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| Anna Akhmatova |
Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out,
The wing of black death has flashed,
Everything has been devoured by starving anguish,
Why, then, is it so bright?
The fantastic woods near the town
Wafts the scent of cherry blossoms by day,
At night new constellations shine
In the transparent depths of the skies of July --
And how near the miraculous draws
To the dirty, tumbledown huts . . .
No one, no one knows what it is,
But for centuries we have longed for it.
June 1921
A curious counterintuitive thought: is it possible that reforms -- legislation, laws, things that liberal people believe -- have ended up worsening rather than improving society? Did progressive legislation end up worsening more than it helped? To paraphrase John Cage, don’t try to improve society, you’ll only make it worse.
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Is what we have now, a divided society, with homeless encampments in every major city as well as in smaller cities, towns, and rural Canada, an increase in drug addiction and mental illness, the absence of rental units so that rents have increased and renters live in fear of both rent increases and losing where they live, the inflated cost of food a constant worry to average people, hospitals collapsing, is this what reforms have ended up producing; we plug holes in the dike and bigger new holes appear a few feet away.
———
Consider our present dysfunctional, divided society, and the future dystopia, did anyone envisage this future for Canada? Things seem worse; "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". The government and well-meaning people find the answer to social ills in more government intervention in people's lives, they want to keep us "safe", a favourite word of Justin Trudeau; Justin always wants to keep us safe, but for one group to be "safe" another group is oppressed.
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Surely the 1950s must have been much worse than today. But were they? Remember the film The Hours in which Julianne Moore played Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife; she hated her life, she was a prisoner of that life, but reflecting on the character Julianne Moore played, we see her as a very unpleasant and selfish person, not someone to feel sorry for. We sympathized with her feeling entrapped by her life, conformity weighed heavily on society; she must have been oppressed by an angry and abusive husband as feminists have portrayed men. It was the 1950s so it must have been the way Hollywood portrayed it; Hollywood doesn't lie. But we also see that the cause of Julianne Moore`s character's anxiety was herself, she placed herself first, not her husband, not her son; nobody came first but her. What about Laura Brown's life was so bad? She had a house in suburbia, only one child, a young son who loved her, a husband who loved her and who wanted to please her, a next door neighbour who was supportive of her. And what did she do? She ran away one day, she deserted her son and husband, to the applause of many people watching the film; Laura Brown claims she chose life over death. Too bad for her son who was traumatized by her abandonment of him. (Did one or both of your parents abandon you or said they were leaving you when you were a child? Consider the depth of trauma abandonment, or death of a parent, causes in a child.) Then she lead a life of her own, maybe in a room of her own, probably reading Virginia Woolf's novels, maybe she read Mrs. Dalloway, and her son, who became a poet, committed suicide, he jumped from his loft window. His mother showed up for his memorial service. The perceived judgement, promoted by Hollywood films, is that the 1950s were deadly to the soul, to the spirit; the homogeneous society, the suburbs full of boring white people, the houses like little boxes "all in a row", were soul destroying, as Pete Seeger sang.
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And then we turn to today's society. Christianity is laughed at, rejected, or hated; the Bible is said to be hate literature and the progressives want parts of it censored; values are laughed at; marriage as an institution is being abandoned; our prime minister and others want school boards to have more authority over children than the parents of these children; medically assisted suicide has become another part of our health care system, the Hippocratic oath and the moral authority of our physicians is of little importance; freedom of speech has been compromised or limited; we live in a cancel culture society; meanwhile, there are encampments of homeless people in every city and town, in every state and province; an increasing number of these homeless people are dying of overdoses of fentanyl, mental illness is common; legalized gambling is a source of income for a money hungry government; we can’t house our own citizens and we let in millions of immigrants, does the government do any research before acting, do they ever think anything out? Is this what we wanted when we tried to improve society, piecemeal, with endless legislation? We forgot that what you change may not necessarily improve society, it may make society worse. We forgot that when the old is discarded it will never return. It is our collective hubris writ large.
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After eight years of Justin Trudeau's time in office Canada is in worse shape than it has ever been; this is what happens when someone is elected based on appearance and not on substance, when someone's progressive and woke values trump common sense legislation and frugal management of taxpayers' money; whatever Justin has done will eventually be discredited, it has already begun. Justin Trudeau's legacy will be that he was a wrecking ball, he is the Miley Cyrus of Canadian politics, he wrecked the country; we are now a society of debtors, a society without common values, a society where our politicians are always expedient and rarely insightful (look at them in the House of Commons, it is embarrassing, they are like braying accusatory children who have been spoiled rotten by their parents).
Photographs of the Robert Burns Pub located beside the Village Shopping Plaza.
The old Village Shopping Plaza has been vandalized, windows broken, things falling apart, garbage strewn everywhere, junk from inside the building littering the area; the old Robert Burns Pub has also been vandalized. Nature is taking over; first it destroys, then it occupies, then it's returned to the source.
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| Planet Earth, 1972 |
The Anthropocene
is cancer on the planet:
people are everywhere,
from suburbia to homeless, and in a crowded
Indian street someone yelling
"1.2 Billion!!", full of fervour
celebrating India's population
surpassing that of China;
while in Beijing tofu houses,
disintegrating apartment blocks,
begin to crumble as concrete mixed
with sand crumbles in your hand,
someone's always cutting corners
to increase profit;
it's all paper tiger here
on Planet Earth,
a papier maché society
of cities and cars and pollution;
civilization founded on graft and grief,
and appearance always
over everything else,
there are just too many people
roaming the planet, scratching
out a living in dirt and sand,
dominion over animals, trees, insects,
birds, lakes and rivers, oceans and seas,
we're killing everything, extinction
for the natural world, we're killing birds
with windmill generators, while
off Long Island whales are dying
where windmills as tall
as the Chrysler Building
stand ominous a mile off shore;
it's the Anthropocene cancer—
Stephen Spender: "The more
I am acquainted with my dog
the less I like humans."
Think of Detroit
where middle class people lived,
half the population uprooted,
moved to other cities,
suburbs, slums
or living on the side
of a road, a trailer park,
a Walmart parking lot,
from city life to homeless, city blocks
returned to weeds, sidewalks
crumbled, electricity
cut off, water mains broken
at 3 a.m., never repaired,
the residual cancer
of too many people, it's become
hell on earth; the Anthropocene
is spreading, changing the planet
to a likeness of ourselves, people sleeping
in NYC subway cars, migrants
sprawled across two seats
legs spread open, and at the
bazaars in Thailand, hoards of
people out at night, they're all
eating roast chicken, steamed
rice, mountains of food, by morning
it's mountains of shit, piss river,
and buckets of semen, the same
in South America, just too many people
degrading the noosphere and changing
everything that once was,
the US border jammed with migrants
streaming across, here they come folks,
from all over the world, truckloads
of young men, people fleeing at night
for their lives, fleeing
across the border, people
from China and Cuba and Venezuela
and Africa; if you own anything
soon you'll own nothing, you'll
be homeless, soon you'll rent
everything, listening to second rate music
from America, even the fine arts
have been desecrated by people
with no talent, no vision,
no craft; in the future
everything you own
you'll be able to carry
in case you have to run
like hell, across the fields,
through the darkened streets,
behind the razor wire, the barbed wire,
it's not going to get greener this way,
it used to be a lush world, green
with a blue sky overhead, a quiet river,
and then the rain came, the floods came,
the fires came, top soil blown away,
people came with their guns and greed,
the greed of people is only surpassed
by their ambition, not caring who dies,
they're maimed, arms amputated, minds
destroyed; the rich don't care about you,
they never did; the Green Belt desecrated
and monster houses constructed;
sold down the river, the big house,
the factory parking lot, the empty lot,
piss river a chemical soup,
the orange coloured sky,
earth that grows nothing,
you can dream all you want
you just can't take off this veil of tears;
believe nothing, the blight of the world
is too many people, soylent green;
the Anthropocene is cancer,
wars and propaganda,
history a commentary on a commentary,
lies piled on lies, it's become unintelligible:
the Anthropocene
is cancer on the earth.
Photographs taken the evening of September 7, 2023.
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| Evening, and the light is coming in diagonally and preparing for ever diminishing brightness |
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| Phlox are back for a second bloom |
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| On the right, that's a sumac tree that self-seeded and in three years is at least 15 feet high |
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| The brown-eyed Susans are reaching the end of summer, the cone flowers are mostly finished |
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| See those little things towards the right? They are a cloud of little flies one sees in the summer |
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| Sometimes the dying and dead flowers can be attractive |
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| There is that sumac again |
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| A hollyhock, they are a lot more difficult to grow than they should be; they were weeds in my youth, now they are biennials and celebrated when flowering |
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| A huge hosta, as though I have some special ability to grow hostas... well, they grow themselves and the best advice is to leave them alone and they'll get it right |
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| The house is covered in vines as though old people who don't maintain their home live here. . . someone tells me they are bad for the brick work and I plan to cut them back |
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| Some planning can go a long way |
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| Black currants I planted three years ago |
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| This did so well |
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| My wife planted this gingko tree about fifteen years ago beside our front lawn, it has done well |
