The Canadian cottage garden in mid-August, 2023

Not a large garden but a cottage garden; not manicured and trimmed and finely rounded edges and borders, but a garden that makes its own shape, that makes its borders temporary, they may be different next summer, or they may be the same. More of a comfortable old chair with a throw and an open book on the floor than a formal garden with box hedges and roses. A garden of flowers, large displays of flowers, all perennials to reduce the work but also because perennials have a soul unto themselves, they return, they multiply, they are frugal in work but great in display. They return and return and always give more than they take. A place of solitude. A place of insects, butterflies, bees, and spiders, and of birds visiting the bird baths. A small garden that contains much. A garden born from where it began, a place where little was growing, a place of grass and a single old apple tree. Now, it is a place of walks between garden beds, flowers, and giving the appearance of being larger than it is.

The Village Plaza in September 2015

 

Now the Village Shopping Plaza and the Robert Burns Pub are a ruin, closed, derelict, and slated to be torn down and a high rise mix of apartments and commercial buildings will be built on this site. 

Visitors to the bird bath

 

Untitled Poem, -- to Natalya Rykova by Anna Akhmatova

 

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

You will only make it worse

 

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. 

———

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. 

———

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. 

———

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. 

———

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). 

Revisiting the hidden trail

 

Inside the Robert Burns Pub

 Photographs of the Robert Burns Pub located beside the Village Shopping Plaza.

The Village Shopping Plaza today

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.

The Anthropocene is cancer

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.