Language Severely Injured

In the recent WikiLeaks saga of events, most of the media interest has been focussed on the material that has been revealed and the unfavourable light  into which politicians have been thrust. Rudd, the current Foreign Affairs minister in the Gillard government, has been publicised as "a control freak", Gordon Brown as "wobbly" on economic matters, and the list goes on. But one of the unnamed victims of the onslaught by governmeents of various stripes against the revelations has been language. As politicians try to outdo each other in denouncing the website and its founder Julian Assange, exaggeration has been piled on exaggeration, until finally, Newt Gingrich reached for the "T" word, and labelled Assange "an information terrorist." 


Now while the effect of the publication of some of the diplomatic cables might have caused embarassment, not one death nor even a flesh wound has been reported as a consequence. More than one pollie, or a pollie's aide, has called for Assange to be executed (presumably after some show trial) or assassinated (thereby avoiding the further embarassment a trial might cause). It's ironic that once the skirt of diplomatic newspeak has been lifted to reveal the more earthy expression of diplomatic exchange, then pollies here, there and everywhere are more than happy to drop any pretence of constitutional rights or due process as they lash out, heedless of the consequences. 


Newt-speak now presumably sets the precedent for anyone to call for the assassination of anyone causing discomfort.


Presumably, given Newt Gingrich's example

Birthday Milestones

Another milestone passed yesterday, my 68^th. The number does not have the same resonance as some others – 65, 50, 40, 21 – and in some respects it was uneventful, perhaps not even memorable. But since I passed 63, the age at which my father died, each year represents a minor triumph over what I considered at one time to be my destiny: to die before the age of 63. This observation may sound a little morbid, maudlin even, but when I was told, at the age of 55, that I had diabetes type II, that I had already developed cataracts in both eyes, and discovered that my father’s family, with one exception, had died prematurely, often following blindness or amputations as a result of the condition, I was sure that my physical destiny was to follow the same path as my father’s: obesity, shortness of breath, poor circulation, and, eventually, heart failure.

The one exception on my father’s side of the family was my Aunt Eva. She might have developed diabetes like her siblings, but she had the good fortune to meet her husband, a Polish soldier who had chosen to be demobbed in England, and who took her for their honeymoon to see the parts of Italy where he had been stationed, as a driver for the German army.  The experience changed my aunt’s life irrevocably. Having grown up in the Black Country, where any sighting of the sun was always obscured by industrial pollution, the quality of the light, and the more relaxed style of living of the Mediterranean showed my aunt what life could be like. She and her husband Geoff decided to emigrate, but found it hard to choose between South Africa and Australia. Both of these Commonwealth countries were offering inducements to immigrants, both had the climate that my aunt now so strongly desired. And so the choice was decided on the flip of a coin, with Adelaide, South Australia selected as their destination where a job was already waiting for my uncle. My aunt had always watched her diet, and the chance to have a large garden meant that she was always physically active, with the result that she lived a full life until her mid-80s.

Will I reach more milestones? I don’t know. But I do know that I intend to keep the diabetes in check through diet, physical exercise, and medication, and to continue checking off every milestone I can, including some of the more resonant ones.

Where is home?

We arrived in Perth late on Saturday night after a 33 hour journey that started in Vancouver at 2 am Thursday morning, with one day “lost” as we crossed the International Date Line somewhere on the Great Circle route from Vancouver to Hong Kong. Four hours’ wait there, then a Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore, and then the final leg, again with Singapore Airlines, that brought us into Perth just before midnight.

The disorientation that rapid transportation from continent to continent, and from one hemisphere to the other, to say nothing of the interruption of circadian rhythms, often means that the first sight of a new place occasions a feeling of dispossession, of a loss of centre that can be distressing. One factor that contributes to this malaise is change in the apparent path of the sun.  When the sun shines in Newfoundland, it rises in the east, moves through the south-east quadrant of the sky, then the south, south-west, and finally sets in the west. In the southern hemisphere, the trajectory takes the sun from the east to the north, before setting in the west.

In spite of this unsettling of patterns of behaviour,  I immediately feel at home here. It is not only the warm welcome of my in-laws, nor the fact that this is not my first visit to Australia; rather, everything feels right. The quality of light, the scent of vegetation, even the fact that we drive on the left-hand side of the road, everything opens up a place for me to be in.

I have a similar feeling each time I return to St. John’s, but there the individual factors are more difficult to identify as they have been blurred by 43 years of habit.

But when I return to my birthplace, Fenton in Stoke-on-Trent, nothing seems familiar or welcoming, nothing that says this is still my home. I went to the house where I was born, took photographs of the places that had not physically changed since my childhood, but I still felt like a tourist. Even visits to close relatives had the feeling of encounters with strangers.

So where is my home? It is not where I was born and grew up. And yet it is not exclusively St. John’s or Perth. Perhaps it is now time to re-examine what the concept of heimlich means, especially since its opposite, unheimlich, has such an important role to play in the dynamic of our psyche.

Farewell to Falgstaff

After nearly a week in the Wyndham Resort in Flagstaff, we are getting ready to leave for Las Vegas. We have seen only a fraction of what is to be seen and will have to come back to explore further. We got to see only part of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and nothing of the Flagstaff historic district. We had to forego the day trip to Antelope Canyon because of the heavy rain which probably caused flash flooding. And there are doubless many other sites we missed, or need to see again.


Tomorrow, after checking out, we drop our friends at the Greyhound bus station (they are going to Phoenix, while we head for Las Vegas for two nights.I don't think we will even go into a casino, but I don't know what other attractions there are in the area. About five hours driving to get there.


The end of this stay has been a little difficult. I think our friends are getting tired of Heather's pace of visiting, so today while we were waiting for them to return from shopping so we could go to dinner, they decided to eat by themselves.  I don't tolerate waiting to eat very well, so a 6 hour gap between meals upsets my blood sugar level.  I did not handle the situation well....

Fun with friends

We met up with our friends at Phoenix airport at lunchtime, more or less at the time we had planned. Our drive from Cathedral City to Phoenix was uneventful, with good road surfaces to drive on, for the most part. J took over the driving (a relief for me!), and we soon were on the outskirts of the city when we decided to stop for lunch.  I had never eaten before at Denny's (apparently a well-known chain in the US and Western Canada) and was well pleased with the service, the quality of the food and the prices.


Back on the road we made good time with J at the wheel, and apart from one slight glitch in navigating (our printed instructions from Google Maps did not correspond with either common sense or the garmin GPS system J had brought along) we made it to the resort by 6 pm


A quick shopping trip to purchase the necessities (Mount Gay rum, Jamieson's Irish whisky, wine and Guinness draft in cans ... oh! and some food for breakfast), we came back to check email and plan activities for the rest of the week. M is very tired and has gone to bed. We will soon follow, and tomorrow is going to be a fairly light day.


It's going to be a great week. J has a wonderful sense of humour, and M enjoys a good laugh too. What a treasure to have such friends!


Time for bed, said Z...

Relaxation!

After 48 hours of almost non-stop work, Heather and I managed to finish getting our house ready for leasing. Totally exhausted, we fell into bed at 4 am to grab two hours sleep before it was time to finish packing (all done by Heather), do some laundry (by me) and then off to the airport to catch the noon flight to Vancouver, where we arrived at 4.30 local time, 9 hours after take-off from YYT. A quick meal, and then collapse again into bed at 7pm. 


After 12 hours of deep sleep, a leisurely shower and a good breakfast, I feel refreshed and relaxed for the first time in months.


And so I ask myself: "Why do I put myself through this?"  It's not the first time Heather and I have been faced with a deadline that took extraordinary effort to meet. Do we procrastinate until it is almost too late to accomplish what is needed, let alone desirable? Or do we simply take on too much? This time we were "saved" by one event (the Tuckamore fundraising dinner) being postponed, and the other also postponed, this time courtesy of hurricane Igor.  If we had lost those two evenings this past week, the house would still have been unrentable!


I have vowed never to allow ourselves to be put into that situation again. Just the physical effort of the renovations, climbing up and down ladders and the many stairs in our house, stretching to reach areas for painting because it would take time to go and fetch the step ladder, all took their toll. And combined with the mental stress, worrying if the work would be completed in time, to the point where I could not sleep for more than four hours, thus contributing to my physical tiredness, all meant that breaking point was not far off for me.


So the title of this post is a sigh of relief and a command to self: take time to smell the roses, and the coffee!

What I learned about myself today...

... was that I take on too much! I have been in a tizzy the last two weeks, helping organize a fundraising dinner, helping organize a meeting for the District Association of the NDP, repairing our house to get it ready for new tenants, and trying to see as many of our friends as possible before we leave for six months starting on 25 September. I have never made so many phone calls in such a short period of time. Now, I have to make a resolution, and stick to it, that I will not get  involved in a hands-on way with so many activities. I am not indispensable (even though flattery that I am has worked on me in the past), and I need to start acting my age.


(I've just re-read this post, and while it puts me in an unfavourable light, I'm going to leave it!)

NRA involves itself in Canadian Politics

CBC News yesterday carried this item, that the NRA (National Rifle Association), an American lobby group, has been providing support "of various kinds" to the Conservative Party of Canada's campaign to destroy the long-gun registry. A number of comments spring to mind.  There is of course the almost instinctive reaction that an American lobby group has no business involving itself in the Canadian political process. But further reflection prompts the retort: "Why not?" Since the HarpoCons are intent on americanizing the Canadian way of life (note the "z") and making Canada the 51st state, it is quite natural for the border between Canada and the US to become as transparent as possible. NAFTA has already ensured a one-way street for Canadian raw materials, with no possibility of turning off the tap (especially for oil and gas). British Columbia exports water and electricity to California (sometimes having to wait for  payment until it suits that state), so why not have the NRA use its vast resources to sway public opinion (and the vote of Canadian MPs) towards that association's goals?

The newscast included footage of Harpo's parliamentary secretary giving a statement denying the involvement of the NRA, and when questioned about the links between Mr. Barnardo and the NRA, the PM's spokesperson replied that he did not know who Mr. Barnardo was. CBC countered with a clip showing Barnardo appearing before the House of Commons' committee on the gun registry earlier this year, and then another showing the same man against a backdrop of NRA logos. Peter Mansbridge did not draw attention to the discrepancy between the claims of the PM's spokesperson and the visual evidence there for all to see.

I'm sure we will be seeing more of these kinds of incidents in the coming months, especially if the Liberal Party finds its backbone and decides to pull the plug on the Harpo pseudo-government...

Jouissance

The title says it all...but it says more than I can possibly say even if I were to blog until my last breath. Jouissance is French, from the root "jouir" to enjoy. At least, that is its simple meaning, which of course varies with context. In a lease of land, the lessee can enjoy the fruits of her labours, of her use of the land. In the context of sex, it can mean to come. The English rough equivalent, "enjoyment", leaves out the intentional aspect, the evaluation of worth that Dany Nobus captured more closely in the neologism/pun "enjoymeant". Jouissance is not simply pleasure, rather it is the inexplicable, unexpressible aspect of that which we are driven to do, repeatedly.

Jouissance is what drives some women to repeatedly seek out abusive partners, some men to seek women to abuse. Repeatedly. Again, these examples could be repeatedly explored (guess what form my jouissance takes...), but a short-cut would be to refer you to Freud's well-publicized case histories.

Now, imagine a scenario where, in my boring life, in a neighbourhood where I have lived for twenty years, I suddenly find that the house next door has been sold to a young family from Haiti. Now, instead of the quiet neighbours I used to have, the music is too loud, their children play really noisily outside in the back yard, and the husband and wife are always laughing, hugging their kids, hugging each other. It's just too much.  Their jouissance is beyond my understanding, does not fit in with my idea of what family life should be like. 

After a few weeks, I find that I am detesting this family more and more, and with each passing day, my detestation has turned into hate. But then I discover that my hate is now becoming a weird form of enjoymeant. I can't make sense of it, but each time I turn my thoughts to this family, a churning in the pit of my stomach tells me that I do not simply dislike them; I hate them in a strange way that is an adrenalin rush that pulls my thoughts towards them, and a physical revulsion that turns me away, with neither feeling dominating enough to drive out the other.

Clearly, this is an oversimplified and foreshortened process that leaves out whatever experiences in my earliest childhood have prepared me for this. But it will, I hope, give you a different way of looking at one of the ways we come to hate.

Perhaps there will be more...

Why do we hate?

With peace talks underway between Gaza and Israel, and the announcement that ETA and Spain have agreed on a cease fire, there is a possibility, during this lull in violence, that serious discussions can take place to help understand why we hate.


There are various ways of going about this. One is to look at any given social situation from the point of view of logic and set theory. In order for a subject to identify with a group or set, another set composed of at least one subject not in the group has to be created. Identity requires non-identity in order to maintain itself. 


This opposition seems to be absolute, unless a way can be found to create another opposition, thereby creating a new identity of that which was opposed. Possibilities for this absolute Other are rather limited since we have to avoid selecting another human to fill that role. Aliens are a possibility (perhaps the popularity of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter may be explained this way), but hardly satisfying emotionally.


More on this later...

First Whisper

How to influence people and win friends. Beginning a blog is one way to increase my web presence as part of my foray into Empire Avenue. This first whisper will simply announce my presence in the blogosphere, but I intend to post here at least once a week.