“Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don’teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you’restuck. Sodon’tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou’re tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon’tletyourfeetstop.”—Haruki Murakami (from Dance Dance Dance)
(Clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part.)
Maybe I’m a bit slow but it always takes me a while to catch on to seasonal shifts. This weekend, I finally felt myself really sinking into autumn. There are a few gardens on my street that are enjoying a farewell flourish. I love the slow wither and drift. I love the look of something, once grand and complete, gently falling away.
One of my favorite stories is The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. It takes place in a weird post-industrial landscape. A boy finds a bizarre and mammoth creature on a beach, and decides to find a home for it. (“Nobody else seemed to notice it was there. Too busy doing beach stuff, I guess.”)
There is a deep melancholy in The Lost Thing about what gets left behind. People who read the story may have different ideas about what it all means. For example, does the lost thing represent the imagination? Is it meant to be a paean to society’s castoffs? An indictment of capitalism? Is it about our tendency to categorize and pigeonhole the foreign and unfamiliar? (Responding to the story’s ambiguity, Shaun Tan has said: “I guess the concept of a ‘lost thing’ is quite philosophical, but not in any specific way.”)
What remains interesting to me about The Lost Thing, and what I missed on my first reading of the story, is the disposition of the main character: i.e. he is a scavenger. When the story begins he is busy collecting bottle-caps on the beach. On the one hand, there is this streamlined world where people are forever self-occupied and, on the other hand, there is this boy who is dawdling along, scouring the wayside of the world for useless bits-and-bobs. In fact, it could be argued that the only reason he alone spots the lost thing and responds to its presence, is that he is already somewhat stopped or slowed by his scavenging.
There is a whole underground of people combing the world for lost and remaindered things: the dumpster divers, the woman with the rattling cart, the freegans, and the archivists of our surplus. (I wrote about some of them here.) I see the hero of The Lost Thing as belonging to this tribe of urban gleaners. Where others proceed myopically, moving through narrow corridors of experience, he sees the world laterally, moving unbriskly, always taking in the periphery.
Last night I spoke at a museum in Brampton that is hosting an exhibition of personal artifacts selected by the local community. “What objects have you kept from your past and why?” There was an old chair, a medallion necklace, a Royal Doulton figurine, an old airline ticket—each object embedded in a story. As I wandered about, taking a glimpse into other people’s lives, I was reminded of the power of museums to sacralize the everyday. What might have been random bric-a-brac in another context suddenly carried the air of “worthiness.”
But what about those things that don’t really come from anywhere, or have an existing relationship to anything or anyone, and are ‘just plain lost’? What about the objects that have been stranded without a story?
In Shaun Tan’s modest allegory, lost things are portals. They are the doors through which we encounter worlds and creatures we might rarely meet in the normal run of things. It is dedicated to “Those Who Have More Important Things to Pay Attention To.” Yet for all its small epiphanies, it ends on a somewhat disheartening note. The boy-narrator concludes:
“I still think about that lost thing from time to time. Especially when I see something out of the corner of my eye that doesn’t quite fit. You know, something with a weird, sad, lost sort of look. I see that sort of thing less and less these days though. Maybe there aren’t many lost things around anymore. Or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing them. Too busy doing other stuff, I guess.”
How do we stay open when the temptation is to close down to others, to feel overwhelmed by the too-muchness of our digital age? The story offers no pat answers but it does show that the world is an infinite and whimsical place for anyone willing to embrace strangeness and mystery.
“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”
—Virginia Woolf writing about Lewis Carroll.
(Glass lantern slide based on based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustration.)
Last night I watched and listened to the storm from my attic bedroom window. It was high-octane drama: from the insane lashing of tree branches to the whoosh and howl of gale force winds to the abrupt wail of sirens rushing to a west-end fire. Last night, my double-glazed windows suddenly seemed very, very thin…
Here is a link to a piece I wrote for Shambhala Sun about maintaining (swaying) balance in the face of outer or inner storm conditions.
(Etching by Tokyo-based Kumi Obata.)
The primordial urge of childhood is to re-invent the world, to reject the already-signified (be it a Lego castle, or a Tonka truck), in favor of the disassembled and fragmentary—the yet-to-be. Children break toys apart, reduce them to raw materials, and re-combine them in order to contravene the laws of nature and manufacture. All children are surrealists at heart. They can make a squid drive a bus, and draw speech from a log.
My own children inspire me by refuting the rules and values which govern the adult world, by retreating into the forest of their imaginations. They show me what it means to be a creator rather than a proprietor: to see in the world things worth making not just worth owning.
(Art by Mika, age 8.)
Thinking of teachers: the one with the wild scribbled notes that grow wilder with enthusiasm or tiredness, the one with the ears that seem larger for being open and listening, the one with the reclining deckchair that turns every child into a king or queen for a day, the one who can transforms a child’s hindrance into her proud gift, the one who calls on the weekend to see how a child is doing after a bad fall, the one who encourages loud undisciplined reckless music, the one who gives space to a child’s grief without making that space feel like a banishment, the one who openly admits to being outsmarted every single day, the one who teaches the genius of a good mistake, the one who appears unbendable who then bends, the one who grows kindness in his classroom so it spreads like a robust weed…
Thinking of teachers in Ontario and why they deserve our full and unconditional support (despite the short-term frustration of losing extracurricular sports, arts and clubs) as they defend their long-term constitutional rights, their right to strike and to exercise collective action and their right to oppose the frightful legislation known as Bill-115.
If you want a reminder of what a school can be if its teachers are treated with the respect they have earned and deserve, then you might want to visit George Webster Junior School (as I did last week.) The Principal, Nancy Steinhauer, will tell you that the so-called “little things” (whether that be nutrition programs, weekend programs, a pediatric health clinic) require a boosted staff and can make a world of difference.
A happy and hearty howl of congratulations to Isabelle for her GG illustration nomination for VIRGINIA WOLF!!!
Apparently, Marshall McLuhan would always turn to page 69 of a book and read that page to decide whether or not the book was worth reading in its entirety. Today, I finally decided to give the “page 69 test” a try. The book: Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. (It’s actually one I read several years ago). The page:
I loved reading Nuala’s book but what I found on page 69 made me pause. Those who know me even a little know of my love for John Berger. The infatuation began when I was art history student. One moment I was numbly memorizing the Western canon, the next moment I was sneaking off to watch episodes of Ways of Seeing. What can I say? Berger was my moonshine, my contraband cigarette. His entire worldview carried a waft of the illicit. With his piercing stare and tousled hair, he opened my eyes to what a story (or an artwork) could be—i.e. the thing happening off to the side of the tale other writers/artists were telling. Call it the “sideview” or “underview” or whatever you wish. I have been lost in my own version of (what Nuala O’Faolain describes as) “hero worship” ever since.
So Nuala and John. There is So Much Implied on page 69 (and page 68!) but let’s forget the salacious, and perhaps questionable, overtones and focus instead on the gulf O’Faolain describes existing between the coal miners and the villagers they filmed. This idea of the “gap between” strikes me as one of the most perfectly observed portraits of empathy and its limits that I have ever come across. “There is a gap between what you can see and feel and what you can imagine….between the life aboveground and life underground.”
If we’re very lucky, if we find the right book, or the right circumstance, I suppose that’s where fiction can take us—to that place in-between. Imperfectly, and maybe in a compensatory way, our stories have the power to get us a bit closer to seeing and feeling other worlds.
(For those lucky enough to live on the west coast, a portrait of Nuala O’Faolain is currently screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival.)
The winners of les Prix Jeunesse des libraires du Québec were announced this past Saturday in Montreal. “Fourchon” (the French version of “Spork”) received the award in the 0 to 4 years old category. Isabelle and I share this honor with our wonderful French publisher, La Pastèque.
(Isabelle Arsenault created this beautiful drawing in appreciation.)