourage you to push out like a star. 

Last weekend's amazing Formation video repeatedly featured this star-spaced theme -- combining the physical act of making space with attention to the social relationships that challenge or support this space making, something I'd like to stay a few more things about, given that moving the yogathon to February from its prior location in April has placed it squarely in Black History Month.

This child takes this space in front of a line of riot police, which gives a sense of how this act of reaching out can take different kinds of effort, since the star-reaching, dry-swimming, afro-maintaining dance formation in the pool is obviously not easy.

Beyoncé is obviously very powerful -- and part of what has made Formation rock the internet is not just the power of star poses, but their particular use: pitting that power in both powerful and vulnerable ways against oppression:

Splayed out on a police car as it submerges in a New Orleans flood, after asking "Stop shooting us," or restaging plantation representations, she enacts what Adrienne Maree Brown describes as important visionary fiction, showing possibility and what the space it inhabits looks like:

Re-appreciating Place

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in a long-term learning project that has been named after various geographic regions where it takes place – in the case I participated in in northern Georgia, it is the Piedmont Project. In northern Arizona, it’s the Ponderosa Project, and I hear that there are many additional regional variants.  

These projects exist to engage faculty in the places in which they teach, and through that engagement, to support them in taking on sustainability themes in their courses—whether that be through explicit learning for sustainability and “education for sustainable development” (something the U.N. has just completed a decade of promoting), or rather more lightly through taking on a sustainability-themed example in a language class, for example, translating an explanation of campus recycling or energy conservation efforts. We returned repeatedly to the power of places for reminding people both of the most common tropes of sustainability work—the material processes of our everyday lives and their effects—and also, and perhaps more importantly, for engaging people in the wonder that inspires sustainability work, that makes people reflect on what should be sustained for all people to thrive in the long term.

I was prompted to share my experience because as a geographer, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about and exploring place. But like any canon one learns, there can be a tendency with things once learned to seem like something everyone has learned. So no matter how much impact it had when I was first encountering the power of really noticing place, and paying attention to its qualities, and what being in place FELT like, it has still been remarkably easy to set it aside and not focus on what it offers in terms of entry points to experiential learning. 

Noticing place has its weirdnesses, too: in this amazing, clearly very place-inspired meeting spot, all of the bathrooms were graced with air freshener whose location in Georgia seemed to invite considerable analysis: I challenge anyone to describe the smell of TimeMist Clean Cotton—and to tell us where that places them.

Feeding Movements

The past several weeks in Minneapolis have been tumultuous if hopeful. Protests have gathered since the November 15 police killing of Jamar Clark, and these have revealed both the volatile persistence of white supremacy (via the subsequent terrorism and shooting of peaceful protestors) and also, via sustained caring work of thousands of people to support the various needs of those involved, the steady persistence of communities determined to dismantle racism and its institutions.

As an identifiably white woman involved in food movement work (where white women form a corps of allies—although with a longstanding and often problematic and privileged history of unsuccessfully trying to make things better), I am cautious about the ways I seek to discharge my own feelings of frustration and dismay over the injustices being protested. I vocally appreciate the many efforts that have been made to push back against policies intentionally designed to exploit and injure—like redlining and other "black rules" that keeps people of color from homeownership and other loans that make middle class stability possible—and I am also vocal in revising the stories that blame the failures of extending middle class participation equitably on those from whom it has been withheld. Now in the midst of the North American holiday season, my brother has been jokingly sharing helpful how-to lists about avoiding politics and rancor at family meals, recognizing the number of times I have helped clear the end of the dinner table lingering by taking my male relatives up on their baiting rants about black fatherhood responsibility or unemployment patterns or the current complaint about political correctness. I find the conservative-talk-show-fueled handbook of explanations about social issues irresistibly compelling in part because it opens conversational doors my aunts and colleagues, for example, are more likely to ignore. And once opened, there are so many stories of dispossession resisted, of calories withheld and recreated anyways, of food knowledge suppressed but sewn in seeds into hems, and persisting to nourish people in their long, long fight to even be recognized as having food knowledge, as deserving land and love and repair, and as our relatives, our neighbors, people to whom we have responsibilities of basic human decency, even if we cannot understand the abstract ways we are implicated in their traumatic histories of enslavement and discrimination, and the ways finance and property and educational systems continue to benefit us at their expense.

So given eighteen days when this conversation is brought out into the streets, where white people walk tentatively down the sidewalk to say they are neighbors and want to be supportive but that they do not understand what is at stake and how we have gotten to this point of conflict, I found myself needing to be there, not because I felt like I could help so much as because I felt so overwhelmed with helplessness and disempowering rage otherwise. Being there, the Black Lives Matters leaders gave a focus to my emotion; I could find tasks needing doing, and orientation to keep on in the face of this offered while working alongside people who have to live with this rage and systemic disempowerment.

Maybe I was a little bit helpful for some of those white folks who were wanting to enter a conversation and needed someone with the time to talk them through some history, or for the various crews where I was able to help keep people fed or warm or sustained in some other way, including the nerdy crew of mostly outsiders who launched into the project of catching ourselves up on the history of the community centered around this police station (built symbolically on the site of a former community center). But more than anything, what I was able to do there was to learn viscerally how movements feed themselves, both practically and intangibly, using their overwhelming emotion as the fuel that sustains movement logistics, and practically giving many the chance to learn what’s happening and why and how, and how to be fundamentally human, through the chance to feed each other—to give and receive food, and in talking over its practicalities, to reproduce a community, find out what it needs, and find out how one is a part of it.

After asking hundreds of protesters dancing in the streets and listening to the speeches of American Indian Movement and Black Lives Matter speakers and singers after a march on City Hall whether they had a pocket tool that might open some of the many cans of food donated, I tied this can opener above to the kitchen tent during the first week of the protest. And I’m sure it was bulldozed at the end (somewhere around 36:00 here...); but after being sent on mission to find it in the nearby neighborhood grocery store (the one amidst the 37 fast food restaurants and one ascendant sit-down, youth-employing, amazing community-anchoring café and the similarly inspiring West Broadway Farmers Market), I kept the other one in my pocket because I know I’ll continue to need it.

Phenological Anxiety and Abeyance

Last year at this time, I watched the leaves flame out with peculiar detachment: for the first time, I was leaving my temperate deciduous autumn during the brief interval between leaf fall and snow fall, dissociating the exhilarating experience of gorgeous foliage transformation from the anxious anticipation of winter. This year, I am attempting to channel that dissociation to mitigate the seemingly unavoidable resignation that comes with the end of warm season foliage.

Psychologically, part of what was interesting about trading in my usual excruciatingly cold winter for a cool southern hemisphere summer in Dunedin was that it did not feel quite like summer—it was much more like coasting in a pleasant autumn/spring holding pattern, the kind of seasonal dawn/dusk people in places like Florida and California must experience, complete with a full panoply of broadleaf evergreens whose home range just doesn’t extend quite this far. This in-between season is quite a contrast with the ominous gloaming of both the second half of autumn and the first half of spring in Minnesota, both of which twinkle with the starry brightness of long clear nights and the occasional crystalline sunny days of a winter too cold to snow but also stretch out with snow cover that one knows will last almost half of the year before the leaves flesh out again. Even if it might be t-shirt and swimming weather (like it is today!) while the leaves are crunchy on the beach in Minneapolis, one knows that the lake could freeze within the week, and this leads to a certain pinchedness that contrasts the relaxed abandon elicited by extended warmth in summer.

In a Dunedin kind of summer, any warm morning is almost certain to be followed by a stiff breeze off the cold ocean separating you from Antarctica, sucked in by the lifting warming of interior Otago. The short half-life of warmth prompts somewhat more structured adventure: one is motivated to get out into the promise of warmth but without the illusion of extended heat or the punishment of overheating. This is consistent with spring/fall activities of my prior experience, times when I have found it easiest to plan around the possibility of being outside, getting some sunshine and warmth in whatever time of day best allows it, and then retreating inside to get work done with the rest of the time—a rhythm that feels well balanced and measured, overextended into neither lassitude nor action.

The summer/winter rhythm, in contrast, often feels like one of allowing catch-up relaxation time contrasted with the holing up of cold months recognized to not be much good for fun. Everyday winter sports like biking or snowshoeing or skiing (even as a commute) are process-intensive enough with their bundling and equipment to feel laborious. And the cold is punishing enough to elicit a constant low-level vigilance. Even on days nice enough to lounge around outside if dressed warmly enough, for example, I’ve had police stop to make sure I wasn’t dead when trying to soak up some sun sitting against a tree in the park. Constant reminders of how not to be killed by the weather require a fair amount of the “hygge” coziness that has become a trendy aspiration of cold winter sojourns.

So as I watch orange, red, and yellow leaves stream off the trees today in the uncertain mid-autumn sunny warmth, I am compelled by ways to build up my measure of phenological equanimity in the face of oncoming winter. Phenology is the study of the signs of seasonal progression, and it was an unusual gift last year to be able to watch these signs without bracing for the onrush of seasonal symptoms one expects next (ice! snow! dryness crinkly with static, dark mornings, afternoons, and long nights and slippery roads). This year, I find myself poking at the edges of this anticipation in a more exploratory way, wondering how to build mitigation by other means than escape.

I remind myself that I already organize my daily commute around sun gathering, and that I own a reasonable trunkful of warm winter clothes. The walking and bike commute may soon be more difficult, but I have just discovered a bus route that stops within two blocks of my home and office. I am looking for some better sources of humidity, and spaces to be active and at ease without a lot of extra clothing this winter. If I could build into my schedule regular sessions working in community greenhouses, pleasant spaces, and sunny places to write, can those feel as ordinary, well-balanced, and un-emergency as staying out of the high sun in summer or keeping the garden weeded?

Two Sharp Shakes

On Indigenous Peoples Day, being back on laundry feels mundane—but I am going to celebrate efforts to decolonize places by understanding the stories we use to shape those places, in the hopes that such efforts can help us shape them more equitably. 

Partly because of health problems, and arguably also because of class positioning and the effects that has on people's tolerance for disgust and their enthusiasm for demonstrating cleanliness, my mother taught me how to do laundry when I was quite young. And after twenty years living with my mate, one of the things I still often find myself trying to demonstrate persuasively is two sharp shakes of each laundered item as it goes from the basket onto the line or into the dryer. 

I have never liked ironing. (See also: learning to do laundry before being very good at controlling steaming metal appliances, or small ladder required to reach into washing machine, requiring climbing up and then down to the dryer for each piece of clothes...) Given my rather strong aversion, I've always thought of the two sharp shakes mainly as a way to prevent wrinkles. As I've tried to justify it in my demonstrations—and as I've learned more about the dynamics of laundering—I've realized it's not just about wrinkles (although the pre-emptive smoothing of the collar and placket and pockets does save me a lot of ironing). It also shakes off lint from the wash, pollen from the yard, and the various bits of leaf and insects that may be resting on the clothes. 

The pollen pieces (along with molds) aren't something I'd ever thought of before quite recently—and hence the justification felt quite ad hoc, even if it was legitimate. It made me notice, however, that I was adopting reasons that contributed to my feeling of doing laundry right. Noticing the distance between my ability to explain why and this definitive sense that two sharp shakes seemed to both serve some functions and also set the appropriate pacing for laundry hanging made me also notice than when I was too rushed to take the time for each garments' shakes (it turns out I shake them both before hanging and after), the need to shake them out lingers with the clothing, and I'll find myself wondering if it's legit to shake them in the bedroom, or if I need to shake any potential loitering spiders out on the porch, or out the window.

This is clearly a trivial case. However, it strikes me as a good example of the functions that lurk in practices, waiting to be explored. Exploration may provide insights into what makes these practices meaningful—not necessarily why they are persuasive or optimal, but perhaps why they have been made to feel right, perhaps through only dimly remembered instructions or modeled behaviors (it would not have been till years after my formative laundry learning that I regularly hung laundry outside with my mother and grandmother). And it reminds us that the way that we shape spaces to provide these instructions, often outside of explicit language, seems worth regularly exploring and reinvesting in.

Project Bookmark Canada

A lovely idea of Miranda Hill was to start and continue to administer Project Bookmark Canada. (We had a Quick Hit on the Project in April last year, click here.) Each bookmark is a plaque on a sturdy metal post set into the sidewalk at a particular place. The first Bookmark was to Michael Ondaatje. It’s on the Bloor-Danforth Viaduct in Toronto. Ondaatje wrote about the viaduct in his novel, In the skin of a lion, which is about about workers involved in the building of the city. There are bookmarks across Canada, from Vancouver in British Columbia to Woody Point in Newfoundland.

When I am out walking and I see a plaque, I stop and read it. In London, England, I like the many blue plaques on the sides of houses. They began to be set up by the Society of Arts. Then the scheme was taken over by the London County Council, and more recently by English Heritage. 

If I move to a new place, even for a short time, I feel at first without bearings. To combat this disorientation I read writings of people who lived there, and plaques are wonderfully helpful. When I lived near South End Green in Hampstead, London, for three months, I saw a plaque to George Orwell on a building at the corner of Pond Street and South End Road. The place is now a café, Le Pain Quotidien. It used to be the second-hand bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, in which Orwell worked during the afternoons for 15 months. The job allowed him time to write in the mornings. A short walk away, at 77 Parliament Hill, on the edge of the Heath, is a house in which he had rented a furnished room. It has a plaque put up by the Hampstead Plaque Fund. The book Orwell was writing when he worked at the bookshop was Keep the aspidistra flying. I hadn't read it, so then I did. I went to look at 31 Willow Road, not far away, which I imagined to be 31 Willowbed Road, the house in which Orwell has this novel’s protagonist, Gordon Comstock, rent a room. Comstock works in a bookshop in the afternoons, so that, like Orwell, he can write in the mornings. The novel helped give me a sense of that place.

To track down what Orwell had been writing when he worked at South End Green, I had to do a bit of research. I didn't mind doing that, but a very good idea for the Canadian plaques, which can give a start to one's research, is not just to give the name and dates of an author, but to have some 500 words of a piece of poetry or fiction that relate to the spot where the plaque is set up. I feel very pleased to have been present at the unveiling of the Bookmark at the corner of College Street and Manning Street, in Toronto, which bears a passage from Anne Michaels’s book Fugitive Pieces. Here is part of the passage that the plaque bears.

Up Grace, along Henderson, up Manning to Harbord I whimpered; my spirit shape finally in familiar clothes and, with abandon, flinging its arms the stars. 

But the street wasn’t empty as I thought. Startled, I saw that the blackness was perforated with dozens of faces. A forest of eyes, of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps On dark verandahs, a huge invisible audience, cooling down from their small hot houses, the lights off to keep away the bugs.

Image: Anne Michaels on the left and Miranda Hill on the right, at the unveiling of the Bookmark at College Street and Manning Street in Toronto.

Critical pastoral: Reorienting in complex contexts

I spent the past several months looking across the Dunedin Harbour at what is marked on the bus maps simply as "fertilizer factory." The Ravensbourne superphosphate plant bills itself as the premier source for pastoral nutrients in New Zealand, and considering the role of fertilizer in pastoral systems has made me understand something new aboutthe way that explanatory stories operate, especially when they are about something like food -- something we encounter often, may care about deeply, but do not necessary have much systemic knowledge about.

The short version of how I've needed to revise my story of pasturing sheep has to do with understanding of how pastures work. Although I have known, at various points, that people fertilize grasses and other fodder to make them grow better (and hence that pasturage represents a potential threat to water -- frankly, even without fertilizer, potentially, given the nutrients in animal waste), I found that I still romanticized grassland systems as, at best, letting animals forage in ecosystems adapted to their grazing.

This is not exactly the wrong story, but it makes me think about the trajectory of my understanding of corn agriculture: for the first third of my life, as far as I can remember it, I thought of corn as an attractive indicator of successfully retained agriculture (even when I realized it was "cow corn," as we called it in my childhood, rather than fresh corn for human food). As I studied agroecosystems in more detail and came to recognize the food landscapes I encountered in the context of their complex relationships, cornfields became a daunting manifestation of monocultural extractive landscapes, designed for the most efficient transformation of metabolic processes into industrial returns on investment. It has taken over a decade of further exploring corn—growing beautiful varieties in my garden, curating and exchanging gift corn with interesting stories and geographical histories—to learn to appreciate some of the further complexity beneath the surface of what appears to be a repellently stripped down productivist ecology.

The fertilizer factory has helped provide a similar entry point into stories of pastures, making me wonder how others see their complexity. If farmers are compelled to maximize the returns on their pastures such that they become "locked in," as those who study the production of scientific knowledge call it, to the whole system surrounding the relationship between particular kinds of livestock and particular kinds of pasturage (white clover and sheep, for example, despite the better contexts for nitrogen-fixing microbiota that red clover might provide), how can we invite someone just appreciating the pastoral landscape into the whole fascinating world of the political economy of agroecosystems, to debt, the models of nutrients and water flows and soil edaphon, and the many stories that govern how we orient ourselves amidst these complexities?

When to look for new instructions

Like many people in my latitude, where we have just passed the historic frost-free date, I spent a considerable amount of this weekend gardening. Or, to be more precise, painstakingly recovering plantable soil from a riot of opportunistic other plants. Many hours of tracing the rootlets of creeping yellowcress down into the dirt (after the prior three years' methods of reducing the amount of garden bed given up to this hungry and allelopathic rhizomatous creeper) gave me ample time to wonder about how environmental knowledge feedback loops work. 

Gardening seems like a perfect domain for this line of thought: one tries many different things, with fairly stable goals, and only moderately changing environments. Quizzing my fellow gardeners as we weeded, pulled out rocks -- and learned how to build a hoop house through a skillsharing workshop led by Cherry Page and Tim Flowers with the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance (pictured assembled!) -- I realized that the different modes people bring to garden observation may be quite salient to my ongoing exploration of frameworks for orientation.

Many people seem drawn to gardening because it is a domain of knowledge passed on from others -- while others seem more excited about the direct interactions with environment. And both of these approaches seem to have strengths and weaknesses for dealing with the need to change behaviors as conditions require. Hoop houses are a great example of the way that the changing conditions may be social as much as environmental: as people share techniques for building this kind of growing season extender, the process of sharing observations and experiences may invite others into ways of noticing and adapting. What did really well that warm spring or fall that might thrive with more shelter? Which weeds seem to have less yellowcress around them? What kinds of garden orientation seem to get people to come back and keep weeding?

Orientation to very hard things

If you tell people something is going to be really hard, who responds to that invitation?

Can you figure out how to stage the signals letting people know that there will be difficulty -- so they are neither ambushed nor deterred, but invited with the assurance that they will have just as much support as they need to face the challenge?

I have been following this line of thought to figure out how to more successfully scaffold uncomfortable conversation about society and environment issues.

Traveling back to the U.S. reminds me how hard people are on each other, even (maybe especially) when they're trying to build up to doing hard things. So having watched a wave of appreciation for mothers swell the bandwidth of social media yesterday, I'd like to add my appreciation for the orientation provided by people who have done things they think others should try.

I can see how you went. I can witness and imagine some ways these things can be done, especially if I don't also have to worry about sticking exactly to your path(s). And especially then, figuring out the paths to take, I am even more grateful for the sign posts people might leave at difficult passages and choice points.

Orientation and Hospitality: On Celebrations of Place and Time (7th Anniversary Post)

What prompts the scripts that propel us into action? What is disorienting enough to stop us in our tracks?

Today marks OnFiction's seventh year, and the occasion of an anniversary (and a significant one -- will we itch to do something else now?) and also of my return home after a half year away gives me an opportunity to think about functions of the celebration of time and place.

Spending several months in a small foreign city where people mostly speak your language -- just more quietly -- is an excellent exercise in attuning to cues around you. And returning to one's home country -- cacophonous and loud with an overwhelming array of familiar cues makes one grasp for prioritizing tools to decide: what requires action?

I returned from my time in Aotearoa New Zealand via San Francisco, which, it turns out, shares a remarkable array of vegetation. Many plants were introduced to both places from South Africa, and in the beach neighborhood where I was staying with family, my favorite pohutukawa trees were everywhere, as pictured above (and here, in Gisborne, for contrast, and for the context of my tree posture). They were even blooming, throwing me even more completely into seasonal disorientation.

The pohutukawa is widely considered the Christmas tree of New Zealand, largely because its large red blossoms are most fully out around Christmas, the height of summer in the Southern hemisphere. As if it was not difficult enough to make a graceful transition from the starting up of the autumn term in Otago to the wrapping up of the spring term back in the U.S., Christmas trees that had really only just stopped flowering in the late summer of our very southerly latitude (where the trees are really not quite out by Christmas) were popping out in the sunny California April. 

Vegetation is always a force to be reckoned with, setting up association-filled backgrounds that are easy to underappreciate -- and the commanding nature of American spoken language is also a predictable attentional force to be reckoned with. Perhaps more surprising than these were the stars. Looking out over the Pacific when the sun went down over San Francisco, the beach seemed familiar -- but I found myself suddenly gripped with the realization that I would not be able to see southern hemisphere constellations! What was surprising about this reaction is the fact that I can barely recognize any of these constellations, making my attachment to them either purely nominal -- or based on an attachment to place details even more subtle than vegetation-noticing.

Over the next few weeks, I will be further exploring the idea of orientation, and how orientation can be provided through bodies of knowledge codified under the rules of hospitality (or, perhaps more abstractly, specific forms of discourse). Celebrations of time and place provide a profoundly useful starting place, because they feature qualities of orientation -- reminders of the past ways people have interacted with a place and each other, and often re-enactments of how this has taken place and changed form over time, along with celebrations of hopes for future plans in place and in the context of the continuity of community time. Reverse engineering the hospitality of celebrations may also suggest some of the common features of disorientation. Expecting a marginal view of those few constellations I can pick out from the far south, I am thrown off by the realization that my view has shifted (even if it has shifted back to a much more familiar view, this is the disoriented reaction that precedes the slower working out of how stars relate as they appear in the Pacific gloaming). Accustomed to quiet conversation, I am jolted by a thousand conversations that seem to be spoken as if I should be hearing them. A week later, I am re-oriented, having picked back up on the habits appropriate to familiar cues -- but I am also intrigued by that liminal space where habits can be seen unhabitually, and wonder how much that, too, is what we celebrate in the spectacle of things like anniversary?

In celebration of resting space

When I packed up my home kitchen five months ago, it was with a sense of wonder at the number of relationships embodied in the jars stached around the space. A rich map of food chain explorations were laid out there, and although it was a little messy and overwhelming, it provided a concrete illustration of how vividly my days are packed with building and maintaining relationships with people who do interesting things with food and society. Food is something that’s constantly demanding, though – people always need to eat, and food and society organizations always are doing interesting things, and being engaged in such a broad topic definitely puts one at risk of succumbing to the syndrome of being too busy. My busy refrigerator, despite being planted squarely in my kitchen, was a portrait of being pulled across a lot of relational space.

Today, as I take a break to let the kitchen floor in Dunedin dry after mopping it and look through the emptied out, wiped down cabinets, the emotion that bellies out behind my sternum and keeps me feeling as if this is something beyond just a normal day is a feeling more specific to this space. It’s a feeling not unlike what I felt clearing out my office last autumn, as well, although books confer another layer of feeling, perhaps something more outward directed in the way the food collection in my home kitchen felt. Here, the foods that taste like this place—the pohutukawa honey, the apricots—are coming with me, and it is just the space I am leaving behind.   

But a space isn’t an empty hull. One day traveling along University Avenue in St. Paul a few years back, I was struck sharply by a sign that said “Cocoon House,” advertising clothing for women. For a tantalizing moment, in the part of attention that notices and spins things out into fanciful detail before the appraising eye pays more rational attention and trims back the imagination, I saw that place as a silky luxuriant nest, filled with lounging women resting on the cocooning environment of the space they had built. As I scrub its corners and shoo out the myriad moths and grasshoppers who have wandered in over a summer of open doors and windows, this space has these layers, of the months of meals cooked and cooked for me, the exercises done, the pages written, the movies watched, games of cards played, even conversations home over the long internet cable under the Pacific Ocean anchored all from this room.

In both the academic and artistic communities in which I have been trained, there is a strong emphasis on the sabbatical space: the moving away from the ordinary, and finding a regular time away. The distance from the everyday task has been emphasized, and I have been curious about what one now finds in an away space, given the ubiquity of these internet cables that tie us to our working communications. There is the “I am not checking my mail this sabbatical” method, and someday I would like to try that. But there is also something far more prosaic in the way that a retreat to a simplified version of the same kind of day allows one to rest and reflect on the construction of that day.

Toward the beginning of this time, I wrote about my appreciation for the supportive material tasks that it can be hard to properly incorporate when one’s schedule has gotten too full: being able to enjoy hanging out the laundry, luxuriate in making breakfast, write an exploratory page while the mopped floor dries. I am taking the time to document this layer of experience because I see that most of my colleagues are as bad as I am at practicing sabbatical time. With the urgency of the social organizing work we do, reflective time is hard to take, even when we know how useful it is. But perhaps for those of us for whom the traditional “day off” or “vacation weeks” tend not to be a move away from work, per se, we can still take some of the blessing of sabbatical practices by incorporating them into the rhythm of what we do.

Make the space sacred, revel in its richness – and do everything in your power to make sure everyone else can do the same.

Step out of franticness, if only to watch it from a more restful space and try to pick it up again more purposefully. Pay your employees for time spent reflecting on what they have done (/don’t pile more work on them than they can do in the time – if necessary, see what you might glean from some of their reflection time to organize their tasks to meet what satisfies them, but do not only incorporate the enjoyment of rest for its productive purposes). Not all people will enjoy the space the way I do. But pay attention to see whether you might, because a space that reinforces your refresh button makes everything more enjoyable.

Reflexive Dialogics

In recent posts, I have been thinking through some questions of internal dialogue. Noticing the process of narrating new places as I explore them has heightened my awareness of a relatively constant layer of internal dialogue, and I have become interested in the functions of this dialogic layer of thought.

One of my projects in my temporary home has been to make itako boards for planing in the surf here, as the shape of the waves is different from the water where I have swum before, and I have been exploring how to move in unfamiliar water. This has provided two domains for continuing my observation of internal dialogue.

First, surfing language is so amusingly already incorporated into everyday vernacular that there is a hiccoughing cadence to the process of realizing what words like “wipeout,” “bail,” and “rip” mean in embodied, rather than metaphorical, experience. I often find myself using the surfing terms I have picked up from pop culture in the imperative, directed at myself: “duck dive!”

I then often have an agonizing (and very motivated) moment with a wave looming up over me as I summon all of the embodied associations I have with this word to launch myself into (under) the wave (usually a second too late, after such a thought process, and often with the accompanying doubt, “or should that have been a turtle roll?). As the physical experience becomes more familiar and automatic, the verbal exploratory layer gets less noticeable. It is when I am flailing in the fizz that I thrash the potential accumulated glossary for insight; when I am shooting along in a wave, it seems less likely to be narrated. (It will be interesting to see if this is a parabolic association: perhaps once there is more bandwidth to spare, exploratory language will be more noticeable? Are there proportions of expertise to novelty that maximize or minimize internal narration?)

Second, the laborious process of making boards that were seaworthy provided a chance to observe the kind of dialogue that appears when doing repetitive things like sanding or painting. Almost every time I dug into the process of sanding to reach the state of even attention over the surface that contributes to a proper finish, I would find that quality of attention accompanied by the playing out of elaborate dialogues of fictional characters in my head. It reminded me of summers painting houses with my father—a very distinctive kind of imaginative dialogue, where I often came to notice that I was spinning out a story right in the middle of a complex plot.  

Together with my recent attention to the constant labeling efforts of internal narration, this familiar process made me think about how the dialogue that plays through our heads as we make sense of the things we are doing (or as we reach a certain daydreaming quality of attention) seems useful to understand. It tells about the complex networks of meaning and bias we bring to new situations, and reveals some of the ways that we bring our already existing interpretive schemes even when we think we are experiencing something novel and fresh.

It also may suggest interesting things about the way we model dialogue.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours passingly portrays Virginia Woolf’s relationship with this almost subterranean creative process. In the film version, Woolf is seen in a series of scenes in a very specific state of distracted attention, in which she discovers, in quite fully formed shape, large sections of dialogue and plot. Looking back over our archives to see how dialogic thought has been treated, I found it productive along this line of thought to revisit Thomas Scheff’s 2009 essay on “Virginia Woolf’s Multi-personal Dialogues”:

If women are usually better than men at spontaneous, non-instrumental, rapid role-taking, with looseness of association, this difference might explain women’s greater intuition then men. It may be that rapid, loose and/or non-conventional associations are a feature of parallel, rather than serial processing in mental activity. Parallel mental processing means that one is thinking in several different trains of thought at once. These parallel trains of thought are all, or all but one, going on outside awareness. When these several trains are all attempts to solve the same problem, they can give rise to extremely rapid and imaginative solutions to difficult problems.