Here's Hoping

I had a conversation with a friend of mine today, about the effort to put meaning to one's own life.

It's no surprise this topic arose on the day after the Easter holiday.

The overwhelming image of the past weekend for me was graffiti on the door of an abandoned church near Bloor and Dovercourt. This mighty old red brick edifice, now surrounded by a wire fence, hung with signs reading "Power Of Sale" seemed a somber sight on Good Friday... the more so, as a hand-scrawled message on the door read "Jesus has left the building. You are now on your own. You'll have to work things out for yourselves."

But a second writer had modified the original message, with a parallel possibility: "Jesus Is Everywhere". Cheering, surely, especially for the former congregation of that bereft building. But what about those, like me and many others, who find themselves not entirely comforted by either sentiment?

Sure, I worship in my way. I spent Easter Sunday the company of friends and loved ones, visiting the McMichael Collection, a temple of Canadian creativity surrounded by a stunning white pine forest, set in rolling hills.

I'm at peace with finding divinity in a place like that, whether it's gazing at Lawren Harris' icebergs, or communing with Norval Morriseau's spirit people, or simply running my hand over the board-and-batten walls of Tom Thomson's shack.

I believe in a resurrection of spirit that accompanies a brisk walk and a breath of fresh air beneath a blue April sky.

Still, putting the meaning to the moments between those moments tests my strength, my resolve, and indeed, my faith.

What exactly is it, I wonder, that I believe in? And is it possible to make meaning of something that can't even be said?

Here's hoping...

Whereof we cannot speak

Way back when, as a student at Pearson College near Victoria, I encountered a book that would change my perspective permanently. It was by the precocious philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, it bore the inelegant title "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," and it was an unlikely bridge between (roughly speaking) Western rationalism, and Eastern mysticism.

It's been a long time since I read the Tractatus, but I remember that it begins with the provocative and profound statment "The world is composed of facts, not things." I also remember that the arguments are laid out like the sections of a software manual: main points are numbered 1 through 7, while their respective discussions are designated by decimal points. Hence, there might be a section 6.1 which elaborated on 6, a 6.1.1 which went into further detail on 6.1, a 6.1.2 which gave a further elaboration on 6.1, and so on. Given that it was written around the time of the first world war, it seems pretty forward-thinking by today's standards.

But what affected me most about the Tractatus, which is extremely literal and deliberate in every way, was that it used the ladder of logic to reach a place in which logic no longer held sway. Wittgenstein pointed out that certain understandings do not stem from deduction; rather, they are "made manifest." Moreover, he noted that the existence of that which logic cannot explain or describe, "what is mystical." And he concluded with a bold and beautiful statement, "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence."

Which brings me to the crux of the matter. I agree with (what I understand of) Wittgenstein, whole-heartedly and reverently. Logic can't touch the ineffable. That's what makes it ineffable. And indeed, beyond our radically subjective lives, wherein everything is filtered through our concsiousness, our sensory input, our emotional chemistry, and our memories, pretty much everything is ineffable.

Yet as an artist I feel my job has to do with sensing that, exploring it, expressing it in my way. It would be lofty to suggest that doing so benefits the world. I'll settle for saying that it feeds my soul.

But in any case, I believe that music and art and the written word waft the scent of the ineffable into the halls and cubicles of ordinariness. I believe that creation can be glimpsed and hinted at intuitively. I believe we can share little morsels of communion with the divine. But is doing that just trying to say what cannot be spoken? Is it only a disturbance of the critical silence to which Wittgenstein referred?

I think not. I think what we do as artists is to point to the existence of the ineffable, usually implicitly, by expressing the poignant limitations of the human condition. We try to say what is, and the open-minded listener or viewer or reader is led, perhaps, to that indescribable vastness of what-is-beyond-what-is.

About this, we can say only, it is, because it must be, as a corollary of our own limited and experiences. "I think, therefore I am; I am limited to this thing that is thinking; therefore, that which is not me thinking, is...?" We can say that it is, but we can't say what it is.

We can give the divine, the ineffable, the inexplicable, the unknowable a name, a name like "God," and we can sing, dance, sculpt, paint, write the glory of the name among the pains and perils and gifts and glories of our own experience.

But what God is... about that, we can say nothing.

Is that not the profoundest peace of all?

'Twixt shaper and sheep

Years ago, in a damp and dirty basement beneath a ramshackle Halifax house, I found a ragged, coverless paperback book. It was called Grendel. I wolfed it down then, but I've been gnawing on its bones ever since.

Grendel is written from the point of view of the dragonish beast in the saga Beowulf. But Grendel's internal monologue is deeply human: he's as brilliant and self-absorbed and confused by his own condition as Hamlet.

Grendel has no patience for the local sheep, whose lack of consciousness and instinctive behaviour he finds irritating. But he saves his real rage for the mead-swilling, meat-gorging, medieval men and women who live in nearby Hrothgar's hall. Drinking, rutting, feasting and fighting from cradle to grave, these are apparently conscious creatures who nevertheless live like vermin, and die without dignity in a world without meaning. Grendel delights in decimating their ranks. He can't help himself. People are pathetic.

But there's one man among them whom Grendel lets live: The Shaper. The Shaper is an old, blind poet-musician who lulls both the locals, and Grendel, into momentarily believing in beauty. The Shaper adds sweetness to the suffering, glory to the gore, and meaning to the meaningless of existstence. Grendel loathes him and loves him at the same time. He lets him live, he thinks, as punishment for being stupid enough to sing of these things that cannot possibly be: freedom, beauty, truth, love... even Grendel, despite himself, weeps at the words of The Shaper.

I've identified with The Shaper for years now. I understand the need of his fingers to find the strings, his voice to find the words to say it all matters and means something. I called myself a Shaper of Songs, knowing that my craft was a blind effort in a dark world.

But the more I learn about myself, the more I find myself seeing things from Grendel's point of view: stuck between The Shaper and the sheep. I hear the music alright, and it's nearly enough to convince me that there's something greater out there... yet everywhere the dull creatures of earth still batter their thick skulls together, and the halls of glory are full of rotten, cowardly self-styled warriors. What's a dragon to do?

I've read a lot of history lately, and page after page after page shows the same damned scenes, all of them just like the sorry spectacles of Hrothgar's hall. Humanity, your treachery is ageless, your gluttony is endless, your stupidity is legendary and your arrogance offends the world.

And yet... in your art and music, in the brief fictions of your pretty pictures, your sweet sounds and your wondrous words, there is some awesome trickery, or divinity, that would make even a dragon hang its hateful head and weep

The Crossroads

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it's time I wrote it down.

On the Festival Express DVD, there's a Janis Joplin performance filmed in Calgary that is like nothing else I've ever seen. She is pushing the bounds of the blues so hard, singing with such raw and painful emotion, that it's actually difficult to watch - yet totally compelling. She reminds me of those men in the Phillipines who are willingly crucifed; she's literally made a sacrifice of herself. And six weeks after that mesmerizing performance, she was dead. You could see it coming; in fact, it would have been difficult to imagine her going on giving that way.

I believe Joplin, like Van Gogh before her and Cobain after her and many, many others at many times, made the conscious or unconscious choice of feeding her creativity with her essential, rather than her available energy. Her art came right from her heart's blood, and that's powerful stuff. It's strong and rich with feeling and vitality, and it makes for incredible creations sometimes.

Maybe this is what's meant by selling your soul at the crossroads: it's like you've made a pact to give your life to your art. I can see why people do it, but it just isn't for me. Tonight I heard a soulful singer doing Joplin, singing "take another little piece of my heart," and I thought about how few pieces of a heart there are to give away. What do you have when it's all gone?

A crossroads isn't just a place to sell your soul to the devil for the sake of the depth of your blues. It's also a place where you can choose the other road. You can choose to live a life that's about life, to feed your heart first and then feed your art. I choose to belive that the heart, the art, and the artist will all be better off in the end.

With all my heart, or at least all that's left, I hope I'm right.