"The Mysterious Naked Man" by Alden Nowlan

 

A mysterious naked man has been reported
on Cranston Avenue. The police are performing
the usual ceremonies with coloured lights and sirens.
Almost everyone is outdoors and strangers are conversing
 excitedly
as they do during disasters when their involvement is
 peripheral.

'What did he look like?' the lieutenant is asking.
'I don't know,' says the witness. 'He was naked.'
There is talk of dogs—this is no ordinary case
of indecent exposure, the man has been seen
a dozen times since the milkman spotted him and now
the sky is turning purple and voices
carry a long way and the children
have gone a little crazy as they often do at dusk
and cars are arriving
from other sections of the city.

And the mysterious naked man
is kneeling behind a garbage can or lying on his belly
in somebody's garden
or maybe even hiding in the branches of a tree,
where the wind from the harbour
whips at his naked body,
and by now he's probably done
whatever it was he wanted to do
and wishes he could go to sleep
or die
or take to the air like Superman.

"The Unknown Citizen" by W. H. Auden

 

Photographs of the Robert Burns' Pub from 2020

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

"All great Peoples are conservative . . . ", Thomas Carlyle

 

Here is a quotation from Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843): 

All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in Law, in Custom once solemnly-established, and now long recognized as just and final.--True, O Radical Reformers, there is no custom that can, properly speaking, be final; none. And yet thou seest Customs which, in all civilised countries, are accounted final; nay, under the Old-Roman name of Mores, are accounted Morality, Virtue, Laws of God Himself.

The garden's progress; insects, birds, and urban wildlife

A large lawn is like a paved parking lot; it is better than a parking lot but not a lot better. I can see this everyday in my garden; a garden attracts a variety of insects, more insects every summer, and more birds every summer, a lawn doesn't attract anything. If this is important to you, or interests you, then plant more flowers or vegetables, plant a perennial garden; this way you'll be making a home for insects, birds, and urban wildlife that will never know you have made their habitat a better one for them, they will make use of your garden as they would anywhere else in the natural world. Also, you'll be making your environment a lot nicer for yourself and you'll also be doing a service to the insects, birds, and urban wildlife. One of the good things about nature is that it doesn't take long for it to return; the only ghosts in ghost towns are human ones, nature is quick to move in and make deserted towns their own. In the old days we all sang Joni Mitchell's song, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot", now we know that the parking lot didn't necessarily last long and paradise returned.  

Photographs of my garden taken on July 7, 2022.

The next morning I took these photos:

The Brave New World is Here to Stay

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

It's off to work we go,

 A few months ago I heard our former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney say that Canada needs a larger population, he suggested 100 million people as a population projection. When the interviewer expressed surprise at so many people inhabiting our country, most of which average people would find uninhabitable, Mulroney barked back, "Tough luck!" Yes, tough luck to anyone who disagrees with the former Grand PooBah!  

Increasingly, it seems to me, the world's single largest problem is overpopulation. People are everywhere, working, eating, defecating, screwing, drinking, smoking, fighting, arguing, being born, dying, and starting over again; we've become an existential threat to ourselves. Forget about climate change, there are just too many people wanting increasingly limited resources. According to Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World Revisited, overpopulation is the world's greatest crisis. Fewer people = less demand for consumer goods and less destruction of the natural world. 

I recall reading Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is a typical dystopian setting, it is 2021 and the world has been destroyed by wars and ecological disaster and most of the former inhabitants of Earth have moved to another planet. Meanwhile, there are people still living in our now impoverished and decaying society, in the ruins of apartment buildings, crumbling cities, and other remains of what once was. Think of present-day Detroit. The movie version of the book, Blade-Runner, embellishes Dick's novel, the visual depiction tends to exaggerate the future, it makes it worse than in the novel, but perhaps the movie makes it more realistic to our present-day; think of what we see on the news of some other American cities, encampments of homeless people everywhere, crazy and violent people, drug addicts shooting up on the streets, middle class people carrying concealed weapons for their own protection, and worse. However, there are other characters in Dick's novel, they are androids who have a perfect human appearance but aren't human. Androids are a product of technology and have a furtive and underground existence as they try to survive and blend in with human beings. The protagonist of Dick's book hunts and destroys androids, they fear him, and they will even betray each other for their own survival. In Dick's dystopian vision most of the human population has left the Earth; what is left of Earth is a place of devastation, of poverty, social isolation, and existential ennui. This is the wreck of a world mankind is working on creating.

 

New Sculpture on Loyola Campus

The science hub, the new building on the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, includes a recently installed sculpture. I don't know the artist's name or what the sculpture is called (it hasn't been announced), but it is quite imposing and you get an idea of what it might mean when you approach it from a distance. It looks like a "rough beast", almost an invisible man not wrapped in gauze but in striations of aluminum. This is a formidable sculpture, as though an amorphous human body, one arm bent and protruding from the body making it look like it is slouching towards something; standing beside the sculpture it doesn't seem to be anything but a formless mass. I don't see any celebration of science in this sculpture assuming there should be considering it is located between two science buildings (literal me), it is more of a dystopian impression of the new soulless human being that has been manifesting for the last hundred years or so. The sculpture is hollow so you can step inside and looking up you see the blue sky, windows of the new building, and the endless and infinite universe over one's head. These shapes above one's head remind me of work done by Hans Arp, if I remember correctly. The sculpture is actually a very perceptive and accurate image of an aspect of our new world order, one that is both disturbing and disconcerting.

Now I remember what the sculpture reminds me of, it is the Golem from Jewish mythology; this seems appropriate considering the age in which we live. 

And now (09 October 2020) I know the artist's name, it is Marc-Antoine Cote.