Synecdoche, New York- Genius Lost in Translation

This strange film, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, initially unfolded with sufficient weirdness to lure me deep into its heart, but then I began to suffocate in a heavy-handed mess that would never end. On and on it went, way past any favourable impressions of ‘deep’ and ‘ironic’ and ‘creepy.’ I was ready to join Roger Ebert in calling it a ‘brilliant film’ until the weirdness began to swallow me whole.

It’s difficult to understand how the screenplay went so wrong. This was Kaufman’s first directorial debut, but it was the stuff the characters had to say that went horribly awry. That Kaufman wrote the stunning and original scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind makes this all the more difficult to understand. I’m almost inclined to believe that the mixture of genius and ludicrous overwrought filmmaking was a technique to illustrate how the theatre character Caden’s life went so very wrong.

At first the characters were utterly compelling. Then they got boring. Then I hoped they would all die, which they did, more or less, in unending slow motion. At first, the strange plot and arty symbolisms were thoughtful and thought –provoking, and then they began to turn even the most avant-garde film enthusiasts prematurely from their seats. At first, the tinge of bizarre was a dazzling contemporary twilight zone with deadpan humour and razor sharp insights into the most remote corners of human anxiety and existentialism angst. By the halfway mark, even fans of Sartre and Coteau, even those art-school ne’er-did-graduate-relics who dropped the word ‘Dadaist’ cavalierly at every turn in the smoke hall- even they had started to shuffle uncomfortably in their seats.

On and on and on it went, growing into a boring behemoth of such massive magnitude that it threatened to swallow up the rest of our lives. At first the script was wry and astute, and then it was convoluted, and then it was ridiculous and then it was inane.

If I had to give a one-word review, ‘bleak’ would battle ‘boring.’ But neither is truly fair. I spent enough time dressed all in black reading Nietzsche and Andre Breton to figure out that the spiraling dullness and density of the film were symbolic and experiential bridges into main character Caden Cotard’s unraveling waste of a life poorly lived.

Here’s the gist of the thing: Caden is suffering from a number of symptoms of increasing severity, from grey poop to gum disease to tremors to impotence. He is terrified that there is something wrong with him, and his unsympathetic, sapphically suggestive artist wife wants someone less…disappointing. She takes off with daughter to Berlin for a big opening of her paintings and hooks up with a duo of new husbands- simultaneously- and a sexy lover named Marie, all living in polyorgasmic bohemian decadence. Meanwhile, Caden, bereft of wife and child, alone, suffering, lonely, sick, grows more ugly and more anxious. Caden’s theatre work is successful, but he can’t tell the difference between the stage and real life, and decides to produce a massive masterpiece that will help sort out the meaning of life. It’s a daunting task, and it takes twenty years or more to finish his oeuvre. It’s supposed to evoke something of Mary Oliver’s famous quotations: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

But it doesn’t, really. Those twenty years of watching the actors go through the motions while the director grows increasingly confused are where you will take your nap, or take your leave. The moral of the story is – bleak- that the meaning is death, we all die, we all try to make sense of it, we all come to no real conclusion, and if we do, we die anyways. You see, Adele, who seemed alive and sexual and spontaneous and successful and cruel and wild, while he stood in for ‘dead’- grey, lonely, sick, slow- well, she also died when they reached old age. Deep.

With heavy handed narration as earth shattering as ‘everyone is everyone,’ and scripted play-inside-the-play and characters that played the characters in the play- well, we were supposed to be involved in solving a surreal puzzle, perhaps tinkering with our own identities, perhaps questioning what we have done with our life. The problem is, we were out in the lineup buying more popcorn, or sending text messages of dire importance like “I haven’t made my new year’s resolutions yet, and u?” Aha- you see? Same thing, really.

Still, this over-ambitious and bumbled philosophical conundrum left me WANTING it to be better. Could they not go back in, edit the second half; shorten it from two hours that seemed like four into two hours that seemed like two? Because I really enjoy a good mind game, twisted humour, and decent acting, and this had all three. The intent of the film was exactly those things, in spades.

The clues were everywhere- the title, Synecdoche, plays with Schenectady, New York, another word for ‘nowhere.’ A synecdoche is a part of a whole, a substitute for the real thing- because half of the movie is a play about Caden’s life. And Caden Cotard’s name springs from Cotard’s Syndrome, a disease where a person believes they are dead, or that they are losing blood and vital functioning. The masterpiece theatre production, where Caden tries to find brutal realism to reflect his feelings of lifelessness, draws a web of strange characters trying to make sense of their own bleak lives. The vibrant and vivid wife, whose reckless passions make Caden feel dead in contrast, ultimately has the same shit, different pile. The acting by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest and others was stellar at every turn.

Sigh. This film about failure is partially a failure, though it’s lofty heights and quirky spirit have intensely worthwhile moments. As critic David Carr realistically states, “Kaufman traces an artist’s life and creative path. Good luck following along.” And Ray Bennett sums it up astutely: “It will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly…those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly.” His verdict is perfect and quaint- “eternal bleakness of the feverish mind.”

If you enjoy fascinating, creative, unusual biographies, you may enjoy writer Lorette C. Luzajic’s other blog, www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com.

You may also enjoy her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, available online through indigo or amazon.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

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chapters.indigo.ca

I Say Goodbye to Uncle Murky

I knew this would be the year I had to say goodbye to my longtime companion, Uncle Murky.  The signs of feline age increased as the weeks went by. Uncle Murky has had vibrant health and a mellow temperament for more than sixteen years. The only time he was ever ill was on catching kennel cough from his nephew Orange, and in his first months of life he was run over by a car. Miraculously, only his tiny foot had been hit and though it swelled up like a balloon, it was relatively easy to treat with some meds and Murky never went outside again.

He did go through life with a funny toe, which we nicknamed The Talon. It healed with a kind of crumpled effect, the middle toe sticking out. Without this distinction, Murky was the most ordinary featured cat- the prototype of feline, if you will, a grey striped tabby like millions of others.

Still, to our variegated family, with me as the one constant, Murky was anything but ordinary. He embodied serenity. In the tumultuous world of Mom’s emotions, Uncle Murky was the eye of the storm. He never felt dismay or bewilderment and though content and happy, he never veered too dramatically into excitement or joy. His Buddha nature tolerated every stage of my adult life, and he was front row centre for all of it.

Uncle Murky was the son of Itsy Diva, whom I had to shovel off of the road after her unfortunate demise, to spare poor Japey the sight of his beloved fluffy princess in such macabre disarray. Itsy Diva was tiny and mainly white with calico bits, nothing like her two massive tabby offspring. She was quite eccentric, like her human, Japey. She was the only cat I knew who went mad for peanuts. I’m talking about peanuts, in the shell, which she would eat along with the nut inside. Japey would stand on the front porch and call her, in a falsetto shrieking lilt, peanut in hand. She would come tearing through the neighbourhood like a rabid rabbit on speed, and tackle the peanut head on. After her untimely demise and her son’s mangled foot, I knew I would never have another outdoor cat. Now Japey is gone, too, a young man felled by cancer, and so Murky felt like a living relic, Japey’s grandcat.

Uncle Murky didn’t mind staying indoors. In all things, he was content. All he asked out of life was a pillow. Nothing made him quite as content as a pillow. There could be boxes galore, or clean fluffy blankets fresh from the dryer, and these he would ignore. All he wanted was a pillow, usually mine. He would clamber upon it while I was sleeping and gently nudge my head to fall off the side of the bed. Then he would get good and comfy and settle in for the night.

If by some lack of luck on his part, I failed to budge, he would attempt to share the space and nestle around my head. I found this quite endearing for a while, but when he took to frequent sneezing, directly onto my face, I took offense and told him, get your own damn pillow. And so ever after, he had his very own pillow, and we would sleep head to head in perfect harmony.

Murky did not bat an eyelash if we moved, if we got into the carrier and went elsewhere, nor if there was a party and a motley assortment of guests fawning over him. He didn’t get excited about much except sushi. Nor did he exhibit those most base and vile of human emotions like jealousy or self-pity, not even if the attention shifted from him to the newcomer- Orange. Orange happened one New Year’s, born to Murky’s brother and his wife. While I was not supposed to be in charge of the new kitten- there was to be no kitten, as we had believed that Miss Purr was fixed- I ended up with the little Orange thing, born no bigger than a thumb, and the only kitten in the litter.

Orange took considerable attention as he didn’t eat anything but milk and cream of mushroom soup for the first six months of his life, making us certain he would not live. But live he did, and to this day, he has no desire for foods that cats like- fish, chicken, and so on. Unlike his calm and collected and intelligent Uncle Murky, Orange is an oddball with few brains and a comic streak. He lives in his own little world, inhabited by all manner of sprites and butterflies. Uncle Murky took him under his wing from the beginning, cleaning him, showing him how to act like a cat at least some of the time, playing ball hockey with him, though Murky was rather disinterested in games from the beginning. He understood that Orange needed a game mate, and was happy to oblige. He graciously let Orange take the limelight, because Orange needed an extra bit of it in ways Murky never had.

In the past year, Murky became increasingly withdrawn and lost a few teeth, presenting them sorrowfully on that beloved pillow. He wore a resigned expression, tolerating the pain but wishing for numbered days. His stomach began to go and he had an increasingly difficult time digesting his food. Eventually, he began to have lengthy fits where he lost control of his stomach contents, spilling from both ends uncontrollably. This unfortunate hell meant giving him frequent baths, which he disliked, but tolerated with the same resolve he’d always had. Though the vet said there was nothing wrong with him but the beginnings of organ failure, I loathed seeing him suffering like this. The bouts became increasingly frequent and I knew I had to make the choice to say goodbye.

Because the Toronto Humane Society has a no-kill policy, I had to take my beloved tabby home to Niagara for Christmas. It’s not exactly how I wanted to celebrate the Yule, but Murky had been increasingly despondent the past weeks and showed complete apathy. He was waiting for the end, suffering through bouts of horrific illness as he waited with increasing impatience. And so, I packed his favourite pillow into his carrier and prepared for Murky’s last ride.

While he was generally comfortable in cars or carriers, because he was not feeling well, he was scared and crying. I was upset enough, and didn’t want him to be distressed for the long drive to Niagara. I wondered if he would be more comfortable with some Valium, and then dismissed the thought, thinking the dose might kill him.

Oh.

And so, I gave him half a human tablet. Within five minutes, Uncle was purring contentedly on his pillow, quite enjoying the scenic route, totally comfortable. When we arrived at the noisy humane society, Uncle Murky was unperturbed by the barking dogs, a rag doll in my arms, still purring.

Once, someone said something that gave me great comfort in this situation- that we are here for the duration of our pet’s life, even if he is not here for the duration of ours.  Still, it was so hard to say goodbye.

When I returned home yesterday, I found a solemn Orange with relative newcomer Bert. Nephew was lying on my pillow, where Uncle Murky loved to be. He looked up at me mournfully, looking around to see if I was bringing Uncle back with me. But the carrier was empty. He climbed back onto his uncle’s pillow, and wouldn’t move, keeping vigil all night long. Whenever I stirred next to him in the night, his eyes were wide open and he was not sleeping. Bert looked on, worried for his friend, wondering where Murky had gone.

But this morning when I rose from bed, still solemn from the hollow in the house, Orange jumped down from the pillow and resumed life at his food bowl, followed by a gathering of all his little sponge balls. He and Bert spent the morning while I wrote playing hide and seek with them.

I must learn from their wisdom, their innate acceptance of nature’s rhythms. Love, and be loved. Say goodbye. Grieve intensely, but not for long, and then greet the new day.

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

In Response to the Shoddily Researched Pro-Soy Blog on the Maclean’s Site

My response to this poorly written, poorly researched blog about soy on Macleans.ca:

Will soy make my son gay?

People are panicking about what’s been dubbed a ‘superfood’

by Julia McKinnell

http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/12/04/will-soy-make-my-son-gay/

Lorette’s response:

Why do people always think the ‘meat or dairy boards’ are trying to slam soy, without considering the massive industry of soy, one of the biggest and dirtiest businesses in the world. We can’t blame the beef any longer for the disappearing rainforest.

Thought beef was to blame for deforestation? Here's your 'green choice' soy in Brazil's rainforest.

Here’s just a few of the errors/omissions/misconceptions in this article:

Messina is indeed a ’soy expert’. He’s at the top of the soy industry food chain. His interest in soy is massive, it’s called money.

It’s not the Western A. Price Foundation, but the Weston A. Price Foundation. They are not paid by the meat or dairy board. Their main slant is not to knock soy, but to advocate traditional foods, including hormone-free, grass-fed, compassionately farmed meats, fats that are not rancid and artificially processed, and chemical free whole foods. The foundation follows the work of Weston Price, a dentist, who went around the world to study tooth decay and health, expecting to find vegetarian cultures that fit his paradigm of health. His studies of nutritional anthropology and modern health advocate whole and traditional foods, as does the foundation. Dr. Kaayla Daniel, who is a member of the foundation, wrote a book called The Whole Soy Story.

This whole idea that soy is a health food comes from- the soy industry! But the roots of soy are deep and dirty. Soy’s big thrust here was as oil. Processed, poisonous ‘vegetable oil.’ You know, the stuff of margarine. Hydrogenated oil. Trans fat. Heart-healthy! the margarine companies chirped. For years we used the plastic on our food as a healthy alternate to butter. The cheap oil was used in all processed foods. Junk foods. As science came around, soy saw the bottom falling out of their market and began pumping another batch of health food stories. Think about it. Hydrogenated oil is one of the most toxic heart dangers, with ZERO as a safe limit. Why are the new ‘health’ products any different?

The quote from the Asian girl about the flat earth was very cute and so on, and strategically used to make us think that anyone who thinks soy is dangerous is a lunatic. Recall that at first, EVERYONE thought the earth was flat because that’s what they were told. The insinuation is, if we are thinking soy is harmful, we are idiots. But considering the massive amounts of evidence against it, we are actually the first to stop believing in that flat earth and consider a wider science. I don’t know the measurement of soy products in Asia, and I am not Asian, and I do believe many Asians eat soy products. However, Asian cultures eat a lot of fish, raw fish, and vegetables, and less processed foods or wheat-based products. There are many many reasons why they don’t have our diseases. Also, Chinese cultures eat a lot of eggs and pork. I mean, A LOT. Maybe this is why they have less cancer? Soy foods are not a substitute for pork and meat, but a complement. Of course, there are vegetarian families like the example given. There are always variations of a cultural norm, everywhere you go. Raw foodie vegan types may be surprised to learn that their beloved Asian prototypes, in addition to loving pork, insist all foods be cooked, not raw.

Finally, there was no mention of something very important: soy foods in Asia are fermented. The entire miso-making culture was about learning fermentation secrets. Why is this important? Because unfermented soyfoods are poison. Soy beans were used as fertilizer, and fermenting the bean made it edible to the people, all those years ago. Asians do not eat isolated soy protein or vegetarian soy and gluten patties. They eat pork, fish, vegetables, and traditionally fermented tofu. Tofu here, and most soyfoods, are not fermented. The fermenting process removes many of the toxins in the soy. Go ahead, ask a real Asian miso maker why they ferment the soy. They’ll tell you why.

Finally, if the aim is to make soy dissidents feel like neanderthal redneck homophobes, whatever. I’m pretty in pink, believe me. But that doesn’t change the fact that hormone disruption is a dangerous thing. Artificial or natural, screwing with your hormone function is risky business. Plants are drugs, don’t forget. Chemical drugs are based on plant science. So it makes sense, just possibly, that estrogen might not be a good idea to feed either boys or girls. You have the estrogen you need already. It’s not about making anyone gay. It’s about girls menstruating before age ten and little boys growing moobs. It is happening out there. It makes sense to question the hormones in meat, the estrogen in plastics, and the estrogen in soy foods.

Those are just a few of my thoughts. Those interested can read more, in my article on the great soy deception, Spilling the Beans, at Gremolata dot com.

Cheers,
Lorette

My Two Cents on the Raw Milk Brouhaha

There’s really no need to point out to the hopeless morons opposed to raw milk that nature knows best. Milk, straight from the cow, is OBVIOUSLY far better for you than any manipulated product. It contains all of the amino acids, cutting down the body’s need to manufacture them out of the essentials. Some people have lived on nothing but milk, straight from the udder. No need to argue over the ‘high fat content’ of what comes perfectly made. The way it’s made is superior, no matter what new trend comes about. From yaks to cows to goats, Mama Nature knows best, and feeds us from her breast.

Vegans who proclaim all the dangers of milk are not wrong. The kind of milk that causes diseases, deficiencies, and intolerances is processed milk. When we drink defatted milk, we are not able to absorb the nutrients. When we take in growth hormones, we take in poisons. And pasteurization kills many of the nutrients and the enzymes needed to digest milk.

Pasteurized milk is pretty much dead milk, instead of living and thriving with a multitude of nourishing gifts. Yes, the process kills a few bacteria- but there’s no guarantee, and far more food poisoning cases happen with pasteurized milk than with raw milk purchases. You may risk some bacteria in favour of the dozens of extra vitamins and minerals. You probably will risk nothing, if you get to know your farmer, and familiarize yourself with the heavily regulated raw milk market. Remember, the so-called advantage of pasteurized milk is lower risk of bacteria. But actually, you still have a risk.

Why is that? Because raw milk contains lactic acid, an in-built system to kill off pathogens. Cows fed on grass create perfect raw milk. Why? Because grass is the right food for cows. As soon as you start feeding cows grain, their milk begins becomes less wholesome. Fed soy? The cows are sick. Soy is poison. Soy beans are soil fertilizer, not cow food. The poor health of cows raised for food and milk is lamentable. But one of the big reasons for their diseases is that they are fed soy foods. I got a letter from a dairy farmer in England who told me all about what happened to her cows when she switched to the cheaper soy diet. This is for real.

Cows fed grass like nature intended make milk like nature intended.

I don’t care what kind of milk you drink. It’s hard to find raw milk where I am because it’s against the law, for shame. If you have access to raw milk, the choice is yours and I don’t really care what choice you make, though it’s always right to support local farms and traditional farming methods if you can. But ultimately, I don’t care. I am forced to use supermarket milk when I drink it, or for my coffee.

But what I never want to read again in a letter to the editor or online chat is this:
“If people want to drink raw milk, go ahead, but we don’t want to pay their hospital bills if they get sick. Our taxes shouldn’t pay for that foolishness.”

This is the kind of tripe and bull from absolute idiots. Dude, puhleeze, I don’t want to pay your hospital bills from your Snapple and Oh Henry habit.

I couldn’t find any solid stats on how many people die annually from raw milk, except an anecdotal one that there have been two deaths in the past seven years. It may be significantly higher, and I’ll be happy to see the studies if you send them. However, I would also like to know how many people died slipping on a banana peel, from chemical bubble bath allergies, from getting stuck in a snowstorm naked, from drinking regular milk, from a rare reaction to kale, and so on.

The point being, you can die from anything. We want to minimize death, yes. But raw milk can protect you from so many diseases by boosting your health…and we all know what the big causes of death are in North American, don’t we?

Your medication, that’s right, death by prescription. It’s a top cause of death. Raw milk was used as medicine for thousands of years. The other causes?

This is for Mr. Everyman who always writes that letter to the editor I told you about. Whining about the health bill for those two people in the past five years. Put down your Coca Cola and your whisky, my good friend, and I’m as guilty as you are. Who’s gonna pay our bill? Because sugar causes all the diseases that raw milk misses, you know, the biggest killers we have- and you know what they are: heart disease, cancer, stroke, accidental injury, respiratory disease, and diabetes. (I suppose accidental injury is not caused by sugar-unless you dropped a case of gummy bears on your head!) So drink less booze, throw out your soda, flush the cigarettes, and buy a cow for your backyard.

Read my Other Blogs

Thanks for enjoying my random snippets of life on Little Miss Chatterbox. Here is where I write my miscellaneous thoughts, and I hope some of them are entertaining and some of them are devastating.

But if you have never visited my other blogs, I invite you to do so. “The Literary Addict: compulsive reading” is all about books and reading, but don’t expect it to be traditional reviews. I write about my experience with books in different ways, usually woven with the same personal threads and characters I encounter on my way.

www.literaryaddict.wordpress.com

Most of all, I invite you to my newest baby, and my favourite blog. “Fascinating People: gossip for smart people” is slightly more rigid in theme- each entry is a profile, an essay about a fascinating historical or contemporary person. We don’t have time to meet every interesting contributor to culture or history, we don’t have time to read every biography. But take ten to twenty minutes here and there to meet these lively thinkers. I keep my ear peeled for the unusual, the strange, the scandalous, and bring writers, artists, spiritual thinkers, actors, doctors, even ‘average’ citizens alive for you.

Don’t expect me to be objective- I don’t believe there is such a thing, and those who work at the newspaper and pride themselves on objectivity are deluding themselves! I bring the full force of my subjective experience of a person to the blog. I attempt to remain factual and highlight where facts are not certain, but I could not leave my irreverent sense of humour or wit out of the story- that would be boring! We’ve got wikipedia for that, and bless their awesome service. But these are vivid capsules of life and how I experience them, always digging in the dirt for madness, peculiarity, shock, always sympathetic and funny.

Who do I talk about? I have tried to avoid my obvious favourites and meet ‘new’ people along the way. You can get to know Josephine Baker, whose pet cheetah wore a diamond collar. Find out about guns, lust, and cross dressing in the Ernest Hemingway family. Meet a woman who lived for fifty years in an iron lung, staring at the ceiling, who described her life as happy. Read Virginia Woolf’s cheerful suicide note. Meet a madcap lady lawyer named Gladys who defended perverts and wore massive purple hats into the courtroom. Discover the story behind the story- you know, the one where Van Gogh slices off his ear and gives it to the 16 year old prostitute. Find out all about Reformation leader John Calvin’s enthusiasm for burning witches- and the rumours of his sodomy charges that he hoped would be buried with him in the unmarked grave he laid in. Meet Voodoo Priestess Marie Laveau and learn her secrets.

www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com

Fascinating People has a spinoff, Fascinating Writers, monthly at www.bookslut.com. Look for it on the right hand side of the site!

The Astronaut's Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. A graduate of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, she has had an offbeat career with the written word and her mixed-media paintings. She writes a column called Fascinating Writers for Book Slut online, and is the resident Spice Girl columnist at Gremolata magazine, where she also writes features about food and a blog about gluten-free life.  You’ve seen her poetry, profiles, and stories in Adbusters, Geez, Fiddlehead, Grain, Kairos, Modern Poetry, Dog Fancy, Style Republic, I Love Cats, Ergocentric, X-tra: Toronto’s queer community paper, Blood and Aphorisms, Canadian Woman’s Studies Journal, Canadian Baptist,  off our backs, Writer’s Journal, and all over the web. She has also appeared in various anthologies, and is formerly the editor of Idea Factory: an exquisite whateverly.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

You’ll Never Walk Alone

Though I’ve half-emerged from a depression and grief that swallowed most of this year, I find myself cynical instead of renewed. Back in the days, not that long ago, when I believed in magical signs, instead of in nothing, I would have put a great deal of store into the fact that for me, this was the year of The Hermit, in Tarot mythology. Coupled with the world’s year, the Wheel of Fortune, the old me would have predicted a topsy-turvy aloneness, a kind of Robinson Crusoe adventure in my very own home. For the biggest lesson of this year seemed to be that ultimately, you are all by yourself.

It’s a spiritual crisis when your angels, your God, and your everyday markers- friends and family- profoundly disappoint you. Maybe most of us find out before age 20 that they can count on nobody, but I’ve always been too optimistic, looking for the good inside the broken, making excuses for why people are the way they are. In some ways that veil was lifted. It’s a tough thing, losing your delusion. But ultimately, the hermit’s sage lesson is more about counting entirely on yourself, and less about counting on no one. To learn the necessity of the first, and to grow into one’s ability to do so, one must suffer the severances, the disappointments, the hellish realization that every man is an island, no matter how things appear.

So frequently have I written in celebration of love and friendship, that these revelations may seem a shock, or an inconsistency, in my outlook on life. I still celebrate love and friendship, and I still understand that it’s never black and white- that we all have the potential to inspire and to hurt. Nonetheless, at some point in life, a person has to stop making excuses for imbalances in their life, and correct them. And whether that implicates friends, family, or the Great Spirit, it’s a painful and emotional thing. It’s devastating to come to terms with some of these things: someone doesn’t understand you at all, and never has; the primary motivator of most humans is selfishness; where some have the capacity for deep love and joy, others have equal capacity for cruelty and manipulation; the idea of deceased love ones acting as angels or messengers is delusional. The signs are all in your head; they are rotting in the ground, and are not waiting to see you when you die.

Will I always feel this way? I hope not. But my Buddhist teacher tells me I must allow these dark feelings, embrace them, get to know them, converse with them, before sending them on their way home. If I cannot welcome them for an honest visit, they will keep knocking at my door, or break it down. Some I may invite to stay forever. Some I may send on the way after dinner.

At first it hurt to hear a longtime friend denigrate my life’s work by mentioning consistently how ‘vain’ and ‘arrogant’ it is to be a writer, that the very fact ‘a writer’ thinks somebody would want to read what he or she has to say shows incredible vanity. I listened to this mode of thinking for quite some time before waking up to smell the coffee. Those who don’t believe in you are dead wood. Of course, the irony is that this particular friend is an avid reader, and so this type of insult was targeted only to me, certainly not to the multitude of favourite authors. I’m astute enough in psychology to know that this person was deeply frightened at their own lack of direction and conviction, and I’ve been there over the years to show support and love at their every endeavour. Not any more.

Of course, these difficult scenarios ask us to question our beliefs, habits, weaknesses and strengths. It is true, of course, that it takes some vanity or perhaps insanity to write. Most of what is written will never be read by anyone at all. There are a thousand hopeful writers and I wish I had become a plumber instead. And if I’m a shitty writer, so what? There are a lot of those! There are crappy doctors, crappy janitors, crappy telemarketers, crappy scientists, crappy ministers, crappy secretaries, crappy models. I deserve my space in this world, however humble that space may be.

Now perhaps it is true that I bare my soul too publicly. I admit that I have to refuel my spirit frequently because I write from the heart, emptying it, naked for all to see. My truth may change, but I write the truth as I see it at the time. This type of exposure, though my audience is still modest in number, is frightening. Artists give of their heart and soul, not just of our time. I understand that this is a renewable resource, but nonetheless, to renew takes nourishment of some kind, from somewhere. I could revert to bland reports of the day’s news instead of the kind of vulnerable introspection of the arts and human life that I write about now, I could hide myself away as far as possible. But that modest audience for whom I write responds most to my work on grief, friendship, addiction, tricky relationships, and spirituality. This is what I am asked for by those who are so kind to send me their own harrowing stories of love and loss. And so, for those few who do care what I have to say, for those who ask for my grim observations and my hopeful quests, I must write. So yes, there are those who care what a writer has to say. It might not be you, so look away.

Though I could relate endless anecdotes from my year of the hermit- a year that doesn’t end, according to my mystical calculations, until spring- I will forego a dissertation on my disgust at pathological jealousy, crude lust, ruthless manipulators, obsession with artifice, the wholly superficial, the unflinching liars, the venomous incubi, the hostile users, abject neglect, the thieves in the temple, and more fucking death, and just talk about the loss of faith in the Big Guy Upstairs.

Right away, my heartbeat goes up. It’s scary to mention I my spiritual emptiness. What will my father say? What about all those years of me yammering about the spiritual depth in our lives? What about the church of which I am a member, my first such affiliation in my whole life?

The thing is, I’m not the only one going through a spiritual crisis. Even those who lived their lives for lepers because God told them to do so had deep chasms in their faith. Much is made of Mother Teresa’s ‘atheism.’ And shall we judge her if she was an atheist deep inside? Seeing what she saw, a different conclusion would be difficult. But I suspect that her faith wavered, came and went. I believe that if we do not have times of spiritual emptiness, if we do not lose our religion, we cannot possibly allow room for another spirituality, for a different understanding, or simply for a pragmatic outlook time to time. If you take the Christian symbolism of ‘asking Jesus into your heart,’ consider how impossible it would be to invite him in if your heart were entirely filled with something else. I was born into the ‘right’ faith, as far as my family professed, and when I emptied myself of it after the rape and murder of a friend, in my teens, my world broadened. I got in touch with the feminine side, forgotten aspects of faith and history. I read tirelessly on symbolism. I threw out the rigid paradigms and found space for other truth: the need for treatment for depression, the need to see outside of views that were forced upon me. I may have remained naïve, but instead I found a spiritual sisterhood while investigating the harsh primal reality of sexual violence. This gruesome incident was the first introduction I had to sexuality. It’s no wonder I broke down and thought God wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Private Grief, artist unknown

I wasn’t away from God for long back then, but s/he was not so limited upon my return. God was not a sycophant who demanded impossible trivialities from us, a tyrant who asked us to refute our natures, a dictator who created women to be lower than the animals. The world pulsed with a depth and glory I had never seen before. None of this could have come about if I had not been emptied of all belief in the first place. Conversely, the more time I spend on broken relationships, the less I’ll have for those precious jewels who really do understand and love me, or for the strongest relationship I have above all- my solitude.

Today, again, I cannot feel a connection to God, to anything even vaguely mystical. The more I have delved into the stories of his messengers, the more I feel that nothing handed down can be remotely accurate. These same messengers and their misogyny and obsessive superstitions pollute every faith I’ve explored, by their inflated sense of personal grandiosity. As every theology I’ve been intrigued by or admired falls apart when I scrutinize the life of he who brought it forward to this day, I find murderers, warmongers, greedy liars. If there is no preserved writing that I can rely on to have even a shred of holiness, then what can I possibly know of Jesus, or of Aphrodite? Every interpretation has come through monsters. “Imperfect” is not a just word to describe the scribes in whom we put our faith. Those who have passed scripture and history down through the ages have perverted it, erased it, are guilty murderers, tyrants. Whom can I trust? No one.

My lack of faith is today- let’s hope it returns tomorrow, in a new guise, or familiar and comfortable, it’s essential to life. I want to be someone who believes. But I know my current spiritual crisis is a metaphor for life. The excuses I have made for God are the same excuses I have made for my humans. We have all accepted bullshit because ‘it’s family.’ We have made excuses for those who abused us or treated us carelessly because we were afraid to be alone. We have crowded out new, healthier choices because our dance card is filled with old ‘gold.’

I’ve excused all manner of behaviour in family relationships and friendships because ‘that’s just the way it is.’ I’ve accepted how little I get back when I’m in need, in some relationships, because ‘it’s hard to love a bipolar like me with wild mood swings.’ I’ve let all kinds of things go by because I ‘understand’: mental illness, men, addiction, that you don’t know better, that you’re not perfect, that I’m not perfect, that the world isn’t perfect. And so be it.

Old Man in Sorrow by Van Gogh

But here in this empty godless expanse of winter, an icy resurrection from a summer I spent crumpled in hysterical hours of weeping, weeping on subways, weeping in streets, wanting to die, missing those I loved who are gone, missing those I loved who are right here but somehow are not right here, somehow in this the darkest place without belief, there was a pertinent revelation.

It’s not exactly new. “To be an adult is to be alone,” said Jean Rostand, a French philosopher and biologist. Indeed, the wild kingdom accepts relationships for what they are- fleeting. It may seem bleak, but that bleak place may ironically lead to room for more loving relationships with The Great Spirit, more fulfilling relationships with friends I have not yet met, more protective boundaries in relationships with the family, or more faith in nobody but myself.

Of course I know that we are social animals, we require interaction, conversation, and so much more, we require love and intimacy and sex and faith. But we spend so much time blindly giving trust to others, when we have yet to establish this same full and complete and very sensible trust in ourselves.

When you stop grasping at straws that distract and detain you, stop flailing in stormy waters, when you stop hoping in futile ways for salvation, when you stop crying because ‘no one understands you,’ when you stop accepting second best relationships because you can’t find something first rate, when you accept that your spouse or child could be a major disappointment, only when you know that the one you love most may betray you, when you really understand that ultimately, everyone you know could die in a tsunami and you still won’t fall apart- then and only then, you will never walk alone.

* * * * *

“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.”- Paul Tillich

“So lonely ’twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.”- Coleridge

“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.” – Van Gogh

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” –Thomas Wolfe

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.” – Nietszche

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Jesus

“An artist is always alone, if he is an artist.” –Henry Miller

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for.” – Dag Hammarskjold

“In solitude, where we are least alone.” – Lord Byron

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.” -Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

“I never trust people’s assertions, I always judge of them by their actions.” – Ann Radcliffe

“I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.” -Henry David Thoreau

“Trust no one, tell your secrets to nobody and no one will ever betray you.” – Bigvai Volcy

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” – Goethe

“I hate backstabbing fucks who pretend you’re “family”, will do anything for you, blah blah FUCKING blah, and the minute you ask for help… help you really, truly need, they turn around and go 10 faced shithead. You know, “friends” are highly overrated. Fuck ‘em all.”- distraught guy on the Internet

“You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.”- Barbra Streisand

“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” -Orson Welles

“There are people I know who won’t hurt me. I call them corpses.” -
Randy K. Milholland

“We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.” – Maurice Maeterlinck

“It wasn’t your fault, it was mine, for believing every word you said.”- graffiti in the washroom at Sneaky Dee’s

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. A graduate of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, she has had an offbeat career with the written word and her mixed-media paintings. She writes a column called Fascinating Writers for Book Slut online, and is the resident Spice Girl columnist at Gremolata magazine, where she also writes features about food and a blog about gluten-free life.  You’ve seen her poetry, profiles, and stories in Adbusters, Geez, Fiddlehead, Grain, Kairos, Modern Poetry, Dog Fancy, Style Republic, I Love Cats, Ergocentric, X-tra: Toronto’s queer community paper, Blood and Aphorisms, Canadian Woman’s Studies Journal, Canadian Baptist,  off our backs, Writer’s Journal, and all over the web. She has also appeared in various anthologies, and is formerly the editor of Idea Factory: an exquisite whateverly.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

Oblivion

Ahh, death, my old friend, here you’ve come again.

And always skirting the issue. If it’s me you want, then take me, and leave my friends alone.

Hello darkness, my old friend…you’ve come to speak with me again…

I’m tired of saying goodbye. I’m too young (or not young enough) to always wear black.

It’s trite to say that Genoveva was the sweetest girl I’ve ever known, but that is very nearly true. All those years ago- what, fifteen? Twelve? longer? – Beba helped me get my very first bookstore job at W.H. Smith at Yonge and Bloor. We had worked together at the card store previously.

Beba was an upstanding citizen who did not run with the wolves.  And so, our friendship was not something built out of weekly hanging out in my crazier days. She was too busy with the struggle of an immigrant- upgrading- learning better English skills, learning more skills period, to waste too much frivolous time waving her hands in the air after too many Mike’s Hard Lemonades. I was going full throttle at the nightclubs in those days, looking to drown my brand new diagnoses in that limelight, hands in the air, beats in my bones. Meanwhile, Genoveva was making lemonade with the lemons life handed her. She was the kind of girl who was always happy, even when everything was total shit.

Still, we built a friendship over a lifetime, and Beba’s generosity of spirit and her pure and simple love helped me weather some of the darker periods of my life. We could always count on each other, though I didn’t want to drag her down- or up, depending on your perspective- in my wilder days. In the last few years, in the aftermath of all the insanity I’ve lived through, she was a small pillar of strength. Her entire happiness in life was based on the simple tenets of raising a child and getting a half-decent job in administration services. She lived to realize these dreams. So what, that’s it then? How cruel and unfair.

I’m certainly not naïve enough to abide by the cotton candy world of ‘the secret’- that you conspire with the universe and get your due- though with their inane chirpiness they got on Oprah and got rich on their gospel. Do you recall it? “There are no victims, only co-conspirators.” Though the message of the so-called secret may be a little too cut and dried for those of us who exist within reality and occasionally read the news, nonetheless, we all subscribe at least in part to hope that we have a shred, a modicum, of control over our destiny. I’ve lived in abject terror of cancer, one of my many neurotic worries, since childhood, certain the bad habits in my life would bring me down in the most humbling way. I don’t believe we pay for our sins with illness, but certainly one who smokes as much as I used to might have some consequences. And statistically, the overweight smokers and drinkers and sugar eaters are getting sick. But there’s always a loop thrown out there to mess with our minds: if someone like Beba can get sick, IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE.

I had to make peace with this random grim reaper visit bullshit already, way too often, and it’s getting a bit tired, I must say. But all your pyramids come crashing down, the foundations you’ve tenuously constructed to protect yourself, your shiny new ‘platform of acceptance and understanding.’ Yeah, riiiiiiigggghhhhht.

The trouble with funerals? All the ghosts of funerals past surround you, too. Just when you’ve tidied up the holes in your heart, patched them together with Weld Bond and duct tape, until you have some semblance of functionality, now you’ve sprung a giant leak again. All the sorrow I feel for Beba and her family is accompanied by a whole choir of angels, angels I would like to believe are welcoming her for me, over there, except I don’t believe in the ‘we’ll meet again’ stuff half the time anymore, not since my grief-related breakdown this past summer. After Bobby left us in March, I lost hope in all of it. Hope just walked out the door, turned its back on me forever. All the energy and love with which Bobby and I hoped for healing healed up the gaping wounds left by Marko’s one way ticket to Planet Y. Just now, it was Dimitri’s birthday, and it was world AIDS day, and I thought cruel, greedy thoughts that couldn’t bring him back to me. “God” took Japey, too, my oldest friend, the purest childhood happiness I had. We promised when we were ten that we would be best friends into the senior’s home. We never expected Japey would drop dead one afternoon in his apartment as cancer crushed against his organs.

Some have suggested that I attract the ‘kind of people who are going to die.’ Here we go again, blaming the victim. There are no victims, actually, not really. Because we will all die. Yuck to that, but it’s inevitable. The people who say things like that will be the first to get into a car crash, if there is any justice. After all, you’re asking for it if you drive. It’s a high-risk situation! It’s just a bit cruel and strange to lose loved ones when they’re young, but there’s no law that says all will have a long life before they push daisies. Millions of children are dying as we speak.

Others have suggested that I should love fewer people. That makes sense, but one has to replenish the supply when you run out.

You bet I’m angry, but at what, at whom? That’s the catch-22. It’s no one’s fault. I sure feel like I’m bad luck, cursed, whatever, but in truth, I’m just as insignificant as everybody else. Maybe Japey was precious to me, maybe Beba was precious to me and her daughter and her family. But that’s it. If ‘God’ really had time to care about the seven billion lot of us, we wouldn’t have kids drinking sewage and Bush would never have been elected president. We wouldn’t still be scratching our heads, wondering how to fix the poisoned food supply. We wouldn’t have babies who suffer brain cancer, like Beba’s daughter, who has survived her mom, and my godchild, who did not survive it.

Still, there has to be some kind of spirit magic at work, because Beba’s living presence of hope and innocence was a special gift despite its brevity. Here I sit, healthy, life ahead of me, feeling sorry for myself for saying goodbye over and over again. But of course, it was a gift to know these special lights who changed my life. Beba was one of the most cheerful, resilient, caring people I’ve been blessed to know. She faced her many, many struggles with a kind of dignity I can learn from but won’t likely ever achieve. If being kind to others really is the secret of happiness, then Beba’s brief stay on earth was very, very happy.

It hurt so much to see how much pain she was in for the past few years. The last time I saw her, Monday, she was laying in the hospital with a broken hip. They couldn’t operate, so they were just keeping her comfortable. Until what? Until what? My mind was shrieking inwardly. Until she dies. The reality hung there between us, when we said goodbye, that we were saying goodbye.

And that’s what we do. We make our mark, big or small, it doesn’t really matter, and then we fade into oblivion.

Allison Crowe’s Tidings of Comfort and Joy and the Opposite, Too

Friday, November 30, 2008 Allison Crowe at Heliconian Hall

It’s too early to be sure, but I’ll go out on a limb to say Allison Crowe will go down in history as the brightest northern star in music. Yes, I realize we’ve got Joni Mitchell, Glen Gould, Leonard Cohen, and Sarah McLachlan. Hell, we’ve got Gordon Lightfoot. Then there’s bratty troublemaker Avril, who can be a bit embarrassing with her brand of small-town gutter punk- but on a good day sounds like Sinead O’Connor. But I think all of these will graciously relinquish their places to allow Allison to take her rightful seat on the throne as composer, writer, pianist, vocalist, and innovator extraordinaire.

Like I said, it’s too early to tell. Little sister Alley’s only 27, and just becoming a household name thanks to her stunning cover of Papa Leonard’s Hallelujah. She wasn’t trying to upstage K.D. Lang, whose lulling sultry country interpretation stunned us in 2004, but upstage her she did. Alley’s live number became something of a cult on YouTube, and for many fans and strangers alike, it’s the song they hum when they think of Allison Crowe.

Of course, history is seldom made out of a single single, no matter how astonishing, and the girl is a far cry from being a one hit wonder. Crowe’s future reign over Canadian pop divadom is simply the logical result of her prodigy. I picture her, not long from now, under spotlight behind a grand piano, on some massive music awards show, in a black Dior gown with Converse or combat boots. She’ll make a few of her peculiar trademark quips to let us share her nervousness, and we’ll begin to shift uneasily in our chairs, but in the next moment we’ll be shattered by impossible sounds. For Crowe formidably commands the piano to her will, sometimes battering it with all the fury of a hurricane, sometimes coaxing it with the lightest touch into sensual submission. There are few people in all of history who can play the piano as well as Allison Crowe.

For those of us who were nursed primarily by noises that beep and blip, there is something primal and unnerving about this music revelation. The piano might be in the way, ironically, of Crowe’s immediate success, because with her nervous, curvy beauty and big voice, the music industry would have her right now blasting the radio waves with something a little more Pink or Avril. But this dressed down diva’s extraordinary prowess and piercing vocal abilities are really just accompaniment for the accompaniment. And while she’s quirky and contemporary in her own way, the girl’s got an old soul that rightly insists on her own vision. To that end, she began Rubenesque Records and has an array or records already- records where her boss did not ask her to change a thing. While some might say you can’t be a pop songstress and an instrumental genius at the same time, in the same concert halls, to the same audience, Crowe begs to differ.

Sure, the cherry chapstick brand of buoyant bubbledom is infectious to be sure, but there’s plenty of that, it’s the definition of pop already. Allison’s going to merge a more serious kind of performance back into public consciousness, just as we all get tired of music that is made out of plug in popularity. And her intimidating intensity is rather addictive, and that’s why I rushed back to Toronto’s Heliconian Hall to see her Tidings tour, though I saw her perform already this year. The show was opened by lovely folk singer Stacey Burke, who set the ambiance for excellence.

Tidings, Crowe’s latest, is a different kind of Christmas album. Recorded by Larry Anschell (Pearl Jam, k-os, etc), it features a few old favourites like It Came Upon a Midnight Clear and O Holy Night, and Allison soared during these songs at the show. A real spine tingler was hearing Joni Mitchell’s River rediscovered.

It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

With this haunting Canadian hallmark, Crowe drew us inside, and then worked her hoodoo magic with rafter-raising, bone-rattling, nerve-shattering manic music. It was an almost pagan incantation to the gods of winter, the howling petitions of ancient circles for peace in chaos, bringing us from the vast and terrible freezing storms into the shelter of promise that Christmas’s very heart signifies.

Allison interrupted the shepherd’s watch by night to take us deep into the heart of darkness with her decidedly anti-festive Disease- all about the shallow end of the gene pool. Here is where you’ll glimpse some of Crowe’s deepest powers. Though her wide-ranging covers demonstrate beautifully that she can always outdo an original and remain quite humble and clueless that she’s doing so, her real talents go even deeper. Disease is a modern masterpiece, a full symphony or opera if you will within a few moments of music. Here she conjures hell, and shows her full mystery as a composer. (Wherever ‘words and music by Allison Crowe’ appear, you may be changed or damaged beyond repair, forever.) Here you descend into the pit of hell, quite literally. Crowe may have been burned at the stake for this dark spell in other times- her spell is more powerful than Dante’s Inferno, and before the literati come to hang me, too, I simply ask you to watch this frenzied fit of insanity before you say it isn’t so.

It’s powerful, dark magic like this that may make some critics tell her to tone it down and pray for bubblegum, but rest assured Crowe doesn’t leave you in hell, for her heart is full of hope and she has an undeniable sweetness: indeed, her emotions in motion span the full bipolar range from despair and disbelief, smoothing into calm and serene, then straight up into the heights of soaring ecstasy.

And while the slick and sickly ick and goo of the Christmas recordings by, say, Clay Aiken or Michael Buble are the real reasons people put a hole in their head over the Christmas holidays, Tidings might help you find your way back to whole.

Not everyone can bring down the divine, not everyone can be vast and mythological or bring the gifts of the gods into a winter’s night. But Allison Crowe channels the spirit each and every time.

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