A Brush Full of Earth and Sky

The anniversary of the passing of Anne’s mom, artist Jane Champagne, slipped by us in March. I took the occasion to write an article of appreciation about her great work. I felt a strong need to honour Jane’s artwork and hopefully attract a new audience for her beautiful images. I’d hoped to publish it in an art magazine but it takes weeks or months just to get a response from publishers these days and I’m moving way too fast for that. Too much else to get done—I have far too many interests! One of the great things about blogs—you can quickly publish and move on to the next thing… 

A Brush Full of Earth and Sky—The Art of Jane Champagne: Part One

“Art is the ordering of the material in harmony with the spirit. Contemplation is needed. The results are often simple, direct, strong and expressive.” —JEH MacDonald (Group of Seven)

Artist Jane Champagne in her favourite mode: en plein air. Champagne literally wrote the book on painting the Ontario landscape. Here she paints the lovely autumn colours of Killarney on Manitoulin Island about 2007.

The landscape art of Jane Champagne is as close as one can get to faithfully rendering the alchemy that occurs when experience is filtered through human sensory perception. Although a fully accomplished, world-class painter equally adept at oils, acrylics and watercolours, her medium of choice was watercolours, for good reason. Her paintings—especially her watercolours—are vibrant, alive, fairly humming with the emotional response of the artist—a brush full of earth and sky. It’s what makes the difference between the greats and the also-rans.

1. In the Shadow of the Masters

Jane died March 28, 2008, leaving behind an incredible portfolio—hundreds of paintings representing more than 60 years of creative work. When Anne and I went out to her Southampton, Ontario home to settle her estate, it took me a week of 9 to 5 days just to photograph all her artwork. Graduating from the University of Toronto in 1952 with an MFA, Jane Carson earned a scholarship that enabled her to go to that great mecca of artists, Paris, where she studied at Atelier d’Art Sacré and met her husband Jean-Remi Champagne. Jean-Remi was a French-Canadian raised in Somerset, Manitoba, who had nurtured the dream of living in the great metropolis of French culture. While living in Paris, Jane and Jean-Remi had two daughters, Anne Elizabeth and Sophie Jane. The family’s dream was shattered when the Algerian War of Independence came to a bloody head in 1962, forcing nearly a million French nationals out of the country. To accommodate them, French President de Gaulle ordered anyone without French citizenship out of France.

The faux Renaissance painting that got Jane into trouble with an envious instructor during her art school days. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

The family returned to Canada, living briefly with Jane’s parents in Toronto. For Jean-Remi, an architect, it was a crushing blow. For Jane, the pressures of raising two small children in a society still unprepared to support women in the workforce meant sidelining her art career. Added to that was a marriage that seemed to be coming unstuck and Jane’s own personal demons. Anne recalls that while training as an artist, a painting Jane had done after the style of early Renaissance religious iconography was so good, it showed up her instructor. Yet Jane fell into an easy but fatal trap for artists—comparing herself with the great masters. She decided that if she was unequal to their level of mastery, there was no point continuing as an artist.

Sophie (L) and Anne Champagne were instrumental in encouraging Jane to return to painting after many years away from it. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

Fortunately for us, as Anne and Sophie reached early adulthood, Jane reconsidered. She may have realized that the point is not to compare ourselves with others, but with our own progress. Or she may simply have been overcome by the artist’s ultimately irrepressible urge to create. She acknowledged the role of her daughters in encouraging her to paint again in her book Painting the Ontario Landscape (University of Toronto Press, 1991): “My own journey through landscape painting goes back a long way, some fifty years, and has been nourished by a great many people. Chief among them are my daughters, Anne and Sophie, who suggested with the perception born of love that after twenty years away from it, perhaps I should start painting again. I don’t know how they knew…they had faith in me when I didn’t. My entire family’s encouragement, in fact, has been persistent, and very much appreciated.”

Jane’s love of painting the Ontario landscape ‘en plein air’ led her to write the definitive book on the subject.

Jane was a self-confessed ‘lecture addict’ and lifelong learner, so once she set her mind to rebooting her art career, there was no stopping her. At first she did so gradually, taking whatever time she could to paint after working hours. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1976 and she had begun working as a copy editor and deputy research chief at Maclean’s magazine in 1978–79, although she had already been assistant editor at The Canadian Composer since 1971. She also wrote and edited for Toronto-based Homemakers magazine from 1979–86. But then, as often happens in the career of artists, a pivotal moment—or moments—came.

“Once I had learned how to paint reasonably well, I was terrified to leave the comfort of the familiar,” Jane later recalled in her arts column (December 9, 2007) for Southampton’s Shoreline Beacon. “Then I went away to Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, to a mixed media workshop given by an artist I admired, the late Anne Meredith Barry. The second day I started to sob uncontrollably in the hall/studio of the local Anglican Church. ‘Never mind, dear,’ said my mentor, ‘You’re just having an identity crisis!’ Oh, is that all! That’s when I decided to choose the identity of a full-time painter. Choosing a life of alternating affluence and penury meant celebrating the magic of spending the rest of my life in the arts.”

2. The Watercolourist’s Dilemma

One of Jane Champagne’s masterful watercolour sketches of the Provence countryside. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

For Jane the irresistible allure was always landscapes, whether that meant painting the Ontario countryside she so loved or returning decades later to the French countryside to paint. Some of her most precious works are the sketchbook watercolours she did in France during the early 1990s—pocket-sized glimpses of French farmers’ markets, vintage buildings and country villages. These pictures are brimming with her sense of excitement and inspiration at returning to the country that had nourished her early art career. Unfortunately we’ll never know if these were intended to be used as sketches for larger paintings. Yet they stand quite well on their own.

This Ontario rural landscape scene painted in watercolours by Jane Champagne reflects her ability to beautifully capture its texture and palette. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

But it’s obvious from even a quick scan of her portfolio that her lifelong love was the Ontario landscape, rendered in watercolour. Having retired to Southampton after a career as an editor in Toronto, the Bruce Peninsula was a particular favourite to paint. This meant having to face down a dilemma central to many Canadian artists at the time. “Ontario painters have seldom had an easy time of it,” she explains in Painting the Ontario Landscape. “They face a chronic dilemma: stay home and paint in obscurity, or seek fame and fortune in the more nurturing artistic climates abroad.” Added to that has been a tendency in the Canadian art world to view watercolourists as somewhat less than ‘serious’ artists. Even the Group of Seven faced resistance when it came to exhibiting watercolours:

“At the time the Group was formed, watercolour was used only for taking colour notes on location; it wasn’t really considered an acceptable medium for ‘serious’ painters. It usually took a back seat to oils, so much so that Carmichael and Casson had to fight to have their watercolours exhibited in the Group shows. Traditionally, if watercolours were included at all, they were relegated to a back room, and the Art Gallery of Toronto, where the Group held its shows, was no exception. Finally, their efforts to have watercolour recognized as a medium just as worthy as oil succeeded; for the Group of Seven’s last exhibition (1932), an entire room was devoted to watercolour, and was an immediate, resounding success. Casson and Carmichael, along with Fred Brigden, another well-known practitioner, founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour (CSPWC) in 1925 in an effort to ‘legitimize’ the medium.” (Painting the Ontario Landscape, pp. 30, 31)

It’s telling that by the early 1990s, Jane still felt this shadow of condescension looming over her work, and even more telling of her character that she persisted as a watercolourist. Besides this obstacle, she had to face down the sexism that relegated women artists to the footnotes of art history. In her own words: “By a Lady… That’s how women painters had to sign their work in the 19^th century, implying that their names were ‘just as irrelevant as their work,’” Jane wrote in her Shoreline Beacon column of July 4, 2007. “Did you know that one of the few histories of Canadian painting lists only two women artists? Or that the National Gallery, when last I counted a few years ago, owned work by just five women? There are more women painting now than ever before, yet how many can you name? The appalling lack of acknowledgement given women artists was rectified to some extent back in 1992 in a book by art historian Maria Tippett, By a Lady (Penguin Books Canada 1992). In it she brings to light dozens of women artists, from the early pioneers like Anna Jamieson to the later feminists such as Joyce Wieland—‘artistic achievement truly worth celebrating.’”

Jane’s signature—sadly missing on all too much of her work. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

But whatever the obstacles, personal and otherwise, the urge to create must ultimately overcome—it wells up like a spring after a winter thaw, irrepressible. And in Jane’s case that’s exactly what happened. She went on to become a highly accomplished artist selling work in seven countries. Her work was represented by the de Boer Gallery in Owen Sound, Valenart & Associates in Toronto, the Southampton Art Gallery, and Shayna Laing Art International in Montreal. As one attains mastery, the desire to teach often arises, as it did with Jane. She taught at the Southampton Art School—the small town but by no means small potatoes school and gallery she credited with kickstarting her career again.

Coming up: A Brush Full of Earth and Sky Part Two

Open Letter to Bill Gates

This was written during our rant workshop at the recent Convergence Writers’ Retreat in New Denver. It has actually morphed into more of an essay, as I wanted to moderate the tone a little into one of an appeal rather than an outright condemnation.

Dear Mr. Gates: Clearly you are a man of great influence in the world, and you have worked hard to become that. But I wonder if you have ever considered what the full implications of your influence are.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is asked by the blogger to consider some points.

For instance, have you considered that by designing products with planned obsolescence, you are consuming more and more of the Earth’s resources? As Annie Leonard suggests in The Story of Stuff, with 7 billion people on the planet, isn’t it time to consider ways of re-using stuff rather than constantly having to replace it? (See: http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-electronics/) We’re entering an era when the old values of craftsmanship and quality will need to be reintroduced if we are to avoid exceeding the planet’s limits. I fully understand that software needs to be dynamic and responsive to user needs and new applications. But hardware could easily be engineered to allow almost endless retrofitting as long as the quality control standards used to manufacture it in the first place were high enough. A useful analogy for hardware designers might be the old mechanical typewriters: with their cast-iron bodies and parts, they literally lasted a lifetime. The only part needing regular changing was the ribbon. In computers that would correspond to software and RAM cards.

Annie Leonard asks us all to consider our use and abuse of ‘stuff.’

I also understand that when you’re working within the current consumer capitalist model of economics, a high premium is placed on ‘adding value’ to products, which can be as simple as making a computer endlessly expandable in its capacities. But when wedded to the ‘throwaway society’ that has emerged during the past century, the imperative seems to extend to making everything as disposable as possible as quickly as possible. Just try to find replacement parts for your flatscreen TV or DVD player. Fewer and fewer electronics corporations even manufacture parts anymore. Meanwhile our overflowing landfills and mountains of plastic garbage are overwhelming the environment—and our health—contaminating land, air and sea, as for example in the island of plastic garbage known as the Pacific Gyre. Small fragments of plastic are now turning up in fish caught for market, and water tables are threatened by seepage from toxic landfills stuffed with disposed electronic garbage. (See: http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-electronics/)

‘Cradle to Cradle’ proposes a revolutionary approach to industry that actually eliminates the waste stream.

As Onandaga elder Oren Lyons has said, “What you people call your natural resources our people call our relatives.” We already have the tools at our disposal to create a society not predicated on garbage. For example, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle, have taken the principle of re-use and combined it with the principle of ‘waste equals food.’ Simply explained, this means that instead of engineering products to become waste, we need to imitate nature, in which the concept of waste does not exist. All ‘waste’ material from the process of decay is put back into an ecosystem as ‘food’ for another part of the cycle. This ties in neatly with Janine Benyus’ concept of ‘biomimicry,’ in which nature is studied in detail to engineer products that work with natural processes rather than ultimately working against them. Braungart and McDonough have consulted with Ford, Nike and other corporations to explore ways of putting the ‘cradle to cradle’ principle to work. As with the concept of lifetime computer hardware that can be retrofitted, it could mean a running shoe that goes back to the factory for new components, or a car body that can be upgraded as moving parts wear out. (See: http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm / http://biomimicryinstitute.org/about-us/what-is-biomimicry.html)

Janine Benyus coined the term ‘biomimicry’ to define the study of nature to help us design products compatible with natural ecosystems. Courtesy treehugger.com

You probably see your company as creating solutions to peoples’ business and leisure needs via computer technology. To an extent this is very true. But have you ever considered the stress you create in peoples’ lives when they have to constantly deal with software that malfunctions or fails to perform adequately? The stress caused by families having to earn more and more income simply to afford to replace quickly outmoded technologies? The lost time at work and wasted energy having to constantly re-learn the same programs because software designers were under pressure to get the latest version onto the market? The old-fashioned principle of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ may need to be applied in your software labs. Then your designers could spend their energy fixing what doesn’t work instead of adding sales gimmicks. People are creatures of habit. Changing the look of the menu or moving things around just for the sake of it is counter-productive for all concerned. You may point to management philosophies of ‘pushing the envelope’ of human creativity to spark innovation but there comes a point when human resiliency is exceeded. That shows up as stress and breakdown. Most working people I know are already at that point.

I wonder if you have considered the implications of being a major participant in the disposable culture at a societal level? As a boy growing up in the 1960s I was taught by my father to always do the best job possible, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant the job was. He had come out of an earlier culture, the culture of the Great Depression, when people had to ‘make do’ with very little. As a result people learned innovative ways of repairing and extending the life of things. They also learned to value an item of quality that would stand up to repeated uses and repairs. Of course this was forced on them by economic circumstances, but it was also a ‘hangover’ of the discarded but still useful ethos of craftsmanship from the pre-Industrial Revolution era. Regardless of its source, people who struggled through the Great Depression either knew already or quickly learned the true value of things and how to separate good from poor quality. With the current economic depression threatening to collapse entire countries’ economies, it’s a value system we may soon need to re-learn.

‘The Spirit Level’ makes it plain: equality is better for everyone, even the richest.

By fostering the disposable culture at a time of environmental degradation you also contribute to social decay. When there’s no incentive for quality, only quantity, everyone and everything suffers. (Well except of course for the owners of industry, but that’s another discussion.) Still, in their recent book The Spirit Level, economists Wilkinson and Pickett crunched the data on rates of economic disparity in societies around the world. They discovered that not only is there more crime, drug addiction, poorer health, more homelessness etc. in societies with greater disparity between the rich and the poor; but that in societies where the gap was widest, even the One Percent were worse off. Sure they had more money than anyone else, but the pressure of a stressed-out culture pushing angrily at the boundaries caused even the rich more health and psychological problems. (See: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level)

You speak of empowerment of people in Third World countries, and through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx) you give generous portions of your wealth to help the less fortunate. That is highly commendable. But have you considered that the very disparity you are placing a band-aid over is perpetuated by the capitalism that created your fortune in the first place? That this type of predatory capitalism actually creates many of these victims? Have you considered, for example, that the history of vaccines has been grossly misrepresented in terms of its actual effectiveness? Or do you own too many shares in the vaccine manufacturers to consider this possibility? Have you considered that if your solution to world hunger lies in promoting genetically engineered (GE) crops, you are unleashing a biological experiment whose consequences could negatively affect generations of our descendants, not to mention other biological organisms? Are you interested in helping people solve the problems of health, homelessness and economy in a way that gets at the roots, or merely treats the symptoms?

So please, Mr. Gates, stop a moment now and then to consider deeply the influence you have on the world. As part of the One Percent, your influence is disproportionate compared to the rest of us, and thus needs careful, informed and heartfelt reflection.

 

Poetry’s Ecstatic Fire or The Myth of Objective Distance

1. Poetry to Change Your Life

T.S. Eliot writes of the inner fire that sustains us in his book ‘Four Quartets.’ Courtesy nobelprize.org

National Poetry Month may officially be over now but to me every month is poetry month. From my earliest memories of my father reading the exciting narrative poems of Robert Service to my sister and I, poetry has been a constant presence. And in times of great upheaval and distress, it has been a spiritual anchor, a lifeline. “We only live, only suspire / consumed by either fire or fire,” T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets. This is where the real power of poetry lies: in connecting us with the spirit, the élan vital, the One, whatever name you choose to give it. For me, anything less falls somewhere short of poetry’s promise.

Reinforcing this view of poetry as a vital spiritual force is the writing of Roger Housden on poetry in his Ten Poems series (Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye, etc.). This transplanted Brit now living in the U.S. must have been as shocked as anyone that a series of books about poetry could become bestsellers in this day and age. But they have. The concept is simple: Housden chooses ten poems that have had a profound impact on his own life and then writes an essay drawing out the deeper resonances in each poem. Unlike academic theories of poetics, Housden concentrates on the spiritual implications, leaving the literary critics to the field of dissecting technique.

Roger Housden’s ‘Ten Poems to Change Your Life’ examines poetry’s spiritual role. Image courtesy Better World Books

For many years now I’ve been fond of quoting Emily Dickinson’s famous dictum summing up what made poetry great to her. You can imagine my delight when I opened up Ten Poems to Change Your Life and discovered this very quote: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” Just as Eliot hinted, Housden picks up the sparks: “Good poetry has the power to start a fire in your life. …Poetry like this is rigorous, demanding, ecstatic. Not just to write, but to read poetry like this can be a fierce and dangerous practice; dangerous because you may never be the same again.”

To which I would add: rigorous and demanding, because it demands we face ourselves and the world with truth and integrity; because a poem requires that we engage not just the brain’s evocative capacity but also the heart’s; and ecstatic because poetry that reaches us at this level is transformative, spiritually sustaining. I’ve often said that poetry is the most spiritual of arts and I think Housden would agree.

Emily Dickinson spoke of poetry that ‘took the top of her head off.’ Image courtesy poets.org

Given this unique capacity of poetry, why is it then that the subject is met with anything from shrugs of indifference to outright disdain these days? Aside from blaming generations of inept English teachers in public school, and the decreasing attention span being fostered by the media, what could cause so many to demean this ancient and honourable art?

Poets are often their own worst enemies. Whether they’re the self-infatuated types droning on artlessly at open mic events, the histrionic gyrations of slam poets, or the impenetrable hieroglyphics of academic poets, all of the above is reason enough for many readers to avoid poetry altogether. Even great poets like Eliot often suffer from an inability to present their work dynamically, while slam poets often perform well but show little evidence of craft. Many young poets actually show little interest in learning their own craft; a sign of the times perhaps, when everyone wants to be an instant artist, singer-songwriter, or movie star. Few seem to comprehend the apprenticeship required to reach competency in their chosen field. This may be gained through exposure to creative writing courses or by an assiduous personal study of the craft. As Eliot said, “no verse is free for the man concerned with craft.”

2. The Myth of Objective Distance

Carl Jung, a protégé of Freud, discovered the vital role of subconscious imagery in both dreams and art.

The other reason for poetry’s diminished audience stems from a historical hangover that has persisted in academia for a century now. The 20^th century, even more so than the 19^th, was the Scientific Century. In every field, the rational, the dispassionate was replacing historical modes of thought conditioned by centuries of dominance by the Church. Freud and Jung were opening up a whole new field they dubbed psychology; Darwin’s evolutionary theories were changing long-held views of humanity’s origins.

Not surprisingly, the scientific worldview crept into the arts, or at least—for the purposes of this discussion—poetry and creative writing generally. Suddenly the impassioned verses of the Romantic poets were held as distinctly passé, retrograde, as if they were merely earlier, outmoded stages of literary evolution. I’ve even seen this evolutionary metaphor used to describe literature courses surveying creative writing over the past century. As if the rational, scientific model could be applied seamlessly to the arts. Absurd.

Essayist Roger Housden’s Ten Poems series of books presents poetry as a vital and accessible force in daily life. Image courtesy Books for Better Living

Unfortunately the effect of this new rationality in creative writing has had the effect of stripping out the spirit, the logos that breathes divine fire into the language of poetry. The conceit adopted was that the poet was to be excised from the poem, leaving only the objective image or scene to be perceived by the reader. Housden captures this perfectly: “In the early part of the 20^th century, there was a generation of poets in America who were obsessed with conveying the natural world in as objective a manner as possible… What mattered to them was the external object in its pristine, even scientific, clarity, not the subjective content of the poet. It was as if there was no room in the poem for the soul of the poet. The result was that, in the United States, for generations, images shooting up with no apparent relevance from the subconscious were largely discarded, even if noticed.” (Ten Poems to Change Your Life, p.73)

Without even getting into the fact that much of Jung’s work on the collective unconscious made crystal clear the relevance of apparently disparate impulses from the poet, this conceit has had a long reach. And although Housden writes of its effect on American poetry, Canadian poetry too remains locked in its sway a hundred years later. This ‘objective distance’ has become a staple of creative writing courses, handed down as a received yet unquestioned axiom. It’s a spurious view I’ve fought against my whole career as a poet. It’s as spurious as the notion of objective journalism or objective history. They don’t exist.

American poet and translator Robert Bly wrote of the tradition of ‘leaping poetry.’ Image courtesy wisdom portal.com

So you can imagine with what joy I devoured Robert Bly’s wonderful little book Leaping Poetry. “In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of the work,” writes Bly. “That leap an be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” In Bly’s view this ‘leaping’ was actively discouraged by the Christian tradition, which saw the subconscious as related to our animal nature and therefore to be avoided. “Christian thought… builds a firm distinction between spiritual energy and animal energy, a distinction so sharp it became symbolized by black and white.” Thus, in the hands of poets like Pope and Dryden, poetry took a turn toward the linear, the denotative rather than the myriad implications of connotative language. As Bly points out, it took William Blake to turn the whole false nomenclature on its head, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience. “Blake could see that after eighteen hundred years of no-leaping, joy was disappearing, poetry was dying, ‘the languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few.’” (Leaping Poetry, pp. 1,2)

Bly felt that the move back toward ‘leaping poetry’ was finally beginning, paradoxically, in the 20^th century, particularly with poets such as Neruda. Yet others in the Imagist school were retrenching the rational, ‘objective’ distance, insisting that the poet had no place in the poem. Here is where the whole scientific metaphor applied to poetics goes off the rails. It assumes that, as with science, literature can be mapped on a linear trajectory from the darkness of insufficient data to the clear light of present knowledge.

Romantic poet William Blake tried to reverse the rationalist trend in English poetry in favour of the ecstatic tradition.

The net result is a scientific materialism that has affected all aspects of modern civilization. The detachment so necessary for unbiased scientific enquiry has unfortunately infected all of society, to the point where we are more disconnected from nature than ever. The disastrous impact on the planet speaks for itself. Whether in poetry or the world at large, scientific materialism excises the spirit and turns the world into a panoply of lifeless objects to be used as we see fit.

This is the very antithesis of poetry, that most spiritual of arts. The ‘objective’ poets—like the scientists and capitalists—conveniently forgot that the observer is also the observed, and vice versa. They are one. Even quantum physics suggests that the very act of observation can change or at least affect the observed. A synergy occurs that is more than the sum of its individual parts, rendering objectivity at best a fiction. Any aboriginal shaman can tell you this. We cannot divide ourselves from the world we perceive, nor should we. Our reaction to it at any given moment is part of its dance—the giver and the receiver, the taker and the taken, in one endless round, each affecting the other.

The poet’s gift lies in articulating this dance, this central truth at the heart of perception, and awakening the reader to its many-faceted possibilities. And while it’s true that the poet needs to ‘get out of the way’ as much as possible to allow the greatest possible clarity, it does not mean the poet has no place in the poem. As Blake and Bly make plain, it is the poet’s unconscious ‘leaping’ that intuitively connects the dots between seemingly disparate objects and ideas.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg spoke of the poet’s ‘vatic’ role, linking it to an ancient tradition.

Allen Ginsberg spoke of it in terms of the poet’s ‘vatic’ role, “the voice in the burning bush” that illuminates as in a fire yet never destroys even as it burns. Like Moses, the poet intuits a pathway to the divine in the moment through an ordinary, everyday object. If the object is merely described with scientific detachment, the spiritual connection is lost. The role of the poet’s presence in the poem is to make the connection clear.

Poetic craft is not analogous to a set of surgeon’s instruments, excising the cancerous growth of the poet’s presence from the body under observation. Craft is the music of language, the particular notes and chords, the key chosen from long experience that creates the song and all its resonating under- or overtones. Just as there can be no song without the musician, there can be no poem without the presence of the poet. He or she is the keeper of divine fire that breathes life into us all.

 

 

Blood on the Snow

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” —Alan Furst (quoted in Dirty Snow)

At last! A Canadian poet writes about this country’s involvement in the Afghan war, and does so with skill and keen insight. And cunningly timed for release during National Poetry Month. Wayman has always been a political poet, from his earliest days striving to reintegrate the presence of working people in poetry. Now he has set the national record straight, creating a poetic testament that will serve to refute the glossy official version of events that will likely be crafted for the history books.

'Dirty Snow' by Tom Wayman, Harbour Publishing 2012.

Wayman might well have titled his 18^th collection of poetry Bloody Snow but it takes little reading between the lines to make this point. To be fair, Calgary poet Richard Harrison wrote some scathing political poems on the war in Iraq in Worthy of His Fall (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), including a brilliant remake of Shelley’s famous Ozymandias (titled Saddamandias). But Dirty Snow makes our complicity in the Afghan war its central thesis, contrasting the bombs and rocket-propelled grenades with the blissful ignorance of daily Canadian life at home. Better yet, it roots the domestic scene in our own Slocan Valley, where the poet has lived for many years. A more stark contrast could hardly have been achieved.

Wayman has seized upon the central dualism, the schism at the fractured heart of the age, the psychic split that allows us to go on pretending normalcy even as our involvement in a foreign war deepens. In Interest, the opening poem (prefaced with Furst’s quote), even though “You’re not interested in considering / the war… These dead / were interested enough in the war / once they arrived at it / to die there…” Our dysfunctional dualism is made even more apparent by alternating poems from the bloody scene in Afghanistan to the crisp, invigorating mountain landscape of the Slocan Valley, where “At Lebahdo Flats / cows graze in the morning fog / as the school bus passes.” It’s a subtle reminder: even if all Afghani children could go to school, riding a bus to get there would be fraught with lethal risk.

Tom Wayman's 18th collection of poetry is a worthy addition to the canon of political poetry. Photo by Sean Arthur Joyce

Not content to maintain the fiction that the suffering and dying of Afghanis and Canadian soldiers is ‘a world away,’ Wayman fuses the two in a single poem sequence, such as Mt. Gimli Pashtun. “A loss thrums in the soil here, / vibrates in the cold alpine wind. / Here the Pashtuns blown apart, or maimed / by bullets released in the name of this country / now dwell…” By transposing the carnage from Afghanistan to this snowy peak in our own backyard, the poet is reminding us that no matter how separate from the conflict we may think we are, there’s a spiritual cost we all pay for such duplicity. “Those who rule us have sent / men and women with our money / to kill to protect a corruption / struggling against another corruption…” We may think we can ignore it, disavow our complicity, but as the poem majestically concludes over the glittering snows of Mt. Gimli: “In the serenity / above treeline / a spreading stain bleaches half the sky. / To the south, amid dim cloud mounds, / are flashes of light: detonations / of an improvised / innocence.” This is pure brilliance—a masterful stroke of political art.

Though it may seem a tired comparison by now, the fact that the propaganda masters have so successfully swept the bloody spectre of Vietnam under the rug bears repeating. This Wayman does in The Ghost of Lyndon Baines Johnson Appears as Guest of Honour at a Ramp Ceremony for Three More Slain Canadian Soldiers. A funeral is an appropriate place for ghosts to haunt, especially for those brutally cut from life. Wayman sees not only the fabric of the present rent by a hypocritical war but the curtain separating us from the past. He reprises President Johnson’s words from 1965 that “we don’t want American boys to do the fighting that Asian boys should do,” but the poet is too complex a thinker to paint any of the combatants in righteous terms. Another voice appears out of the air at the funeral to warn that, “if you stop when Afghan police order stop, / they rob you. If you don’t halt, / they kill you.” And yet a third voice is heard piping across the veil that separates the dead from the living, a Pashtun fighter reciting the Muslim hard-liners’ view that “girls are not to be educated, uh that such an act / is contrary to the holy word…” The ultimate result of all this fundamentalist brainwashing, from whatever side, is that, along with the bodies of dead soldiers, Canada itself is pitched spiritually “into the yawning dark.”

Coalition forces on patrol in Afghanistan. Photo: Reuters

The war metaphor carries on throughout Dirty Snow, appropriately. In the section My Wounds, Wayman writes elegies to loved ones and deceased members of the Slocan Valley community. Once again the poet introduces each poem with an epigraph that provides some insight into why he chose to include the piece. These take the place of a Foreword or Introduction, the writing of which seems to have been discouraged in poetry collections over the years. Yet Wayman’s epigraphs often provide fascinating details or perspectives that add to, rather than take away from, the poems. For example, prefacing the poem Snow Right to the Water, he notes: “Even in peacetime, death shadows our lives. One of the devastating events that happens to us all in the normal course of life is the loss of a parent, then the other. I remember reading the see-sawing statistics from Afghanistan on which side killed the most civilians in a given month: the enemy, or ourselves. I doubt it was a comfort to any individual to think that at least their mother or father was shot or blown up by the forces of truth, justice and light…”

By using these epigraphs to tie back into the Afghan war theme, Wayman never lets us off the hook, even when the poems veer into more personal or abstract concerns. It’s the exact opposite of what the corporate media does—fracturing our attention span precisely so that we DON’T call our leaders on the carpet for murdering in our name. In this, Wayman is connecting to an ancient tradition in poetry alluded to by the late Irving Layton, who called poets “prophets and the sons of prophets” (in his sometimes sexist way, forgetting of course the other half of that equation). Prophets not in the sense of foretelling the future but like the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, stinging the collective conscience, bearing witness that all is not as it should be in the Promised Land. It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, but someone has to do it. And if readers can’t take it, too bad. As Layton said, poets aren’t entertainers; if you want entertainment, turn on CNN or the Disney channel.

But if you pick up that remote you’ll be missing the sheer scope and grandeur that poetry brings to our lives, even when it forces us to confront our own shadow. And confronting our collective shadow may just prevent us from being swallowed up by it:

A shrill wail at these losses, this pain

—a sobbing from far within the earth

also grieving

Tears ascend through soil

toward light

As they flood forth

they blaze into flame

and are buoyed away by air

like particulates of ash

or insects

adrift

among these mountains

(Wasps and the Fires, III)

Links: http://www.harbourpublishing.com/title/DirtySnow

Brothers in Arms vs. the One Percent

Warning: Article contains spoilers.

‘Brothers in arms’ is one of those old chestnuts that can be taken two ways, like a flip of a coin. Taken in its usual context, it’s a motto for a military unit, the so-called ‘band of brothers,’ with the ‘arms’ being weapons. Flip it over, and it’s an expression of familial love. Yet both share the quality of brotherhood—one expressed through solidarity in violence, the other sometimes through violence in solidarity—the latter often an apt description of family life. And it’s an apt summary of the theme underlying Daniele Luchetti’s 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child (Mio fratello è figlio unico).

Accio (left) and Manrico Benassi are brothers with opposing and often violently clashing political views. Courtesy Zap2it

But far more than that is at work here. Luchetti ventures into bold territory, exploring what must surely be a controversial subject given 20^th century Italian history. Through two brothers, Manrico and Accio Benassi, the director explores the psychology of political extremism. What’s curious is its setting in the 1960s. It seems that while most Western adolescents are losing themselves in sex, drugs and rock ’n roll, the brothers Benassi are flirting with revolutionary politics. Manrico is a loyal Communist, an ideology his sister and parents share, in part due to the shabby conditions of their lives as the working poor.

Accio on the other hand is slated to become a Catholic priest but soon realizes he is temperamentally unsuited to the monastic life. He finds himself inexplicably drawn to the Fascist ideology, seeing what he perceives in Manrico and his comrades as a wishy-washy idealism lacking action. Although at first a shock in the film, Accio’s choice is consistent with the implicit and explicit violence of Benassi family life. Accio (meaning ‘bully’) finds himself the black sheep of the family, a role intensified by his Fascist flirtations.

The poster for My Brother Is An Only Child. www.brunetti.com

The family’s Communist leanings have made them as intolerant of Accio’s beliefs as if he’d converted to Protestantism. We see how intolerance and the violence that often accompanies it conditions yet more of the same in the unfortunate recipients. It’s a wonder anyone could survive such constant family chaos with any degree of sanity. Accio’s belligerent nature soon finds an outlet in mindless Fascist muggings. The director seems to suggest that his repressed sexual life also holds a clue to his violent outbursts of testosterone.

Gradually however Accio realizes the contradictions inherent in a political philosophy that can’t even get its own history right. He realizes this not from the books he is constantly studying (he has a passion for the Latin language) but from several shocking incidents. The first comes when he arrogantly insults a Fascist boss and is beaten by his own comrades. The second comes when they are instructed to burn the cars of known Communists, his family’s included. His mentor, the middle-aged Fascist Bella Nastri, is leading the gang in the action. Accio pleads with him not to do it—the cars are all owned by working people who are still making payments. Although Nastri agrees not to burn the family car, they burn the rest.

Manrico Benassi is the brother popular with the ladies and just as popular as a speechmaker for the Italian Communist Party. www.empireonline.com

A pivotal scene arrives when Accio attends the debut concert of his sister with the Communist party orchestra. The party’s elder statesman has taken the liberty of rewriting the poem from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy to reflect Communist slogans. As if to really make the point comical, Luchetti has the gentleman hold up cue cards for the choir as they perform. Slowly a group of Fascists arrives at the doors of the hall and in the gallery above, raining down pamphlets and angry slogans. Some are calling the Communist performance a desecration of Beethoven’s genius. Accio confronts one of his former comrades, pointing out that he’d never known them to care about Beethoven before. The performance is disrupted, the hall emptied, but (unusually for this film) no one is seriously injured.

Accio Benassi is the maladjusted brother who flirts with Fascism until his inevitable disillusionment. www.matttrailer.com/

The overall effect is to demonstrate the ridiculousness of both ideologies, and even the idiocy that they are pitted against each other. Luchetti could have played the comedy more broadly but the tone of the film guards against straying into farce. It is after all a family drama as much as a political one, which is as true in life as in art. Although the metaphor may seem too obvious—the brothers as two halves of the same soul—it’s thoroughly appropriate in a political drama of this nature. In retreating into the narrow confines of dogma—whether political or religious—we end up fighting ourselves, or merely the reflection of our shadow in others. A more futile struggle can hardly be imagined, yet we enact it over and over again throughout history. Dogma breeds intolerance, which in less balanced minds breeds fanaticism, which breeds violence, which feeds the whole eternally damned cycle.

Luchetti creates real characters whose experiences teach them something. The irony is that the suave, sexy Manrico ends up becoming more and more extremist and violent while Accio the supposed bully is gradually disabused of his Fascist infatuation. For a while he even joins the Communists. In the end, while his brother has graduated to guns and bombs, Accio gets down to brass tacks and helps his parents and their neighbours organize to get desperately needed housing that had been promised and built but never delivered. He ‘comes up the middle’ between the two extremes and serves his community—something the Chinese might describe as ‘the middle way,’ probably the only way forward now for humanity in the 21^st century. Luchetti deserves credit for courage, tackling such a difficult theme. I’m willing to bet many Italian filmmakers wouldn’t touch a Fascist theme with a ten-foot pole in this era.

But My Brother is an Only Child should probably be book-ended with The Leopard (1963), a classic Italian film starring of all people Burt Lancaster. ‘The Leopard’ of the film is Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an aristocratic patriarch in 1860s Sicily who watches somewhat nervously while the social democratic movement sweeps through Italy. Yet like a true feline, Prince Salina never loses his cool and never allows himself to be drawn into the political fray, at least, not until and unless it benefits the corporate entity his family represents. Some reviewers have characterized the Prince as indecisive, a kind of Hamlet figure unable to form any firm resolve. This misses the whole point of the film. Prince Salina, like a leopard in the wild, merely waits and watches from the sidelines while the herd tires itself running in circles. When he does strike, it’s subtle, strategic and thoroughly calculated to set his opponents against each other. When that fails, he exercises both his aristocratic gravitas and his intellect for cool negotiation to ensure that his fortunes will be spared, even if his political power is temporarily neutered in the ‘new order.’

A young Burt Lancaster smolders as the suave, steely Don Fabrizio, Prince Salina in the classic 'The Leopard.' www.portlandmercury.com

In The Leopard we see how the One Percent maintain their stranglehold—through cunning, clever if heartless manipulation, and the power of illusion. Even though the old world of aristocratic privilege is crumbling, Prince Salina carries himself like a lord and speaks calmly but decisively, as if what he says is self-evident. He is the ultimate patriarch, and the women in his family have no say. This gravitas contains a vein of genuine courage under fire, even though it’s a carefully constructed illusion used by the elite to cow people into submission. An illusion built on the notion that bluebloods are somehow inherently superior, and that—if left to themselves—the rabble will descend into violent anarchy.

In fact it’s a highly cynical view of human nature that tends to be self-reinforcing. Push enough people to the margins of survival and you can hardly expect them not to get fed up and react eventually. And in select cases the elite actively exercise the principle of Divide and Conquer to set political extremists at each others’ throats. Yet in the absence of pyramidal hierarchy life goes on reasonably well, thank you very much.

An unlikely leading man for a film: Peter Kropotkin, Russian evolutionary scientist who coined the term 'mutual aid.'

As Darwin protégé Peter Kropotkin discovered in the ‘mutual aid’ thesis he developed, when Imperial Rome’s end collapsed Europe into ‘the Dark Ages,’ cooperation rather than anarchy was the general rule. The imperium may have fallen, but individual villages and cities just got on with the business of living. Many crafted community charters to ensure that no one in the village—widows, orphans, the sick, the elderly—went without. Hardly the barbarism predicted. Then with the rise of the Borgias and other mercantile millionaire houses of the Renaissance period, histories had to be cast or recast in the light of the resurgent oligarchy. Quite simply, the new Italian aristocracy had to justify its existence and its right to a leopard’s share of society’s wealth. Just as the corporate oligarchy does today. The Leopard actually made me shudder: will we never be rid of the One Percent?

Well, maybe not. But neither will we ever be without our innate need to cooperate, at least in times of crisis. As Kropotkin wrote in his book Mutual Aid, “The mutual aid tendency in man… is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men—when whole countries were laid waste by wars, and whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny—the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it reacted even upon those ruling, fighting, and devastating minorities which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense.”

Once again I say: Amen.

 —With special thanks to Anne Champagne for her insights. 

The Naming Day Part 2

Personal Experience with the Naming Day

Christopher McLachlan was four months old when his Naming Day ceremony was held in his parents’ garden on June 4, 2005. For both Anne and myself it was one of the most memorable moments of our lives. A bond was forged that day that has made us family and we’ve since become his honourary Uncle and Auntie. A close second to the Naming Day for me will be the memory of him at age 6, literally jumping with delight to see me: “Uncle Art! Uncle Art!”

The genesis of Christopher’s Naming Day developed fairly quickly, the initial spark coming about 10 years before his birth. “In 1994 I was traveling in Guatemala in a tiny village that had a bus that comes in once a day,” recalls Fiona. “There was a Canadian man who used to eat at a little restaurant there who invited me to his summer Solstice celebration back in Canada. It was something that had been held for over 40 years.” Fiona attended the ceremony for the first time that summer and has been attending ever since, eventually taking her husband Brian. “The celebration swung from the sublime to the ridiculous, but one of the most profound experiences was the baby naming ceremony,” she recalls.

The Solstice celebration included a theatrical piece and a dance where the evil was chased away from the baby, a practice common to many native naming ceremonies. “It was such a sacred thing; the first meeting of the child with its final lover, the earth,” says Fiona. “It was in the spirit of that that I wanted to celebrate our son. And I wanted to bring my community together.”

Some of us travel on foot and others in our minds. Fiona has always had an innate restlessness and curiosity about the world that puts her in the category of the former. Given her experience as a traveler, exploring India and much of South America on the rough side, an ecumenical ritual like the Naming Day is in character. So it’s not surprising she and Brian asked his father Jack McLachlan—a retired United Church minister—to officiate at the ceremony. Jack is a tall man with a kindly face, a keen sense of social justice, and a gentle manner. He was the ideal choice. His words were few but straight to the heart of the matter—bringing everyone quietly into the circle of honouring a new life being launched into the world. That circle is only complete when a child is made part of both the community and the Earth.

“It was special to bring him into the world with all those lovely people,” says Brian of the Naming Day. “It was just like a marriage.”

Christopher MacLachlan at four months, wearing his mother Fiona's baptismal gown and obviously loving the attention.

From Fiona’s mother Helen Brown came the baptismal gown Christopher wore on the Naming Day—the same one Fiona had worn as an infant, preserving a link in family history. And it provided a link to the family’s Anglican origins, subtly honouring it without bowing to the full weight of Christian tradition. Yet there were strong traces of aboriginal ritual, especially in the blessings. Brian and Fiona carried Christopher around the circle of gathered friends and grandparents. Each person was asked to offer a blessing or a poem, spoken to him and his parents. If possible they were to state how they would continue to support Christopher in the community as he grew. In a time of deeply fractured community, it was a moving gesture.

A shower of blessings for a new life: Christopher obviously gets what's going on.

What struck me so deeply that day was Christopher’s reaction. At four months old he seemed already an ‘old soul’ to me. He was absolutely alert the entire time, his great blue eyes wide, as if to make sure he didn’t miss a single word or gesture. Unlike some babies that age, he was able to look you straight in the eye. At a certain point in the ceremony, one-word blessings of the assembled people, written on coloured paper, were showered down on Christopher as he lay on a sheepskin. The moment was unforgettable—as the brightly coloured bits of paper floated down on him, a smile lit up his baby face and he laughed heartily.

“There’s such a place in ritual for the loving and grieving of humanity,” says Fiona. “I wanted to do that for Christopher, create a space where he could be lovingly held by the entire community.”

Brian and I had been friends since before he met Fiona, while I was writing my heritage column for the Nelson Daily News, probably during Nelson’s centennial year, 1997. We were both poring over files at the old Nelson Museum on Anderson Street—me for the raw material that would become my columns and Brian for historic images that would eventually become the Millennium mural he created on Hall Street downtown. Museum director Shawn Lamb introduced us and we struck up an instant but lasting friendship. I have never met a man who combines such warmth of spirit with so fine an intelligence, not to mention a sense of humour worthy of a stand-up comic. And like Christopher’s grandfather, Brian is a passionate advocate for social justice. In other words, he is endowed with all the qualities that make Christopher a great father.

Among his other gifts is the ability to memorize passages from great literature and poetry. When I read my poem The Naming Day at the ceremony, Brian and Fiona both later admitted to being mesmerized. As if to repay the favour, when Christopher was about three and a half, his father set him down on a worktable in his shop and said, “Christopher can recite William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger.” And that’s exactly what he did. I could hardly believe it. But then, with two such bright and gifted parents, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Brian, Christopher and Fiona help us with the apple harvest, New Denver, August 2009.

Today Christopher—or ‘Kip’ as we now call him—is a healthy, active seven-year-old who seems to have inherited his father’s ability to build things, as evident in an ongoing fascination with Lego. Both parents are great lovers of language and have seen to it that books, rather than the TV or computer screen, dominate Kip’s intellectual horizon. His favourite books these days are the Adventures of Tintin, which he often reads to us when we come to visit. Its stories subtly introduce kids to archaeology, history and politics, with a vocabulary that would challenge some adult readers. Kip attends the local Waldorf school, and enjoys its emphasis on learning through creativity.

Would we still be in Kip’s life without the Naming Day? Certainly. But for all my dislike of formal religious tradition, there’s something powerful in the act of a public ritual, particularly when it remains fresh and vital. In my view religious rituals should be made to undergo renovation on a regular basis, to clear out the cobwebs of dead habits that no longer evoke a sense of transcendence as they were originally intended to do. As T.S. Eliot reminds us again in Four Quartets: “…the past experience revived in the meaning / Is not the experience of one life only / But of many generations…”

 

The Naming Day—Welcoming New Life Part 1

“You have inherited a thousand generations of wisdom, skill, poetry, song, all the sunrises and sunsets of knowledge past. You are the sum of all the people who went before you.” —A Recipe for Dreaming, www.essentialbaby.com

1. A Long and Varied History of Naming

Humanity’s entry into the 21^st century has been—and will continue to be—one very rough ride. It’s as if all our past sins have come back to haunt us—global climate change, collapsing economies, species extinction, the poisoning of our air, water, land and food systems with chemicals and microwave radiation… It’s almost as if we should be first apologizing to children being brought into the world, because we’ve certainly set their generation a mighty challenge. This century could be the one to determine whether the human race continues much beyond it. So for their own sake, let’s hope that every child born is a so-called ‘indigo child’ of exceptional talents and abilities. They’re going to need them.

Face-painted girl at Hills Garlic Fesival, New Denver BC, 2006. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

The best we can hope to do is give them every advantage possible, though for those growing up in poverty this will be difficult. In this socially fractured age, when the digital revolution has sped up our lives to breakneck speed, it can be hard for parents to know how to integrate their children into community. There are the inevitable streams that will eventually feed their little ones into the wider social world—school, relatives, etc. But especially in large urban communities, it can still be the case that you don’t even know your neighbours.

Although the churches have much to answer for throughout history, in the past they did at least provide the social focal point for families. With the decline of Christianity in the West, more and more people are seeking alternate paths of spirituality, although there has been a resurgence of Christian fundamentalism. (Not unusual in a period of societal decline as conditions become more unstable and people retreat to the security of dogma.) This decline opens up both new possibilities and new challenges. For some it may simply be a case of exploring long dormant family traditions that had been suppressed by mainstream religion. For others it’s a whole new territory, an opportunity to combine aspects of ritual meaningful to the individual. This is what is so tragic about the loss of tribal cultures around the world: they are repositories of ancient ritual, which is to say, repositories of meaning.

Swedish calendar from 1712 with list of names for each name day. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

One example of a ritual that has been resurrected is the tradition of the Naming Day. This ceremony can occur as little as a few days after the birth of a child or up to a year afterward. This is not quite the same as the Christian Orthodox or Catholic tradition found in many European countries of the ‘name day,’ which arose from the tradition of saints’ feast days extending back to the Middle Ages. Particularly in southern Europe and South America today, name days—known as Onomastico in Italy—are observed as scrupulously as birthdays. (Source: Wikipedia: name days.) Name day calendars also have a well-established tradition, with different calendars for different countries. Each day in the calendar has a list of names commonly given children in that country, many of which were once derived the names of patron saints. In some countries the name day is celebrated more festively than birthdays, and gifts are expected.

Naming Day ceremonies also have a deep history, particularly in Hinduism, Judaism, throughout Africa and many North American First Nations. According to Medicine Wheel teacher Duncan Grady, in the Siksika Blackfeet tradition naming ceremonies often occur some time after a child’s birth, although they are given a Christian name at birth. The child’s native or tribal name is given after the community has been with the child during the first 6-7 years of its life. “The teaching is that during this time the child has a foot ‘in both worlds,’” says Grady. “The child’s innate abilities are often in view during this time. So, the experience of the child often contributes to the name that she or he will receive.”

The Nigerian Igbo tribe holds a naming ceremony for the child on either the fourth or the eighth day after birth, depending on mother and baby’s health. “Paternal grandparents officiate Igbo ceremonies,” explains afrikannames.com. “The ceremony begins with ancestor recognition and divination, followed by the name giving and planting of a live plant to represent life and survival. Next, a participant pours a wine libation to share the child’s name with the ancestors. After the usual breaking of kola nuts and prayers, the ceremony, which traditionally lasts an entire day, ends with a family procession.” The use of plants, wine and nuts helps the family reinforce the child’s deep connection with the land of their ancestors.

This little girl unwittingly made a peace sign with her hula hoop at the Hills Garlic Festival, 2007. Photo Sean Arthur Joyce

The loss of traditional ceremonies like the Naming Day or later rites of passage into adulthood have left many young people feeling adrift in modern culture. In the pre-industrial age, families seldom strayed far from the village of their birth, so extended family members were all close enough to welcome the child into the community and help care for it. Age-old traditions were easily maintained, helping children feel part of a wider circle. This continuity was shattered by the dawning of the technological age in the 19^th century. The advent of machines ushered in the classic paradox: it freed us from backbreaking labour and gave us unprecedented mobility and at the same time stretched the bonds of community ever thinner.

Consequently, in the West, the lack of a formal ‘initiation’ into manhood or womanhood may be just one of many contributing factors to the formation of street gangs. Gangs or clubs typically serve the role of both initiating individuals into a select circle and acknowledging competence—vital aspects of socialization. Yet without the guidance of elders, street level initiations can go horribly wrong. In our wholesale adoption of the youth culture in North America, we have exiled to the margins one of our most valuable spiritual resources—the acquired experience, knowledge and wisdom of the aged. Instead we belittle them in popular culture as doddering and useless and relegate them safely away from us in retirement homes. It’s a modern tragedy.

Many Christian churches now offer Naming Day ceremonies as an alternative to baptism for parents uncomfortable with church rites. England’s North Yorkshire County Council, for example, offers such a service: “Every naming ceremony is personal to you and your child. The ceremony includes readings and promises to your child chosen by you from our ceremony booklet. Supporting adults and grandparents can be included in the ceremony and make their own promises, chosen by you, to the support in the upbringing of your child. You may also wish to give a special gift to your child during the ceremony.” (http://www.northyorks.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=2857)

“What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning,” T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets: Little Gidding. With the astuteness of the poet, Eliot hints at the cyclical nature of life, that contained within our beginning are the seeds of our end, and vice versa. Just as we honour a person’s leaving this life, it’s appropriate that we honour their entering it. It’s a way not only of welcoming new life into the community but of honouring generations of ancestral memory and experience, keeping the great circle intact. “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” (Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton)

Part 2 to follow: Personal Experience with the Naming Day