Archives for July, 2006

This is the first summer in three years that I have spent in Toronto. Previously, I lived in Kingston. Not only is that city cooler and less congested than Toronto, while there I had a basement bedroom. During the summer, it was always the coolest part of the house. In the winter, I would sleep without a quilt, because the heating system was about as old as the house, which was very old, which meant that the basement received most of the heat. Those summers I was, if not in the basement, in the backyard where my mom made lunch.

And sure, it was warm, but summers are warm. Reports of heat waves in Toronto washed over me.
Continue reading this entry »

That last post was pretty pathetic. The latent ablism makes me cringe now. Also the fact that I could have just gotten out of the bus and helped the man myself and that would have made maybe 10 minutes late getting home.
I’ve been meaning to say that for some time now.
As you were.

On the bus today was a white-haired man, whose white cane I didn’t see until he got off the bus and began gingerly feeling with his cane the leaves of the evergreen he was about to walk into. The bus driver got off and cheerily led him down the proper path before driving us away. And I know it was rude, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away as he walked through the parking lot towards the shopping mall alone.
There was bravery here, but what caught my breath was a particularly familiar fear that went creeping, crawling under my skin. Continue reading this entry »

I think what I have lost in the crush of this insanity parading as sanity is my anger. It kept me sane, gave me boundaries, and defined my sense of self so that I always knew what I was, always had something to sacrifice and, most importantly, always had a story.
It wasn’t happiness, but it was as close as I could come to knowing.

Now, stranded between the two I am both without choosing. Moments of euphoria followed by moments of anger in a pattern that makes little sense, least of all to me.

Except when I sit down and try to think. Then, there, looming at the edges of my timid thoughts is a fear, a shadowy realisation that this is all of my choosing, that refusing to choose is, in and of itself, a choice. That opting for a life of passivity and waiting for thunderbolts and earth-shatterings is not merely naïve, it is duplicitous. Most of all to me.

So my anger has been replaced by a deep-seated fear at the ways in which I can deceive and endanger myself.

I have robbed myself of the stories I defined myself with. Am now floating, unable to attach to narratives, grand or small. Am looking for the right words, instead of creating them.
And asleep, my dreams have lost their once distinctive allure, the breath-taking rapidity of them, the plot-defying stories peopled with characters who, personifying the essence of the people I knew, were larger than the people I know, who left room for truths and the greater lies. Now my dreams are forgettable, are mute, and grayscaled.
They have nothing to draw from in my waking sleeplessness.

“Our motor is in me. He fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true.”
- The Mouse and His Child

by W. H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like ancient shepherds, sheep, dogs, and horses-and wolves.

- JR Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”