I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland.
Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of November, charting the narrator’s exploration of her world. It sits very comfortably beside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital; a short novella that is saturated with gorgeous passages of writing, a novel way of seeing time and space, and an almost imperceptible pace.
As the title suggests, this is a book that investigates depth. Towards the end of the second volume comes the clue that unlocks the plot device: “Time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not a river. It is a space, a room, a pool, a container.” Volume 2 ends with a beautiful three page meditation on the world as containers, which I can only invite you read for yourself.
Locked in this container of time, the narrator Tara Selter has to discover depth in order to give her life some meaning. The story meanders between longer explorations, that include trying to solve her problem, seeking an experience of seasons, exploring the history of the land in which she finds herself. As she goes she records notes about what is important to her. It’s not clear that there is any reason for that other than that she is consigned to this single container of time as a human, she seeks deeper and deeper meaning in it.
One passage that stood with me is a conversation she has with a meteorologist she meets, who explains to her what season are:
“…the meteorologist then began to reflect on our strange relationship with the seasons. She talked about astronomical seasons, and meteorological seasons. About the calendar years division into spring and summer months, about people’s surprise when meteorological phenomenon did not occur with the calendar, even though everyone knew that any attempt to synchronize the weather with the predictability of planets and calendars was pointless.
She did not believe, however, that seasons could be regarded as meteorological phenomenon. Temperature and precipitation are meteorological phenomenon, she said. Cold and heat, cloud burst and drought, but seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomenon. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes. Conglomerates of experiences and feelings, perhaps. People ask if it won’t soon be summer, even though we are well into July, simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. We going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures from the seasons that lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn – and always snaps with sandals in the summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons, and when everything fits, we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has gotten right. If it is winter in a film, there is always a little snow, she said. Or frost. Even if the film is set in southern Europe, there will always be a sprinkling of white, to let us know that it is winter.”
Containers and constraints generate the spaces inside which we make meaning. What we choose to see, what we fit with our predetermined ideas, or what emerges as we explore things that aren’t implied by the constraints themselves. Containers are emergent. Meaning arises within them and about them.
Balle’s work is a gorgeous meditation on this, with a gently travelling plot line that takes sudden turns into new landscapes contained ointment the experience of a single day.
Volume 3 sits beside me. Volume 4 has just been released in English. There are seven volumes in total. All calculated.
Flags flying on the waterfront at Shearwater BC. There are two standard Canada flags and two of Curtis Wilson’s 2005 Indigenous Canada flag
I spent yesterday, Canada Day, with my friend Pauline Le Bel inside the common room at our municipal hall. The room was filled with the “Canada Day Re-Imagined” part of the program. Michael Yahgulaanas‘ recent works were on display, there was a full collection of posters of the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we were there to solicit donations for the Welcome Figure Project that we are championing.
I appreciate how Canada Day is celebrated on our island. It is a celebration and invites a thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in this country. National holidays don’t need to be excuses for blind nationalism, but they don’t need to be blindly critical of the nation either. They need to be complicated and nuanced reflections on where we live, what we love about it and a celebration of the ways we can make it better, by building community, advancing justice, and listening to the varieties of experience that surround us.
In last week’s Undercurrent (vol. 52, no. 26), our excellent local newspaper, one of our renowned local poets, Jude Neale, offered a Canada Day poem that, in a quiet way, names some of this. I’m sharing it here with appreciation:
Canada Day on Bowen Island
By Jude Neal
On Nexwlélexwm, morning arrives by ferry.
The ramp lowers with a groan of metal,
and Bowen Island opens itself to the day,
green and salt-bright, waiting.
Children spill onto the dock
with paper flags in their hands,
red and white flickering like small flames
against the blue harbour air.
Their laughter rises first,
light as gulls,
carried over the water
and caught in the cedar branches.
Strawberries come next,
stacked in cardboard trays,
ripe and shining,
little summer lanterns
held carefully between two hands.
Along the shoreline, the day gathers colour.
Coffee steam curls above paper cups.
Dogs nose the grass and shake seawater from their coats.
Voices drift between picnic blankets,
folding chairs, coolers, bicycles,
the soft shade of trees.
Families settle on the grass.
Friends wave from across the field.
Someone makes room at a table.
Someone pours lemonade.
Someone laughs and calls a neighbour over.
And Canada appears, quietly.
Not only in the anthem,
not only in speeches or flags,
but in the ordinary grace
of people making space for one another.
In a shared plate of berries.
In a hand offered onthe dock.
In stories carried here
from prairie towns, northern rivers,
Atlantic kitchens, Pacific rain,
and all the long roads between.
It is there in many voices,
many histories,
many ways of belonging.
It is there in courage.
In care.
In the work of welcome.
In the hope that a country.
can keep learning how to hold its people well.
Above this small island,
the summer sky opens wide.
Far beyond it, the north remembers its green fire,
aurora ribbons loosening across the dark.
The prairies breathe gold.
The mountains keep their snow.
The Atlantic throws light against stone.
And here, on Bowen,
the sea folds all of it into one shining afternoon.
A child pauses at the harbour's edge.
Her flag flutters softly in the breeze,
a red maple leaf against summer green.
For one still moment,
the island seems to hold its breath.
The ferry waits.
The water glimmers.
The cedars stand tall.
And through this small bright scene,
the whole country seems to shine.
Thanks Jude.
A baby barred owl seen last Wednesday by Terminal Creek, near our home. These owls breed every year in the same place and the babies sit in the trees and wheeze at passers-by until their hoot-makers come in.
Today I turn 58 and In a couple of weeks I will have lived on this island for 25 years. Being here for that length of time – a duration that has long exceeded anywhere else I’ve lived – tunes one to the finer rhythms and changes of time and place. Today, the thing I’m noticing is the change in the dawn chorus year to year. The sound of the dawn chorus which begins in April really and shifts through a few movements in May and June before abruptly stopping in the summer, is like a developing symphonic piece. There are distinct movements to it that are consistent enough year after year that one can discern the mark of the composer on them. These include the constant buzzes and questioning whines of the towhees, the two note calls of the chickadees: the black-capped clear and bell-like; the chestnut-backed buzzy and wheezy. There is always a distant goose call from the bay, about 600 meters away below us to the south. Juncos chip in the garden. Flickers hammer on roofs and power poles. Crows harass whatever predator is threatening them or call to each other from the beaches down below us. From high above it all, ravens offer their occasional grumbled commentary on the state of things. Creepers and kinglets sing the hyper-soprano parts.
As the spring progresses though, the yellow-rumped warblers (affectionately named “butter-butts” by birders in these parts) and the robins take pride of place in the chorus. These will be later joined by the orange-crowned warblers. As we get into June, the black-headed grosbeaks start singing with their clear, loud phrases. White-crowned sparrows begin calling and a visiting western tanager will offer both flashes of colour and lovely ringing song. Flycatchers round out the chorus, with the western offering a whoop-dunk, the Pacific a wolf-whistle and the willow a sneeze.
But it’s also the variations that grab my attention. In 2020 we had nuthatches meeping away everywhere and then they disappeared from the chorus the next year. Pine siskins, who will migrate hundreds of kilometres east or west in search of eruptions of insect populations will almost overwhelm the chorus some years, while in others, like this year, they will be completely absent. This year western warbling vireos are everywhere and seem to be the most common mid-range voice in the choir. And little packs of bushtits move through the understory like gangs, something we don’t get every year.
This is the body of work that the land here produces. When I travel at this time of year, I notice ways in which the niches of voice are filled by other birds, but after living in a place for a quarter century one can discern the subtle movements and compositional techniques that the island, in this place, and at this time of day employs in its expression of the season. This little patch on which I have sat for 9,000 mornings has its own body of work, and every day, every season, and every year offers variations on the theme.
The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention below.
Cory Doctorow has a long piece today that centres on the theme of “the world moves on.” it is a survey of how the 21st century has gone, the concentration of wealth, the degradation of products, law, governance, environments and organizations. The rise of a fascist view of the world that divides us into those “born to rule” and those “born to be ruled.” It is a push to acknowledge that the real feelings we are all having that something is fundamentally broken is not just a nostalgic throwback. The idea of “Making * Great Again” is not that we go back to a time when it was great. It is that we go forward to a time which the persona that declares that intention is in charge of everything. And others are not.
I had a lovely call yesterday with a younger colleague, a person whose dreams and aspirations and talent propelled her into a relationship with power that helped to meet her desire to have an impact in the world. But she found herself trying to wrestle with the cost of that. What does it mean to get close to power, to have a hand in the policy that changes lives, to be involved in a tangible way to make the world better for many people? There is a cost to it, and I can relate. One feels as if one is selling a soul for the chance to grab some influence.
It strikes me as an interesting bifurcation. When I worked for the federal government in the 1990s I was part of a team of people that ran a very important third party stakeholder process which brought non-Indigenous voices and interests into the treaty process. I didn’t;t always like or agree with the people that I was working with, but as a representative of the Government of Canada I took my job seriously. We were doing the work of treaty making and not including the voices and intelligence of people who would be affected by those treaties was to do a disservice to the First Nations with whom we were crafting a sustained and historical relationship.
My colleagues all had different interests in our work. Some were generally distrustful of government to be able to represent citizen interests and they were motivated to ensure that third parties, especially business interests, were as involved as possible. Others were motivated by the history we were making and desired to be a part of something that was sustainable over time. Still others were deeply motivated to ensure that First Nations found themselves in a just and reconciling process and that the honour of the Crown was of the utmost importance. And some were just good public servants which meant they did what they were directed to do and did it well.
I left that job when someone senior to me told me that “I cared too much” about the work. I wore my passion on my sleeve which led to a disagreement with a new boss who didn’t have the lofty goals of my former boss and whose inattention to relationships and the historical nature of the work was lost behind her need to establish technocratic credentials. I hung out my shingle and went to work for Indigenouos organizations, non-profits and governments that were committed to the work of building communities and caring for people.
Several of my friends went the other way, into industry or saw out their careers in the public service. We had been held together in the common project of treaty-making, even though we had many different motivations and purposes for being there. I don’t know that anyone ever felt like they were selling their soul to do the work they did after they left. But they made choices to find them places they cared about and aligned them selves with that. There is always a tradeoff.
In speaking to my colleague yesterday we both shared a sense that over time our sense of impact had shrunk, perhaps to a more realistic size. We all have huge desires to make a legacy in the world, and it takes true encounters with power to find out if we have what it takes to do that. I am in awe with my friend who have successfully run for public office and formed important pieces of federal and provincial governments, or those who has started non-profits or advocacy organizations that have pushed the needle on public policy. I have done a little of that in my own way, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the local work I get to do, by which I mean what happens in the encounter with people who are confronting real particular problems, often with no solutions. I love sitting with 80 year olds in church halls talking about the future of their congregations and accompanying them in the transition. I love sitting with leaders who are exploring how to expand their ability to work with multiple voices and multiple perspectives. I love to watch our Bowen Island business community wrestle with what a local economy might look like in THIS decade. Or a social services agency who has the talent and connections to deliver good quality services in new ways becasue the context seems to drive them to impossible situations.
Cory’s piece names a dynamic that he associates with “conservatism” and its worth quoting in detail:
I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?
Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:
Now I don’t think that’s necessarily “conservative” although it certainly captures a big wing of the current American conservative movement. I think it’s a description of fascism. But it nevertheless points to a feature of our current times that derives from the concentration of wealth a power: we are increasingly isolated from he levers of real power such that stuff we CAN is not stuff that can FIX whatever is happening.
Doctorow concludes with a kind of muted optimism that the way to be in this world is to be political. Join a union, join a political party, get political. Put your hands on the levers of power while we still have them:
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must.
I like his spirit. But I don’t know. I don;t know what to tell younger colleagues and I don’t know what to tell activists. Politics has become thoroughly enshittified. I have great respect for the people that run for office and chose to govern, especially in the local sphere, but the way politics is related to governance is constrained to serve the interests of the market, the “economy” and those that wield power in those places. That doesn’t mean I don;t think we should devote ourselves to one another and the things we believe in. And I do think we need more unions. The law is still somewhat intact which is why First Nations in Canada are coming in for so much attack. The powers that be know that Constitutionally protected rights throw a wrench in the works of global capital interests who wish to be as unfettered as possible to extract, ship and profit from resources that are located in territories in which First Nations exert a legal form of title. The law still matters a bit, at least in Canada. If I was a young person want ting make social change, I might go into law. I found myself donating to organizations like Egale that fight for the protection of human rights.
My father’s world was different to mine. I started my first real job the same week he was downsized from his, from a company where he had spent 26 years, where he had reached to ceiling of promotion and where he was happy to live out his life as a junior executive. He was escorted from the building at 6pm on a Friday night, because he had been working late. His sole piece of advice to me was “don’t give your loyalty away.” That served me well. Perhaps my advice to folks now is “don’t surrender your love, purpose or integrity.” But I done;t know ho you also make money doing that.
I think the world is different than it has been. Maybe you feel the same way. All I was able to offer my friend yesterday was a connection to someone I felt she might resonate with, and a willingness to just stay in the inquiry because she was so genuinely committed to doing good work in a full-hearted way, with incisiveness and discernment.
What kinds of things are you doing to find your way in it? What do YOU tell younger colleagues who want to do the work you do?
For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go.
The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are tied to a seller – be it Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books or whatever – and DRM locks means we cannot transfer material to a better reading device. Getting myself off Amazon has been a challenge because the kindle really is a great device. (Ton’s posts inspired me) And my subscription to things like BookBub means I have a bunch of books on my kindle that I want to read and for which I paid a couple of dollars. I don’t want to lose those. Kobo seems like the easy answer, but again, won’t let me read kindle ebooks.
The obvious answer is to read on my phone or buy a tablet that can download apps. But that’s another problem. As I’m trying to manage my sleep better, blue light screens at night are not a good idea. Over many months I can see on my Apple Health app how blue light has affected my sleep if I use my phone within a half hour of bed. Reading on the phone is no good. And an iPad is just one more computer that I don;t need, with less utility than my MacBook, with all the toxic attractor basins of a connected device and with a poor reading experience.
And so ChatGPT and I launched into a small research project to find a device that reads like a kindle, allow me to install apps and read from them and tightly constraints its access to the web. After reading some Reddit threads and fitting some ideas to my constraint regime, I decided to order a BOOX Go 7. This is an android device – the first I have ever owned – and it allows me to load my kindle library, my Kobo library and the Libby app (which I use for library books and magazines like the New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry and The Paris Review). It also allows me to sideload books which means I can download epub files and pdfs from places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and so on and easily transfer them to the device.
And it was the cheapest device of all the options I looked at, coming in at a little over $270.
It’s all set up now and it was helpful to have ChatGPT accompany me as I learned the ins and outs of the device. Nearly every question I had got answered by the LLM which was great. It’s a whole other world learning a Chinese-designed android device that is neither a phone or a kindle, but so far I’m there, and I like it and it feels good to have my library in my hands again in a way that means I can lie in a hammock with my phone in the house and spend the summer free of distractions.