Dreams, Expectations and Perennial Melancholy

Honoré de Balzac, French novelist of the nineteenth century and author of the vast Human Comedy, once wrote that 'disappointments measure how great our hopes once were'. His numerous works often illustrate this very point, from the young provincial going to the big city with dreams of being a literary sensation (Lost Illusions) to the young law student witnessing the greed and depravity of those surrounding him in the heart of Bourbon Restoration Paris in which social climbing through deceit and marriage is the only way to become successful (Père Goriot).

In addition to disappointment, there is the theme of disillusionment, the finding out that things are not what they seem and the little of the world that is black and white reveal only a removed prison from the gray that evolves and warps and undermines one's perception of the world. The idea that there is no place to stand in this world, that wherever we are is prone to change, erosion and the this too shall pass of Biblical implication is the only constant. The platitude that the only guarantee is there are no guarantees has offered little comfort but remains a nagging truth.

Balzac was an early influence on my ideas and how I regarded the world. I read his novels in my late teens and early twenties and though I have not returned to his works, I still feel his stories resonate in my own life. And it's not that I experience perennial disillusionment or constant disappointment, it's just for every endeavour relying upon hope and expectation there is a balance. Balzac's characters recover and learn and though bruised and sullied, corrupted they persevere despite the emptiness they encounter in the world of humankind, an emptiness made stronger with its institutions of marriage, bureaucracy and church. 

Though they don't succeed at first, they find their appropriate paths and depending on their character sink or rise though its often a question of perception. In our world, money, a house, time to travel and kids are the accoutrements of success and the hope for them a solemn reminder of how much of our lives is determined by what others expect of us.

For these so-called successes often act as weights and in the instance of the individual who makes money he or she is often chained to his or her work (once I overheard a cell phone conversation in which a middle-aged man,  most likely a business man said "You know Tom, it's how it is. You have money and there's no time but if you have time, than you probably don't have money"). 

And yes, there's the model home, a house to be envied but time isn't kind and with all its passing reveals new repairs that need to be made and remodeling that need to be undertaken. Our lives are tormented by fashion and trends - we are afraid of being left behind, being outdated.

Travel is good but as Stoic philosopher Seneca once noted there is no escape from who you are despite where you are (or to put in succinctly in the words of Mr. Brady in the film adaptation, "Wherever you go, there you are").

And as for children, I routinely encounter young mothers who long for an hour of free time. They have their little ones and take special pride in their role as parents but there is a sadness hidden in the creases below their eyes. They dreamed of becoming a mother, their mothers asked them when they would become mothers and suddenly, they are and their other, more personal dreams have been placed aside.

And this is where I wander into philosophy when I ask what is the difference between what we dream and what we expect? And by dreaming, not what we do every night but what we strive for or believe is the rightful place we are meant for. 

There is the dream of having money and the expectation of what it will bring. The dream is fulfilled and sadly, there is no time. 

The dream of a new house but the happy house owner recovers from the honeymoon of ownership excitement and the expectation becomes a new bill to pay, a mortgage hanging over one's head like the sword of Damocles. 

Travel to escape but there is the weariness of travel and the longing to stay in the places we believe are more beautiful than ours. 

The dream of children, the longing to see our blood and lineage carried on, the joy and miracle of child birth but then the duality of expectation ensues. The new parent is expected to raise the child and the expectation of being fulfilled never arises. 

Perhaps this is why I side with pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and writers like Honoré de Balzac. We begin naive but then it's only a matter of time before we realize that all we want has no meaning and will not bring us complete happiness. Shards of happiness and excitement are scattered here and there but desire has only taken us to the next desire and the satisfaction of one thing leads us to a newer void, a new hunger to satiate. 

Perhaps this is why I hate listening to the radio because music is only a brief distraction from the constant barrage of advertisements. There is no serenity it the voices that try to remind us we are not anything until we buy this or that product (and god do I despise the numerous radio disc jockies with their over-the-top enthusiasm for things crass and useless like clubs you have to go to and concerts you should attend... fuck off...)

For Schopenhauer, resignation from the will, the driver behind all desire is the only answer. For other thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, living the good life, a life free of akrasia (i.e. not being able to control of command yourself) is the best solution. If the desire is deadly or painful, don't fulfill it and be happy with your decision to detach yourself from the dark yearning. 

And I do believe perception is a large part of attaining happiness. For myself, I think happiness is a fleeting event in one's emotions. Disillusionment follows when we believe happiness should be our constant state. There is the climax of a reward or a gift. A wedding is a day of happiness but it's only one day. The birth of a child or a promotion is a cause for celebration and feeling elated and high only lasts for so long before diapers need changing and more hours need to be put in at the office.

We are happy but then we come back down. And being down where we usually are isn't a bad thing. Inspired by my mother, I have come to believe that melancholy is our default state of being. But here I must stress, I don't completely associate melancholy with depression. I would argue that melancholy has a spectrum ranging from just below joy - that place in our minds and emotions where things need to be done and the quiet resignation of accepting the work and upkeep is paramount to persevering - to the sadness and disquiet one might experience when one is alone and there is no respite from the solemn thoughts of life, death and the perennial passing of time. 

There is no drug to heal the melancholy because we need it, it is very the home we return to after fooling around with happiness and joy. There is a contentment to melancholy, a pleasantness along with a gravitas. The fact that we push ourselves to smile is a sign of senility and sickness. A smile is a commodity of the customer service industry and I tire of the belief that it is necessary to help sell products based on the idea that it will ease one's mind and heart when there is no ease.

It is wonderful to dream but equally wonderful to bless the melancholy of daily life (and again, think of the spectrum of melancholy and not its traditional association with depression and down-ness). The beauty of dreaming is kind so long as we don't expect it to fulfill voids or hungers or nullify the perennial state of our getting-by in life. A dream that doesn't come to light is not a failure. Dreams aren't always successes in one's heart. I think we make up these expectations that something awaits us and will relieve us of this burden of being human. The damage of disappointments and disillusionment is a result of the ridiculous expectations we place on being alive.

We are all meant to die. It's the way it is. Being dead won't hurt but life will be over. Whatever dreams we had won't matter and the expectations will finally be purged. I feel the key to  making life good is enjoying the melancholy, finding peace in the aftermath of happiness. I distrust happiness not because it lies but because we lie to ourselves about its importance. The only hope we should have is seeing how petty our illusions and beliefs about life are. Whatever is grandiose should be immediately distrusted.

The Tractor Beam and the Fear of Loneliness

Growing up, I would often wonder why my parents still lived together. I never saw any sign of affection, they didn't hold hands nor kiss with any kind of love or tenderness. It was like watching two strangers live together, so little in common beyond having kids and a mutual history. They went to the same high school for a year, knew the same people growing up. When my mother returned from her West Coast travels, my aunt re-introduced them after a soccer match. 

I know in some way my mother wanted security and my father represented that. And in turn, my father wanted a rebel, someone different from the women he had met, someone different to help distinguish him from his brothers and sisters who had all married very staid people. 

And so they forged this marriage and it lasted twenty years. But they realized you can't love a representation. Masks are mislaid or re-painted and over time, my father began to rebel against my mother and my mother, tired of the suffocating security, realizing it had made her a prisoner, looked for love elsewhere. The marriage crumbled slowly, they kept up appearances but my brother and I both witnessed the fighting, the unhappiness, the strain. My brother and I were in a way divided as I sided with my mother and he my father. (Thankfully, in our adulthood, we are more open to both our parents and see them and love them for them as opposed to a 'side' to pick.)

When they separated at first, I wasn't angry but I was. I said it was about time - my exact words -  but I was bothered they couldn't have done it earlier. I hated my adolescence and having your parents split apart during the rockiest years of your own growth, doesn't give you a firm foothold in the world. 

But I continued to study them, watch them in the wake of their dying unity. And in turn, their lessons have become my lessons. The question of love and how to love never leaves me because there have been occasions where I almost followed in their footprints.

In one instance, just turned twenty, newly home from B.C. I met a woman who worked at a local print and frame shop. How we met? I just went in to drop off my resume. We ended up talking for about two hours about books, poetry, painting and music. The next time I dropped by, I suggested we go for coffee. She was pretty but I was more attracted to our conversation. I didn't have a lot of friends at the time and wanted to be wanted. And here was my chance. 

It started out as a kind of friendship that fell into a relationship that fell back into a friendship only to get more complicated by becoming a relationship again... all in the course of four months. She was the first woman whose body I explored. I had seen women naked in strip joints and the magazines my father stored on the top shelf of his closet. But here was a naked woman, in my presence, under my hands. And I kept telling myself, you're only attracted to her being attracted to you. The desire to see her naked, to kiss her became a kind of addiction but when we went out in public, I couldn't hold her hand, ashamed of myself for not being honest with both of us about how I truly felt. 

The sexual chemistry was there but my attraction was based solely on what I have come to call the 'tractor beam'. With this woman, I was responding to her, reacting to her affection as opposed to being stimulated by my need and longing for her. The attraction wasn't mutual. During our time together, whether kissing or fooling around, a part of me felt like it was floating around, watching the scenes unfold. Kissing her, I felt this pity for myself because I wasn't going after what I truly wanted. I was settling. 

Of course, it had to end. After a day trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake, walking downtown, holding her hand, I knew I was being a fraud. We broke up the next day, quickly and painlessly though a part of my regretted it. I know I made the right decision and hoped something better would come along.

The 'tractor beam' didn't affect me until many years later. Dating fell by the way side due to being ill for so long - just getting through a day was an ordeal. But when I started to consider the opposite sex again, I either met the unrequited, the hard-to-get type or the 'tractor beam'. This occurred when I was living out west. I met a young lady in a continuing education class. We hit it off as friends and hung out. But I started picking up mixed messages. If we were friends, how come she made an effort to emphasize her cleavage? She also seemed incredibly sympathetic about everything I talked about. At times, it seemed I could do no wrong. 

Then one night I suggested we become friends with benefits. No, that wouldn't do for and it was like I offended her.

Shortly after that, I invited her over for dinner. We drank a full bottle of wine, watched half of a movie together. She said she had to leave and the tractor beam took over. 

Maybe it was just seeing her go, spending another night alone in my bed that made everything less real to me. Of course she was pretty - she's very attractive, brown eyes, nice cheeks, a soft voice - but I wasn't in love nor felt the hunger for her beyond the sexual and basic need of comfort. 

Throughout our time that evening, I kept telling her I wanted to be her boyfriend and that we could work it out. But I was lying to myself and her and the friendship which had briefly become a relationship only barely recovered in the weeks thereafter. Waking up the next morning, I regretted my advancement to her - though she had given me enough cues and hints that would have tormented any sane, single man with sexual yearning - and wrote her an email that morning.... I should have waited though. Receiving my email, she left work emotionally destroyed. Angry emails found their way in my inbox and we didn't speak for two months. 

When we re-met, she had found someone else...

And I suppose, I'm writing this now because I'm concerned it might be happening again. I've met someone recently, enjoyed our conversation but I don't see her as the kind of woman I want. She's had her trials, her disappointments and it's true, there's something fascinating about her but fascination isn't love (nor is infatuation which is kind of a sad obsession). 

And it's one of those things where if I go somewhere, I seem to keep meeting her. I feel the quiet tragedy build up and pray for the strength to avoid any miscommunication or moment of weakness. It makes me wonder if most people are together simply because they are afraid of the loneliness that surrounds them. Working in a winery, I see couples come in everyday and I wonder what percentage are happy or just merely content. Many appear to be doing well, or maybe they've been drinking wine and wine makes everything lovely and everyone lovelier. Maybe people need a little bit of blindness to care for the person sleeping beside them. 

And so it is, I'm tired of this pattern I've fallen for - actually several times... though for the sake of brevity, I'll leave writing about them for another occasion. At least having this post I can come back to it, read my thoughts, hopefully avoid my next disappointment with myself. These words are my own testament and having written them will no doubt sustain my awareness, reminding me not to be weak but strong in my approach. I've been lonely before but I would rather be on my own than be with someone I have no honest affection for.

This I can truly state.

Interpreting 'Cornerstone' by the Arctic Monkeys

My brother first introduced me to the song 'Cornerstone' by the Arctic Monkeys. The initial listen was preceded by this encapsulating explanation: a man, perhaps young, is going around at night finding different girls who all resemble his ex-girlfriend. In each encounter, he asks these female look-a-likes if he can call them her name. By the end of the song, alone, desolate, the narrator wanders into the 'Cornerstone' to find his lost love's sister, on 'the phone to the middle man' and in a moment of grace, the sister allows him to call her 'anything [he] wants'.

Since that rudimentary listen, I've tuned into the song umpteen times, fascinated with the hero's journey involved as much as the pop sensibilities of the band's music. One would think the song was mulled over and built like a story but according to Alex Turner, the band's lead singer/guitarist and main songwriter, the song was written quickly and in the morning. 

But as with many brilliant pieces of music or poetry, there is something intuitive that arrives when artists are most vulnerable. And being a writer, poet and songwriter myself, I find the morning the most natural time to compose because one is fresh from sleep and only emerging from the flurry of dreams. There are no inhibitions, no dominating thought beyond the feeling of being half-way between night and day.

The song 'Cornerstone' gives one a sense of that borderland, the liminal state. Like the hero's journey I mentioned above, the narrator is on search. What I find the most fascinating is that every locale, from the 'Battleship' to the 'Rusty Hook' and 'Parrot's Beak' each have a certain pirate if not sea-faring theme. We get the impression the narrator is 'at sea', at a loss, cast off. And in the first place or what we assume to be a club he sees a girl that looks like his lost love under 'the warning light' (perhaps an allusion to lights used in vessels under attack). She is a 'vision trick', a play in the eyes and the narrator is foolish enough to approach and ask her if he can her 'your name'. 

From this first verse, the listener realizes the narrator is addressing the eternal you and we are immediately taken in. It is a love song but far from typical in presentation. The genius of this song lies in the descriptions, the places he goes and the three different girls before he meets the sister at the song's end.

Take for instance the second verse in the 'Rusty Hook' where he approaches a girl 'huddled up in a wicker chair.'

I wandered over for a closer look

Kissed whoever was sitting there

She was close, and she held me very tightly,

Til I asked her awfully politely

'Please can I you her name.'

Building on his story, the first verse illustrates the narrator in a comical situation. By the second, we realize his obsession and subsequently begin to feel more compassion. What makes the second verse all-the-more poignant is that for a brief, fleeting moment, the past is recaptured. The girl opens her arms to him, he once again experiences an instance in which his loss disappears. Here it is, he can almost be happy again yet he opens his mouth, making his polite request to give this new girl the name of the one loved and lost. 

The chorus, repeated twice opens with two brilliant lines: I elongated my lift home/I let him go the long way round. Here, we get the impression he is in a taxi, on his way to who knows where but he doesn't want to get there fast enough. He wants to slow down. He smells her scent on the seat belt and the aroma alone, tantalizing and bittersweet, keeps him from instructing the cab drive on the best short cuts. Again, he is recapturing the ghost of his lost love, albeit in a fragrance. The past, a mere impression, haunts the narrator but he is determined.

In the third verse, there is a claustrophobic if not destructive element. He is in the 'Parrot's Beak' and the third template of his lost love is playing with the smoke alarm. The club is loud, the girl has a broken arm and the walls are wet, giving the impression the girl has successfully triggered the building's sprinkler system.

Despite having the use of one arm, the young woman spells out using a Letraset that 'no, you can't call me her name'.


Letraset is a UK-based company that produces markers and other artistic publishing products. It could be she is using the traditional manufacturing sheet of transferable lettering or one of the writing tools produced by the company. Considering the girl in the third verse is using a Letraset writing tool, we can safely assume she is a creative person, whether in graphic design or marketing or maybe even a graffiti artist considering the prank she is pulling off.

The narrator is unsettled by this third encounter, disconsolate, even questioning his own reality. In the bridge portion of the song, he wants to know where his lost love is hiding, worried he will forget her face. To me, this might even suggest he is falling for girls that may resemble aspects of her personality as opposed to appearance. If his memory of her looks is dissolving, then we know he is only looking for the comfort of the past, its name. Her name. In other words, the narrator only desires the feeling of being in his previous relationship for how could he forget the face if he has spent the entire evening mistaking all these girls for his lost love?

By this point, we return to the chorus, the long cab ride, haunted by the scent. The listener must now wonder: is it the same cab or is he following her, hoping to get a final scent in this sacred backseat? If the former, is he asking the driver to wait outside each locale? And in the case of the latter, is his lost love just one step ahead?


Whenever I hear 'Cornerstone', I am reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke poem that begins with 'Du, im voraus/verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene' which roughly translates into, "You, just ahead/lost beloved, the Never-to-come-one' or as Stephen Mitchell brilliants interprets as "You who never arrived". In the said poem, the narrator feels he is following the wake of his 'verlorne Geliebte', that everywhere he goes, he is reminded he is always one step behind and will never catch up to her.

...An open window

In the country house – and you nearly

Stepped out pensively to meet me. Streets I found

You had just passed,

And sometimes the mirrors in the merchant shops,

Still spinning from your reflection became startled

By my unexpected presence (my translation)

The 'Cornerstone' narrator experiences the same wistful hopelessness as Rilke's and we get a sense of the bittersweet in the poignant piano solo that acts as a kind of prelude to the final verse. The music feels like raindrops on a car rooftop, the flicker of lights through a windshield, maybe even the melodic tears of the narrator in his hapless silence.

Thankfully, hope springs eternal and things are always closer to resolve following the bleak and bitter. The narrator wanders into a 'Cornerstone'. The name, ironically, is derived from a counseling centre in the Arctic Monkey's hometown of Sheffield, South Yorkshire in Northern England. In the song, we may assume it is another club or perhaps a play on the words corner store. Either way, the sister is by herself and the narrator feels she will understand his predicament. 

She was close - you couldn't get much closer

She said I'm not really supposed to but yes,

Call me anything you want. 

The song closes, the journey ends but an attentive listener will always have questions. If he dated this lost love and then finds himself in the company of her sister, does that mean he was always looking for her? If throughout the song he found templates of his ex, does this resolve indicate he is finding peace or is he again lost in the rapture of repeating the past? 

The sister, especially, intrigues me. I assume she is as compassionate as the listener. We already identify with him by the first verse as we see things through his perspective. We want him to be happy because we want to be happy in our relationships. In a sense the sister is a surrogate but also sanctuary and with her acquiescence the song closes only with more questions but the listener is released from his anxiety concerning the narrator. The sister (like a sister of mercy) will take care of him; we are relieved. Judging by her reaction to his plea, perhaps she is acquainted with his sensibilities and attitudes. Like a nurse in a psyche ward, she is familiar with his psychosis. Perhaps she is even used to him and has long expected this - for how else would the narrator have predicted she would comprehend his situation and open his arms to him?

Ultimately, the sister goes beyond the previous girls in that she knows what she is getting into. The first girl was simply a trick of the eyes; the second may have been amorous, kissing this new stranger but unwilling to play his game while the third was a trickster, up to no good. The sister is the climax of the tale, the deus ex machina for how else could such a wonderful song end? 

The sister is also 'your sister', the ex's sister and because the song is addressed to the eternal and elusive 'you', 'the she' behind all his solemn and scattered behavior, the sister is like another pawn.

The listener has enjoyed the journey but the sister (again 'your sister') must put up with the narrator, in a sense - when we think of the title - become his counselor. 

The ending can only allude to the suddenness and illusion of happy endings. The narrator hasn't found what he is looking for (or maybe he has if we consider he was always looking for the sister, his ex being a simple prelude) nor has he recaptured time. There is a significant element of failure here. What he will attain from his relationship with the sister is unknown. But judging by his behavior, he will go on unsatisfied, unsettled, his desire tormenting him. 

He is lost, the you he was looking for is no where to be seen, stilling hiding but the evening's journey is thankfully over. 

The song ends and rests with his rest.

The Winter of Summer, The Summer of Winter

I openly admit the winter of 2010/11 was a rough one - I ended up in the ditch outside of work one morning, hitting a patch of ice and sliding into the embankment, but that's another story - but I'm strangely sad to see it go. 

No... I shouldn't say 'strange'... this is normal for me, this different kind of melancholy watching the snowy days recede.

Many people look forward to spring and summer. There is the burst of blooming colours -  barren trees beautifully sprinkled with white and pink blossoms - along with the eagerness and energy to meet the longer days, to walk over the green grass, to see the bare arms and legs of strollers pass, pale but tanning in the sunshine.

Spring and summer are certainly wondrous seasons. Life re-emerges, almost miraculous from the cocoon first laid by autumn leaves and the subsequent quiet walls of winter. People can't wait to get into their gardens - my mother included. People can't wait for the beach, kids can't wait for the summer holidays - so much 'can't wait, can't wait' as so many are looking forward to summer sports.  Hockey dads are active in winter, what would summer moms do without soccer? There is a certain raison d'etre, I'm sure, involved in little league games, in carting around swarms of tiny sports enthusiasts, their bodies buzzing with sugar and enthusiasm.

But for me, I have no kids, so there's no responsibility there. I don't have a garden - though I would like to someday (but that's a kind of lie I want to believe in). I'm also not a sports enthusiast. I could care less about beach volley ball. I like watching soccer on television with my father because he has an excellent memory for players, team stats that bring a new dimension to the game. 

Overall, I'm an introvert and though I work in an environment where I showcase extrovert tendencies  (I'm a tour guide at a winery, a rather entertaining one on a good day) I prefer Fall and Winter because the seasons suggest a time of solace for my inner sensibilities.

And that's just it Spring and Summer are about opening up, sharing, showing, revealing which extroverted people tend to do by being exuberant and social in large gatherings. These latter two seasons are by 'nature' (and no pun intended) gregarious. People sit on patios in the summer, the crowds come and go under sunny skies. Though people read at the beach, they are not slugging around battered copies of War and Peace. We have beach books because people want something mindless to read while they are mindlessly sunbathing. It's just the way it works.

Spring and Summer are times when everything comes to the surface after resting in the chthonic layers of Fall and Winter. As the grass becomes greener and the April rainfall falls away revealing bluer skies, I have to ask myself, like the German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, in his famous poem, Abendfantasie (Evening Fantasy) Wohin denn ich? Where then do I go?

In the poem, the poet looks around him. The ploughman sits peacefully after a day of hard work. Sailors are welcomed into town by the church bells. Friends and family have places to go, people gather in the market, in their homes. Where is the poet meant to be, distant, alone, far from the crowd? 

I relate to Hölderlin because I have been asking myself that very question even before I read his poem in my early twenties. I have been asking that question every April.

In Fall and Winter, solitude is acceptable. We as human beings pull away from a world that is no longer warm or hospitable. The days are shorter and evening's darkness haunts our drives home, our dinner hours. Fall and Winter - the time when students are busy pouring over their books, when War and Peace must come out and be tackled for lack of anything better to read. It's hard to read something cheery and flighty when it isn't cheery outside.

Winter especially... that feeling of waking up, the chill, the longing to stay in bed but then, just through the windows, the scintillating but sullen blue of snowy mornings waiting to be breathed in. The scent of chilled cheeks, that blustery redness like a blush, so beautiful on the faces of pretty girls. Winter, with the hypnotic drone of windshield wipers and that sense we are living somewhere between a half-forgotten memory and a sleep-laden reality. Snow heavy on the lids of windows sills, snow on the roofs of churches. The world of Winter telling us to dream and wonder, even if the bare branches appear slightly nightmarish like bones torn from their flesh. 

Now here comes Spring and Summer and a part of me is asking myself, what now? How am I going to act and relate to people who, by reading the above paragraph would consider me a candidate for  anti-depressants. I don't care for the beach. I like patios but it's not going to be the death of me if I don't get to one right away. 

Wohin denn ich? I feel a little naked about this time, threatened (yes, 'threatened') by the warmer days because I know my solitude shows up, is readily seen. Though I like being social, I've never been that party guy, that social guy that knows everybody. And I've gotten to that point where I just don't care if I'll ever get a girlfriend... (yes, probably my problem right, this guy needs to lighten up...)

I suppose it really comes down to that feeling that Spring and Summer also represent things I would like but because of my predisposition, my biography, I'll never really have. There's a part of me that wishes I could lie on a beach and do nothing but read bestseller novels or spend an entire day drinking beer on a patio, listening to a band. But that's just it, I would feel I'm wasting time. And I'm not saying others are wasting time, it's just that's what they want and need. The way that the cool kids needed to hang around in circles on the play ground and do nothing but give you, you the outsider, the impression they had something going on. That longing to be the cool kid still resonates in me but it's so badly misplaced I have to shake my head. The cool kids are really the most boring people in my mind but what I'm not equally fascinates me for the fact I can't be it and if  I tried, I'd deny what makes me unique. 

And I've often wondered what I will be in the person, the being that will have someone. In my own fantasies of love and relationships, I don't see the person I am but this 'other' who goes to the beach, is social, has a large group of friends, etc... But he isn't real, there is no grounding to his life, the way a fantasy is merely a cultivated counterpoint to balance with our daily lives.

Spring and Summer represent 'the other' I'll never know, this counterpoint. The person I could be if I loved these two seasons wouldn't be the person writing this. You won't find me on a beach with a volley ball. I prefer a beach when the leaves are falling, when tanned steroid strutters are no where to be seen eye-balling a set of bimbos.

The poet in his Evening Fantasy looks further, up to the purple clouds where there is a Spring blooming - his Spring being a peace, a haven. He asks himself, why is the sting of restlessness always effecting him.

I know it affects me. I'd rather be doing something than not. Fall and Winter help motivate me, Spring and Summer are all about indulgence, superficiality, reminding me of People magazine and Cosmopolitan covers with bikini-clad celebrities - people offering us only the vacuity of entertainment. That is Spring and Summer for me. It's life in North American society which has yet to appreciate the deeper and finer things because it has yet to cultivate them. 

In the main and to best summarize: Summer for me is what Winter is like for the extroverted ones, 'the others'. I suppose I have to accept this. They got through the Winter, it's my turn to get through the Summer.

That Sense of Almost Home

The night's synthetic half-light, rolls over your steering wheel
I'm closing my eyes just for awhile...We're almost half-way


A house - the first thing I see, filled up with a family...
Surrounded by city and by sea...We're almost half-way
Will you wake me when we're almost half-way;
I don't want to take this trip alone...
- Villagers, Home

A co-worker friend is visiting Japan. Several weeks ago, before the earthquake, I was reading her status on Facebook, she said she was home but sick. I misinterpreted the word 'home', thinking she had already returned to Ontario, that she was back with her husband, happy again.

In writing back, she corrected me, mentioning she had a few more weeks in Japan. 

It made sense. I had forgotten how long she was going to be there. But it was all due to her use of the word 'home'. I then understood - for her, home wasn't here but there.

The idea then struck me, how home is sometimes, if not ever the place you live but the place you come from, the place you often want to go to. For my co-worker, home is the return. 

Then the earthquake struck. I thought of my friend and knew she was safe,  visiting family in the west. Meanwhile, homes throughout the north east of Japan were swallowed up in floods. A single tsunami had overtaken and destroyed the lives of many. I began to wonder what happens to our lives when our ideal of shelter is struck and weakened. Home becomes vulnerable; in the aftermath, the word then becomes less associated with a place, more a concept, a moment in time so strangely ephemeral, elusive, even irretrievable and yet, there it is, the centre, the very core of who we are and what we want. 

In the wake of the news footage, the word 'home' continued to haunt me. I thought of the word and how I've routinely used it in the past. While living in both Victoria and Vancouver, I would refer to home as that place where my mother lived on Vancouver Island. The various apartments I had rented and lived in, moving from to the next, distant from her and my step-father but familiar to me were simply way stations, unstable and transient places with a bed, a bath and some brief respite. Home was the hour I walked into her foyer, home was the good hug of welcome. 

While living in North Vancouver, I would occasionally take the ferry over to see her in Parksville and it was always difficult leaving. Not that I'm a mama's boy, but for me, it was like leaving the comfort, leaving the return to the past I wanted to keep. Every visit, the entire feeling of home rushed back into me. It was like time traveling. Though I was older, the childhood I had experienced and given up to be an adult came on with the feeling of home. Home in the coming back for lunch hours half-way through school. Home in a dinner meal, a time when my father asked the gas attendant to fill it up for twenty dollars. Home on a street that is still there but the aura of connection is no longer felt. Home with all her ghosts and evenings, watching the neighborhood kids ride home, lingering on a stoop, laughing at something a friend has said to embarrass himself.

Home and the "almost". In British Columbia I continually experienced the echo, that moment in the before and after of being home, a time of both anticipation and loss. There is nothing like the feeling of being close to where everything is complete. There is a wholeness in the dream of being home. Home, how it floats closer and closer then leaves. How sweet and brief. And when I left and returned to all my apartments, the walls that were supposedly mine felt dead; my bed, my kitchen, my bath and front door, as soon as I fell back into that place I couldn't really possess, that feeling of exile flourished in my heartbeat.

Perhaps it had to do with the reminder that I wasn't happy then. Home helped me forget, moreover it helped me forget the present and return to the past, appreciating its aura, longing for its rebirth. 

It doesn't cease to amaze me how memory and home come together. Another co-worker, also Japanese once told me about her first going home after so many years of living in Canada. While riding the train from Tokyo into the country, she said she felt quite moved, sentimental and tears began to pour from her eyes. In her childhood, she lived between the sea and the mountains. This was her home and when she left it for the city, she wanted to get away, to challenge herself and  live amidst the busy urban streets. Eventually she met the love of her life and moved to Canada. There were hard times, those barely getting-by kinds of months as she and her husband struggled to bring things together. Life eased up, they found a place together. But then after settling, she flew back to see her family and on that train ride, the sense of loss and homecoming collided in her. It was so beautiful, she said and I could relate. 

After living in British Columbia for over five years, my father and step-mother arranged a ticket for me to travel back to see them. I recall boarding the plane with a dance in my step. I was excited because I was about to see my hometown for the first time in over six  years. Arriving late at night, my step-mother and father greeting me at the airport, I wanted to believe I had just woken up and that those six years had been a strange miracle I experienced but had left no physical record on my body. I wanted to reclaim those years and start again.

But I had lived six years away from where I felt the closest to peace, a grounding. I left on bad terms with my father and brother; I left because I needed my space and home then didn't feel like the home I stepped back into.

On that trip, I saw my father's new house on Lake Erie, my brother's new condo and all the latest developments in the city. Soon after, I saw the house I grew up in and the nostalgia swept over me. I didn't cry, though there was a moment where I wanted to walk through that old front door again. I wanted to hear the sound of a barking beagle coming up from the basement. For a moment I even did a double take as my brother drove by the house, thinking we had missed our stop. Why aren't we pulling into the drive? I remember thinking. 

Since moving back I go by the house, asking if it is possible for anyone to logically explain, even metaphysically why a place could still be a place even though it had fallen out of our possession?


Home is the place of the beloved, the out-of-reach for me. Living in the sense of 'almost home' means one isn't quite there yet but what is there? Is it fulfillment or a feeling that you are closer to the truth of your life, to seeing it the way you have always seen it in your soul and not with your eyes?

Though I live in an apartment, this evening, after taking a long nap of recovery (I hadn't slept well the night before, having consumed too much wine at a family get-together) I woke up with that feeling of loss again, of not having what I had in my sleep. I dreamt my bedroom had filled with different colours - greens, yellows, reds and oranges. I dreamt I had moved on to somewhere else but didn't know. I awoke slightly confused and melancholic. I wish now there was an English word to describe that feeling when we have lost something that was never ours. A word to describe what we can't lose because it doesn't belong to us here, only in the 'there' of our souls.

That's the word I need.

The word would be in the periphery of the "almost home" concept and emotion I've been dwelling about. The word would make the entire yearning, the sehnsucht as the Germans call it (an often untranslatable word meaning the "inconsolable longing for one knows not what" to quote C.S. Lewis)  feel embodied, more real and less abstract.

But I'm struggling with this.

We have 'home' in English which is from the old Germanic 'khaim'. But what about the ghost of home and the emotions associated with that ghost. We need a word to describe how home is no longer home. We need a word to help us distinguish between the places we feel safe and loved and the places that have no meaning but we reside there nonetheless. For my Japanese friend, it is the former she wrote about. I know this.

Maybe there is homelessness in our language (the German philosopher Martin Heidegger often discussed a similar idea in his works).

Is it futile to think that once we create or find these words, it will be a matter of living something new again? Or is it just a matter of continuing, building new experiences in new places even though they aren't the same as the ones we want and can't have back? For me, home does feel elusive, out of reach and what pours out of me is the sentiment and the philosophy that maybe it's attainable in a different shape, with a different perspective and attitude. From now on, I have to give up the old home and bring on the new, moving past the mourning for the irretrievable.

Then perhaps, poignantly, the 'almost home' will lead my way to home.

 

Beauty as Completion

Many years ago I read an interesting quote which today I cannot remember verbatim. 

The idea of the quote, however, resonated with me. 

I had been reading a newspaper - I believe it was The Globe and Mail, though again, I'm not sure - and there was a section of odds and ends. Amongst the columns of forgotten words and quip-like phrases a woman author said something rather pertinent regarding beauty. She said unattractive women are the ones who become artists, who gravitate towards finding themselves and completing themselves in art. The beautiful women, because they are beautiful, feel complete, therefore, they don't look for art, for that missing spiritual link in their lives. 

The impact of those words burrowed in me. I wish I had the exact quote, the exact wording because I wonder how deeply my memory is tarnished in attempting to reconstruct the ideas of this now anonymous writer. 

Over the years, the quote continued to hold a light up to truth for me, especially in regard to my social life.

Many years ago I dated two artists, one in Vancouver, one in my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario. 

In regard to the above quote, I have to mention that in both cases, I wasn't truly attracted to their looks but their ideas, to the conversations I had with them. In our North American society, we are often culturally bereft due to the dominance of television, movies and the music trends of the moments. These two women, each with their own charisma and faults, their distinct personalities and desires had no real winning beauty in their features. But they had thoughts, ideas, they struggled with concepts. 

The Vancouverite, yes,  was a bit dark. She smoked, she said cynical things about love and channeled the  anger from her previous relationships' break-up into her writing, music and the paintings I heard about but never saw. The girl I met here in Ontario, worked in a print and framing shop. She painted a hockey player for her youngest brother and other beautiful images - lonely fields, women at windows, gazing out. She read me Tennyson's "Lady of Shalot" and quoted from the letters of Keats.

I was attracted to the aesthetics of their being, their outlooks but not once was I in awe of their physical looks.

This often saddens me. The majority of attractive women I meet or encounter typically have boyfriends, like to watch The Batchelor and listen to pop music and hip hop. They are pretty but conversation gets no further than pop culture. They often glance at me with a weird, tilted head expression when I mention my interest in opera. 

Speaking of the opera, even when I go to Toronto, I rarely find a striking or beautiful female face  in the crowd before viewing a Wagner or Verda performance. Passing from one level to the next at the Sheraton Centre for the Arts, I often see the same kind of women. They are interesting to gaze at but they have a certain severity to them as if sterilized. Often they look like the female alternative to their male counterpart. 

But why am I dwelling on something so superficial as looks? 

Well, I suppose it has to come down to reflection. Reflection in the sense of being pensive but also how the interior and exterior can reflect one's self. The female artist that isn't pretty, is she then searching for truth? In Martin Heidegger's essay, "The Origin of a Work of Art", "art is truth setting itself to work." Those who create must feel they don't have what they are looking for. They are working towards beauty. Are they then looking for beauty in a spiritual mirror? If they can't find it, do they use art as vehicle to fulfillment? Are they exploring the beauty of truth beyond the physical?

If Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Margaret Attwood, and Margaret Lawrence (to name a handful) been attractive women, would they have written a word? Probably not.

If we lack something physical, do we make up for it with art? Charles Baudelaire wrote that sex is the lyric of the poor, meaning they give up creating because they offer themselves to the world of love making. The energy invested in sex could have gone to art. But no. Once they finish their love, they'll turn on the television, watch Letterman, check their email and go to bed.

What always attracted me to the artists I dated was their ability to communicate and be somewhat detached from the expectations of the world around them. They critiqued the status quo, felt the media offered nothing more than useless distractions and no real answers to the rigomarole of life. 

Yet they also wanted the same thing as their friends - namely to find someone, to fall in love, eventually get married. They both expressed interest in the idea of family. The girl in St.Catharines wanted to get married, perhaps because her younger sister was already married and had her second child.

In this regard, I couldn't offer them anything. In both cases, the relationships never progressed beyond the initial basics of dating and getting to know each other. In one instance with the girl from the print and frame shop, there was intimacy but I couldn't go forward. In public, I couldn't hold her hand because I didn't feel a love or even a passion for her physically. She had everything I wanted mentally and emotionally but not in regard to her appearance. I simply couldn't hold her hand because in public I wanted us to appear as friends, to still feel single. We spent an afternoon in Niagara-on-the-Lake, walking around downtown. She tried to hold my hand and I took it resentfully while gazing at the other attractive women around me. 

And that's just it. Every time I engage with a woman who can offer me something intellectually, she offers me nothing in terms of physical beauty. Whenever I've performed at a cafe or attended an author reading, the female listeners are rarely if ever pretty. In North America, intelligence is for geeks, not goddesses. The beautiful women go to the bar, get drunk with the idiots and go home. When they get a little older, they look for someone with a good job or they spend most of their time in their career which limits them. Art rarely touches their lives while television, texting, emails and ipads make up the gap. They get no further than the columns of newsprint and read books that if they were edible would have the same nutritional value as a digestive cookie or sugary Special K. 

Maybe when I read that authoress of long ago with her solemn take on female beauty and art I was highly impressionable. I keep asking myself, did I take the author's words as a kind cue and allow the idea inherent to shape me or did the truth exist there in that long ago reading and I've merely spent my life acknowledging and accepting it? In other words, in regard to the latter, those words warned me.

I feel that long ago author spoke the truth, especially in regard to North American culture. If a stranger or alien were to ask me about the female gender here, I would no doubt mention that the prettier ones lacked culture while the unattractive ones had depth.

I shouldn't say this applies for all, just most. The majority really. I know I sound unkind in my assessment and really, I'm being subjective as opposed to objective, using what could really have been a made-up quote to justify my distaste in the North American female. But to quote Spinoza: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. 

Finding brains and an appreciation of beauty matched with beauty in a single package in Canada is the rarity.

The Grotto

Last year I moved out of my brother's condo into a one-bedroom apartment in the Facer area of St.Catharines.

A generation ago, the community was once home to many new immigrant families from the Ukraine, Poland and Italy. Today, there are many bi-lingual shops, delis, businesses and banks located throughout the area serving these people. 

The move to Facer was necessary. It was inevitable -  I had to find a place of my own or suffer the tension that was evolving between my brother and I. There were several appealing apartments but the one I found in the local newspaper suited me, both for price and location (I commute outside of the city for work and being close to the QEW was perfect).

A month after settling in, restless, in need of exercise I decided to take a mid-summer walk through my new neighborhood. I remember it was a warm evening, the sun was red-orange and fading, the sidewalks, trees and front porches browned by dusk. Passing the park, I made my way down a street of red brick houses, coming across a grotto behind the Polish church on Garnet St. Throughout my thirty years of life, I had yet to encounter such a scene. The Virgin Mary serenely stood, eyes-closed, hands together in prayer within a rock frame, flowers surrounding her. The rocky grotto itself stood protected in a kind of  small amphitheater, the scene above the Virgin painted like a clear blue sky. 

I felt moved by the grotto's appearance amidst the red-brick houses. On such a night, the discovery, albeit solemn, excited me as if I had discovered a hidden, forsaken, peaceful treasure.

I approached the figure of the Virgin and crossed myself, not from any Catholic training but simply in reverence. Growing up, my family never attended a single church service. For my father, the church represented greed and bloodshed. Raised briefly in the Dutch Reformed tradition, my father's father eventually pulled away from the controlling hand of religion. My Opa had quickly tired of his country men's religion, feeling the church only wanted his money, his attendance and his freedom. My father grew up distrusting organized religion. 

As for my mother, the church didn't play a large part in her life and I don't recall any stories of her parent's taking her or rebelling. 

But approaching the grotto, I felt this need for connection. The Virgin Mary, idyllic, clothed in white, the mother of God. A beautiful emblem, an ideal made human, the sacred as flesh, bone and time.

I have always been curious about the sacred. For the Romanian professor of religion, Mircea Eliade, there is the time before time when an event occurred for which we feel nostalgic. This is the paradise we all long for, when the gods and goddesses lived. Time made sacred by the event - the beginning of the world, the mating of a god with his goddess, etc...

In the minds of many Christians, the Annunciation would be considered a sacred time. This moment  is reported in the New Testament when Gabriel brings Mary  news of her pregnancy. An overwhelming event, timeless, poignant for the participants, especially Mary in the realization that her flesh has been touched by the divine. 

Looking at the grotto, I was reminded of how the female, the matriarch had once been the true spiritual centre of all divinity. Before the rise of the Sky Gods - Marduk, Zeus, Ra, Jehovah - the gods of the earth were goddesses and given their due. Demeter (or Ceres) was the goddess of the grain. Gaia the earth. In the religions of Africa and distant Europe, men were the hunters and women the keepers of the hearth. Instead of a patriarchy, a pyramid social structure, the matriarchy was centre based, with every one playing an equal role in maintaining the community.

In the book The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler, basing her research on the writings of Lithuanian-American archeologist, Marija Gimbutas, explores the world of Old Europe and the rise of the Kurgans, the mysterious invaders of the north that took over these matriarch societies, overthrowing them and subjugating their women. 

If one takes a cautious look at today's world's religions, there is a continual imbalance between the sexes. From Judaism to Islam to Christianity. And it is sad that the patriarchy not only extends within religion but also into daily life reminding me that the relationship between church and state, however superficially tenuous is disarmingly strong beneath the social fabric of our lives.

Standing in front of the grotto, I felt a sense of hope, wonder, a secret kinship with the feminine sacred. I thought of a Greek philosophy class I had taken years ago. The professor had a wondrous gift for story telling and reminisced about visiting a quiet Greek island. There, the Greek Orthodox church ruled the land but on certain nights, the women folk would go out and rebelliously light candles for Demeter, tying white ribbons to the branches of olive trees. 

In the Homeric Hymns, it is Demeter, mother of Peresephone who wanders the land in search of her daughter only to find her in Hades. There, the god of the underworld and the goddess of the grain strike up an agreement. Peresphone will live with her mother for so many  months of the year only to visit her husband in the underworld the remaining days. The days Peresephone are in Hades are the Fall and Winter months. When she returns to her mother, these are our days of Spring and Summer. These Greek women, my professor explained, though Christian in their social lives, still revered what was eternal to their land and spirit. The Church runs the land, but the Goddess gives them nourishment and warmth.

It is the same with all truths. They are coated and briefly muddied by falsehoods, ignorance and the insecurity of controlling individuals but they never disappear. They may be ignored in everyday conduct but they are still remembered. And even though the Virgin is respected and loved, she belongs to a sphere beyond the confining churches of orthodoxy. The Truth behind her, the Truth she represents, I realized is the reason why I've never been able to attend a church service or convert.

The longing for the sacred is personal and universal. Leaving the grotto, I left a physical space. I crossed myself, a gesture connected to a religious social structure but one in keeping with the circumstances. The gesture is a form of language and however we use a language shows our character and intelligence. They are as many corrupt men and women crossing themselves as there are good.

The rest of the walk was peaceful, happy. The connection to the moment bright and heartfelt.

Every time I go out for my walk, I make sure to pass the Virgin.