Hopscotch

It’s happening again.

This time, I’m standing in the sidelines, the periphery, feeling completely empty. An old friend from the first of many bookstores I worked in has been battling cancer. She’s thirtysomething single mom with a daughter who has already defeated brain cancer. The girl also has scoliosis. She is six years old.

B. and I have been in touch through all these years, but we didn’t see each other too frequently.  She and I had very different circles. We tried to get together a couple times a year. B is one of the kindest, purest souls I know.  Why this should fall on her, I cannot say. There goes that positive thinking theory. B. is still thinking positively today, laying in bed, hooked up to catheters and wires and tubes. During all those years that I was drinking and smoking and otherwise self-destructing, I was totally terrified I might get lung cancer or something. Meanwhile, B never smoked, ate healthy, and probably had a total of six bloody Caesars in her whole life, all of them at staff Christmas parties with us.  She was industrious, stable, nontoxic.

A few months ago I went over to her place for dinner. I was shocked that she was using a walker, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. She was so frail. B has always been very small- she’s less than five feet tall. But she was barely there. I couldn’t imagine how she could be so graceful and grateful. I was furious on her behalf. How dare the universe do this to her? Yet she told me she was so thankful to just be at home instead of in hospital, as she had been for so long. She was thankful that she had gained 15 pounds, because she’d been barely 75.

B had looked death in the face and he retreated. But he said to her, I will be back soon. I asked how the hell she could be so serene while facing this kind of nightmare. She told me that everything was very simple now. You either had another day, or you didn’t. Every morning when she opened her eyes, she knew she still had today to be with her daughter. She didn’t have to wonder about getting a better job or whether she would move or what the neighbour was doing or who would be President. Life had been stripped to absolute terrifying and beautiful simplicity. Nothing really mattered now, except the things that mattered.

Yesterday B. called me. She broke her hip, just standing there at home, and was now in hospital. They couldn’t operate on it, because they don’t have the right machine to assure B. will wake up from the anesthetic. There’s not guarantee she’ll wake up regardless. I couldn’t stop crying when she told me she was so scared. This is hell- the fear of dying. There was nothing I could offer, no words I could say. Love and prayer are useless when you’re staring the great unknown in the face, but that great unknown is less terrifying than the left undone, the family and friends and dreams you leave behind prematurely. How can I possibly help relieve B. of this burden? Simple- I can’t.

When I was a kid I had some funny theories and a whole slew of neurotic anxieties about stuff. One recurring thought that was particularly dominant in my psyche was the idea that the universe was like a sidewalk. I lay awake at night crying if I’d stepped on an anthill. I spent a lot of time trying to avoid stepping on one by accident. I couldn’t bear the way those tiny bugs worked like slaves. That they built the anthill a grain of sand at a time blew me away. I thought of the pyramids and the slaves who built them. All that work the ants did would be in vain if someone stepped on the anthill. And yet, the survivors would begin again. The toil of these creatures broke my heart.

Do you see where I’m going with this? This insane fixation. Out of the mouths of babes. It feels like we are an anthill. Our whole labour is easily destroyed. We could be maimed and homeless in the next second, not knowing what hit us. All the joy of birth and beauty is hardly reward for the toil. It’s just that even as an adult, when something I can’t face is happening, when something I can’t stare at serenely and say, it’s God’s will, bla bla bla, well, in these times I think we’re just like the ants.

When I feel this dark and bleak, I don’t even take it personally. It’s not that anyone wanted to punish the Sri Lankins with that tsunami. It’s not that B. did anything wrong.  It’s just the wind and the waves. It’s just fucking random weather, that’s all, nothing we said or did, nothing personal. It’s not even a cosmic joke. It’s NOTHING.

We are ants, the gods are frolicking, and we might be in the way. The gods step on us while they play hopscotch.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

As I Lay Dying: Call Me Troy, Scott Bloom’s Film about the Unstoppable Rev. Troy Perry

As I Lay Dying: Call Me Troy, Scott Bloom’s Film about the Unstoppable Rev. Troy Perry

It was back in the early summer that Scott Bloom’s film Call Me Troy screened at a film festival here in Toronto. I’d known about the Reverend for a long, long time: looking for answers as a teen, my BFF had stumbled on Perry’s ‘little book of heresy’ at the public library. The Lord is my Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay was just as comforting to both of us as the 23rd psalm referenced in its title.

My pal Japey and I even met clandestine to visit Toronto’s MCC, terrified our parents or home pastors might somehow see us enter into that den of iniquity where all manner of unspeakable crimes and deviance would surely be taking place. Imagine our surprise at a very familiar set up: songs, sermon, The Lord’s Prayer, and fellowship coffee hour. It was only two hours of our lives, but it was a window into the possibility that perhaps Japey was a normal, beautiful, fully contributing human being that God loved wholly. This made its mark on us, though I had no idea that MCC was my spiritual home until a good 20 years later. Like so many youth sick of being lied to by the powers they trust, I vowed never to go back to church beyond the odd Easter service with the folks. It was grief that brought me through those doors by chance: I needed some old-time religion following three close deaths, including Japey’s. I just wanted to hear Amazing Grace. And I remembered that we’d been to a church together many years before. So I went again.  Like so many who enter, I was crying within moments of arriving. Welcome home, the pamphlet said.

Neither Japey or I or indeed even the most active friends in our community had any idea that the increasing freedoms we enjoyed to gather on Church Street (Toronto’s gaybourhood, another awesome irony!) had come to us because of the work of many brave men and women.  Though we knew of Rev. Perry, we had no idea that he was at the forefront of the fight for freedom and civil rights for LGBT people in North America, risking his life in the worst days, living up until now with the struggle for acceptance for all of us. Even today, most of our gay community thinks very derogatorily of the church and is totally unaware that a few unlikely Christian activists- Perry a ‘leather bear’ no less, and our very own beloved Rev. Brent Hawkes- are the reasons why we are free to be you and me.

Call Me Troy, a fabulous documentary by Scott Bloom, seeks to change this knowledge deficit. Here Bloom shows the world the courageous journey of one of the world’s most charismatic, loving leaders of all time, the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church forty years ago. Now were we not always told that ‘the Lord works in mysterious ways?’

Director Scott Bloom told me, “Troy was the voice of history in my first film Original Pride: The Satyrs Motorcycle Club, and when he started to tell me a bit about his history in the gay community, I thought to myself, why hasn’t someone done a film about this man, he’s a hero to our community and yet no one knows anything about him.”

Getting funding to create the film was a challenge, but most surprising was the gay community’s resistance to the film. ”We have met with some resistance from some in the gay community in getting it played in certain cities.  I think there’s still some resistance to Troy and his word even after 40 years.  It’s really kind of sad because I myself come from a pretty damaged religious background.” Bloom says, “Gay spirituality is evolving.  I think there are a lot of gays that were damaged pretty badly by organized religion and it’s been pretty hard to reverse the effects of that.”

His film has no doubt been instrumental in that reversal, showing the profound struggles and courage of our beloved Rev. Perry. Not your everyday guy, Perry’s flamboyant buoyant joy is still unstoppable, even as he approaches the twilight years. The boy was born controversial, hailing from the deep south, where his Aunt Lizzy Smithy was a strychnine drinking snake-handler at the ‘white trash church of Georgia,’ the Church of God. The young Troy was already deeply religious and totally theatrical, and his brother used to kill bugs so they could have a ‘funeral,’ giving Troy a chance to do what he would always do best- preach.

So Troy knew from the get-go that he was called to preach the word of God, but puberty brought its own conundrum, and he wrestled inwardly with the knowledge that he was gay. He tried to do the right thing and marry, but it was disastrous, and a number of infractions brought the wrath of the church and community upon him. Troy felt he had no choice but to opt out of the gift of life. But while he lay dying, he heard God calling, and he rose from the bathtub where his life was draining from his wrists, a dramatic baptism. Rev. Troy Perry may have been ‘defrocked’ but he was still as at home in the robes as he was in his chaps, and he started the spiritual home for gays we now know as MCC. It was a small irony that the first service, in an L.A. living room, was Troy and twelve people. Now his church has grown into hundreds worldwide. This is truly a man who heard the call: Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.

“I had to trust God,” Rev. Perry told me during an interview. “I had to trust that whatever happens, it’s going to be God’s will. Perfect love casts out all fear. The very worst thing that could happen was death,” he said, something he had already triumphed over. “I can’t fear death,” he said. “If I believed what I said I believed, in life after death with God, then death was not the enemy, it held no fear for me.”

Today we celebrate 40 years of MCC, a sanctuary of progressive spirituality. But through the years, Rev. Perry risked everything time and time again, on the front lines of queer activism, rallying without fear for every civil right we now enjoy, and those to come. He faced endless defeats along with the triumphant gifts of abundance. In 1973, his church was burned to the ground. Instead of throwing in the towel, he stood on the heads of his enemies and conducted that Sunday’s service in the street beside the charred remains. Over 2000 people gathered for his sermon.

“Can I hear an amen?” If you’ve been blessed to hear Rev. Perry speak, you know you just might jump into the aisle no matter how conservative your faith roots are. Even atheists might find themselves filled with the Holy Spirit. In person, Troy’s charisma is just as vivid, and the gregarious, robust preacher will wrap you in his arms and kiss you and call you sister with never-ending love. Troy’s tireless, enthusiastic journey has led him from rallies to the White House to churches all over the world.

The film, however, is important now that he is starting to slow down. It can show his history and work to others, and inspire new trailblazers to pick up the torch. Troy has ‘retired’ from his church in Los Angeles, but evidently his definition of retirement is different from yours and mine, and he is still active 24 hours a day, most recently in the fight for gay marriage in the United States. (Rev. Troy and his partner were married right here in our Toronto sanctuary by our Rev. Hawkes!) While he has lived in and loved the limelight, he confesses now, “I am getting tired of it, I’ll be honest. God has given me this wonderful, wonderful gift, but I’m getting older, like it or not. Even just sitting on an airplane can be exhausting, those long trips. It’s the body, it’s not like when I was a young man.”

Still, it’s not over ‘til it’s over. “I’m 68 years old,” Perry tells me. “And I plan to continue on.”

This article is from Global Connections, a newsletter outreach initiative of Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Home, Sweet, Home: Vessna Perunovich Examines Themes of Home in Emblems of the Enigma

Beautiful, dignified, luminous, deeply intelligent- artist Vessna Perunovich is the kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

Here’s a story: Once upon a time, Vessna’s book, (W)hole, was on my coffee table. My date, we’ll call him Frank, thumbed through it while waiting for me to get ready. To me, the catalogue of eerie, dreamy emblems- hands, shoes, cords, blood, goo, fences- clearly spoke of exile, family, femininity, and political homelessness.

“Wow,” Frank said, as I emerged, ready to go, from the powder room. He was holding the book at arm’s length, as if it were contaminated. “Clearly, this is the artwork of a disturbed man hater!”

I was stunned. Despite the stellar chemistry and some genuine affection, it became crystal clear that we had nothing in common. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to date yet, after previous disasters. What do you do when someone doesn’t understand the concepts most sacred to you? Do we still live in that Freudian hell where women who aren’t mute are disturbed? Who could, in an instant, reduce all the power of politics, rootlessness, war, immigration, grief, and exile into the insecurity of the North American male?

On one level, this trivial tidbit doesn’t really matter in the long run. People like different things, right? People interpret things differently.

Yet on another level, it matters so much. It illuminates something remarkable about that elusive puzzle: why is art important?

We know in the deepest part of our soul that art is important. Whether it is hymns or Italian fashion design or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it matters so very much.

How we respond to something, how we interpret something, reveals what our souls hide. And this gentleman’s soul hid some crazy fears about crazy artist women, and that made it loud and clear that a crazy artist woman like myself would never be understood or accepted by this person, no matter how great the date would go. If being a strong, creative artist who spoke against corruption and inequality and war meant you were disturbed …ultimately the person who thought this would see me this way, too.

Jet two years into the present. Vessna Perunovich’s retrospective and companion book, Emblems of the Enigma, was just on display at the Art Gallery of Mississauga last month, now traveling. Donald Brackett curates the show. (Vessna Perunovich: Emblems of the Enigma by Donald Brackett is available at Amazon online. Visit Vessna’s site at www.vessnaperunovich.com.)

To be fair, Vessna’s work IS disturbing. How could it be anything less? When you’re examining themes of identity and exile, coming from a place that no longer exists, then who are you? What does home mean if you can’t go home anymore? There is blood in this work, reflecting the questions of lineage and genes, the sick memories of war and corruption and destruction and death, and questioning life and the ties that bind. Blood- it is who we are, but who are we if we are torn from our families, our lovers, our land? This is not something lucky born-in-Canada people like myself can know. And that is why Vessna asks us to imagine it.

Brackett says, “Perunovich’s work …is able to make a deft commentary on our shared values as embodied creatures who require metaphysical as well as physical sanctuary. In fact, the search for sanctuary has become an emblem in itself for the multitude of miniature enigmas we all face on a daily basis.”

Most of her sculptures, paintings, installations and performance pieces use a limited colour spectrum of red, black, grey, white and beige. The emblems we see over and over again are bizarre, gooey shapes that feel cellular, biological, and faintly grotesque. Fences and ropes are prominent, suggesting physical limitations and bondage, representation of emotional or political barriers. Occasionally, a severed foot or hand appears, or scrawled, cryptic phrases that feel like dreams or nightmares.

Vessna at Nuit Blanche, 2007

There are no safe spaces for the audience: certainly nothing that’s merely pretty or decorative, and nothing that makes perfect, immediate sense. Why should interpretation be easy for the viewer? Millions of orphaned, lost, exiled, injured, tortured, raped, sick, scared, helpless immigrants and refugees the world over are struggling to make sense of their existence, forge an identity from rootlessness, from war and grief and silence and loss.

I ran into two young ladies at Vessna’s show. Their reaction to her work was completely different than Frank’s, and I watched them with fascination as they fearlessly examined the art and talked together with great excitement about what the work might mean.

The scene was straight out of a small-budget film about Canadian multiculturalism. The spacious gallery, almost empty near closing time, with eerie, bloody sculptures by a woman immigrant from the former Yugoslavia. The Canadian writer girl, fortunate to be born into the best country in the world,  thanks to the struggle of her own ancestors to escape execution after hiding Jews during the second world war. And two girlfriends, spending the afternoon looking at art together. The filmmaker could not project the exact ethnic background of the friends, but they are dark-skinned and beautiful and one girl is wearing a headscarf. Their names are Niwah and Arzoo. The writer is assuming that Niwah is of Indian descent, but can’t be sure. Arzoo says she is from Pakistan, but it doesn’t matter where she was born or lives, what matters is that she is Muslim, and this does not change. Niwah is a photographer, and Arzoo is a clinical researcher and poet.

There is a piece of art in one corner that features a book with a million red pinpricks throughout it. A bucket of latex gloves on the floor encourages tactile exploration. The women don the gloves, touch the book, and the red ink rubs off on their hands. They talk together about how it seems as if the book is in Braille, and that a blind person might be able to read it by touching it. That the unknown makes all of us blind. The red rubbing off on the gloves is the blood, one blood, of all of us here on earth.

I go over to take a look at the book. One of the girls hands me some gloves, excited for me to experience this book of life. I’m not sure if it is really supposed to suggest Braille, for the raised dots in the book are all uniform. Perhaps that signifies that there is only one language, one written in the blood on all of our hands, in all of our veins?

All three of us move onward, to a sculpture where red oozes in and out of two silver cups. The artist is not here, but the conversation nonetheless involves her. Four women, talking about the boundaries of love, sex, of blood, oozing in and out, creating ties and terror between lovers.

This is how the hypothetical Can-film scene ends: The writer waves to her new girlfriends, takes her coat, heads out into the gorgeous day, away from all the strange images of identities merged and severed, back to downtown Toronto where she lives and writes.

On the surface there is little to connect that writer to the art, or to the maker of this strange and profound work, beyond her girlish desire to have equally profound things to say, equal strength and creativity as that artist. But then there is that blood, oozing through all of us. Then there are those bonds, those ties, and those bizarre and cryptic connections that ravel and unravel the human race.

The writer is not entirely sure what brought her here, but it is part of that red string running through Vessna’s works. She first learned about the artist through a friend of a friend of a friend of her own husband, now dead.

He is the one who taught her to live without borders, who came from Serbia also, who bore witness to the exact climate of politics and identity of which Vessna speaks. His mind and spirit and blood and ashes are now permanently meshed with the writer. Two souls who belonged to one another. Home is where the heart is. Home sweet home, even in his absence.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She also writes about food, mood, art, and literature. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Upstairs in the Crazy House: Touched by Fire, second floor at the Gladstone Hotel

Let’s go back three weeks in time. The day began the same as any other- my eyes pop open just before seven. The orange cat hogging the pillow begins to purr when he feels me stir. And I roll over and wish I had one of those coffee machines you start up with a remote control.

But I don’t have one of those, and so I throw back the blankets and the cat flies toward his food bowl. That’s when I noticed that colour had crept back into the paintings on the wall and the patterns on the blankets. Cautiously, I looked all around. The world was breathing and pulsing with life. And that’s how I knew that nearly half a year of the dead, defeated, hopeless hell they call depression had come to a complete halt.

These are the kind of days I make full use of. Alive days, I call them. I have my share of hope and reason and relative confidence. Sure, my moods veer dramatically to and fro on any day, but generally they waver about within a larger framework of either melancholy or inspiration. Though my black spells can last much longer than six months, this time calling it melancholy was putting it mildly. This last spell was so intensely dark I didn’t know if I would ever believe in anything ever again. It was a crippling grief at betrayal by everything, including my most beloved friends, and my own mind. Everything was dead, including God.

On a day like today, I can handle the burdens of grief I carry for the dead and walk with head high. I can accept the petty feuds that fuel the social circuitry, the misconceptions, the missed connections, and accept them with grace. I can feel my own heartbeat, and know its part of the pulse of the larger puzzle.

On a day like yesterday I was explaining all of this once again to a lady in front of me and to the men behind the mirrors. It makes me laugh how the universal voice of the shrink is sort of calm and breathy. Do you ever hear intrusive thoughts that aren’t your own? they always ask. Voices telling you to hurt others? I do actually chuckle, and they make notes about that. Never, I say. My mania is all mine, when it comes. I tell them I don’t hear voices- I just have a zillion ideas all at once. I start a thousand things and don’t finish them. I thrive, fly, full speed ahead. Most of this is wonderful, except when too many things later end up under an umbrella of “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” It’s all fabulous, except when I appear impatient or distracted and I’m actually really interested. I tell them about the t-shirt my friends wanted to get me: it says, I’m Talking, and I Can’t Shut Up.

That may be, but I didn’t really feel like talking at that particular moment. Sure, I’m ‘working’ on my issues. Always have. It’s just that there are a lot of ‘em. And though I like therapy, I really do, it is an exhausting commitment. And on ‘plateau days’ when I’m normal, and not up or down, I can’t see a great deal of need for it. There’s that feeling that maybe the black dogs won’t come back, and maybe the chaos and flurry of dreams and nightmares won’t come back, either. I can do without the meaningless despair years just fine, thank you very much. And because my thoughts aren’t racing right now, I’ve got some handle on how to get it together from here on in, and don’t want to answer all the questions over and over again, ever again.

Still, the most important part of therapy just might be the group. When you hear the stories of others, you find coping techniques. You compare notes. You make jokes that the world at large might not get.

I killed a few birds with one stone yesterday (what a horrible expression! who wants to kill birds with stones?). I’m committed to not missing therapy appointments, but I used the chance to swing by and visit a friend who’d recently been formed. (To the uninitiated, that means ‘admitted’ or ‘signed in’ or ‘committed.’) Believe me, it’s not the first or the last time I was upstairs in the crazy house. The only surprise is that I’ve only been a visitor. I guess there’s a bright side to this stuff running in the family: you already know you have it, so it doesn’t broadside you in the middle of a normal existence. You never really lose it, because you lost it a long time ago.

So on a day like yesterday, I wasn’t all that surprised to run into a number of old acquaintances at Touched by Fire, an art show presented by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. It’s amazing how many coworkers, colleagues, and relatives you run into at various meetings, clinics, and associations. While I’m pretty upfront about my lifelong struggle with depression, being an artist and all that, not everyone else is so vocal. But don’t be surprised: we are everywhere. And last night, we were all at the Gladstone Hotel, where more than forty ‘mentally ill’ artists exhibited a stunning array of painting, sculpture and photography. (I always feel trepidation describing a way of being as a ‘mood disorder’ or an ‘illness’ because in all fairness, it’s those who think the world is running smoothly who are delusional. It’s those who are well adjusted and feel no pain who are possibly sociopathic.)

The Mood Disorders Association of Ontario is an incredible resource for people who experience depression, social anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and so on. They are also a resource for families and for professionals. They have ongoing support groups that include peer support, education and self-care, and recreation. They have speakers on mental health, an extensive reference library, campaigns for specific outreach endeavours, and every possible kind of help and hope a person on the brink might need. One amazing feature the MDAO has is www.checkupfromtheneckup.ca, which helps you anonymously determine online whether you might be experiencing any mental health concerns. They also have an annual subway campaign debunking stereotypes and myths about mood disorders. (One of the prominent myths is that mental illness is rare. Don’t kid yourself. Mood disorders are very common and you know all kinds of people who are struggling with them right now.) The MDAO supports a number of paradigms on mental health, and so they offer information about a wide variety of treatments from traditional to alternative. Educate yourself, or find a lifeline by visiting www.mooddisorders.on.ca.

Touched by Fire is an ongoing initiative of the MDAO, “a program to stimulate and celebrate the work created by artists with mood disorders.” It shouldn’t be news to anyone that a world without crazy people would be a world without art. No Van Gogh, no Mozart, no nothin’. After bipolar artist Rebecca Burghardt committed suicide, her father and others in the aftermath sought to build not just “a memorial, but a road forward against mood disorders.” Touched by Fire is an ongoing online exhibition (www.touchedbyfire.ca) and an annual gala that showcases creative contributions by artists with mood challenges.

Closer than she Appears by Susan Strachan Johnson

Last night hundreds of visitors flocked in to see amazing works by artists like Susan Strachan Johnson, Pat Moffatt, Michael Yee, Xenia Vakova, Sunny Crittenden, and more. Of course, I was there for my longtime partner in art crime, Joey DAMMIT! whose influence on my own artwork is obvious to everyone except the blind. He was exhibiting Shirley Temple Black from a show he did about depression called Only Happy When it Rains.

Joey DAMMIT! with one of his favourite works

I have to admit that my fear of crowds nearly caused me to run screaming before entering the sardine-packed room, despite my eagerness to see Joey’s disarming smile. My heart was racing in terror at the sight of zillions of fortysomethings sipping fine wine and the idea of somehow making space for myself among them. Then I thought about the other people who might be terrified to be there. Knowing that tonight I wasn’t the only nutbar in the house made it a little easier to enter, that, and the free wine and guacamole and smoked salmon.

Now Sunny Crittenden was also terrified by the scene. She wrote about her apprehension on her website (www.sunnycrittenden.com). I was immediately drawn to the chaos (and the tampons) in Sunny’s assemblage, Mania in the Key of Psychosis. There was an instant recognition factor in the dense, hurricane layers of ideas and objects. Often I create art with a similar vehemence, a whirlwind of objects and images and textures. Often I create more than one piece at a time- up to 20! But then there are other times when my work is much calmer or streamlined, or slow, depressed, nonexistent.

Viewers of Sunny’s Mania piece were astonished to see the sweet, calm simplicity of her other works. If this isn’t a window into the mind or the mood, nothing is. Sunny said that Mania in the Key of Psychosis was something she made just before a major break with reality- you know, psychosis. It was frantic and urgent, and every little detail inside had a direct emotional significance. She’s only selling the piece because she’s ready to part with that part of herself. It’s a ritual in it’s own way.

I understood right away about the layers of details and their loaded meanings. My own works may seem random, and they are. Yet the most personal ones are endless layers of very significant symbolism. Every word or image in my furious collages might have meaning in my manic universe.

Sunny sure didn’t seem psychotic. A very bubbly and creative young woman- very…well, sunny. On her site she writes very openly about her shyness, her ‘illness’ (remember, I hate to use that word for what is to me just reality. It’s like calling a tidal wave or a volcano an aberration. It’s just nature.) But I know too well how hard it is for other people to think good ol’ fearless Lorette is actually crippled with shyness. You may view me as very open and gregarious. But that’s what wild mood swings are all about. It’s all true. It’s just another part of me.

Mania in the Key of Psychosis by Sunny Crittenden

I was also really taken with Xenia Vakova’s No Public Parking. A simple geometric map painted on found wood, with the title stenciled in. Too bad the piece was already sold! I like maps and shapes, a semblance of order in disorder. Xenia says, “While I was in Halifax, provinces away from friends and family and unable to find a therapist/counsellor, depression hit me in a big way and I was forced to quit school for the time being and return to live with my parents.  During that winter, I continued the series by painting this same map onto a sign I found downtown, which said ‘no public parking.’ It is common for me to start a series and get only through one or two pieces before I lose interest.  Perhaps one day I will return to the shapes of the original map, or make a new one using the same principles.” Xenia’s only 21, and already a veteran of art and of the mind games mood ‘disorders’ play. Her art wouldn’t be the same without them.

No Public Parking by Xenia Vakova

The textures and the kind of storybook-macabre illustration powers in Closer Than She Appears, by Susan Strachan Johnson, were also stunning. A photographer I’d spoken with at length upon arrival

Dragonfly 6 Escher by Ralph Martin

snapped it up. I’d first met Ralph Martin at one of Joey DAMMIT!’s art shows, and I’m blown away by his photography (www.ralphmartinphotography.com). He photographs doors and windows, and close-ups of nature, revealing exquisite patterns and shapes in the world around us.

I was sorry not to run into Pat Moffatt. I was intrigued by the intense light and shadow of his paintings, with thick brush strokes. I will not be the first or last to compare his work to Van Gogh. The subject matter of Pat’s oeuvre is also the momentary landscape, a tree, a flower, perspective of a room. The Canadian Arles. In Moffatt’s statement, he said he worked quickly and intensely until finishing, just like his great teacher.

I wanted to break all the rules of gallery etiquette and touch the paintings. Perhaps a greater writer could better describe the intensity of these works. In that intensity, the rapidness of their completion, the immediacy of the ‘wet-paint’ feeling they evoke, there is tremendous beauty. This is not what I was referred to when I said I woke up three weeks ago and saw colour infused back into patterns, breath inside of life. But it IS what I will see when the scales tip and I start to “go up.” The vibrancy and intensity at that time is so gorgeous that every single pain and grief I’ve borne is worth it, in spades.

The Fishing Shack by Pat Moffatt

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia!
Jean Dubuffet

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She is a food writer for Gremolata Magazine, a voracious reader and reviewer, and a dedicated follower of Cosmo Kramer. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Our Long Goodbye by Lorette C. Luzajic

Depressed by Lorette C. Luzajic

I Have a Dream

The past six months or so held the blackest depression I’ve had in years. It’s a popular notion that depression means a whole lot of feeling sorry for yourself. And certainly, there can be a lot of pondering over lost friends or the ‘what am I doing with my life?’ question.  But overall, depression is a much larger grief. Within depression, I can often still be quite thankful for shelter and cats and for those few who reach out to me. What hurts is something much bigger, that I can’t control at all- the whole damn world. Depression is not always about what happened in own private Idaho. It’s an abject disappointment in the entire world, human race, history, and God.

Nature protects us with a certain amount of delusive grandeur, a certain limitation of scope that makes your own family or self more important than the rest of the damn trash heap. This lets you focus your care and deal with what’s at hand. In depression, that valve isn’t narrowed to mean only you and your feelings: the curtain is totally removed, leaving you without skin, exposed nerves. This summer I really struggled with humankind’s historical legacies of war, war, and more war. I couldn’t open a newspaper without sobbing over yet another senseless act of violence, a violence humans adore and glorify the world over. I had a fury toward evil, which I saw the seeds of in even people I once believed cared about more than their own sexual or monetary greed.

In my own survival games, I was expecting the end of the world. I was living with hopelessness. I couldn’t imagine how we had let a partially retarded reptilian warmonger into the White House. Even intelligent people like my dad seemed to buy into Bush’s bullshit, and I couldn’t imagine how the man could be any more transparent. He could hardly speak and his heartfelt convictions about God and country were puppetry. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the dude seriously worshipped the devil, but of course his true religion was worshipping himself in the mirror. Same thing? My youngest sibling could see right through him, too. “DAD!” he admonished fervently. “How can you think Bush is a real Christian?” It was obvious to him as a teenager. And though Bill Clinton was practically impeached for an innocent puff of marijuana decades before, making “I didn’t inhale” an international t-shirt industry, somehow Bush got away with inhaling barrels of cocaine and it barely made the press. It’s my own private hope that Bush will be tried as a war criminal, just as surely as the Serbian butchers. Bush should be locked up with the criminally insane. It’s clear to anyone with two or three brain cells to rub together that he loves war and dreamed of being a great military strategist. His inflated ego rivals Hitler’s, with none of the oratory prowess. Which proves the powers of darkness don’t even need a charismatic leader to operate.

Like another romantic, I had a dream. A dream where one day we might say sorry to the native people that we shot for sport and made into dog food for the kings. And no, I didn’t do it personally, but someone has to make amends and stop passing the buck. Whether or not I am personally guilty, my freedom here is because of their blood. They welcomed strangers, taught us to live in these harsh climes, and shared their food. But they didn’t make very good slaves, so someone thought we would head over to place where it all began and take men, women and children from their homes by force, bring them here under torture and captivity, and force them to build up their bank accounts, cities, and provide sex whenever they wanted. And that is how America the beautiful was born.

It had been awhile since we’d had a good bloodbath, so Bush had to make one up. He made up an elaborate threat, and went in. It’s always a stupid, futile idea to move in on people who have more money, more faith, and infinitely more brains than you do. Yes, yes, yes, there are incredibly sick systems of greed and lust and oppression ‘over there.’ But it was none of our business! Angelina Jolie has single-handedly done far more for women in the Middle East than our busybody butchering. How will oil wars bring women into emancipation? Women whose sons and husbands were slaughtered. What kind of possessed madman thinks he can defeat Iraq, bring secularism with God’s face? This is the newest civilization in history hoping to teach the oldest civilization in history a thing or two.

It all boils down to this: men love war. And that is in many ways the deep sickness inside of me. I can’t stand what we are.

In some ways, the American election meant a last straw. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but in my mind, it was the end of the line. I expected the end of the world, but woke up to a future of new possibilities and hope. God Bless America!

Much will be made over the significance of what happened today, and much should be. Once upon a time, any number of American citizens could have owned Barack Obama, had him picking cotton with which to weave their Gap jeans. (The actual weaving would be done in the Phillipines, of course, or China. We like a whole rainbow of slaves!)

In a way, Bush did it. He was voted in twice, and maybe Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that ‘war is not the answer.’ Does our world really have a biracial leader today, a unknown dude with a dream, who thinks women and queers have just as much right to safety and love as rich white men?

Of course, I fear that those who hope for peace will be assassinated, because they are ultimately more dangerous to hell’s agenda than anyone else. It happened to the best of them, including Jesus. Still, as twisted as JC’s legacy was made, his soft-spoken words have never gone away. Love one another. The hardest thing. Are we capable now?

At least we have a chance to find out.

“I am asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
President Obama

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net