Seventh Generation

This is the sort of thing I worry about all the time:



A demiurgic pelican named Alexander Pyes
Was pleased to paint with ketchup when he used up all his dyes
He painted an angelic flying squirrel with crimson eyes
And christened him Saint Francis underneath tomato skies

Pious Alexander felt Francisco would be blue
Without a red compatriot to sing a chorus to.
And so he had Saint Francis chant a spell, and lo, there grew,
From squirrelly head a stout hibiscus fresh with morning dew.

The newborn flower was a storyteller in her heart
She set to work with ardency and in the hero’s part
She cast a dour donkey once condemned to pull a cart
Who broke his chains and cantered off to undertake his art.

The donkey’s art was sculpture and his sculpting was quite nice
His knowing hooves brought forth from what was began as solid ice
An empty-hearted vulture with a spirit bent on vice
Who gorged his vestal stomach on a clan of frozen mice.

After he was sated he began a bawdy tale,
Centered round the exploits of a misbehaving whale
Whose name was Leighton Landau and whose skin was deathly pale;
Who muttered dark expletives in an ocean filled with ale.

Leighton was too lazy to conceive within his mind
A single thing beyond the shores in which he dined and wined.
So foolish was the ashen whale he actually opined
That he was born the greatest soul of his or any kind.

The truth of Landau’s lineage we presently review:
The beast who made his maker is too common for the zoo,
So goes the flower’story—if the flower only knew
She owes her soul to magic of the cousin of a shrew,
While Saint Francisco’s maker is a bird who long since flew
Away, I say, for Alex flies where I enjoin him to!

Each beast within this tale of tales knew not its rightful station,
For lordly Leighton Landau was the seventh generation
In this consecution of occasions of creation--
Is it not with barest prudence I look up and give oblation?


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Folk Festival

Last week I began my new job at Neegan Burnside, a civil engineering firm in Winnipeg. They work in northern communities in Canada, water, wastewater and infrastructure stuff. No complex, technical, expensive stuff here, but a fair bit of travel around the province and beyond, and a tiny office. Small enough to know everyone’s name and probably a few other key facts as well. That first week though, I only worked two days, the week was cut short on both sides, by Canada day on Monday, and the Folk Festival on Thursday and Friday. The festival extended to Saturday and Sunday of course, but those days are off by default in this country, thanks to the blood spilled by our heroic forefathers over the centuries in defense of western civilization. Well, not my forefathers, though I’m sure that they performed other actions, such as plowing, in equally heroic fashion.

The thing that surprised me most about the Winnipeg Folk Festival was that I had never been before. Music was just the beginning. Well, music wasn’t actually the beginning, speaking chronologically. Days ended with music, and continued with more music at the camp site, but by using the cliché that something, music in this case, is ‘just the beginning’ I mean that there was a lot going on in addition. These additional items of interest were the natural setting, the crowds of people (and what an eclectic bunch), food, and the rather ambiguous ‘good times’. Incidentally, volunteering is the way to go. Volunteers get free admission, food, backstage access, and an embarrassing amount of praise regarding their indispensability. I for one was not indispensable, as Tavern Security. Why anyone would think that I would make a good bouncer is not within my capacity to fathom, but even further beyond that capacity is why 17 bouncers are needed at the beer gardens of a family-friendly celebration of folk music, peace and love.

One foolish idea that I had was that I would meet up with my cousins at the campground, and set up next to them. The campground is a vast field with over 70,000 tents, and there is no finding of anyone in specific. In fact, it is a rule throughout such an event that you cannot set out to find anyone in particular but if you wander around long enough you will find someone, an old friend or perhaps a new one. This is right out of Siddhartha—finding is better than seeking. The downfall of the seeker is the joy of the finder—the objects to be found are dynamically infinite, not only beyond count but in constant flux.

I was worried that it would be hard to transition from the last two months of random jobs, job hunting and music festival attendance to a regular office schedule. Time will tell, but the first full week wasn’t so bad. Still, it’s hard to get too excited about grey carpets, grey cubicle walls and fluorescent lights. While I’m not excited about those things, the people to work with, the huge part of my country that most people never see, and the problems to work on in that region, should keep me going for a while. I think that when it comes to finding the right place to be at the right time, at some point you just have to pick. One thing which I lack, and I know I’m not the only one in my generation, is depth of experience. We’re all about the breadth. I surprised myself with the realization that I didn’t want to travel around the world and do something different in a different place each year. I was also surprised by the force of that realization; it was a potent idea, potent enough to get me to stay in Winnipeg with no immediate plan to leave.

It seems to me that there are lots of ways to throw away vast stretches of time without actually living, but one in particular—refusal to leave home, see the world and chase dreams—gets a disproportionate amount of press. What about running around constantly without a home and failing to see much of anything on a meaningful level?

There’s this feature on the Facebook website that lets you show everyone a world map highlighted with all the places you’ve been. General disdain aside for all the extras on Facebook—it started as a brilliant networking site and I still use it to catch up with all sorts of people—there is something about that map that makes me uneasy. I don’t want to say that having a map like that is a terrible thing, so I will introduce an independent character to say it:

Soren the Angry Stegosaurus: I am angry! In part it is because I am being chased by bees. The bees here in the Cretaceous Period are much larger than the ones you know, and have a painful sting, but what stings me even more is the notion of a map to keep track of all the places that I have gone. In an absolute sense, such a thing is morally wrong. It is not resonant with the spiritual energies of the world and I find it abhorrent.

Now, I wouldn’t go nearly so far as Soren. If keeping track of the countries you have visited online makes you happy, more power to you. For me, I think it would end up reducing genuine life experiences to ticks on a check-list. I can’t figure out why that is so tempting. It must by a symptom of a wider condition, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it is a desire to set quantifiable standards for a successful life, and see steady progress. People seem to be really insecure across the board. Ugly plants grow with confidence alongside pretty ones, and obnoxious animals like squirrels chatter as if they owned the place and never worry that perhaps there’s more to life than hoarding nuts and chattering. People though, they can’t receive enough outside affirmation to slake their insecurity. Even accomplished, confident people. A subject for future thought.

Anosmia

A multicoloured array of blankets lay sprawled across the grassy field, with folding chairs standing at intervals, unoccupied except by the sweaters and jackets of those whom caution or prudence had driven to heed the weather forecast and bring protection against the colder and wetter conditions which had not yet arrived. Many of those who had attended the church picnic, for that is indeed the setting in which we find ourselves, were playing a pick-up game of baseball. The distinctive sound of the ball being struck by the bat, which we are accustomed to describing with a word, crack, could be heard from an adjacent field, that word, adjacent, being used in this case to describe the location of the diamond-shaped field in relation to the array of blankets and folding chairs and barbeques. Under different circumstances it might have been the area occupied by the chairs and barbeques that would have been described as adjacent to the diamond-shaped baseball field, but the demands of our narrative require that the blanket, chair and barbeque area be treated as the centre of the scene, for it is there, among the handful of persons who remained in that area, that the first significant plot development will unfold. Of those who were not involved in the baseball game, nor engaged in that activity which has become for us a euphemism for undemanding activity of all kinds, a walk in the park, there was a group of elderly women, the sort ubiquitous in church congregations of the region, seated upon folding chairs, speaking in animated tones and taking grudging turns at listening, and at a distance a similarly ubiquitous circle of elderly men, speaking less often with lower animation, an environment that would facilitate listening should it come to pass that someone would have something to say, and again at a distance a younger man, who we can identify by the size of his nose, it being noticeably larger than average. The man with the large nose was looking at a book which he held in his hands, most likely a work of fiction, and sitting cross-legged, his back toward the barbeques, that is to say, less conventionally, his front away from the barbeques, it might at this point be told that these barbeques were under his supervision. There were three barbeques, though one was larger than the others, being used on this occasion to cook burgers and hot dogs, those being the most orthodox choices for an outdoor gathering in the middle of summertime, and what group more appropriate than a church to select the orthodox choices, if not to our religious institutions then to whom do we turn to oppose change, which while necessary must be met with some degree of challenge lest we find ourselves in a state of constant and uncontested flux. The meat had been placed on the grill some minutes prior, and had been flipped by the man with the large nose, who was now thoroughly engrossed in the book which was resting on his left knee, he turned another page at the precise moment that an elderly man from the ubiquitous circle, dressed in a green sweater came running over to the barbeques, and spoke to the younger man with some degree of alarm, The meat is burning, What, It smells like the meat is burning, the man with the large nose set aside the book, now drawn from his reading material and whatever images it evoked, by his duty as barbeque attendant which he seemed to be in danger of failing, he ascended to his feet rapidly, in a manner which might have reminded the man with the green sweater, or any other observer, of the coiled metallic objects used to store and convey elastic energy in many tools and mattresses, and inspected the claim of the man with the green sweater, its veracity was confirmed by the black appearance of many of the burgers and hot dogs, not so burned as to be inedible but enough to impart an unpleasant charcoal taste, after a moment the man with the green sweater spoke to the large-nosed man, Most of these are still good, I wasn’t paying attention, Didn’t you notice they were burning, I was too engrossed in my book, But didn’t you smell them, we could smell them burning way over there, the man with the green sweater said, pointing at the ubiquitous circle of elderly men over twenty-five yards away. The younger man replied, No, and narrowed his eyes in a manner that gave his expression a sense of puzzlement, he took a burnt hot dog up with the tongs and held it to his nose and sniffed deliberately, paused and repeated the action, he turned to look at the elderly man as the expression in his face changed from narrow-eyed perplexity to wide-eyed realization and fear, I am anosmic.

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What can I say, I finished Blindness not to long ago, and I had a bit of free time. More to come, possibly.

Anosmia

Jose Saramago