This Little Light of Mine: the astonishing art of Canada’s Pat Moffatt

There are a few tricks to getting the kind of colour and light that seems almost supernatural in Pat Moffatt’s paintings, the kind of colours that bounce around the room against the sun’s changing shadows, reverberating with glowing energy. One is gratitude, an inner illumination that comes from letting go, forgiving, moving on.

The other is more technical. Just don’t use brown. Ever. “Brown is a zero,” Pat says. “In my mind, brown is one big orgy of colour, that the brilliance of the truth of colour has been lost. There is no opposite of brown, it sits alone.”

This act of symbolic omission creates stunning works that vibrate with a luminous beauty I’ve never seen before. There’s a certain purity, and maybe that’s exactly what the artist is longing for. The colours shine like stained glass, like a lighthouse clear and bright over shadowy pines and a dark bay.

I happen to like brown very much- it is the colour of bark, sand, the earth, chocolate, giraffes…but I admit I’ve never seen a vivid brilliance like what shines in Pat’s work. Besides, everything Pat does has an important symbolism. The number of flowers in a vase, the colours used, a doorway, what the sky holds- all of these hold a story, a particular piece of Pat’s heart and soul. And the things that are not there- brown- also have meaning. “Brown symbolizes a wealth of bad things,” he says. And Pat prefers to leave the bad things out.

His symbols are not consciously planned out in advance. “I see it after they are done, not before or during,” the artist tells me. Consider the painting Forty. “I started painting January of 2003, I was forty. I had my first one man show at The Gallery Wall on Bloor Street in February 2005. There were forty paintings in that show. The show was called Forty. I knew it had to have a theme. A consistency. So I started working on a ‘theme’ piece. In it you see a wheat field with nine modern

Forty

bails of wheat. Two of them are in the foreground, representing my two marriages. The sky, a very dark blue, almost like there is a planet very close to earth, and out of there is a bolt of lightning hitting a pine tree. Illuminating it from within. The tree being hit with energy represents me being given the force to paint, to create… to connect with God? There is an abstracted version of a small chapel on the left representing my belief that there is something much greater than ourselves and because it’s abstracted it may mean that ‘religion’ has corrupted the ideal of spiritualism. The painting is actually a sign of gratitude for the ability to paint. To express.”

The ideas come in a flash, on a subconscious level. “I have this urgency to act on it…and when the creative process is over, I always see profound things in the work that pertains to my life. This in turn helps me deal with those things. Come to think of it…. during the whole process, I’m not a part of any of it.”

Teachers told Pat early on that he was an artist, but he did not begin painting until he was forty. It began rather suddenly, and has been wildfire ever since. Each and every work is created, “rapid fire, no thought, like an oracle.”

There was a “set of rules, in place, in my mind, from day one,” Pat says. “These were there before I even touched the brush to canvas for the very first time. I never break them, and starting and finishing a painting in one sitting- three to four hours, on average- is one of them…It’s all about letting go for me, and in that, comes beauty.”

Pat lavishes the canvas with abundant helpings of paint, another symbolic gesture of the generosity and giving of humans, and his gratitude. This effect, combined with the furious brushstrokes, the colour vibrancy, and the speed of the composition, gives a cosmic energy to each work. He churns out about two paintings a week, but feels he should be making several a day.

Indeed, the muse has come amazingly often since Pat began painting only six years ago. He has since created hundreds of gorgeous oil and acrylic paintings, and none show any sign of a fumbling evolution, a movement toward maturity, of the search for one’s own artistic identity, signature style- the “voice.” Rather, they are all, from the beginning, instantaneous masterpieces. The “brownless palette” creates an immediate and vivid cohesion. The fast fury of brushstrokes contributes to their vitality. The underlying use of symbolism means that a still life is not quite as still as it appears. And the distinctive use of perspective and choices of subject matter have yielded, in the artist’s earliest stages, the works that an artist might finally come to after decades of study, experiment, exploration, trial and error. Could it be that this humble man from Thunder Bay, Canada, is a master in our midst?   For even the creative geniuses had a gestation period, Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh…

Van Gogh. It’s what the viewer thinks about from the first moment.  When I experienced Pat’s work  at a Touched By Fire art exhibition, it was exciting to see someone continue on in the master teacher’s style, even, dare I say, improving on it? I assumed the stylistic focus was intentional, and I admired the artist for such singular dedication to learning from the best.

I was surprised to learn that the connection was spontaneous, and there from the very beginning. “I somehow do paint like him. A blessing or a curse…not sure?” Pat says. “This comes naturally and logically to me. My natural brush strokes look almost identical to his for some reason. My best friend for 32 years has an oil painting I did when I was thirteen. I had no idea he’d kept it all these years. Recently, he brought it out and showed it to me- I almost fell out of my chair. My brush strokes are the same as they are now! But at the time it was painted, I hadn’t even been introduced to Vincent Van Gogh.”

Van Gogh did use browns, but the kind of quick, short brush strokes that energize everything Pat paints indeed evoke the master and no other. The type of perspective used, the sorts of colour choices, the framing and splicing of the composition, and the subject matters- laneways, churches, flowers, faces, skies, landscapes, fields- all of these things have the feeling of deep homage to Vincent. I can’t help but wonder at the connections, the statements Pat has made about not really being there during the process, not premeditating the work, acting as an oracle.

“When I paint, it’s almost like I’m in some sort of state,” Pat tells me.  “Like runner’s high. Most runners will tell you that they cannot remember any details of the five miles they just covered. For me it’s the same thing. …. To me, painting is 100% freeing, connecting, maybe even connecting with God.”

Depression and madness cut Vincent’s life short at 37 years.  Outside of grade school, Pat didn’t start painting until he was 40- and then he did so furiously. Vincent sold only one painting in his lifetime. He would have wanted to sell more, and to have more time to paint, take his distinctive style to the next level. Could Pat be his channel? Or a reincarnation? Well, stranger things have happened…

Pat says he could talk about Van Gogh forever, and whether or not it’s conscious, I feel that he exudes a playfulness that celebrates the parallels. In Ballet of the Silent Mind, a dancer stands before two paintings that show Van Goghian chairs. Chives or Chinese lanterns in vases tribute the composition and vividness of the famous million dollar sunflowers. The many churches in Pat’s work suggest the rambling angles of the Church at Auvers. The dark swirling skies are more than a little evocative of the unforgettable Starry Night. For whatever reason, the spirit of Van Gogh is part of Pat’s work, a blessing and honour.

Or, as Pat suggested, a curse? Because even with this uncanny high honour of effortlessly conjuring one of the greatest artists of all time, it must be odd to represent the limelight that another never had.

And of course, Pat has many distinctions in his style that are difficult to convey in words. The parallels to Van Gogh are in no way detracting from a body of work that is wholly original. The purity of colour, as mentioned, is breathtaking.  Each piece is so glossy and shiny that the paint still looks wet. There’s a surreal, dreamy quality as recurring characters like nuns or accordion players enter the works. And some of the works are unmistakably Canadian, like the beautiful Northern Lights and Silver Birch. Occasionally, an oeuvre veers completely away from everything else, like Apology, which is sort of like Keith Haring and Kandinsky at the same time.

And then there’s the other part of the ‘curse. Depression. “I have battled alcohol since my 20s and I’ve been diagnosed with major depression. I think very creative people are so sensitive that problems or obstacles tend to be too much to deal with. A misdirection of fear or vulnerability,” Pat confides. “The worst enemy of the artist is fear.”

“There have been many days when I cannot paint due to depression. I don’t force the issue,” Pat says.  “But another one of my rules is that there will be no darkness in my work. I will not subject the viewer to the dark places in life. My job is to lift people up… not to share some horrific thing because I feel that I must. There would be no light without darkness, and it’s my job to show light. I really hope that come across.”

Pat says surviving his childhood is his greatest accomplishment. “I will not get into the details of it but I will say that the first nine years of my life were full of trauma, violence, tragedy, loss, and confusion.”

“More than anything…I long to become one with God. Becoming one, instead of being lost. Money or material things mean little to me. I have been extremely poor and middle class. I have climbed the corporate ladder to great heights only to fall off the ladder. I have dined with artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs. I have also dined with the poor, the insane, criminals, addicts, and have-nots. We are all the same, deep down, we all want the same things.”

That’s what I see reflected in the light of his artwork, in the attention brought to vivid objects or paths or angles we may miss along the way if we’re not watching. I see that beauty that’s reflected off the darkness, just as the luminous moon dances diamond ripples across dark waters.

“My eyes have never been wider than they are right now,” the artist tells me.  “There is so much to learn, to forgive and to let go of. If anything I am ultimately grateful.” He feels it is amazing to be here, to be able to create, to feel the connection with spirit, or God, those forces beyond ourselves that are mysterious and majestic.

“If I had a ‘normal’ upbringing, I think I would be selling used cars or vinyl siding,” he says.

Contact artist Pat Moffatt at patttygo@hotmail.com.

See over 100 of his works at http://www.artmajeur.com/?login=moffatt&go=artworks/display_list_galleries.

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

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My Crisis of Faith: Farewell to God?

My Crisis of Faith: Farewell to God?

My church prayed for Obama to win the election, and we celebrated with a community viewing of the inauguration ceremony. While no president could be exactly what anyone wants, morally, politically, personally, we hoped America would see through the lies, murder, warmongering, torture, and hatred values of George Bush. With all the debate going on now whether or not Obama is a ‘real Christian,’ how is it that none of these lazy thinkers can see that Bush stood for none of Christ’s values at all?

I love my church. After decades of bitter spiritual exile, in which I was a believer without a church, because I had not found a church of progressive thinkers who were not racist and respected women, I felt welcomed into a thinking community where all were encouraged to be leaders in effecting change around the world. I thought my church was giving, courageous, and deeply spiritual- now I wonder if we’re just woefully misguided, along with our more murderous predecessors of faith?

Not yet a week into Obama’s office, I’m on the verge of canceling my faith. Not because Obama isn’t a REAL Christian. It’s because the army of God has made it abundantly clear to me that they are ignorant, prudish yet obsessed with sex, hate mongering, war loving, vicious, hurtful, spiteful, vindictive, uneducated, murderous people.

Inside I’ve known this all along.

Religious hatred is one of the chief causes of war. It was one of the causes of the Holocaust. The cause of the genocide of native North and South American Indians. (Conveniently, my church could always blame these bad things on the Catholics, but plenty of Protestants hunted natives for sport. Don’t believe me? Check your history books.) Oh, yeah, then there were the witch burnings. Thousands, maybe millions, of women and suspected homosexuals tortured and burned at the stake for their husband’s impotence, or for having sexual intercourse with Satan. Then there are all those practices to ensure women’s morality- such as castrating them with a rusty razor, a practice still widespread in countries today. The Pope giving the finger to poverty by continuing to preach his bullshit ban on contraception. And racism, let’s not forget- Christians had to bring the heathen devils to America to build it for them and farm their food supply. I have a few books written in the 1800s. In Defense of Slavery is a Christian treatise on the moral imperative of breaking the backs of other human beings. There was little in there about sexually molesting, raping, and siring with the slave girls, but clearly, our forefathers had nothing against extracurricular sex, so long as it was had by men.

Yet, still, I pushed these shocking, horrible facts aside in order to believe. Like Mr. Jones, I want to be someone who believes. I’ve taken great comfort in my faith through the years, in the feeling of being loved by God no matter what. I’ve felt I had to answer to someone for the way I lived, and that the kindness of Christ was clearly the way we should be living. Furthermore, there is a great comfort in believing in magic and miracles, and in the idea that ultimately, justice will prevail, even if it is not meted out here on earth. Clearly, human beings are religious. Few societies, anywhere, and fewer individuals within them, deny God. We are a religious species. From early rites and rituals to our most spectacular temples and art, people want to believe in God. We need a vocabulary, a way to understand the mystery, to explain the unknown. For these reasons, I’ve never held anyone’s religion against them, including my own, even if it led some to unconscionable things. I believed truly, that the mayhem might be even more profound, given the low intellectual and moral capacities of most humans, than it already is.

But now I’ve been inundated with the venom of my fellow believers, who are looking past the immense strides and progressive morality of a president who has to clean up a world in shambles, clear up the economic catastrophe and war crimes of his predecessor. But Christians everywhere, with no apology for Bush’s war obsession, lies, and megalomania, are yammering on about Obama’s pinko agenda. He’s a babykiller, a radical Muslim terrorist, and a servant of the homosexual agenda.

I find hope and poetry in the fact that Obama is half black, half white. Much of the world, which has rejoiced at his victory, sees this potent symbol. That Obama’s father is Muslim and Obama is Christian is also a symbolic possibility of hope, given the horrifying mess of Christian-Islam relations right now. Obama has reached out to all enemies and asked that they come with open hand, and we’ll work for peace. Not to approach with a fist. I’m not naïve enough to think this means instant world peace- humans have difficulty enough disagreeing peacefully within a single family or country. But it’s a damn better start than bulldozing into terrain that is none of our business and starting a fight in someone else’s home.

The fact that Obama follows Christ’s message to feed the poor and visit those in prison and help those who are tortured is labeled Commie by these ignorant groups shows how deep and impenetrable their inability to get along with others reaches. Let’s recall that Christians are the newcomers on this land, and the cost for freedom here was the blood of native Indians, who had very different faith systems. Yet Christians, never a group for seeing logic, can’t accept that all humans have human rights, regardless of their religion.

Seeing as you can’t agree on the right church, the right interpretation, the right rules within the same religion, how should those to whom you minister know to choose? The feud between Catholics and Protestants- meaning the murder going on between the two- is still raging in Ireland and elsewhere. But right here at home, there are hundreds of denominations with their unique interpretation of the Bible, insisting their view is infallible, totally inflexible. And regardless of how well-meaning any president is, any citizen for crying out loud, OF COURSE the guy’s not perfect. No Christians seemed to mind when Bush was slaughtering infidels. But now you’re all calling for ARMS because Obama thinks gays should be able to find employment?

I’m well enough versed in church rhetoric to know that Christians will conclude that if my faith is wavering, I was never “really” a Christian, or I had never been “born again” or that I was a ‘backslider.’ The third may be applicable, but certainly I was- am- “really” a Christian. I had most certainly been born again as a child, deeply schooled in the Bible, traditionally devout until some major hurdles came my way. I was sixteen when a friend was gang-raped and murdered. The “comfort” extended to me that she “might not be in hell” because she may “have called out to Jesus during her torture” immediately gave me pause to reconsider how Christians view women. I left the church and read all about the great matriarchy, but largely saw it as a symbolic force of history, not a literal one. Indeed, my faith, though perhaps not exactly like your faith, was unwavering, despite embarrassing me frequently among the educated and intellectual circles I am part of.

I believed in God. I had a personal friendship with Jesus. As for arguments about what a ‘real’ Christian is, no Christian has yet sorted that out. Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Baptist, Calvinist, Fellowship, United, Unity, Coptic, Orthodox, Mormon- there are literally thousands of offshoots with the same basic premise and a unique constellation of magical ideas who all believe their exact interpretation is the truth revealed. So whoever is right, only an extremely small percentage of Christians are actually going to heaven.

I’m not the only intelligent person to cherish my faith. Indeed, nonbelievers form an extremely small number of human beings. My faith has not been literal and nor has it excluded all other faith traditions, but it has been constant and amazing, a source of deep joy as well as restless conflict. The characters of the Bible are real to me, especially my beloved Jesus, who said even when I am lost at sea, to cling to my belief in him and I would find peace. And I have, great, tremendous peace. I cannot ever blame Christ for the unseemly hatred of his ‘followers’. But now, I feel the truth is being revealed at long last, or unveiled. I have always, always questioned how to have faith, and what kind, and who to listen to as a teacher. But I have never, ever questioned giving it up entirely, or asked with an open heart if I have been deluded all along.

Now with a wide-open heart, I am exploring the question I never wanted to explore: is it possible that it’s ALL bullshit?

I’ve long cherished a belief in the miraculous, in signs and wonders, in the divine blessings, in the majesty of Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music. But now I’m more and more sure that these wonderful experiences are psychological illusions, escapisms, delusions just like drugs. They’re lovely, but they are not reality.

The more I investigate historical messengers, the more corruption is unveiled. It seems the whole of religion- indeed, perhaps, the whole of human history, is all about insecure masculinity.

The biggest uproar I see right away is hysteria over the “extremist homosexual agenda” of which Obama is purportedly a pawn. After all, within five minutes in the White House, they say, he updated the official web page to show support for the gay and lesbian community, giving those evil homos free reign. Apparently hate crime legislation is “dubious and discriminatory” as these Christians want to defend their right to gay bash. The President also called for the passing of employment discrimination acts to end discrimination in the workplace. A law like this might “ force business owners (religious and otherwise) to abandon traditional values relative to sexual morality under penalty of law,” says Americans For the Truth About Homosexuality, a group that adheres to a scientifically outmoded idea that being gay is a depraved moral choice. Now, I’m not sure when basic human rights and freedom to find work and not get beat up where any extremist agenda. Perhaps we should repeal all progress so far, and put blacks back in the cotton fields, and force women out of the voting polls and the workplace.

It’s obvious that president of the organization, Peter LaBarbera, is a self-loathing homosexual, taught to hate himself and so he teaches others to hate, too, in opposition of the words of his teacher Jesus, who preached love. That said, of course there will always be some who believe it’s wrong to be gay, just like they believe it’s unclean to be a menstruating woman, sin to eat oysters, or to sleep with both a mother and her daughter, or to clip the edges of the beard. And so I propose that we renege all equality laws for employment and discrimination concerning menstruaters, shavers, or oyster eaters.

Clearly, this concept is ludicrous. But let’s say, even if you do believe it’s a sin to be gay, can you seriously refute basic human rights? No way. Last time I checked, we all err. If we were to deny basic human rights to liars, cheaters, the greedy, thieves, gossipers, or those who have sex before marriage, guess not one of us would have any rights at all. I would like to deny employment rights to all liars and bigots, because their acts are against my religion.

Of course, the LaBarbera site americansfortruth.com features a salacious photo of leather S and M equipment with the shocking headline Pig Orgy. It can’t just show a nice gay person in his backyard with a barbecue. Yes, sex free for all orgies are a bit disturbing, but no gay man has ever invited me to participate in one. However, straight men have constantly pushed, belittled, prodded, begged, pleaded, whined for sex. Perhaps we can put pictures up on this truth site of straight men buying child prostitutes in the Philippines, or their nice straight magazines featuring spread-eagled pregnant women or gaping female buttholes. Yes, sex is dark and dangerous and dirty, sometimes. Disconcerting. I could get myself in trouble right now by saying that that is something to do with men, not specifically gay men. But I won’t. I’ll just say that there are a lot more S and M practitioners who are straight then gay. While I would hope that after being granted employment rights, the gay man would not bring out his business right there at work, but hey, those sick straights do it fairly often in hopes of wooing the secretary or proving themselves.

At least LaBarbera manages to restrain himself and still use genteel language. This good Christian man was a bit less eloquent. “The bible says that during the end times (2012?) God will separate the wheat from the chaff. I say let the chaff go. Fuck ‘em and every other preacher willing to crawl through shit-smelling rump rangers just to pray at Obama’s feet. I guess when you take it up the ass after God tells you your ass is for shitting then you can’t expect him to do you any favors. Cancer maybe. But no favors. Just remember when you’re infected with some fantastically exotic homo-virus don’t even bother begging money on the corner from all those “close minded hatemongers” that told you not to play with people that smell like shit. You know – the conservatives, “rednecks”, working class, christians, muslims, nuclear and extended families, soccer moms, jews, and all of those other “crazy” people that know clean is better than dirty.” A friend of the nice gentleman above mentioned that he’s stockpiling ammunition and heading into the Appalachians. Right- where the men f* their children up the ass, or their unwilling wife, and have babies with their babies? You know, I’m tempted to observe that every man, for whatever reason, is obsessed with the elimination orifice, especially straight ones. Don’t you know that pornography outsells every other entertainment industry? HUH? Yes. And most of that, but not all, is heterosexual porn purchased by men. Half of it features homosexual acts between women, and the other half is completely obsessed by the female anus.

Or this: “The homosexuals cannot reproduce after their own kind so they prey on the young people of today. If Obama gets into office, our country is surely done for.” You can’t ‘catch gay,’ you creeps.

Why are so many Christians threatened by gays? Why not claim that ‘liars’ or ‘rapists’ or ‘thieves’ are threatening the moral fabric of America? Oh, yeah, that’s right- the Old Testament encourages God’s armies to ‘leave no man, woman, or child’ alive, except for virgin girl children, so that they may be raped.

You know the innocent guy who was beheaded on the Greyhound Canada bus? The upstanding moral citizens of Reverend Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church said he was beheaded by God for Canada’s fag loving agenda. No mention of the sin committed by the beheader. Now they were rejoicing at Obama’s grandma’s death, as she was headed straight to hell for raising a fag lover.

Perhaps Phelps is a little extreme for you moderate minded conservatives. No need to hold up fancy picket signs- just quietly execute the abominators, just like the good book decrees. Well, friends, my Bible also decrees the execution of a wide number of sinners- unruly toddlers, teens who have lost their faith, women who have been raped, those who commit adultery, and those who work on Sundays. Prepare to tremble- by your obsession you shall know them. And seeing as every three days another evangelical pastor is arrested high on drugs with a male prostitute, we know there are many other queer fornicators who have not been found out. Get in line for the guillotine. Those who have not been fancying the fancy boys have surely had their hands full of garden variety pornography, and porn is adultery. Man, death row is overcrowded these days! Why not let your very own Texecutioner do the deed?

Furthermore, for those “Christians” who don’t want your kids polluted by “cross dressers and transsexuals defiling the role of men and women” I would like to ask you if you have ever met a transsexual person. Do you ever consider that no one wakes up and says, “Hmm, I think I’d like to live the rest of my life in identity torment and I’m going to cut off my dick?” Once you thought brain damage in the womb, birthing “tards” (retards, for those not schooled in Christian redneck vocabulary- in our vocabulary, ‘mentally challenged individual), was the consequence of a woman’s lust for Satan. Now you think the same thing about someone who has had serious hormone havoc, not of his or her own volition? Have you ever read a single book? Including the Bible, where Jesus clearly shows compassion and love for all humans, not just his followers?

I’m not going to say, “Some of my best friends are transsexuals,” although I could, because one of my best friends is. Do you know how much she has suffered in this life from discrimination and death threats and public ridicule? Never has she hurt anybody. She is not stereotypically campy or slutty. She is an engineering student unable to find decent work to fit her education, but always working hard. She gave up a fiancée because she had to be honest about her identity confusion. She is a loving friend. Instead of feeling sorry for herself for not quite fitting into the mold around her, she goes to Haiti where the children are dying, and volunteers at the hospitals where there aren’t enough doctors and everywhere she looked she saw small stretchers, covered, dead.

I’m not even going to get into the ‘have you ever met any gay people’ thing, because anyone at all with any education, empathy, or spirit of Christ inside them knows full well that gays are a gift of God, that they bring wit and candor and verve and style and hygiene and creativity and great art and great science and love and kindness and joy to this world. And in a final futile attempt to get it through your sick, selfish minds that gays deserve jobs, too, and that their life is just as sacred as yours, I’ll say this: so what if you think it’s sin to be gay. There are other sins, and if you’ve committed them, you do not deserve basic human rights.

Next is the ignorant faction who hysterically screeches babykiller about Obama, because of course, Bush was ‘pro life,’ a fact evident as the Texecutioner cheerfully presided over 152 death row executions. Several of the deaths were Gulf War survivors who went mad from nerve gas, and were brain damaged. At least one of these was innocent- but George didn’t extend his death despite new evidence suggesting he was wrongfully convicted. Though Bush himself went on a 100 000 body killing-spree in the Middle East, he actually made fun of a woman he sentenced to death, publicly, in the news. Making a mocking face for the camera, he pitched his voice higher and mumbled, “Please, don’t let me die.”

Karla Faye Tucker was the first woman to be executed in Texas. And her crime was abhorrent- she participated in a bloody frenzy with a pickaxe. I knew nothing at all about the crime but when I read that bare information, I immediately was certain the rampage was fuelled by methamphetamine. It’s unfortunate for Karla that her childhood was filled with violence and abuse and prostitution by age fourteen, and that like millions of other Americans, including George Bush, she drowned her sorrows in drugs and alcohol. Meth makes you into a hollow shell of fear and terror. Their terrifying paranoia is real, in 3D. The person really believes that they see men with guns in the house, kidnappers, aliens, wars, or demons.

Karla needed to take the consequences of her crime, yes, in respect to the victims. But meth free, fifteen years later, she was a model prisoner and deeply sorry for what she had caused. She also became a Christian. She did not ask to get out of prison.

Though Bush himself is an alcoholic and apparently, a cocaine abuser, he turned down her request to carry out the rest of her life in prison, and made fun of her- hardly fitting for a redneck, never mind a president. Pope John Paul II, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, and Pat Robertson were among those officials who begged Bush for her life. And though not all of his casualties are dead, about one hundred thousand are. Pimp Daddy Bush has also caused at least 50 thousand Iraqi women and girls to resort to prostitution for survival in nearby Syria. Who knew the land of the Bible would become a destination spot for sex tourism!

Paul Craig Roberts of V World said it best: “The same stupid American people elected a Congress that is too corrupt to impeach a president who is a liar, a war criminal, and a tyrant. Instead, they are prepared to let Bush off with a mere “mistake,” a courtesy denied to President Clinton. Lying about sex is an impeachable offense. Lying about war is a mere mistake.”

Now that we’ve established just how sacred life is to Bush, who established National Sanctity of Life Day, it’s easy to see why Obama’s outreach programs and health care for the poor are so controversial. Because sharing wealth is pinko, and just like he did for queers, he signed up for worldwide baby massacres in the first five minutes of his reign. (The friendly Christians who have dominoed my crashing faith claim that “the nigger is legalizing white robbery by asking the rich for another five percent in tax.” Never mind that the poor have been funding the rich corporations, and slaving for them, for centuries.)

I’ve been arguing on chat boards about abortion now for half the week, a topic I prefer not to talk about. There won’t be a resolution, because the issue will go on legal or not, and like it or not. It is something practiced worldwide to varying levels of safety. It’s an unpleasant, emotional debate and an extremely difficult thing for women the world over to face. Despite my left wing comrades and feminazi friends, I don’t know anyone who takes the matter lightly. Nor do I. Life is precious.

Yes, it is, and sometimes difficult things need to be weighed. No one will ever agree on the right or wrong of it, but on the message boards, most of the “pro lifers” seemed to agree that the best punishment for the crime is the capital kind. Of course, only women and their doctors will be executed in this utopia. I suggested that all men who use the sexual services of children should be executed, but in their eagerness to swap back and forth gruesome photos of mutilated babies, no one heard. I also suggested that men in general- who impregnate the women who should be executed- should share a spot with their lady on the electric chair. Then I thought I’d make a post that showed some brutal photos of other important children- child slaves in Bangladesh, starving kids in Sudan, orphans in Romania. There are many causes that suffer our lack of attention when we only moralize on this one thing.

The simple, cruel fact of the matter is that there are too many children, and yes, they are all miracles. With half a million women dying worldwide during childbirth, and millions more made ill, and billions impoverished, some enough to be forced to sell a girl into slavery or prostitution, it is absolutely imperative that we get contraception to these communities. You don’t have to agree with abortion to believe that there are much larger issues at hand. It could be said that every time we don’t help the starving or sick masses, we commit murder.

Well, the Catholics think contraception is just as bad as abortion. The narrow-minded scream of Obama’s plan to annihilate all children. After all, he immediately passed an order around the globe to start murdering babies.

President Barack Obama struck the rule that prohibited American dollars from being granted to foreign family planning clinics unless they agreed not to use their own private funds for abortion services or counseling. So, because a contraception initiative MIGHT discuss abortion, we have withheld our support. Given that many third world women die during pregnancy and complications, and they could have had access to contraceptives, this is also murder. You don’t have to agree that abortion is acceptable to see that it is unconscionable to refuse to support access to health care.

Obama cannot change the laws of other countries, and the States already has abortion on demand. So he is not actually babykilling at all. He is simply allowing support for birth control services. Yes, those services MIGHT counsel abortion to women who would otherwise die. Poor Catholic or Muslim countries do not offer abortion on demand- only abortion that would preserve the health of the mother! Contraception would reduce this number. But the fanatical self-righteous can’t see beyond their indignation and think about the matter at hand. Obama is not so powerful that he is able to legislate babykilling around the world. In fact, he will drastically reduce it.

Not everyone has the option of saying no, like we purportedly do. I’m sure you’ve wondered why women in India “keep having babies.” I doubt they’re thrilled about it. Believe me, if you are waiting in the rice line in Sudan, you’re not thrilled to by the blessing of a late period. What a miracle! Another precious bundle of joy for the starvation statistics! Another girl child to sell for rice money! That we let this happen when we have an option of providing contraception and education is reprehensible.

“Denominations including the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Union for Reform Judaism, among others, have urged the U.S. to support family planning overseas, teaching that wealthier groups and nations have a special responsibility to help and care for persons in the poorer countries of the world, which includes support for the basic reproductive health services,” writes Reverend Dr. Carlton W. Veazey on www.rcrc.org. It may well be a case of the lesser of evils. Abortion is heartbreaking, but it’s more heartbreaking to endanger a sick, impoverished mother, a child who may live suffering until he’s three or five, and all of his or her brothers or sisters. To withhold contraception because the clinic might talk about abortion is beyond all belief, especially while we are talking about our care for life. We must also care about those already born.

The fact of the matter is that it’s best to avoid abortion, which may be a necessary evil, but an emotionally distressing choice no matter what situation the woman is in. The best way we have to avoid it is to use birth control, lots of it. Organizations that educate about birth control may discuss abortion, and that is why the west withdrew support of those outreach initiatives. MAY DISCUSS. Consider here that in most countries around the world, abortion on demand is not available. Abortion is only considered if the life of the woman is at risk. A sick, hungry, or refugee mother will very possibly die during pregnancy or shortly after, meaning her child will also die and so will her other children. Clearly, in this case, there is less human death by access to safe abortion. Better yet, the woman will have contraception available to her.

The archbishop of Rio said that condoms will continue to be a ‘sin’ because DOGS do not take the time to place a condom over their copulation act. Thus, it is unnatural. Of course, the fact that dogs do enjoy gay sex doesn’t sway the natural argument for gay, because we are not dogs.

Aside from preventing more poverty, more abortion, and more child prostitutes, contraception saves lives by preventing AIDS. We already know that religious groups believe AIDS is God’s special bundle of love to homosexuals, though the fact that it’s rampant among women and children in Africa probably has more to do with lack of clean water and food and other immunity-necessities, as well as the widespread practice of female mutilation which makes even the most monogamous sex bloody. Forget the fact that STDs including AIDS are practically nonexistent among gays- gay WOMEN- because the religious authorities don’t mind gay women as long as they let men watch.

Then there’s the Cardinal Alfonso Lopez de Trujillo, the Vatican president for Pontifical Council for the Family. He stated that condoms are ‘secretly’ made with tiny holes to let the AIDS virus pass through. Nice. And not isolated. Cardinals and archbishops in Nicaragua, Kenya, Uganda, to name a few, told their flocks that condoms CAUSE AIDS. Cardinal Wamala of Uganda said that women who die of AIDS instead of succumbing to the evil of the rubber are to be considered ‘martyrs!’

I can just see it- Saint Bantati, who heeded her Lord’s admonishment against latex and suffered and died! Praise Be!

Of course, of course, ‘real’ Christians aren’t Catholic or Mormon or Lutheran or Unitarian or Anglican or whatever version you are not.

Of course, religions that are heathen to Christianity are even better at social control than we are. Foreign Policy Magazine reported that Pakistan’s AIDS problem was smaller because of reverent Islamic values. Of course, a woman in Pakistan can be SENTENCED TO GANG RAPE to assuage a crime committed by HER BROTHER. Smile, God loves you.

So question- if babykiller Obama will save so many lives through health care aid and contraception, helping to prevent AIDS and prevent unplanned pregnancy and hence prevent abortion among sick women, how will he carry out his murderous agenda?

Question: what if the unborn that we want to save are homosexuals?

Another question: I’m tempted to ask how close to the truth it is that there would be almost zero need for abortion or for contraception if all men the world over would keep it in their pants. But that ain’t gonna happen, and it will be women and children suffering from this double standard, including being condemned as “whores” who should be “executed” or sterilized for ‘not using birth control’ or sentenced to death for ‘spreading their legs.’ (All quotes from the wonderful godly pro life people this week.)

On a discussion blog made to warn us about “Comrade Obama” and against ‘ecofascism’ that refers to the babykilling regime, I mentioned the admitted lies of Bush and the 100 thousand dead.

“ If you call my President a war criminal one more time, I’m going to ask the powers that be on this blog if they will edit that out of your comment or delete your self-righteous drivel altogether. Please. I normally fully support free speech, but sometimes I just get sick of Bush Derangement Syndrome…May Jesus open your eyes to the truth of this matter.”

Yes, it’s a volatile issue. No one wants to hurt a child, but the fact remains that there are millions of hurting children and not enough resources or humans willing to look after them. On that blog, I never once spoke in favour of abortion, merely raised questions about Bush’s pro-life stance, and what we are doing about the millions suffering. Nonetheless, I was referred to as the enemy and as an “Alinsky acolyte.” Apparently they knew my ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies.’ They knew I was coming in from the left!

I regret I’ve never heard of Alinsky, though apparently I’m playing his game, so I had to look it up. Seems these Christians are also anti-Semites. (What about Jewish unborn babies then?) Alinsky is a Russian born Jew who believes in the deadly notion of power analysis, which according to Wikipedia “looks at relationships built on self-interest between corporations, banks and utilities.” He taught the poor how to actively seek democracy and representation. Now, I’m sure it would take some serious study to really know what I’m being accused of, but from my quick wiki skim, I can’t see what in the world is wrong with addressing the rights of the poor. Jesus said, “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor.” For starters.

Interestingly enough, I never advocated choice or abortion on this blog, but merely questioned how a warmonger could care about life, and whether contraception or abortion might possibly be more humane options than more children being born into poverty. In addition to being accused of my Jewish or atheist regime, my thoughts were curiously referred to as “parrot droppings” and I was called a “troll” and a “twit” and a “fool” and a “brainless turd” by these loving Christians who never considered that I too, am a compassionate Christian who hopes the world can avoid as many abortions as possible. Hence, why contraception is so necessary. Perhaps Jesus did “open my heart to the truth of the matter” because my belief, which I confess has been shaky after multiple personal tragedies and a deep depression last year, kick started into full erosion with the words of these deeply spiritual and Christlike bloggers.

When I dared to mention that I had dropped by with an open heart and that spiteful people like this certainly don’t make any points for witness to the Lord, I was lambasted as a pitiful and desperate loser who needed to refute those of deep intelligence and conviction in order to feel important. In fact, it’s starting to feel more and more important to run fast and far from anyone who identifies with faith.

I’m also noticing that a seemingly non-controversial topic- pollution, smog, environmental disaster, lack of clean water- is apparently contested by Christians who believe ‘there will be a new heaven and a new earth,’ so no real reason to look after this one. Apparently, the fear of running out of clean water is proposed by ‘ecofascists’ despite vast documented evidence to the contrary. Ummm, it’s a FACT that people in Africa, India, South America, and hell even here in Canada, don’t have clean drinking water. Or food. It may be that global warming is a natural cosmic phenomenon, not caused by us, but there’s no question we have poisoned our own food supply with chemicals and greed and overpopulation.

But apparently people who care about stewardship of God’s stunning creation, earth, are practitioners of witchcraft. That’s right, it’s pagan heathenism to care about the earth. It’s the president’s communist agenda to be concerned about our pollution, and he’s practicing witchcraft.

And then there’s sexism. Because all over, I see religious men writing about how Obama’s sold out to the evil of women’s power. I recall back in the 1500s, Protestant reformers Calvin and Knox also warned us of the monstrous regiment of women. Then they burned us at the stake. Calvin couldn’t tolerate a woman who didn’t want to marry and get pregnant; Knox couldn’t keep his hands off of children and in his 50s married a 15-year-old girl. Both eagerly stoked the funeral pyre upon which thousands of women lost their lives- to both Catholic and Protestant hatred. But now apparently in 2008 I’ve got to rescind my right to vote and if I’m a real Christian, I have to worship and submit to a man’s “headship.” It’s increasingly transparent that that’s all religion has ever been- the hatred of women and little else.

Of course, over and over we hear the catchphrase “family values” as if no family exists outside of the traditional “Focus on Family” style family. To the contrary, there are hundreds of kinds of families in cultures worldwide, and even here in North America. But by assuming that ‘the other’ is ‘against’ ‘family values’ “Christians” insidiously imply that unmarried, single parent families, extended families (read: Catholic), gay families, broken families, family-less families, childless families, are not families at all. How the American family dream came to be the Biblical prototype I’m not sure, because ‘Family Values’ in the Bible are a whole different ballgame.

Abraham fathered children by two women. Jacob married sisters Leah and Rachel, and also had children by two different mistresses. The sexy lovers in Song of Solomon were not married. And unless you totally block out the reality of everything, David and Jonathon were in love. When J. died, David said, I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan, your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women…” [II Samuel 1:26] Then there was a whole lot of incest, polygamy, concubinage, and more. While none of these were held up as the hallmark of perfect family life, neither was anything else. The family, in all of its forms, is imperfect, and based on our culture, neighbourhood, and circumstance. And ALL families are sacred.

James Dobson, who leads Focus on Family, got his knickers in a knot while telling Obama his interpretation of scripture was incorrect while Dobson’s and all other evangelical Christians’ was right. He called Obama’s leadership the “lowest common denominator of morality” (though I vote Bush as much lower!) He said Obama had a “fruitcake interpretation” of the constitution. Focus on the Family has been pumping propaganda of a post-Obama world where terrorists have overtaken the States, homosexuals reign over every family with their sex orgies, where black crack gangs take over the streets, where poor people clog up the lines at hospitals, where doctors are murdering old people left and right, where we all masturbate all the time, where taxes are robbed from white men, and half-dead babies bumble around in the streets. Perhaps there is a different interpretation? That peace is possible, even among Christians, that poor black kids who were not aborted might have access to health care, where discrimination is wrong, where people who earn over 250 thousand dollars pay an extra five percent to help the poor like Christ commanded (yes, that’s what the big Obama tax threat is), where people grow up and realize they can’t live in a bubble and call it reality. We can’t clean up a mess that way.

Dobson said Obama is stretching the Bible to fit his own ‘confused theology” but any group of Christians will say the same about another group’s interpretation. Obama was told he shouldn’t ‘reference ancient dietary laws’ when refuting Dobson’s personal interpretation of the Bible. What Obama said is, “Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?… Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?..”So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bible now…Folks haven’t been reading their Bible.”

So? Who will pick up the first stone to stone me, as I stray from my faith? Mom? Dad?

And then there’s racism. Sadly, Judi McLeod of the Conservative Free Press, is not the only one to accuse Obama of Islamic conspiracy. “What if Obama is engaged in pious fraud? This is a Muslim practice of pretending not to be Muslim to further the cause of Islam or to “defend the faith”. He becomes President and then says, “Gee…I think I want to be Muslim again” after he finds the “football” in his hands that carries the launch codes for the USA nuke forces,” she writes.

“Fuck, I HATE that purple-lipped, slackjawed nigger and his ugly-ass chimp of a wife,” wrote one thoughtful commentator. But hate is empty without murder, and so multiple death threats from God’s right hand were uttered, including: “This is bullshit. There’s no reason to put up with it. Someone kill this platelip and fucking save our country!”

And “nigga man’s gunna get his head blown off.”

Though he has been accused of being a Jew-lover by anti-Semites, some Jewish wing nuts have written that Barack Obama’s name means “Lightning from the heights” or hence, Lucifer, and that therefore, Obama is actually Satan. Haven’t we outgrown the idea that the nigger is the devil in disguise? Or, is he secretly Jewish? His mother might be! “Obama, secret Jew!” some ‘Christians’ write. But if he’s Christian, he’s the wrong kind. The wrong colour. He’s a Muslim terrorist! Religious bickering is starting to sound more and more grade two playground than ever before. Grow the fuck up. IT IS NO EASY FEAT to navigate a world on edge of total war over religion and race. Let him do his job as best he can, and support him.

It goes on and on. Fuck, argue over the economics of health care, go ahead, but one reverend writes about the “sin” of mental health problems and the fact that our future reliance on Obama’s mental health care injections is Satanic mind control because relying on doctors for our health is the aim of the devil.

You know what? It’s one thing to protest partial birth abortions and lovingly rally for resources for women. It’s one thing to ask for freedom of your religion. It’s one thing to disagree with the new president on many matters.

But it’s another matter entirely to hatemonger against homosexuals without viewing the plentitude of perversions in your sick world. To refuse medical care to poor women because you think you have the answers for difficult questions. To say Bush is not accountable for his war crimes, but Obama is evil because he lets homos have jobs? To jump on different hate wagons- he’s the devil, he’s black, he’s a pawn of the Middle East, he’s a pawn of the Jews, he’s a closet homo. Oh, and why is it that those of you who say you are pro life are angry that Obama reasonably thinks gun control is a good idea? What about all those murders, suicides, and accidents? A gun has only one purpose- to kill. If you think you need to protect yourself, use a knife. Of course, now that a nigger is president, he might creep into your home looking for crack and you must be prepared.

Shame on every one of you religious bigots, fearful, sick, disgusting, racist, sex obsessed, self-righteous, idiots. I thought progressive faith would lead us to a place in history where we could follow God in the traditions of our culture, celebrating our uniqueness, while rejecting the narrow minded assumptions, garbage left over by power-hungry religious fascists.

I understand that many, many of you religious people, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, have never acted in these manners and want me to understand that “not all Christians are like that.” Yes, many Christians, Muslims, Jews, and more have given their lives to charity and love and compassion. You may even feel that you outnumber in multitudes the sick few who act like I’ve described. But I don’t think you do. I think kindness is a minority group, marginalized. That you have been kind because you are an extraordinary person, not because God led you to be that way. Did God lead those people to be THAT way? or is it just that we are animals after all? We are ‘filled with sin’ but not the sins you can’t help- your gender, your geography, your orientation. Not the sins that might be foolish errors but aren’t born out of venom and murderous rage. These crimes, genocide, bigotry, torture, greed are not few and far between but make up most of religious history.

I’ll say it now- being female is not a sin, loving and consensual sex is not a sin, being gay is not a sin, being mentally retarded does not mean you are demon spawn- though you used to say it did. You all obsess about the things a person cannot change- the colour of their skin, their gender, their sexuality.

But the real crimes are lying, hatred, bigotry, racism, guns, war, killing, allowing poverty, religious intolerance, withholding medical care from anyone- including the mentally ill, allowing hunger and homelessness, rape, rape of children, pollution, obsession with other people’s sex habits, cutting down forests to make junk, not allowing women to vote or speak at the pulpit or study, wasting food, emotional abuse, the widespread practice of female castration and infibulation, marrying off your girl child to anyone but especially to an older man, censorship, discrimination, child slavery, sex slavery, beating your wife, beating anyone, thinking your wife is not your equal, thinking your husband is not your equal, making fun of disabled or mentally challenged people, allowing the kind of poverty and abuse that leads to hopeless addictions and other esteem issues, not caring about the poor, being cruel to your parents or children or anyone, lying to your partner about sex or other important issues, lying about fidelity, committing to a relationship when you can’t be faithful, using a person, not being there when a friend needs you desperately, arrogance, swindling, senior citizen abuse, lynching, slavery, killing people, exploiting others, stepping on people to get rich, underpaying workers, poisoning the food supply, banning contraception or withholding it, sentencing suicide attempt victims to hanging or suicides to eternal damnation, torture, chopping up native Indians and making their flesh into dog food (yes, we did, oh vile Christians), rape of native children in reservation schools or mutilation of their tongues and bodies if they did not learn catechism quickly enough, hunting natives for sport, parading around putting crosses all over South America holding heads of conquered victims on sticks with great pride, human sacrifice to sun god- no it’s not more barbaric and heathen than Christian crime but equally so and also religious, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, imprisoning anyone for victimless crimes or for different conscience, genocide, the holocaust, war crimes, never-ending religious wars, …get the point? Put a little love in your hearts.

What I’m witnessing today clear as day and remiss to even admit is the fact that obviously, the religious are and always have been warmongers who cannot function in a civilized society. Unevolved, savage, primordial buffoons.

It’s hard for me to believe that we just happened here, so although I believe in evolution, I believe (d) in some kind of intelligent design, that the deepest spirituality was creativity, manifest in the majestic works of nature. The totality of the awe of mountains and cats and the ocean and cultural diversity was the manifestation of God. I can’t really believe that evolution happened, unaided. On the other hand, if there was such an all-powerful master of the universe, then certainly he has the power to end human suffering and correct our mistakes. (Yes, I’m ready for it, interject here ‘the cross corrects our mistakes’. You know what? the cross is not a free for all so you can all kill and maim.)

Now I’m questioning the inevitable, and I don’t want to let go of that which I’ve cherished, that which has sustained me. I WANT to believe we are spiritual, magical, beloved beings, not “just” animals. For the very first time in my life, I’ve started reading what the atheists have to say, and so far Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion is right on the money about what’s really right and wrong. This book, among others I’ve read when I was not this ‘vulnerable’ to “Satan’s lies” have really uncloaked that which we see clearly but do not see: that like it or not, religion is at the root of most “sin”, not “godlessness.” Dawkin’s observes that immorality and greed and murder and torture and war and rape and exploitation all happen, upon closer scrutiny, WHERE THERE IS GOD and not where this is godlessness! (Atheists have been trying to tell me this for years, but I love Jesus and didn’t look into it carefully enough.)

We cloak it as tribal war and it’s happening today. Islam versus Christianity. Islam versus Jew. Christian versus uncertain or undecided. Yet- it’s really the same. My God is bigger than your God. My gun is bigger than your gun. Dawkins writes, “If you were born in Arkansas … you think Christianity is true and Islam is false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan…”

A book I dropped like a hot potato, condemned to hell by the very title, “god is not great: how religion poisons everything,’ is proving to be monumentally eye opening. It assembles chunks of history we aren’t supposed to find out about or interpret when we do.

I can’t deny my ‘personal relationship’ however faulty, with the Lord Jesus Christ. I feel his presence and I believe (d) in the rituals and mysteries that made him my personal saviour. When we sing, “This is the air I breathe…Your Holy Presence…living in me” in church, I get chills down my spine, I feel the living water pouring through me. But all “other” religious experiences can be reduced to subjective emotion or demonic intervention, according to Christians, so perhaps my experience is the same. Clearly, the  concept that God cares personally and fully about each and every one on the planet is a farce when I see children whose eyes have been ripped out or who are eleven and pregnant. Perhaps my need for divine intervention, for belonging, for unconditional love has conjured this illusion, as it has for people in all the other religions. After all, Mormons, who believe blacks and Chinese are coloured as punishment for their sins in the celestial world, and can’t go on to heaven, are completely positive that Joseph Smith was divinely inspired and not a raving lunatic. And Muslims are completely sure that Mohammed is the prophet of God, but outsiders are taken aback by his child bride (shouldn’t be- John Knox had one, too). Hindus are certain that their pantheon illuminates aspects of the one God, but Christians are SURE they worship wooden statues, empty of all spirit except for the devil. And among those of us who are SURE they have a personal relationship with Christ, we can’t decide among us whether the REAL Christians are Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Mennonite, etc….

It hurts to stand here, potentially faithless after decades of cherished belief. Perhaps the Bible really is just sacred poetry and historical storytelling at best, or a document to validate the power hungry, at worst. After all, this is what we Christians think of other “holy” books. Can I really survive without belief? Have these haters taken away my joy- or just my delusion? Can I go on without believing that I’ll see Marko again? Dimo, Bobby, Japey? Or maybe I won’t see them again regardless- they could all be BURNING IN HELL, right, in Hitler’s special inferno, where God sends those of us who get it wrong, the billions upon billions who were born in the wrong country at the wrong time.

I can feel my mother’s and father’s heart breaking. They did their best to train up a child. But they could not stop the history of examples of Christian faith that have unveiled themselves this past week, who have made me delve into the past and into geographical strife without blinders on.

Blasphemy is not my intention. My intention is honesty, so that we can all help each other from a place of truth. And so, I’m just going to go out on a limb and make a very bold statement of faith: I DON’T KNOW. I don’t have the answers to the mystery.

I could go it alone, just rejoice in the teachings of Christ to love one another, do my best to carry on loving with an open heart. But I feel sick. I’ve got to wonder for sure if this stuff was all made up to serve some megalomaniacs on earth. Live in peace with one another, Jesus said. I’m going to try my best, but I can’t deny a very large part of me has fallen away because of what I have seen among these “Christians.” I’m losing my religion.

Lorette C. Luzajic

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

Against the Wind: reflections of bipolar ‘illness’

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
-Virginia Woolf

Biology is our nemesis: it dictates everything beautiful and evil in the human race. Our efforts to outsmart it have been clever, coy, and very inventive, giving us what we call ‘culture’ and value so much: you know, art, buildings, law, literature, language and so on, and science, of course, medicine, religion, philosophy, and on it goes. But all of these are still no matches for the innate insistence of the body’s way. Nature trumps all, in the beginning, and in the end. We glimpse this truth even when we say “it runs in the family” and this certainly applies here.

Though I philosophize deeply against reducing my profound disappointment in human life into a medical label, I can’t refute our adamancy to harness and describe those particular chemical components of soul. It’s science: this chemical soup inside our heads and bodies is the physical depiction of this spiritual malaise.

There’s no reduction in calling my life pattern “bipolar.” It’s zero mystery to those around me that my moods veer in extreme ways. The depression world, and then the triumphant rise after a veritable entombment. I’ve always relished the truth that many writers and artists were depressed nutcases: I was pretty sure I was going to grow up and be a writer. So sometimes as a child the history of madness and depression gave me a sense of solidarity.  Call it what you want: most of the creative world is unhinged. In some ways, I feel sorry for artists who flat-line instead of getting their full heritage.

If your depression is bipolar, you get a bit hopeful when the dark cloak of nothingness gives way. You start breathing again. There’s a period of normalizing. It’s nice, brief, and not that familiar. Then you really start feeling amazing. Colours get brighter, and you start feeling the pulse of the mystery instead of thinking it’s all a crap heap. There’s so much flow, and other people’s attitudes don’t bother you as much. You’re super nice and energetic. Work it out, girl. Then you’re off the handle again, and it’s great. Everyone likes you here. No one likes to be in a dark room while you throw back the wine and whine about death. You’re baaaack. And you’re super creative, just like when you’re lowest, but then you’re slowest, and when you’ve got this much energy for creation, it’s a tidal wave. Amazing. You can rise to any challenge. You start a million things and make rapid progress on all kinds of stuff you’ve procrastinated.

Right about here is where you have a shotgun wedding, or shave your head, or date a hot Arab, or take a lot of drugs, and eat candy. If you’re Britney Spears, that is…. Mania’s promises are wicked, devastating, and you can’t see the damage that these impulsive turns can cause. They seem like a good idea at the time. The chaotic makes perfect sense.

I’m so blessed by some of the friendships I have known, and one especially has been my warrior of ‘positivity’, Daniel. His balanced mind and joyful spirit is enviable. Ask him how he is and he’ll sincerely tell you, “I’m LOVING life. And how are you?” Daniel is an amazing and gifted artist, though his true gift is the genuine joy and no-nonsense encouragements and admonishments he doles out. A few weeks ago, after about twenty years of friendship, I told him I finally figured out why he just can’t seem to get into art. It’s puzzled us over the years, because his talent for both painting and music is beyond belief. But the drive to put it together is intermittent, and it feels boring to bother. I realized why, finally- Daniel’s not depressed or crazy. He’s balanced.

Not everyone’s such a good friend, and like you, I’ve had my share of disappointments with people and have ‘trust issues’ and ‘boundary issues.’ It’s profoundly disappointing when people you would and did do everything for find it easier to up and disappear, the coward’s way, instead of coming to someone they care about and telling you what you don’t see. That you aren’t making sane choices, that you don’t see that you’re being vacuumed into crazy places you might not be able to get out if, into a world that will leave you broken hearted or dead. My life was not that much value to this type of friend, evidently. I think we have to be able to tell our loved ones when they might be getting lost. Hard things to say.

Of course there stands the questions: could I have listened? Can you stop a storm from coming? But that’s not the point, really. We have some duty to at least warn a loved one that they can’t see the forecast, try to free them from some extreme pain. A real friend would risk that hope. If a madwoman can be a loyal friend, then what the fuck? Even though you try to arm yourself against the takers, the bipolar person lives with a new slate constantly, hoping, giving benefit of the doubt, assuming it’s a new page. You fully expect others to operate the way you do, with a wide-open heart, because that is all you know.

But you see, the dichotomy of madness is that I couldn’t trade in any of those days now or in the future. I’d love to go back and avoid the addictions and avoid falling in love with people who would die. The pain is unbearable. But other broken people are the ones who loved me, had time for me, gave everything they had to me, and I them. You take what you can get when no one else is offering. Also, in some terrible ways, I thank God no one could stop me, because the times of greatest impulsivity and chaos are also the most creative times. While I’ve grown adept at creating in any mood through sheer discipline, nothing I do according to my organized and structured plans can come close to the output and innovation and sheer body of material and ideas that come out of nowhere. I could not be happier than times of brainstorming, productivity, hurricanes of ideas.

Yes, I’ll do my best to look where I’m going, and armed with hope and confidence and trial and error, I’ll get there. But despite the tsunamis I’m prone to, indeed, because of my risk-taking that nature built into my ‘sick’ brain, I have had an absolutely extraordinary and devastating life, a profound and vivid existence.

I’m grateful for both extremities: mania is a life force. Legend has it that God made the world in seven days, hello. This mythology shows us that the meaning of life itself, the force of it, is wild creation. Depression? It’s the other side of the revelation, for we are dark and horrible in part and depression simply reveals the wounds and the darkness. To live in balance is ideal, yes, even Buddha was striving for complete detachment from the whirling emotions. But no one has completely achieved that, for it is total illusion to think we have healthy, functional families and societies. Who wouldn’t be profoundly depressed by the sickness and malice and greed that fester in this world? Depression is not about ‘poor me’ so much as it is a sane reaction of the sensitive to the injustice of child abuse, rape, cruelty, torture, pollution, extinction, murder, disease. Depression is grief. Depression is a teacher. Another legend has it that a king died on a cross, wrongly accused, and suffered there the torment and abandonment of all that is good. This story is not about one religion being right over another. It was about the humility of depression, about how there is no reward for innocence, about abject grief over a world of darkness.

All this observed, I still thank God that once I thought it was a good idea to fly off in a beige pickup truck and see America. Thank God I have been so loved by some I loved so much. It’s better to have loved and lost. I’m so glad I somehow was inspired to make over 500 pieces of art in my first few years of picking up some art supplies. I’m so glad I spent the last two years starting over seven books and about ten other major projects. Where are they now? You’re right, not everything gets finished. But there are a few hundred thousand words coming at you soon, so get out your wallets.

Do you think I would trade those times in for something a little more even keel? Well, I’m trying…I seek the balance we all seek.

But- I know I can handle everything I’ve thrown at myself, everything thrown at me, and even if I can’t, it’s okay, because the unpredictable winds of the ‘manic depressive’ mind are just a metaphor for the unpredictable volatility of the cosmos.

There are sunny days, rainy days, violent hurricanes that could wipe everything out. Our deepest spiritual malaise is not really mental dis-order. It’s the deepest truth about our nature.

—

What do these names have in common?

Beethoven
Russell Brand
Lord Byron
Sinead O’Connor
Ozzy Osborne
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Charlie Pride
Nina Simone
Britney Spears
Margaret Trudeau
Mark Twain
Vincent Van Gogh
Kurt Vonnegut
Virginia Woolf
Sir Isaac Newton
Florence Nightingale
Edvard Munch
Vivian Leigh
John Keats
Abbey Hoffman
Herman Hesse
Ernest Hemingway
Peter Gabriel
William Faulkner
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Charles Dickens
Kurt Cobain
Leo Tolstoy
Hans Christian Andersen
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cole Porter
Victor Hugo
Leo Tolstoy
Oscar Wilde
Charles Darwin
Albert Einstein
Tennessee Williams
Albert Einstein
Picasso
Goya
Mozart
Chopin
Bach
Berlioz
Robin Williams
Marshall Mathers (this is me speculating, he is not officially ‘out’ on this list, but come on.)

If you guessed ‘manic depressive’ or ‘bipolar’ you were half-right. All these people are, but that would have been obvious, given my essay. What all of these bipolar personalities have in common is INSANE CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY.

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

Feast or Famine

Now after all the morose noose news of the past posts, you’re all expecting me to be brimming with the grim. But despite having spent the morning in my least favourite position- the dentist’s chair- I am on top of the world. It’s nice to have a respite, however brief, from the crippling depression I’ve been experiencing lately, and if I knew how to hold onto this pinnacle, I would. But I don’t, so I’m just enjoying it for all it’s worth. I get increasingly alarmed when the episodes of doom extend so long and deeply that even Kramer fails to make me laugh, or my own private monk fails to get the dharma through my thick skull. It may be that the first truth of the Buddha is that life is suffering, but I like that laughing Buddha better, and tonight I am she.

You can’t pinpoint what tips the chemicals back into balance, or into a more preferable imbalance. By all accounts, today should be abject misery. My financial woes are larger than their usual monstrosity, given the dental prognosis of the morning. My local mini mart ran out of Arizona Iced Green Tea. I ripped the garbage bag in the hallway and you know it’s always kitty litter and Tampax when the bag bursts open. Plus, I just finished torturing myself with another riveting trek into that bitter brain of Crad Kilodney’s- this time it was Excrement, the prequel to Putrid Scum, in which the writer recounts his hatred for the illiterate masses. I found a few new varicose veins, always cause for fresh hysterics. And of course, the bad news from yesterday, of brilliant writer David Foster Wallace’s hanging. The morbid and the sordid, and yet I’m dancing on the ceiling, filled with joie de vivre.

Well, I have a lot to be thankful for and glad about. Today for a change of late I’m donning that attitude of gratitude. I’m glad I’m finally going to see James on Tuesday. I have fresh lychees to go with the doob-tube later. I got some fan mail in regards to one of the Fascinating People blog posts, and a couple of new assignments. I had a good purr-down with all three of my fine feline, had a good chat with dad, and though no one rose from the dead in the past two thousand years, I was somehow flooded with peace like a river from the great beyond.

Best, I was so productive at work and I did my exercises, so I have no qualms about two hours of sitcoms and the brand new Haruki Murakami, After Dark, that I’ve been waiting to devour. And tomorrow after work I am dressing up and going out to celebrate with the festive and the gay. For as Auntie Mame said, “Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!” In my days, I am fortunate to have been stuffed to the gills, but today I’m absolutely ravenous, and absolutely fabulous to boot.

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

In Which the Author Confesses to a Lack of Belief and Crippling Depression

Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones
Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes
-Counting Crows

These days, I must confess that I’m wrestling with a beast I have long wished to conquer- depression. My emotions are typically erratic and all over the place, plunging into dramatic despair one moment and into swirls of possibility the next. And I was a melancholy child, way too deep, in between fits of spontaneous laughter and delight. Yes, I’m well aware that they call that bipolar. I don’t mind the poles, so long as I don’t go shopping during the mania part.

Sure, I accept the roller coaster. I see it as the essence of life itself. After all, there are endless tragedies and fears that would lower a spirit into hell. It would be odd to not feel some sort of grief or despair when terrified of the future, or mourning a lost loved one. And it would be just as odd to not soar to heights above when something goes right, when something lost is found, when one is happy in love or finds a key that helps make sense of the puzzles. Life’s gifts and its scars move quickly, randomly, intensely.

So up and down it goes, the yo-yo, the rollercoaster. One minute I think I can’t depend on anybody, that even the nearest and dearest to my heart can and will and have betrayed me. The next I am certain it doesn’t matter, that I don’t need anyone and can survive anything. And then I think survival sucks. Who wants to just survive? I’m sick and tired of making excuses for the traitors and liars and cowards and cheaters, for those who don’t give a flying fick about me but pretend to. The next moment, I’m more sympathetic; knowing the people who have disappointed me had stuff to work out on their own. But the moment following that, I’m not sure I can deal with how much I miss the people I love who have been taken from me in the past few years. And I hate cancer and AIDS and addiction and suicide more than I can bear.

photograph by Gonzalo Cardenas

You look around at my art, at my writing, my public persona, which is not entirely a reflection, but pretty much, you know, that’s pretty much how I am. My writing and other creative work pretty much says it like it is. Of course, I don’t tell you EVERYTHING.

But one thing probably stands out as consistent through my different modes of expression. I seem to have this huge, sweeping, all-encompassing belief in everything. Everything means something, and all of it is true. “I believe in impossible things.”

I’ll let you in on a little secret, one I find quite disturbing. Sometimes I don’t actually believe in any of those things.

To me, that’s what depression is. Lack of belief. Religion may well be the opiate of the masses, Karl, my friend. Is existential angst a better way to spend your life than opiated out of your mind on God? Most cultures through the ages have said no way. Humans all have some sort of religion or ceremony or systems that help us accept the cycle of life and death. From primitive magic to so-called sophisticated and intellectual faith, humans believe in what they cannot see. After all, it still remains unanswered- where do we come from? Even if you ‘know’ how, it is still a miracle, however sadistic.

I speak in my art quite convincingly, and honestly, too, about the magic side of life: I am clearly “a seeker” who has seen a few things on the journey, and I keep my heart open. But the past while, I wonder if I’m finally just losing the ability to hold hope, if the final disillusionment in humans has happened to me.

Today Rev. Hawkes talked about how he spends so much time in the company of sadness, that it could seize him in the middle of a trip to Costco. He’s learned to greet it, and then move on with his day. He doesn’t say anymore, “I am sad.” That would be letting the sadness be your essence, instead of a valid emotion you experience along the journey.

The Reverend always makes me cry. I have felt profoundly welcomed under his tutelage. No lesser mortal could have dragged me back into a ‘church family.’ Bloody impossible.

The childhood religious theme and coming home has all been vastly symbolic for me, solidifying my less Christian belief in connections, deep connections from mythology, with earlier ways of being. It all works for me. Who doesn’t ponder the big questions in their life? We all have this trip. We all have our in-conclusions. Nobody knows.

But the question remains… do I believe in the things I believe in? I confess that today, I don’t know. When I’m depressed I look at my trite efforts of extracting meaning from tragedy, and admit to being flummoxed. I defeat. I sure look for meaning. But the most recent losses piled up with delusions I thought were friendships frighten me.  Humans are downright macabre. Self-centred, narrow-minded, deceitful. Yes, I know, it isn’t new to me that the heart is deceitful above all things. But I’m feeling it more now, because when you’re depressed, you can’t put things ‘in perspective.’ Plus, death is anxious stuff. I feel like I did okay through an endless series of unrelated losses. And now I wonder if I have only ever been in the first stages of grief and have yet to go through more pain. Because I can’t do it. I want my fucking friends back, and I want my Marko. I don’t know if I have cried in my whole life the way I have cried in these past few months of exhausting sorrow.

Sometimes I just strip all the veneer of life’s elaborate cushions- the libations that ease social living worldwide and always have. That great opiate of the masses, as well, some religion. Hope. (Hope? What was that? I admit it, my friend, for all my bubbly optimism, I often look out the window, without hope. Hopeless. I don’t even know what hope is in those moments. You, too. This is human experience. It’s bottomless and I hate going there.

I make art series with names like Life Addiction to ward off any suggestion that I’m sending out negative vibes. I want hope, lots of it. To have it is to live another day. But yeah, sometimes I don’t feel much hope. I look around and think why the hell am I wasting time cranking Mahalia Jackson: can her stunning artistry and absolutely sacred convictions be anything but laughable in this world of war and suffering? And why was I bothering to read all that dense mythology instead of just heading to see Brad Pitt in Troy? Did it really matter what the ancients observed about human nature?

I look around and can’t believe that war is allowed, never mind esteemed, valued, and lauded- words like ‘heroic’ and ‘warrior’ show our sick, disgusting souls. War is a way of fucking life for most of the planet through most of history and I get so angry I want to jump off of it. I can’t believe it…I just can’t believe it…I mean, over and over we make war. Limbs and lives, tossed around. We just love war so much. That’s why we do it. We play it. We live it. We like it. We love to look at guns and artillery and intellectualize ‘military strategy.’ We like to fantasize about the enemies, about what we’ll do to show them.

“It’s a fact of life,” and a big one, taking up most of our evolutionary energy. I don’t want any part of that dreck, that horrific truth. It has nothing to do with me. It depresses me to be German, as much as I see great qualities in our lineage outside of that sick shadow we made on the world. But then, I could have been American. There’s The Killing Fields, the Civil War, Bosnia, Rwanda. I mean, what the hell is going on and on and on and on and on here? I want nothing to do with war. Not one human should ever have to experience fucking amputations and torture and severing limbs and explosions.

We love to kill and maim.

I want to get out of this place, but there is no escaping it- the truth of history.

I don’t believe that religion is what makes us do the war thing, though it may appear on the surface. We would do it anyways, and have. Money and land and power and who has the bigger dick are even bigger reasons for wars, big and small. It looks like it’s about religion right now- George Bush on the God team and well, we’ve all seen the South Park with Saddam as the devil. But it’s not really about that. It’s about oil. It’s about wanting to tell people what to do in their own country. It’s about George Bush dreaming about being a big warrior ever since he was a little boy. It’s not about ‘catholic versus protestant’ or Islam versus Jewish. If we look deeper, we see that as a whole, humans just love war. Our cultures adapt a faith not just to oppose another, but to cover up the open wound of what are we like inside.

I confess that lately I am so depressed that I feel I don’t believe any of the love stuff I might talk about, or go to church for. Right now I don’t think my favourite tarot cards really mean much and all the special symbols I hold onto to bridge my world with the dead, they’re probably all illusions. It’s all just dust.  For all the wild cosmic meaning life is infused with when you believe- these days, well, hmm, I don’t know about all that. I defeat.

I was literally sitting there today wondering if I could really take this “back to church” thing I started last summer seriously anymore. We’re singing about love and happiness and redemption and all I can think about is through all of history how bombs might have been falling or plagues sweeping through or massive beheadings or the slaughter of Canada’s east coast Indians and just about every other thing I can think of does not at all resonate with this religious mystery stuff. I’m just not buying it when the good reverend tells me we are all made in God’s image. I don’t feel God inside. I feel absolutely powerless.

Yeah, well, so that’s just a glimpse into one of the lovely ways depression manifests in me.  It’s spooky though to feel nothing but numbness, to feel…nothing. It’s dangerous, that’s for sure. Certainly, I can’t go through much of life like this, emptied of everything.

Then Rev. Brent talked about how he walks with sadness but does not say “I AM sad.” He often asks addicts to refer to their ‘struggle’ with addiction or their ‘walk with’ addiction, to see if we can move away from defining ourselves as ‘addict.’ That’s all fine and lovely, but I’m of the mind to call a spade a spade. I AM sad. I AM a lush. I AM angry, addicted, grief-stricken, crazy.

But hey, I have nothing to lose from trying to be a bit more positive during this dark spell. So with tears streaming down my face, feeling like a fool, I made a little promise to the Great Spirit that I’m going to live as if I believe from here on in, just like a while back, even if I don’t believe at all.

I’m going to live as if I believe I have a fate to fulfill, something meaningful to say, even if I don’t.

Just in that small, solemn promise, a hint of light angled itself through the creaky floorboards of the dark barn I’ve been in these past months. I can’t be strong and vibrant every day- it is right to give some time to mourning, also, some time to sorting out anger and hopelessness and fury at betrayal or time to work through isolation.

But…now, in this absolute fury at how we humans love war, this awful pain and fear of loss… once again those outlines of …magic, the pulse of life. Beyond all this, there’s just a glimmer of belief…just a tiny shimmering of maybe…that it’s all about something.

Life might be worth the sorrow. I hold out for this possibility, one I’ve always believed, deep down.

Visit the writer at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Anhedonia

Anhedonia (a short story by Lorette C. Luzajic)

No one would guess that when Lucy leaves the university library for the day, she’s just as likely to head to a bar for a few shots of tequila straight up as she is to head home for a Detective Goren marathon.

Perhaps tonight she has had one shot over the line, or perhaps it is just the calendar haunting her into the fuzzy place of persistent loneliness that hovers gently over her life. In a few hours, she will turn 28, and while this turning will bring the same routine as last year’s and the years before it, today she feels an old, familiar weight of quiet sorrow.

She flicks the switch on the TV and tunes into a Prison Break rerun. Life is a routine of books and television and the steadying, illusory comfort of alcohol on melancholy. There have been very few men in the picture to disrupt the even anhedonia with which she had lives her life. This is the same as it was for her mother, who seldom spoke of Lucy’s father, carrying the heartbreak of abandonment and single parenting with unspoken dignity.

There’s one thing, though, that Lucy carries in her heart. In the back of the closet in the hall is a small box, and inside it are letters, lots of letters, most written in pencil on yellow paper. The letters came from men as lonely as she is, men who wrote their most solemn thoughts without fear of recourse or rejection. These pen pals Lucy had never met, corresponding with meek encouragements and patient details of books she loved, books these men might find inside the library of the place they were imprisoned. Lucy has always been drawn to guys in trouble: she is one of the women they talk about on Oprah, women who spend their time writing to men behind bars.

For the most part, this unusual intimacy has never threatened the quotidian details of an uneventful life. Her thoughts flow freely when writing to inmates who are depressed and remorseful and angry, men who forget what freedom is. She feels more herself, more interesting, when stamping an envelope to Clark, or to Allan, doing hard time in Texas for armed robbery. She feels special when a letter comes for her, scrawled in near illiteracy with statements of the heart, regrets, dreams that won’t see the light of day. This is usually where it stays, a kind communication, and Lucy won’t let it get under her skin the way some of these women will. She doesn’t know why she is one of these women, a misunderstood bunch of who take a surge of adrenalin and feelings of love from men who can’t possibly know how to love, and even if they did, were not free to really be responsible to it.

photograph by Ian Ference

Lucy knows the real draw here is that there is no threat of true involvement. She can bare her soul, but no one will really claim it. Certainly it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that her “lovers” are just as absent as the father she never knew. Whatever it is, her mom had the same penchant, though she guarded it carefully lest it screw up her life more than it already had. Her mom raised Lucy alone with dignity and sacrifice, refused to talk about the night that left her pregnant. She never knew that Lucy knew, that she had found the letters in the attic once when helping Mom get ready for a yard sale. The shoebox, dusty and hidden under blankets in an old trunk, was eerily familiar and Lucy sensed its contents somehow before opening it. Her father was inside it, a few letters from all those years ago, poorly spelled dashed hopes and apology for being locked away. From the letters, Lucy knew her dad didn’t even know about her, that Mom had wisely cut ties with a man she fell head over heels for, a man who had murdered another in a bar room brawl. Keeping her daughter from this tragedy was the only way Lucy’s mom could make the best out of the quiet mess of her own heart.

There was one glitch, however, a private pain that seared so deeply that Lucy just put it away, far into the back of that hall closet in a different shoebox. She had seen Jared’s photograph in a newspaper once upon a time: he looked no different than a million other cons snapped by media hungry for a brooding, brutal cover boy. But something in Jared’s eyes seemed soft and hungry as the daily news announced his life sentence for killing his wife.

Lucy had written, shyly at first, and later with intensity, for two years before she took the next progression. Jared was the only pen friend that she ever went to visit. Ashamed of the pull of these violent, inaccessible men, she just let it be and tried to stay away from trouble. It was different with this one, the way her pulse changed when she saw his handwriting, and later, began accepting his collect calls and hearing stories of alienation from the inside. She had something to live for, a special, private affection. The letters became intimate, and provided an erotic vitality that lay under her goody-librarian persona like a secret. Lucy drove four hours to see Jared twice a month for several years until she received the news that Jared had hung himself without warning. The last letter mailed to her hinted at why- he had said something about 15 more years being too long to wait for her.

Tonight as the clock approaches her birthday, Lucy thinks about the shoeboxes, ponders the meaning of the things that drive an individual. When her show ends, she gets up and rummages through the cupboard for a bit of whiskey. She wonders if every human quirk and idiosyncrasy is just the way of the soul, trying to find its way home.

This story originally appeared in 1000 Words, an anthology of 1000-word short stories based on photographs, edited by Jordi Ribas. Please visit the author Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.