Drowning Nor Waving

1) "Soon Love Soon," Vienna Teng

2) Sonnet: Against Entropy, John M. Ford

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I will add to this list as time permits. And I would love to see what you'd add to it.

Over the past few weeks I've been thinking about inspiration.

(No, this is not a writing post. It is a post about the things we do with our hands.)

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Jack Layton -- for the international readers, the leader of the (social democrat) New Democratic Party and the current federal official opposition -- died abruptly of cancer two weeks ago. The response was solid national mourning: my very political Twitter friends posted their personal Jack stories; publishing people linked articles and eulogies; my very apolitical suburban upper-middle-class relatives talked about him in an almost puzzled, off-balance way at a family funeral last weekend, like people who'd lost a tooth and kept worrying at the gum. People who didn't like this mostly demonstrated enough sense and class to keep their mouths shut and respect everyone else's mourning.

There was a state funeral, and a lying-in-state at both the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and City Hall here, where he served for many years as a very active and visible city councillor. I went to the visitation with friends, and waited an hour and a half in line to pay my respects at that flag-draped coffin. commodorified, who was in town though I did not know it, inadvertently started a tribute they'll be talking about in the history books. We left chalk. It was almost the definition of a community experience: the vast iceberg of a whole city and country groaning and shifting together. Everyone drawing a little closer.

He left a letter. It was his last public act. It's called A Letter to Canadians, and was released shortly after his family announced that he had passed away.

You should read it, but here's the important bit:

...consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

I am not politically partisan, both by personal inclination and professional obligation, but I believe in those words. They took me in the chest and made me cry at my desk for the loss of a person I'd never met. They are good words, and I say that in the way Beowulf keeps repeating þæt wæs god cyning. Yes, they confirm my worldview to a certain extent, and one must always be a little careful of that. But they are good words. They are right.

I want them so very badly to be right.

It's been a week. Things go back to normal. They do, and they don't.

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But this is a post about inspiration.

I don't know why it's faintly embarrassing to say that paragraph inspired me, especially when it came from someone who was often cited as being close in the vicinity of inspiration: down the block or right next door. I want to twist to avoid the word. I want synonyms, waterings-down, elisions.

Possibly it's terrifying.

It's the same root as respire and spirit; Latin spirare. It means "to breathe". It means to have something put its lips to yours and fill your lungs or soul like a sail.

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There is, I think, a particular courage inherent in being willing to be inspired: being willing to take someone else's words into you, breathe them into your lungs, and let them animate your arms and legs and heart. To hear someone else's words and change your life is a ceding of a certain kind of control, and it's frightening, and brave: it puts you on roads you didn't plan to walk to places you've never been, and some of them can be trying and terrible and dark.

They demand willingness to devote yourself passionately to something bigger than you, and nebulous, and chancy, and like all passions, bearing a terrible risk of heartbreak. And many of us, in pursuit of ways to never fail, are perfectly willing to make a very bad tradeoff, and never try.

It does not mean agreeing with everything the speaker ever said or did. That's role model, not inspire, and I remain very against role model on the grounds that it's sloppy critical thinking. But it means picking your stars, and orienting yourself by them, and then throwing yourself into space by their light.

(Yes. Throwing yourself into space.)

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It's been six months since my grandmother died. She left a letter for each of us too. Mine was not polished in the way political rhetoric is: either because of the times, or possibly my great-grandfather's views on women and education, my grandmother never got halfway through high school. But it was honest, like the one I linked above. It was good words, and true.

She told me that she would be there for me, and that good things would happen; questions would be answered in their own ways. She told me to always smile.

I take that as one of my stars too. I carry it in my lungs.

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This can be read, I suppose, as an argument for activism. It's definitely an argument for living an engaged and deliberate life. It could also be an enormous arrogance and intrusion: to have someone else speak, and expect you to twist and alter your life and all your careful plans.

What I think I'm asking here is for you to take courage: to not shrink from that word (that task, that challenge) or minimize it. To reject the cynical, slowly or altogether, raise sail, and fix, one by one, your stars.

It's terrifying, yeah. Space is cold. Jumping is the kind of thing that always tends to make my knees lock.

But it's the most natural thing in the world, too. It's nothing but breathing.

Breathe in.

Via sdn on another platform, Hipsters on Food Stamps: They're young, they're broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?

I'm not sure what this post is going to be, exactly. I'm not pointing this out to slapfight with it and the 400+ comments it's engendered; not really. I could point it out to dissect its rhetoric (ew, hipsters! Bad people doing a thing we find bad!) or assumptions (artsy neighbourhoods are actually rarely that because they're expensive; often, it's the other way around) or to talk about the sort of financial slut-shaming behaviour evident in the comments, the kind that people get into when it comes to the taxpayer's dollar. The attitude that public money = my money and therefore I have a board-of-directors vote in how you live -- that you aren't winning at poverty unless you're demonstrating you're really, really sorry for being poor -- is a really ugly one, but we've covered that around here before. These are all valid angles on it, but not really what I'm feeling today.

What I want to talk about today is food.

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I did a really good shopping run in the past two days; cut loose a bit, because I cleaned out the fridge to the bones before going to Arizona and I had nothing fresh in the house, and besides, it's spring. Four kinds of nice cheese (jalapeno havarti, gloucester with stilton, mouton noir, asiago) and goat's milk and Mediterranean yogourt and dolmades; antipasto shrimp in oil and sundried tomatoes and purple grapes and pears; dried mango, figs, a pomegranate, walnuts, red peppers, and four trays of fresh-made sauerkraut and mushroom pierogies; sliced roast beef and pine nuts and strawberries. The first thing I did Monday afternoon was start fresh bread: honey and buckwheat flour.

That's how I eat: mostly -- if only incidentally and accidentally -- vegetarian, fresh, local where possible, and well. I like food. I like it in theory and practice. I get joy out of planning menus for other people that work, despite allergies or preferences, in the way some people enjoy cracking an engineering puzzle. I grow some of my own vegetables in the summer, I lust after urban chickens, and I cook.

Hell, even making that list of all the stuff I have in my kitchen right now made me feel really, really good.

The thing is (and yes, here's the thing), food is a lot of things that it's not; it's a marker and symbol of a lot of things about a person above and beyond putting calories in to keep the engine running.

As Roger Ebert pointed out in his Nil By Mouth (which you should read if you haven't. Right now), food is community on a fundamental level. It's the first step to a certain awareness and respect of another culture: eating a Japanese or Moroccan or Ethiopian meal kicks you out of your own headspace a little, into how a Japanese or Moroccan or Ethiopian person conceptualizes eating, living, comfort. Food's also an expression of our weird, patchworked personal cultures: my ultimate comfort foods are lokshen and cheese because my Jewish mother made it, egg-in-the-nest because my blue-collar grandmother made it, and miso soup because I have lived every day of my adult life in downtown Toronto. Food is love. Some feminist theorists argue it shouldn't be, that that link needs to be decoupled, but too bad. Food is love.

You can tell things about a person's cultural background, geographical background, class background, and who they conceptualize themselves to be by what they'll go for when they're feeling stressed. You can also tell things about their politics and worldview by where they'll get it, or how.

Food is also like books in one crucial way: it is not an interchangeable commodity. One does not equal the other.

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When I was in my early twenties and poor enough to qualify for food stamps, poor enough that I would steal rice out of the cooker at the restaurant where I worked in order to get a second meal into the day, I still paid ten bucks a tub for parmigiano reggiano. We were eating a lot of pasta at the time; pasta was cheap and wasn't full of bad shit, the kind of preservatives and chemicals and high sugar content that makes my body and brain chemistry go apeshit. The generic Kraft or grocery-store parmesan extruded byproduct tastes like nothing but salt. I hated the way it tasted without a little cheese. A lot of people would look at that expense and find it silly, but a very little of the good stuff, stretched and thinned to last, was a thousand times better than all of the bad stuff I could eat.

That cheese was my treat. It was my treasure. Whenever I cracked it open and rationed some out, or managed to score a tote bag full of fresh fruit and vegetables in Kensington for $12, or just got something to cook and the time to do it in those years, I was chasing entropy out of my life. I was reasserting a little bit of control. I was doing something small that was good for me, that made me happy, in a space where very little I could do or say was going to stop the way my life was spinning its wheels. Ten bucks of high-end parmesan cheese a month kept the strictures of civilization in my life, kept its walls still standing and intact.

Food is also self-expression and dignity. Food is the most basic and vital thing you can do for yourself, your basic self-reliance. You decide what you will eat, and you go get it and cook it for yourself with your own two hands.

And maybe we are back at the notion of poverty and sufficient shame. Because the only reason I can see for a person to want someone to eat like shit, to remove their ability to express their culture and geography and class background and politics and worldview and self-concept, is because of the idea that all poor people are the same; that self-expression, dignity, and self-reliance are a privilege that comes with money; that if all poor people don't act the same, they should be made to.

We live in the first world. We are rolling in resources; more than we reasonably deserve.

Seriously. There's no need for that shit.

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I have a job with a salary now; have for a year and a half. Keeping my fridge stocked is no longer a concern, although I'm still psychotic and anal about wasting food and probably always will be, and I still wear my jeans until they fall apart and my socks until they're more hole than sock.

I did, however, make a rule with myself about food: You can have anything you want. It doesn't matter how much it costs. I buy any grocery-thing my little heart desires, now, and am forbidden to feel guilty about it. I buy dried mango and figs and pomegranates and walnuts and four trays of fresh-made sauerkraut and mushroom pierogies.

I also give to the Daily Bread Food Bank, every month.

And I don't waste food.

From the garden this evening:



Also, I started knitting my first pair of socks today while at cszego's, where we had our Canada Day lunch/picnic thing/hang around and eat and chatter party. They are purple and green and lovely. I have already messed up the toes a little, but this just means the toes will be a bit pointy.

This evening, there will be farmer's market cherries and revisions.

Since today is the first day of the rest of your life second half of 2009, I think that's a pretty good halftime show.