Take the 15 for 25 minutes South and you arrive at Smith's Falls. Wind back 200 years and all you have there is a few mills in a rough wilderness, a piece of land owned by the son of a British spy, and a doctor. A little farther back that land was bought from the Mississauga nation for some trivial items. The Mississauga had fought the Americans with the Loyalists, but they had no idea what title would mean for their allies, and for themselves, and for the Algonquin, Iroquois and other Six Nations who had agreed to nothing.
I quit smoking this year. I used to enjoy that pensive moment. Smoking has always been best done outdoors, smokers who argue against the ban in restaurants are lazy and ignorant. I won't comment on the Legion, the mental health ward or the veteran's retirement home. Just these healthy and able-bodied smokers who feel their civil liberties are diminished by smoking in the fresh air, rather than in an enclosed space. Healthy people smoking in the fresh air, while an ironic sentence politically, is the best alternative.
So, I enjoyed smoking outdoors, letting my mind smoothe out. I enjoyed the conviviality of the smoking crowd, if we were risking our lives, we were doing so together. There's a sense of community in that somehow. And sense of community is what's missing a great deal from places of work, places of study, in 'society' in general. And that leads to unhappiness. Smoking is a fairly shallow medium for community, and at a high social cost. But part of the reason for the addiction is our lack of sense of community. I'll miss that community, as temporary as it is lasting as it does, only the length of a cigarette.
I feel great to have quit, I have wanted to be free from it for a while, even as I continued to appreciate the habit. I hated paying for them the most. I hated buying cigarettes, and shelling out $8 for a pack every couple of days. I hated asking for Peter Jackson regular king size and rarely mixing it up, what's the point really. I was never one to develop a discerning taste. That would acknowledge the addiction too deeply. No, PJ's are usually the cheapest. I hated flicking them, littering, on some level though it didn't prevent me from doing it. I would never litter anything else. I'm not entirely sure why it's acceptable to litter butts, but it is. You can judge people for it, but it's not the same, for some reason, as littering other things. So, you'd really be being judgmental, because littering butts is acceptable to smokers. You'd be insensitive to the culture of smoking to judge people on the same standard as littering other garbage. I don't make the unwritten rules. I would often make the effort to use the butt-stops, or even scrape out my cigarette and throw it in a garbage can. But if there's no garbage and no butt-stop, no one's going to carry the thing around with them. The only place where it's really unacceptable is in a park, municipal, provincial or national - you can get away with it in municipal parks, though, especially in the winter.
No, I'm glad to be done with it. What I need to is publish literature, I need to form a country-rock band as well. I've got no balance in my life with the creative and artistic things that give me the most fulfillment and the drive I put into work. That work is also fulfilling, it's creative and meaningful. The problem is that the academic world, the university where I work, has a culture which I find utterly bereft of spirit today. It is dominated by egos. It's a pissing test to see who is the most credible. It's a lot of wordplay. And to think that once, universities were the lifeblood of civilization, the incubator of ideas and knowledge, the patrons of creativity, brilliance, problem-solving and energy. But they've gone and established themselves under high modernism, then decided that criticism was the highest form of this. Yet the criticism's net effect is to reveal that academia is really a castle made of sand. And castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually. So said Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Springsteen said, about his chums and him, that they 'learned more from a three-minute record than they ever learned in school'.
High modernism. The problem is that physics has gone way ahead of everything else, and humanities have fallen behind. The humanities have gotten lost in post-modernism, post-structuralism and other such sophistry. And the prefix 'post' is a curious thing. These thinkers are supposed to come after modernism. In doing so from their critical nose-in-the-air perspective, they render their predecessor's knowledge meaningless and relative. Physics, on the other hand, though it's breakthroughs create new paradigms, these paradigms exist in dimensionality with previous understandings, such as mechanics. What is challenged is the completeness of the prior paradigm. But the understanding of quantum physics, the dimensionality that this brings, as well as relativity with the expansion of possibilities of perspectives on space-time, are built in continuity from mechanics. Mechanical equations do not lose all meaning, they are still legitimate in the field of reality that is not quantum, yet the discoveries of the quantum levels open up new possibilities for the understanding of global reality, ecompassing quantum and non-local fields as well as local and mechanical fields. In humanities, criticism has attempted to be post-positivist, instead of being meta-positivist as physics has done. Or, some have sought to resist new perspectives and become more dogmatically positivist, yielding the politically charged perspective of scientism.
The Algonquin once were the guides to explorers like Jacques Cartier, ably transporting the Europeans through difficult Canadian wilderness and teaching them. White people have a difficult time understanding their history. My mother was always one for sayings, especially those critical of the establishment, or those that were pithy commentaries on society. She loved the saying 'history is written by the winners'. When history is written by the winners, and these winners are the Europeans who dominated most of the world under their empires, when it comes to understanding history, their descendants become losers. When it comes to a loss of knowledge, as a result of the domination in history, and the domination in writing history, the descendants are doubly at a loss. The documentation is replete with missing information, and each time a people that experienced itself as superior would encounter another people, it would fail to learn anything from them. What it knows best is how to dominate, but this is not the same thing as having knowledge that serves one's people well. The domination can be seen as a benefit, but that benefit is superficial and time-bound. What the people have not realized fully, is that the world of problems faced by humanity in the age of late modernity exists as a consequence of selective awareness of the dominant societies. Dominant societies' tend to be selectively aware of reality for several reasons. There is guilt associated with being the oppressor, or even knowing on some level that benefits arise from an association with oppression by one's leaders and benefactors, rather than from honour. This shame tends to de-select parts of reality from the general consciousness. Then there is the encounter with the other under the assumption of superiority of one's knowledge, and even a sense of competitiveness that seeks to demonstrate that superiority. This then leads to the rejection of the ways of knowing of the other. The knowledge of the other can be lost completely, if the society of the other is destroyed. Or the knowledge is left separate and marginalized as quaint. As such, instead of learning the farming techniques of the Iroquois, our arrogance in the advancement of our agricultural technology leads to unsustainable farming techniques. The lack of deep understanding of democracy as known collectively to Western civilization historically, as it has been known to the original Nations of the Americas has corrupted democracy. The lack of a deep understanding of ecology as known most extensively by the indigenous people's of the world leaves our planet in peril. The rationalism that atomizes people, and reduces them to responders of stimuli, as processors, as self-interested but not enlightened, this psychology fails to learn from the psychology of wisdom.
Until the dominant socieites recognize their loss, and are humbled by the limits of their civilization, they'll continue in this distorted modernism.
Smiths Falls has 2000 empty beds. The province is trying to move the remaining 300 severely disabled residents into the community. The residents cannot speak for themselves, but they are being moved against the will of their guardians. The shortage of health-care beds goes on. The pain of the families facing the institution's closure goes on year after year. The province cannot see the grounded reality. The economy of the town is being devastated. They can't see that they could fill the bed shortage, prevent the calamity of moving these residents and save the regional economy, and save themselves money. Somehow, this doesn't figure into a rational government, who can only say that they have a target, and they plan to achieve it. Someone decided twenty years ago that institutions were all bad, and though twenty years has changed and institutions have changed, and we've not provided community supports, and we've realized that even with the best of community supports, these can't replace residential care, the priority is completeness and consistency, going to the logical ends of de-institutionalization. Internal logic that doesn't respond to grounded reality, and evidence. Stupidity, not rationalism. Rationalization. De-selecting the evidence that contradicts the program.
In McEwen's Field long ago, where Rideau Regional stands today, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally over 10,000 strong. In the old institution, there were a few horrors. The institutional model was far from perfect, and far from the level of accountability to residents it should have had. These kinds of things can happen in a group home too. They can happen in a long-term care facility. There is a greater stigma attached there as a ghost. People are afraid of the severe disability, they are afraid of the darkness of things difficult to imagine, of lives very different from our own, of abnormality. Apparently too, there may be a First Nations burial ground in the vicinity. The First Nations could teach us how to cleanse the spiritual energy of a building. They know how to cleanse the spiritual energy of a person, something called a smudging ceremony.
In my faith, we have something similar. In its similarity, it is also close to communion in Christianity. We take water blessed by our Hazar Imam in a cup and pray over it, we ask for blessing from the server of the nyaz, we drink that water. We take a little food, in a similar way, sukrit. We do chanto, and ask for forgiveness, and our brothers or sisters repeat verses wishing this forgiveness to us. We do this after communal prayers. There is agurbhatti (incense) burning during this short ceremonial practise. After this there is socializing with our community. We go home cleansed. I don't get there enough, it pains me. I need that shower. I'm in the wilderness for long periods of time. I'm working for God in some way, but away from the community, away from prayers in a hall. It is as if I must travel by rougher roads, in rougher areas, to do so often under the cover of darkness, in the dirt, in spiritual back roads, as a missionary of sorts, without a religion. Long periods pass before I find renewal. It is ok. It is a path for me to take - rich with drunkenness, turmoil, struggle, conflict, to make sure I cannot pretend to be above anyone, or more pure. Fall into the sky, fall into the mud - it is the same. All is within the heart and compassion of God.
Man-made progress, natural wilderness. Science and mysticism. Wisdom. Time moves forward in modernity, and stands constant in eternity. We can't please everyone.
I need this country-rock band. Doesn't have to be country-rock. I want it to be direct and heartfelt, strong and human. I want it to be driving, but not boring. I want it to be drinking, but not totally drunk. I want it to smoke cigarettes with some pretty girls outside the bar, without me having to smoke, just as a metaphor for that companionship and sexual tension. Music for friends, and to listen to while washing the car in the summer. Music to break up to. Music to play on a third date, and make love to. Music about losing a job, being broke and politics. Something like Born in the USA, but for 2008 in Canada. A rejection of the idea of a post-911 world. A re-discovery of Canadian wildness. Something to break wide open the rural-urban divide. Something to play on Y101 and on the Bear (is it still called that?). I need some poet-musicians, people who get desire for music as a craft and an art. For its raw beauty. Good arrangements, room for improvisation - strong lyrics, straightforward but not totally predictable. Melody that makes you yearn. Lyrics that leave you vaguely aware of something richer and deeper than can be expressed in words. Music that cuts the bullshit out and goes straight to the heart, and the sexuality that begets life. Lonely or in communion.
umm.....
Wait for it. one day it might suprise you.
