Eighteen Bridges - Winter 2012

FEATURING

Stories That Connect

Christine Fischer Guy Richard Haigh Daniel Baird Jocelyn Brown Russell Cobb Kate Beaton Ken Babstock

WINTER 2012

AM I CRAZY?

Diagnosing psychiatry’s central text

LOOKING UP Cloudspotting 101

I FEEL LOUSY New fiction by Caroline Adderson

A GOOD FIT

The surprising resilience of marriage $7.95

Literary JournaLism July 3 – 29, 2013 Apply by March 15, 2013 Faculty: Ian Brown, Victor Dwyer, Charlotte Gill Looking to develop a major non-fiction essay, memoir, or feature piece? this month-long residency will enable you to work on your manuscript with individual consultations from faculty editors. the program also features round-table discussions, interaction with invited guest speakers, and engagement

with other participants, and artists from other fields. in addition to a $2,000 commission fee, writers accepted to this program will receive an award to cover the program fee, some travel expenses, and private work space in the Leighton artists’ Colony.

For more information: www.banffcentre.ca/writing arts_info@banffcentre.ca 1.800.565.9989 BanffCentreLit BanffCentreLit

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I ss u e 5

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WINTER 2012

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

– E. M. Forster, Howards End

features BORDER CROSSING

Russell Cobb

22 Glorious and Free. Mostly.

Why a liberal Texan is still in Canada.

IN PROFILE

Christine Fischer Guy

28 Burden of Proof

What a Métis blogger found out about her country, and herself, in the wake of the Attawapiskat crisis.

HUMANKIND

Max Fawcett

36 Why Knot?

One writer’s look into the unexpected evolution of marriage. fICTION

Caroline Adderson

46 I Feel Lousy

They took ten minutes to kill. Then you had to comb out the corpses.

Cover photo Pedersen WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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Carolyn Campbell, Directly Within Sight

span

Craille Maguire Gillies Richard Haigh Sophie Lees

07 Silver Linings

Sometimes it’s good to have your head in the clouds.

10 Law is Elsewhere

Why we don’t, and shouldn’t, always take the law literally.

13 Psychiatry’s Best Guess

The new DSM is flawed and often unreliable.

It’s also indispensable. miscellany

Sarah Leavitt & Cameron Chesney Clive Holden Carolyn Campbell

18 Drawing Conclusions

In which the graphic novelist Cameron Chesney interviews the award-winning graphic memoirist Sarah Leavitt about the potency of their art form.

26 Can•Icons: The Maple Leaf 40 Can•Icons: Same Sex Marriage 56 Solo Show: Room 56 POETRY

Stevie Howell Paul Farley Lutz Seiler Susan Wheeler

11 16 25 42

No Good Clever and Cold culmitzsch From The Maude Poems SOUNDINGS

Jennifer Cockrall-King Scott Messenger Jocelyn Brown Daniel Baird Paul Matwychuk

55 That’s Naturetainment

Life in the woods. Virtually.

57 Thanks for Nothing, Pop

If only I hadn’t played my parents’ music.

59 Something of Silence

John Cage and the ultimate pause.

61 Photography, Then and Now

A powerful art form faces a crossroads.

63 Might As Well Live Don’t do it, Anna.

BRIDGES

Kate Beaton

66 Song for the Causeway It was built for going away.

EIGHTEEN BRIDGES WINTER 2012 WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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EDITORS’ NOTE

I ss u e 5

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WINTER 2012

EDITOR Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Lynn Coady CONSULTING EDITOR Paul Wilson Managing editor Sarah Shewchuk Assistant editor Connie Howard GUEST POETRY EDITOR Ken Babstock DEPT. OF FACTUALITY Head: Craille Maguire Gillies Body: Irene Angelopoulos, Leslie Garrett, Jessica Lockhart, Kim Tannas, Wajiha Suboor CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Deborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio Craille Maguire Gillies Lisa Gregoire Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson Lisa Moore Timothy Taylor Chris Turner CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Joyce Byrne Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson website Gunnar Blodgett BUSINESS MANAGER Tiiu Vuorensola Eighteen Bridges ISSN 1927-9868 is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, 3-5 Humanities, University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E Canada.

The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, was provided

by Venture Publishing Inc. Occasionally, Eighteen Bridges makes its subscriber list available to like-minded magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you would not like to receive these mailings. Subscriptions are four issues for $25.95 plus GST. To inquire about advertising, subscriptions and back issues, contact ebmag@ualberta.ca or visit eighteenbridges.ca.

All contents copyright 2012 and may not be reproduced without the permission of Eighteen Bridges.

PM 40020055

* put FSC LOGO HERE

Onward One of the more satisfying ironies of the recent US presidential election resides is a core contradiction of its outcome— that, in voting for the so-called status quo, the American people refused to reward the party of turning-back-theclock and instead affirmed their faith in change. And we’re not talking about a bland, election-platitude kind of change, but the kind of change hinted at last May when President Barack Obama took one of the biggest risks of his political life to announce that his opinion on gay marriage had “evolved.” To consider that moment in historical context is breathtaking: the first black president of the United States is also the first president ever to publically avow his support of gay rights—and suffers no discernable negative consequences.

That’s something much more than mere change: that, in the president’s own words, is evolution, and that’s what we’re celebrating in this, our fifth issue of Eighteen Bridges. We’ve done some evolving ourselves since our first issue appeared in Fall 2010 (seems like yesterday!). 2011 was a particularly good year, not only because we managed to get two more issues out into the world, but because by spring of 2012, the world let us know we were doing something right. At the National Magazine Awards our stories won a gold medal, a silver medal, and eight honourable mentions. We returned home from the Western Magazine Awards carting fifteen nominations and four gold medals, including those for Best New Magazine and Best Alberta Magazine.

This kind of affirmation is what a magazine like ours needs in order

to continue its evolution (well, that and more subscribers). To mark the occasion, you’ll see we’ve updated our look. Eighteen Bridges was founded on the ideal of evolution, after all—the understanding that we would have to be adaptable to make our mark on this Darwinian media landscape.

Our writers seem to be thinking about evolution in their own quarters.

Sophie Lees writes about the flawed, yet crucial work-in-progress that is psychiatry’s “bible,” the DSM-5. Christine Fischer Guy profiles a woman who refuses to allow old-school stereotypes about Canada’s native population dominate the narrative following the Attawapiskat scandal. Max Fawcett seeks to evolve beyond the serial marriages and divorces on both sides of his family, but first needs to figure out why marriage still matters at all. Russell Cobb considers his own evolution as a new Canadian, charting his progress from reluctant to disgruntled to proud Canuck (but, okay, still a little disgruntled—it is winter in Edmonton, after all).

During the frenzy of each issue’s production, the editors of Eighteen Bridges conclude their rapid-fire emails to one another with a single word: “Onward!” It’s the only direction we know.

The Editors

A THANK YOU: The Stollery Charitable Foundation, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Edmonton Arts Council, the City of Edmonton, Mayor Stephen Mandel, Patricia Misutka, Patricia Johnston, Don Groot, Bernie Kollman, Brian McPherson, Pat Gillespie, Cathy Condon, Jessica Gillespie, Eric and Elexis Schloss, Daniel Laforest, Marie Carriere, Tiiu Vuoronsela, Sarah Shewchuk, Connie Howard, Craille Maguire Gillies, Lesley Cormack, Heather Zwicker, the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts, Catherine Swindlehurst, Jennifer Cockrall-King, Joyce Byrne, Ruth Kelly, Kim Larson, Gunnar Blodgett, Blaine Kulak, John Mahon, Todd Anderson, Ryan Barber, Paul Pearson, The Wedding Shop and Derks Formals.

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CONTRIBUTORS A few of our contributors…

pg 25

pg 28

KEN BABSTOCK’S most recent collection, Methodist Hatchet, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry.

The featured translation from German was done with the assistance of Eva Bonne while living in Berlin on a DAAD International Artist’s Residency.

CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY is a Toronto writer whose journalism has appeared in The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life, among others. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Journey Prize and her debut novel Moose will appear in 2014.

And the rest of them…

CAROLINE ADDERSON is a Vancouver author. “I Feel Lousy” is from Ellen In Pieces, a novel-in-stories.

Daniel Baird is a Toronto-based writer on art, culture, and ideas. His last piece for Eighteen Bridges was “No Ideas But In Things” in the Spring 2012 issue.

JOCELYN BROWN lives in Edmonton. Her book The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1-19 was recently published.

CAMERON CHESNEY is a cartoonist/actor and outstanding retail employee. His long in-progress comics work, Daphne, will eventually see publication if it kills him.

RUSSELL COBB is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Slate, NPR, The Nation, and Texas Observer.

He was recently nominated for a National Magazine Award.

He is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Alberta and is at work on a book about the idea of authenticity.

JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING is a writer from Edmonton who travelled Cuba, Europe, Canada and the US for her book Food and the City: urban agriculture and the new food revolution.

PAUL FARLEY is a poet and broadcaster. He has received many awards for his writing, including the 2009 E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His most recent book is The Dark Film.

MAX FAWCETT is an Edmonton-based journalist and the managing editor of Alberta Venture Magazine. His work has been published in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Avenue Magazine, and THIS Magazine, among other places.

pg 66 KATE BEATON is a cartoonist whose book Hark! A Vagrant was named one of Time’s best fiction books of 2011. Her comics often have to do with poking fun at history, and on a good day she gets to draw epaulettes.

craille maguire gillies is a former editor at enRoute and a National Magazine Award-winning writer who contributes to Canadian Geographic and Reader’s Digest. She is based in London where she’s working on a book about modern nomads.

Clive Holden is best known for two multi-disciplinary art projects: Trains of Winnipeg (2001 to 2006), and the on-going U Suite (2006 to 2020). Born and raised on Vancouver Island, he splits his time between there and Toronto.

SARAH LEAVITT is a writer and cartoonist and the author of the critically acclaimed graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. She lives in Vancouver.

Richard Haigh is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school.

He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law.

STEVIE HOWELL is a Toronto-based poet, editor and critic.

Her chapbook Royal/Ringsend was released in November 2012, and she is currently at work on a full-length volume of poetry called Forest of Elders.

SOPHIE LEES is an award-wining writer and term instructor at MacEwan University.

Paul Matwychuk lives in Edmonton, where he works as the general manager of NeWest Press. He is also a writer, actor, playwright, and puzzle constructor, as well a pop-culture columnist for the CBC. His weekly podcast, Trash, Art, and the Movies, is available for free through iTunes and Stitcher.

Scott Messenger lives in Edmonton, where he’s a full-time writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician.

LUTZ SEILER’S collections of poetry, fiction, and essays have won many prizes including the Bremen Literature Prize, The Christian Wagner Prize, and the Ingeborg Bachman Prize.

The featured poem is from his fourth collection, felderlatein.

SUSAN WHEELER is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Meme, and a novel. She teaches at Princeton University.

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SPAN Reporting back

SILVER LININGS

Painting John Constable

O

ne t ypical Monday morning in

September, Londoners narrowly avoided collision with each other in their rush-hour dance through Paddington Station. Navigating the crowd, I slipped on the slick marble floor as I headed for my train to Somerset. A drop of water splashed against my face and I looked up. It was raining inside the station. These were not the tear-shaped raindrops teachers taught us to draw as children but flat cushions of water that pooled on the platform. In fact, it had been the wettest summer on record; spring faded imperceptibly to autumn with only a handful of sunny days.

Today was not sunny. The charcoal nimbostratus cloud that shrouded the city for days stretched all the way to Reading. But as the train reached the town of Castle Cary, ninety minutes southwest of London, white clouds fringed with grey hung in a faint blue sky. These, surely, were stratocumulus clouds, I thought, or perhaps altostratus. I consulted my pocket-sized Cloud Collector’s Handbook.

I was on my way to meet the book’s author, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who has become something of an expert on clouds.

His recently published picture book, Clouds That Look Like Things, compiles photos by the thirty-one thousand members of the Cloud Appreciation Society, a group he founded in 2004. I read his bestselling debut, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, as I lay in a park near my flat under layers of clouds that occasionally shifted like tectonic plates to reveal the sun. Looking up, I noticed the upturned arc of what I assumed was a rainbow, but decided it must be what Pretor-Pinney describes in his guidebook as the “Mona Lisa of the vapours”—a circumzenithal arc, or a halo effect created when sunlight travels through the hexagonal ice crystals in a cirrostratus cloud. (Other optical phenomena, he explains, includecoronae, rainbows, cloud bows, and, my favourite, fogbows, ethereal circles that appear “when sunlight shines through a gap in the fog, from behind the cloudspotter.”)

So for the past week or so my head had been in the clouds, an activity I suspect Pretor-Pinney would heartily endorse. The Cloud Appreciation Society’s manifesto proclaims that clouds are “unjustly maligned” and they “pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking.’…Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.” Clouds are, Pretor-Pinney elaborates in The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, “magicked into being by the inscrutable laws of the atmosphere…One moment, they’re joining and spreading into undulating layers. The next, they’re breaking into torn shreds. One moment, they’re building upwards in enormous, weighty towers with dark, brooding bases. The next, they’re cascading back down in delicate, translucent streaks.

And then they’re gone—shedding their moisture as rain or just evaporating into the blue.” They are an occasion for idle contemplation, a pastime Pretor-Pinney and his fellow cloud aficionados believe is sorely lacking in modern times.

I picked up a taxi at the station in Castle Cary. Stopping for directions from a man on a tractor, the taxi driver asked, “How deep is that puddle?” The puddle in question looked to have the beginnings of a pond and covered the road in front of us, but the man on the tractor assured him it was shallow. We cruised through at a snail’s pace and a hundred metres beyond found our destination—a low stone

barn with a courtyard. The street had no sign and the house had no number, but a sticker on the back of a Vauxhall Zafira minivan in the driveway showed a cheerful blue cumulus cloud bearing the words “The Cloud Appreciation Society.”

Pretor-Pinney met me in his office, a square room at one end of the barn. It had a bank of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and two ukuleles on the floor. (In 2013, Bloomsbury will publish The Ukulele Handbook, which Pretor-Pinney is co-writing with childhood friend Tom Hogkinson. It’s no surprise that this same pair founded The Idler magazine in 1993.) Boxes of t-shirts were stacked near a woodstove and a box of freshly printed stickers sat near the door.

A few days earlier, Pretor-Pinney sent out the society’s very occasional newsletter, and orders for merchandise were flooding in, mostly from Britain and the States. An assistant stuffed large Cloudspotting 2013 wall calendars into envelopes.

“There’s a danger,” Pretor-Pinney said as he made tea in the kitchen, “of becoming known as the Cloud Man. But clouds are not the only thing I think about.” His surroundings did not alleviate this concern. On the counter was a delicate blue mug decorated with clouds.

On the ironing board nearby, a toddler’s dress with cloud-shaped appliqué waited to be pressed. One section of wall showcased his daughters’ artwork, including a drawing of a sky full of cumulus clouds with “The Cloud Appreciation WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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Society” carefully written in a child’s hand.

A n aneroid barometer on the wall predicted rain.

Occasionally, he is invited to speak at weekend events with fellow cloudspotters, and over breakfast someone will inevitably point to his bowl of Weetabix and say, “You chose that because it’s shaped like a cloud, didn’t you?” He stops short of rolling his eyes, which are the blue of a summer sky.

The sky that particular day was a milky grey and wind blew a light rain across the courtyard. We settled on a sofa near a bank of windows to talk about the weather.

Framed illustrations of the ten cloud genera—from cumulus to altocumulus to cirrostratus—hung behind him. The illustrations are featured at the beginning of each chapter in Pretor-Pinney’s guidebook.

Pretor-Pinney was amiable and relaxed, if somewhat distracted. “Cloudspotting,” he said, “is supposed to be an aimless, pointless activity.” It is a kind of meteorological meditation, a contemplation of the heavens above. “There are two ways of looking at the sky. One is very scientific and the other is, oh, that cloud looks like King Kong.”

With this he made a long, slightly apologetic analogy comparing the male and female characteristics of weather. “It’s important to cultivate both aspects. To do one or the other means you’re not fully engaging in the sky.” His iPhone buzzed several times.

One call was from Bruce Woolley, co-writer of the song “Video Killed the Radio Star,” with whom he is developing a documentary about Léon Theremin, a Russian inventor and rumoured spy who created one of the first electronic instruments. Pretor-Pinney then spoke with BBC Radio 4 to arrange an interview by Skype later that afternoon to talk about a new species of cloud, undulatus asperatus. Cloudspotting’s idle pleasure was beginning, he said, to feel like work.

“Sometimes I do catch myself getting serious about it and I start to think, ‘Yes, I’m the cloud expert.’ That’s the kiss of death. When I hear myself saying things like, ‘This clearly isn’t an example of a cumulus humulis,’ I think, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a photo of a cloud that looks like a bunny’.” As president of the Cloud Appreciation Society, he has become, willingly or not, the go-to man when media need a quote about clouds. The week before, a reporter for USA Today followed up on Pretor-Pinney’s three-year campaign to have the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva recognize undulatus asperatus as a new breed of cloud. He kept telling journalists that the story was premature. While clouds themselves can move incredibly fast, the WMO moves incredibly slowly. It has not updated its International Cloud Atlas since 1975 and hasn’t introduced a new cloud genus since 1951. Still, National Geographic’s News

Watch blog picked up the story, writeups appeared in most of the major British papers, and Pretor-Pinney found himself turning down requests to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today show and BBC Breakfast.

Fellow enthusiasts see the society as a champion of this most maligned of weather systems. Rumours circulate about the sinister use of cloud seeding—a sort of genetic modification of the weather. In the ninteen-forties, the United States military asked scientists at General Electric to develop smoke screens to protect covert operations, along with techniques to de-ice the wings of airplanes. They also created artificial clouds that produced rain or snow. Three decades later, the American journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA used cloud seeding during the Vietnam War to turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a soupy mess. (In The Cloudspotter’s Guide, Pretor-Pinney also details more innocent examples of cloud seeding, such as the practice of Moscow’s former mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who in the ninteen-nineties employed cloud seeding to, in Pretor-Pinney’s words, “stop it raining on his parades.” Luzhkov spent close to a million dollars to control the weather during Moscow’s 850th anniversary festivities. It didn’t only rain, it poured.)

Conspiracy theorists claim that governments manipulate condensation trails, or contrails, produced by planes, for sinister ends, and implore the Cloud Appreciation Society to take a stand. “There’s nothing to explain!” Pretor-Pinney said, somewhat bemused. “You’ve got a warmer dry layer of air, then a colder, moister layer, and as a plane changes altitudes it passes through slightly differing air masses, breaking up the contrail. That’s all it is, do you know what I mean? People send me emails saying that I am an agent of misinformation.” Others post messages on chat rooms that criticize the society.

“One guy wrote that, ‘Yeah, I’ve looked into the Cloud Appreciation Society and I’m pretty sure they’re government sponsored’.” (They aren’t.)

Pretor-Pinney excused himself to test the Skype connection with the BBC. Not long after he returned, the sky brightened and the rain clouds dispersed. He slid open

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heavy glass doors on the barn and poked his head outside. The air smelled of wood smoke or peat. The potted lavender was still wet and a child’s red wheelbarrow lay on its side in the grass.

In The Cloudspotter’s Guide, he recounts how, as a child, he believed that men climbed long ladders to harvest cotton-wool from cumulus clouds, those puffy white varieties you see on a sunny day. Now he shares his hobby with his daughters, who are six and three years old. For adults, clouds are harbingers of bad weather, but for children they inspire

you everyday, you’ll find what’s fascinating, exotic, surprising, even in the mundane. Otherwise, you’re constantly wanting more, constantly wishing you were somewhere else,” he said. “There’s a philosophy in reminding people of the beauty of clouds, that they’re not just something that blocks us from our beloved sun.”

By now, the sun had reappeared and Pretor-Pinney rose from the sofa and went to the window. “Those broken-up masses are stratocumulus. And the ones above are cirrus, which is Latin for a lock of hair.” He and his wife, Liz, whom he met

There are two ways of looking at the sky. One is very scientific and the other is, oh, that cloud looks like King Kong. wonderment. Grown-ups may find philosophizing about clouds to be alarmingly new age. At one point in our conversation, he referred to our “relationship” with the sky. Yet the more I studied the clouds— Britain is not lacking in weather—the more I came around to Pretor-Pinney’s point of view. “If you look at what’s around

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at the cloud lecture where he launched the society, named their first child Flora Cirrus. Liz had no compunction about naming their first-born after a cloud and cirrus was an obvious choice. “Cumulonimbus doesn’t have much of a ring to it,” said Pretor-Pinney. “Mama [a type of cloud] could be confusing. A nd it

wouldn’t have been good to name her nimbostratus.”

When my taxi returned to drive me to the station in Castle Cary, Pretor-Pinney was settled in front of his computer waiting for his BBC Radio 4 interview to begin. His youngest daughter, Verity Iris (Iris is, not coincidentally, the Greek goddess of rainbows), arrived home from day-care and bounded toward his office. The driver had the radio on as we pulled away, and I could hear Pretor-Pinney describing the recently discovered cloud undulatus asperatus.

The announcer sounded fascinated. “Well, I think we’ll all be looking up at the sky,” she said, before moving on to news about Prime Minister David Cameron and the UK banking system. “And that’s the world at one forty-five.” The driver turned down the volume and I looked out the window. On one side the sky was a murky grey, threatening rain, but I could see the sun shining in fits and starts amid layers of clouds. It was going to be a beautiful afternoon.

– Craille Maguire Gillies

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LAW IS ELSEWHERE

A

friend and I recently walked into a dark cave-like room full of young, cool men and women. Most seemed to have tattoos, piercings, and smartphones.

We didn’t fit in, though it wasn’t at all uncomfortable. We were at the nightclub/bar to attend a Toronto lecture series called Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture series with a twist: the speakers are not allowed to be experts on their chosen topic. In other words, they are just like you and me at the office water cooler, chatting about things they know nothing about. The talks are almost always funny, thoughtful, and interesting. One night, you might get an insight into Toronto’s PATH system, dads, and pregnancy idols. On another, the virtues of living a life in slo-mo, the Mega Bus to New York, and shopping malls.

Invariably, the talks provoke further reflection. On this night, one talk got me thinking about how law, nightclubs, lecture series, and life are all connected.

Law exists all around us. The irony is that law is rarely required because it is everywhere. It’s like nighttime—we don’t tend to think about it too much but we’d miss it terribly if we didn’t have it.

Most people only consider the law when it comes at them directly, usually in the criminal realm: the TV news about the latest murder, or maybe a police officer standing behind a tree pointing a radar gun at us as we drive by. Valid instances, of course, but only the merest tip of a much larger law-berg. In reality, law comes at us every which way, though not always predictably or coherently (or in ways that a layperson may recognize).

In its grandest form, law is ubiquitous. If you were like me, as a child I used

10

to send things to “Canada, North America, Northern Hemisphere, The World, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe.” It was a way of showing that, at some level, there were locations common to all of us.

The adult version of this, in law as opposed to geography, runs as follows: without the law as set out in the constitution, there wouldn’t be a Canada. Without a provincial legal power over municipalities, there might not be a Toronto. Without tax laws, it’s possible that no roads, public transport or other services would exist to enable us to get to Trampoline Hall. Without business and zoning laws, it would be almost impossible to imagine a coherent city where nightclubs participated in something like a Trampoline Hall. Without laws regulating industries, there probably wouldn’t be consistent and reliable sources of electricity, water, and sewage. So law’s meta-role is ever-present, yet hidden.

Law’s more prosaic roles are a little different. Any event like a lecture series relies on a ticket (the Trampoline Hall tickets are works of art in themselves; for this show, they were cupcakes). A ticket is the contract that exists between the patron and the promoter. To get into the event, you need to have one. Maybe it’s only law geeks who actually read the backs of tickets, but I recommend it. A sampling from other recent events I’ve attended: “Cameras, audio and video recording equipment, and wireless devices are prohibited from being used at this event. Artist, program and date subject to change without notice.” In my experience, certainly in the last decade or so, the use of wireless devices (smartphones) has become common—in concerts, they are used to take photos, to text friends, and even as electronic lighters. So why prohibit them on the ticket? It’s a legal escape hatch: if they don’t like you, for whatever reason, they can use evidence of a wireless device as an excuse to kick you out.

The second clause is even more troubling: The entire program doesn’t even have to take place. It’s only by the promoter’s good graces (and its desire for money) that they decide to give you the show you’ve come to see. Imagine this though: it’s conceivable you leave home thinking you are going to see Tony Bennett and you get Megadeath instead.

This could well happen, and if it did you wouldn’t be able to sue the promoter.

Or take other more specific aspects of a lecture. Trampoline Hall consists of three separate talks. As is the case at most events, you can also purchase mementoes of the lectures (in the form of buttons) and refreshments, such as alcohol (“goods,” in legal terms). Consumer protection laws usually allow us to return goods that are defective. So if your drink or button was not “merchantable” (another legal term), you could ask for a replacement. In fact, the entire industry of consumer warranties is largely based on laws that require goods to be merchantable.

But what about services? Since the conceit of Trampoline Hall is that it is a lecture series given by non-experts, there is always the risk of failure. If one or more of the talks were substandard (leading to, say, daydreaming about the law in everyday society), what recourse would you have? Consumer protection law may not apply. That’s because defective goods are easier to assess than poor service. I can tell if a beer is stale but my dislike of Susan’s talk on traffic jams may be based on irrelevancies, like the unfortunate dress she’s wearing.

Obviously, a lecture series depends on communication. Many legal concepts are raised by the words spoken during the show. Take the host’s role at Trampoline Hall. A highly intelligent, absorbing performer, Misha Glouberman starts the program off with a description of how the show will proceed. “There will be three lecturers,” he notes, “with a break inbetween each one. At the break, the bar will be open. It serves drinks. If you’ve never had one, I recommend them highly. In fact, have a thousand of them; liquor has never done anyone a lick of harm.”

It’s meant to be funny, and it is, but what if someone tried to follow his advice and drank far too much? Courts have held commercial establishments liable for this kind of thing under a doctrine called “social host liability.” This means that the bar must be cautious in allowing inebriated patrons to leave if it’s foreseeable that they may get in a car and drive away impaired.

But what about the host of a show, not associated with the bar, who is clearly exag-

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No Good

the stage. It’s too difficult gerating for comic effect? to assess whether freedom He’s probably able to rely on of expression governs, or the fact that the law leaves an There’s only one thing you can do whether libel, human rights independent host alone, but with a sawed-off rifle, a low IQ, and curiosity codes, or hate speech prothere isn’t a particularly good about human biology. visions are in play. A nd reason why. Maybe some day, You awake at sunset, yourself still, don’t fret about that pipedexaggeration and parody will a storm-eye of boredom, drink, and LSD. in music. W hile record fall prey to the reach of tort That’s the only thing that c omp a n ie s t r e a t t he i r law. I’m not saying this would

ever made sense, was tidy or clean: intellectual property seribe a good thing, but it could how convenient and pre-emptive excuses are, ously, they do so inconsishappen. arising out of capitulated-to tently and selectively. Big Perhaps the emcee has desires, imbibing, cussing, so many record companies rarely, another defence, the notion ‘good times.’ if ever, worry about triviof “freedom of expression.” alities like bar bands doing It’s a constitutional right to be You were estranged from yourself, covers or piped-in music in able to express onesel f not yourself, that night. But this is even truer restaurants. freely. The constitution is sober. We can guess your past Most of us rarely think our supreme law, which is a neighbour’s unfinished basement, about the laws that weave and means that it trumps orand that when you recline, you feel his breath warp in a tangled web underdinary laws such as those on your freckles again. neath the surface of millions requiring hosts to be cauYou are a victim, too, and the violence of events like this every day. tious. Since his statement is of your life is all you’ve ever known. It gulps to unwind Laws exist for all of us to use obviously intended as a joke, its weaving, unknot, and breathe, and rely on. They are everyit’s possible his freedom of

but undone can’t be done by doing. where, it’s true, but really expression rights would they are elsewhere. At events, carry the day. The law would Rabbit-trapped, quickening at restaurants, in parks and treat his humour in context. you march a man through a thicket, where streets, in the layouts of our “ T he law doesn’t deal in no one can hear him plead. cities, laws operate in the trifles,” is one of its maxims.

Your steps mulch recently fallen background. That’s where If we turn our focus away autumn leaves, snap branches, snag they stay, however. We rarely from the emcee to the speakwider the tear in your jeans. rely on law directly because ers, another legal dilemma it tends to be clumsy, cumabout speech arises: What if Your panting. bersome, heavy-handed, one of the non-expert lecturHis panting. opaque, and abstruse. It is ers littered their talk with It’s a kind of transfusion. devoid of much that reflects some rude and possibly hateour humanness. ful words? Imagine a smat–Stevie Howell By being elsewhere, law tering of “motherfucker,” allows other forms of regu“cunt,” and “nigger.” Does lation to prevail wherever possible. Social is yet another situation where one could freedom of speech mean this is allowed?

Libel and slander laws do protect repu- turn to the law. There are many forms of norms are a useful term for them. Social norms are lithe, constantly shifting, tation, but they almost always require copyright and other intellectual property negotiable. They are, to put it bluntly, protections that exist to protect the rights particularizing a victim. The possibility more human than laws. They help us navof artists; the distribution and enjoyment of group libel is still quite new in the law, igate the complexities of our existence in of music is, therefore, largely controlled so it’s uncertain whether such a claim a way that laws do not. We could, and do, by law. would succeed. There are also criminal use them all the time.

So in a sense law is everywhere but hate speech laws, which might come into As my friend and I were leaving in another it isn’t, because we don’t end play. These are carefully circumscribed, Trampoline Hall that night, we shared up using it all that often. Seeking legal however, and generally applicable in only another of those things called drinks. We redress for either a stale beer or a poor the most egregious of situations.

Although neither my friend nor I lecture is not worth the time or the effort. decided not to take the host’s advice to have a thousand of them, but if we’d tried, Better to simply offer the beer to an enemy followed the emcee’s drinking directions my guess is that both the law and social during the break, we did notice that mu- and send him to a bad lecture. What norms would have come into play. about speakers who can’t control their sic was piped in over loudspeakers. These tongues? Better to just boo them off days, we hear music everywhere, which – Richard Haigh WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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PSYCHIATRY’S BEST GUESS

I

was a third-grader when I f irst entered a psychiatrist’s office. The prelude to my visit was a skipping lesson I gave my brother, who was in first-grade at the time, one morning before school.

Not skipping as in using a skipping rope, but the locomotive kind in which you lift your knee and hop forward. I wanted to share with him my recent discovery of the joy and giddiness that comes from literally bounding through space. Perhaps I should have realized that skipping is an outdoor activity. In my defence, however, the lesson occurred on the second floor, which consisted of our bedrooms on either side of the landing. Thus, our skipping trajectory, spanning the northsouth axis of our home, seemed amply long. Time was pressing, but after a few tries, he was doing it, he was skipping along the axis in the grip of joy and giddiness, and it was beautiful. But in all my coaching, I had failed to teach him how to stop, so he didn’t. He kept on skipping until his hand went right through two panes of glass.

Such an event should be a hilarious family story, and it is, shared between my brother and me. But my mother was convinced then, as she remains today, that I pushed my brother through the window. Her conviction landed me a session with her psychiatrist, marking my introduction as a life-long mental health consumer.

My session occurred around 1978, during the final years of the DSM-II era, as psychiatry was shedding the last of its dark history and pseudo-science skin. No two books have done more to rescue psychiatry and establish its legitimacy as a medical speciality than the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), published by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The ICD, which first included its chapter (Chapter V) on mental disorders in 1949, is the official diagnostic and billing system for mental health care services

in both Canada and the United States.

However, many clinicians practising in North America are unaware of this fact, such is the pervasiveness of the DSM in all arenas of mental health, including clinical practice, research, treatment development, and law. Its influence has earned it the explanatory moniker, “the bible of psychiatry.”

At no time has the DSM’s singularity been clearer than today. In 2013, new editions of both books are being published: the DSM-5 in May and the ICD-11 in October. Yet, only the pending publication of the DSM has inspired controversy.

Throughout the revision process, which began in 1999, accusations of maleficence have been as steady as a drumbeat.

Early disputes concerned the transparency of the process and of the system of disclosing financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies. As drafts of the proposed revisions became available, the invective has focused more on the content than the process, but what has remained constant (and shocking) WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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is the public nature of the accusations.

Even the editors of previous editions, Robert Spitzer (DSM-III) and Allen Frances (DSM-IV ), have made their concerns public. Frances has said he fears the DSM-5 will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”

When psychiatrists themselves align their voices with psychiatry deniers who characterize the field as fraudulent, it gives one considerable pause for thought.

It’s nearly impossible to keep psychiatry and the DSM separate in one’s mind.

As such, personal beliefs about the sanctity (Frances) or profanity (a denier) of psychiatry often bleed into discussions about the DSM. Because personal beliefs are involved, the stakes are high and emotions higher. The APA only adds to the conflation between psychiatry and the DSM. Describing itself as “the voice and conscience of modern psychiatry” the APA assumes a God-like role that defies reason. Is it any wonder that in the minds of both supporters and detractors, the DSM ’s success or failure extends beyond the APA to all of psychiatry?

In truth, the DSM’s primary use is the standardization of psychiatric practice and research. The disorders that it contains and categorizes become, simply because of their being in the DSM, officially recognized. Each disorder has a set of diagnostic criteria, a description, and a billing code consistent with the ICD. But therein lies the potential for controversy: the DSM categorizes human behaviours. It declares what is normal (shyness, for example) and what is not (social anxiety). More, it attempts to define the point when a normal behaviour (like, say, losing one’s temper) becomes a symptom of a disorder (an antisocial personality disorder). And because the DSM holds such a singular position, its contents not only shape the day-to-day practice of psychiatry but also influence the efforts of the pharmaceutical companies looking to develop the next Prozac.

For good or bad, the DSM has become the sum and substance of our mental health system.

Because of its centrality in the mental health field, I too conflate the DSM with psychiatry. The desire to protect psychiatry from its deniers is what first 14

drove me to wade into the controversy.

Allen Frances may fear the DSM-5 will so damage public opinion that psychiatry itself may not survive, but I fear that if psychiatry does not survive, I (and many others like me) will lose my understanding of the world and how I fit within it.

I am someone who is mentally disordered and I cannot change that, but I can replace fear with thought. I read op-eds, blog posts, and magazine, newspaper, and scholarly articles criticizing the DSM5, and I read the APA rebuttals. I went through gigabytes of data that record the stages of development, the workgroups, the proposals and rationale for each revision posted on the DSM-5’s exhaustive website. I’ve spent hours flipping through the thousand-plus pages of the current tome, the DSM-IV-TR. Contrary arguments have persuaded and dissuaded me.

Never before have I changed my mind,

the DSM-IV, the so-called two-month bereavement clause existed to distinguish between grief (a normal human behaviour) and a depressive episode (a mental disorder). In a 2011 proposal, the APA removed the clause, not because it decided, suddenly, that grief wasn’t normal, but because the distinction between grief and depression is so obvious, it needn’t be stated. Not only was it not necessary, the clause itself was problematic: why single out bereavement when so many events in a person’s life—such as divorce or job-loss—can cause normal, everyday feelings of grief and loss? The clause also presumes that someone cannot be bereaved and suffer a major depressive episode simultaneously.

Critics pounced on the removal of the bereavement clause. Removing it was tantamount, they said, to equating the grieving process with a major depressive

In 2010 one in five Americans was taking some form of psychotropic medication. going back and forth, so often on the various issues the DSM brings to public attention. Those issues range from the profoundly philosophical—whether psychiatry is a valid field of medicine and its corollary issue of whether mental disorders exist— to the individual and ethical—whether psychiatry is medicalizing ordinary human behaviour (for example, one op-ed author quipped that the diagnostic criteria for oppositional defiant disorder— losing one’s temper frequently, being disdainful of authority, or acting touchy and irritable— equally defines teenager) and its corollary issue of whether psychiatry is in bed with Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical companies that research and develop drug therapies. Only the second set of issues, which are valid concerns, directly connect to the DSM. When considering whether the DSM is medicalizing ordinary human behaviour, critics point to two changes the APA initially proposed. The first concerns the diagnosis of an episode of major depression. In the previous edition,

episode. Clinicians would now diagnose the bereaved as depressed and treat them with antidepressant. Thus, went the criticism, the DSM was creating a new clientele for Big Pharma to target with its psychotropic medications. The cynicism in this characterization is staggering. It presumes that clinicians have so little understanding of a major depressive episode that they might misdiagnose grief as depression.

The issue that actually demands our attention isn’t the bereavement clause.

It’s that major depression is already being misdiagnosed. Studies indicate that in 2010 one in five Americans was taking some form of psychotropic medication and that antidepressants are the most prescribed medication in the States.

The question is why: why are doctors not able to determine whether someone is experiencing normal or clinical sadness? This question is vital because antidepressants don’t work on those who are experiencing normal sadness, and they also come with side-effects that can harm

EIGHTEEN BRIDGES WINTER 2012 WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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patients. Prior to prescribing antidepressants, a doctor should have an informed belief that the medication will have some benefit. So why are antidepressants the most prescribed medication in the States?

Before we accuse the DSM of medicalizing the human condition, we need to know whether the diagnostic criteria of major depression are leading doctors to misdiagnose the disorder. Other factors, such as the direct marketing of antidepressants to consumers, need examining.

What about our mental health care system? Does it contribute to misdiagnoses? Consider that only in 2012 did Canada publish its first national mental health strategy. And, although it’s estimated that Canada’s forty-one hundred registered psychiatrists do not come close to meeting the coutry’s needs for psychiatric care, not until 2007 did Canadian mental health agencies begin to collect data to assess and ameliorate this shortage. How healthy can our mental health system be when it has been neither qualitatively nor quantitatively analyzed? Perhaps another factor is our misguided belief that medicine somehow has the ability to transcend human limitations of incomplete knowledge, varied levels of abilities, and the gamut of human behaviour. For too many years, we’ve watched Dr. House, whose medical specialty as a diagnostician is a television conceit, and marveled at his ability to correctly diagnose all of his patients (albeit always in the third act).

T hough it emerged from a dark history of abuse in the not-very-distant past, psychiatry is a specialized area of medicine, like gynaecology, oncology, or cardiology. (If placed on a spectrum, psychiatry would sit somewhere between neurology and psychology.) A psychiatrist, then, is a doctor with the same foundation of knowledge all doctors have, plus a specialized knowledge in the assessment and treatment of mental disorders, such as psychopharmacology and psychotherapy. Most people understand this. What’s less known, however, is that any doctor, whether or not he or she has specialized knowledge in assessing or treating a mental disorder, can diagnose a mental disorder and prescribe psychotropic medications to treat it. As

there is a significant global deficit of psychiatrists in developed countries and even more so in developing countries, the general practitioner—the family doctor or the doctor at a medical clinic—is often the one to whom the assessment and treatment of a mental disorder falls. Even with full knowledge and ability, a clinician needs time to make an accurate diagnosis, time to build a relationship with a patient, time to draw out the patient’s history, and time to observe the patient. Sometimes, he or she needs to spend time with the family to gather the observations of those close to the patient. The burden of too few general practitioners, whose clinical hours are usually segmented into fifteen-minute appointments, coupled with even fewer psychiatrists, makes that kind of time a luxury few can afford.

Consider the session I had as a thirdgrader with my mother’s psychiatrist.

What I remember is a sense of unease that turned to relief when the psychiatrist asked me to draw a picture of my family. He never asked me about the skipping incident, but the resulting drawing he shared with my mother confirmed his diagnosis of severe jealousy. (Forgive me for being cheeky.

Neither jealousy nor sibling rivalry is pathological; it appears nowhere in the DSM or the ICD, even if you do push your little brother through a window, which I did not.) He noted the paper was slightly torn where I had drawn my brother’s glasses, represented by dark pencilled circles. The darkness of the lines and the paper tears were obvious signs that I was deeply jealous of the glasses my brother had recently begun wearing. He prescribed a pillow, something other than my brother I could punch to relieve aggression. My mother and I left the session, went to the nearest department store, and purchased a pukegreen velour pillow that I put away as soon as we got home.

This story is not meant to stand as a cautionary tale on the dangers of misdiagnosis, which can obviously be devastating to the patient. Neither my mother nor I suffered harm through this gross misdiagnosis. But neither were we helped. Instead, the story demonstrates that assessing the causes of an individual’s behaviour takes time, a certain mindset, and a willingness to

foster a connection. The psychiatrist simply assumed I had pushed my brother through a window. Based on that assumption, his interpretation of the drawing was conceivably valid. But had he assessed me as a patient and not the daughter of a patient, I like to think he’d have interpreted the drawing as the work of an overanxious child who wished to please him and who, given a task, was compelled to do it right.

Drawing glasses is difficult, at least for an artist with as little talent as me. I can imagine the endless erasing and re-drawing I would have done to do my brother justice and the welling self-hatred when I realized I had once again torn the paper.

He wasn’t able to recognize my anxiety because I wasn’t his patient. A proper diagnosis requires knowledge, experience, and investment. It’s not easy work, to be sure, but he didn’t take the time, make the time, or even think the time was warranted.

The APA has listened to both the work group that put forth the proposed change on the bereavement issue and the critics of the proposed change. The DSM-5, on the date I am writing this, plans to include information differentiating the sense of loss arising from normal human experience from the sense of loss arising from major depression. It will likely end up as a footnote, not a clause.

There are other proposed changes critics cite as proof that the DSM is medicalizing ordinary suffering and lining the pockets of Big Pharma. One is the inclusion of a new adolescent diagnosis, psychosis risk disorder (which describes adolescents who are experiencing psychotic symptoms, such as hearing voices, hallucinating, or experiencing delusions, but who are still in touch with reality, i.e. not experiencing full-blown psychosis). One of the most vocal critics is Allen Frances, the very man who birthed the previous edition, the DSM-IV, in 1994.

Frances has reason to be cautious, even sceptical, when it comes to including new adolescent disorders: Under his reign, the DSM included a new diagnostic category for bipolar disorder in children. Over the next decade, the number of children diagnosed with a bipolar disorder— WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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sion, that of Allen Frances. When Fran- label of bipolar disorder to children who, many of whom had experienced neither according to the DSM’s criteria, should ces learned about the inclusion of a new a manic episode (a necessary criterion), not have been diagnosed. adolescent disorder, he understandably nor reached the age when a proper diagThis is not meant to suggest that feared a repeat of the children with bipolar nosis can be made—increased forty-fold. every disorder in the DSM should stand disorder epidemic. Perhaps so too did As treatment follows diagnosis, many the APA, as it has since announced it will as is. Our understanding is incomplete misdiagnosed children were prescribed and, as we fill in the gaps, the disrisperedone, whose effects on deorders within the DSM will change veloping adolescent brains are little in accordance with new knowledge. understood, but whose side-effects However, as much attention should (significant weight gain, increased It’s hard being clever and cold. be paid to how the DSM is used in risks of obesity and diabetes) are And I should know. Jack Frost came clinical practice as to what disorwell known. This was bad enough, to my childhood window one night and told ders the DSM contains. Focusing but it got worse. In 2008, a United me: Look, from now on things won’t be the same. on whether a disorder should or States Senate investigation, headed should not be included is to lose

by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Its great stillness is not merely a pose. sight of the larger purpose of psyuncovered that psychiatrist Joseph Not coming in from the cold, but cold coming in. chiatry: the patient. To prevent misBiederman, who had advocated for I try to keep warm but ever since diagnoses by excluding disorders the inclusion of bipolar disorder in our little mind-to-heart, I’ve known from the DSM seems a poor stratechildren in the DSM-IV, had failed to cold’s wider intelligence. gy. Here Frances and I differ: I don’t report the 1.6 million dollars in fundthink the APA should remove diaging he’d received between 2000 and How all days should be crystal days. noses that describe actual disorders 2007 from Johnson & Johnson, the You can see cold for yourself at work people suffer from simply because company that owns Risperdal (the in the shapes it makes something in our health system is brand name of risperedone). out of any January park: broken, be it too few psychiatrists Biederman’s financial relationfangs on the lip of the slide; a lid for the lake. and psychologists or our fantastiship with Johnson & Johnson did, cal belief in medicine to cure all it’s true, occur after the release The sky is thinking hard before it snows. that ails us. Can we not accept that of the DSM-IV and its inclusion of You can see how frost hides from the sun, differentiating between what is norbipolar disorder in children. Critkeeping itself to the shadows mal and what is pathological is difics who therefore point to this reof walls and hedges. It has a mind of its own. ficult and requires from physicians lationship as the smoking gun— The sun can’t have everything its own way. an investment of time and energy proof t hat t he DSM ex ist s to that our current system doesn’t profit pharmaceutical companies, These are some of the things cold knows. allow? Should we refuse to help the and in turn, psychiatrists— are child who suffers from psychotic misguided in attempting to draw –Paul Farley symptoms or a bipolar disorder a universal truth from a particular because we don’t want to recognize event. In using fallacious logic, critmove psychosis risk disorder from the the flaws in medicine? ics miss the disturbing aspect of the story.

Medicine, not just psychiatry, is imperBy not disclosing the funds he received, main diagnostic section to Section III, fect and, in some areas, downright crude.

Dr. Biederman broke the rules of the which is comprised of conditions that need more research before they can be We’re good at fixing or preventing some university (Harvard) employing him, malfunctions of the human body, such as and the NIH. But more alarming was the considered formal disorders .

But can we hold the DSM respon- broken bones we can mend, diseases we promise, recorded on a PowerPoint slide, can vaccinate against, or malfunctioning sible for such trends when they occur? he made to Johnson & Johnson: His clinihearts we can perform by-pass surgery cal trials would prove the efficacy of Risp- Frances felt responsible in setting off on. And yet we also know, for instance, the children’s bipolar epidemic, clearly, erdal in childhood bipolar disorder. What and the fact that he feels so can be seen that people who receive bypass surgeries researcher knows the results of trial before commonly experience a cognitive decline, as noble. But accuracy, not nobility, is the trial is conducted? Biederman’s concritical to prevent similar incidences. the cause of which is still a matter of specduct was distressing and unethical, but his Surely, the responsibility to assess the ulation. Medicine is frequently an exercise actions are not unique in medical research. causes of the bipolar fad and examine in probabilities. My father, a radiation onIndeed, the corruption of pharmaceutical research is an issue that all of medicine, not the system in which those misdiag- cologist, used to tell me that although he noses were made is the APA’s. To place knew radiation therapy would help seven just psychiatry, needs to address. responsibility on the DSM is to ignore out of ten patients, he could not predict Biederman’s misconduct harmed the which seven the treatment would help and reputation of the DSM-IV and, by exten- the fact that many doctors assigned the

Clever and Cold

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which three it would harm. Seven out of ten are odds I’d take, but what we tend to demand from medicine are not probabilities. We do not want an educated guess, we want certainty.

The gap between probability and certainty is not closed in the least when we continue to refer to the DSM as the “bible” of psychiatry, the kneejerk descriptor the media favours. Yes, we use the term metaphorically to explain its function and emphasize its importance, but the biblical connotations linger. They suggest that the DSM’s contents are dogma, a series of unchanging truths based not on evidence, but on belief in a theoretical perspective.

Taken on faith, in short. This characterization of the DSM is unhelpful. That we are discussing the fifth overhaul of the DSM since its inception in 1952 is proof that change, such as the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-II in 1973, is possible.

(That the current revision took nineteen years to achieve is problematic, given the rate of advances in research.)

As for putting forth a theoretical perspective, the 1980 publication of the DSM-III went some distance towards reducing dogmatic content. It embraced a non-theoretical, descriptive, categorical view of mental disorders, one that did not examine causes or propose treatments.

The shift allowed for the development of a standardized, descriptive language that researchers and clinicians used to communicate to one another, an achievement that has made research and some clinical aspects more efficient and therefore more effective. But over thirty years have passed since the DSM-III’s release, and psychiatry still has a number of competing theoretical perspectives. Clinical, neurological, and genetic research has yet to yield the golden chalice: a valid overarching framework, a coherent set of principles that can explain the nature and cause of mental disorders. Despite the wealth of neurological research we’re accumulating, we are nowhere near confirming a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder with a biological marker, such as having blood tested for the presence of a major depression. That psychiatry still sits in a place between evidence and conjecture is both its sore spot and weakness.

Considering the controversy surrounding the DSM, it seems clear we have difficulty accepting psychiatry’s (for now) inherent uncertainty.

I live in that uncertainty. According to DSM-5, I suffer from two unrelated disorders: major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder. Depressive and anxiety disorders are, for the moment, separated in the DSM’s classification system, but I believe as research continues we’ll discover mental disorders don’t fit neatly into the current system. But for now, the mixed depressive/anxiety disorder, first proposed in the DSM-IV, is to remain in Section III, the more-research-needed section. Whether I suffer from one disorder or two doesn’t matter to me, but that my disorders are officially recognized does. With a couple of labels, I can defend against the tacit accusation that I am someone who has abdicated her personal responsibility to cope and to let pharmaceuticals do that work for her.

I see this accusation in the eyes of all who love me and it hurts. But the truth is that no pharmaceutical does the work it takes to cope. There is no pill for the human condition.

As flawed as it is, the DSM matters.

I have to cope not only with disordered moods and thinking, but also with public perception. I want people who have never experienced a mental disorder to know that the suffering caused by a mental disorder is very different from the suffering caused by the ordinary losses we experience. I want people to know that I do not take antidepressants to avoid the slings and arrows of life but to deal with them. I want people to know that when I take an antidepressant and it begins to work, I feel like I have found myself again, that my core personality, quirky and flawed, resurfaces. The drugs I take alleviate my craziness—defined by emotions and moods unmoored from reality—and the psychotherapy I engage in unknots the flawed coping mechanisms developed during the years I believed my illness to be my fault. I want people to know that I’m not weakened by my disorders; I am strengthened. I am alive today because a mental health system exists, lucky to have found a psychiatrist as interested in psychotherapy as psychopharmacology. I believe myself to be

one of a few receiving proper care in a society with little empathy for the mentally disordered.

Before we resort to burning the DSM and throwing psychiatry off Allen Frances’s proverbial cliff, we should perhaps put out the match and step away from the edge. Perhaps the cause of the controversy surrounding the DSM is simply an ordinary human reaction to uncertainty. None of the DSM is certain; it’s based on probabilities supported by the collection and analysis of statistics, as is much of medicine. Making a best guess is what moves science forward, and so let’s not forget that the DSM is guesswork; informed guesswork, but guesswork nevertheless. We don’t know much about the human brain; in some ways, we are the last frontier of science. If the biopyschosocial model survives, the intricate interplay between the three may take generations to understand. Perhaps the time between now and then might be spent considering the real-world problems the DSM has exposed, such as the gap between care needed and care provided, the existence of too few psychiatrists and psychologists, and the implications of the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in psychiatric and medical research.

Despite his failure with me, my mother’s psychiatrist did end up having a profoundly positive effect on our family. He saved my mother’s life, not by diagnosing her with a mental disorder but by recognizing she didn’t have one. My mother was experiencing unbearable back pain. Some mornings, even the displacement of air caused by my entering her bedroom made her scream in agony. I would arrive home from school every day to find her crawling to get from one room to another. Because no medical specialist had been able to figure out what was wrong, the consensus was that it had to be in her mind. She was referred to the psychiatrist who took the time to talk to my mother. He got to know her. He then stood up to the specialists and demanded something be done. Many tests later, they discovered that calcifications had formed inside a vertebra and were pressing on her spinal column. One surgery later, I had my mother back.

– Sophie Lees WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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DRAWING CONCLUSIONS

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By Sarah Leavitt & Cameron Che sney

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BORDER CROSSING

Glorious and F Mostly.

By RUSSELL COBB

We got to Canada Place at the appointed time—

9:00 a.m. sharp—but people were already lined up past the elevators. A security guard waved an arm in exasperation.

“If you are ready to take the Oath of Citizenship,” he said,“please step forward in a single-file line.”

It was one of those March days where you long to be anywhere but the Canadian prairies. Snow was blowing sideways against the windows. Back in Texas, where I’m from, winter was already over and it was time to sit on patios and drink margaritas.

We didn’t step forward. We—my wife and I, that is—stood back, wondering where the Permanent Residents were supposed to go. We were there to “land”— the technical term—a symbolic act that, for all intents and purposes, would, finally, make us Canadians. First, though, there would be one more interview, with an agent from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC).

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As we waited, we looked around the room. We were the only non-visible minorities. This was astounding to us. At a time when many American states were imposing draconian policies meant to make life intolerable for undocumented immigrants (mostly Hispanics), here was this benevolent country, ready to open its doors to people of colour.

I felt my eyes well up as I watched the Haitian family next to us, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, including a little boy of about six in a navy blue jacket and tie. They took pictures of each other, looking both serious and very happy to be there. Just past them was a Chinese woman in impossibly high heels and

a tight, ankle-length sequin dress, with her entourage of five Canadian friends.

The friends snapped photos of her standing in line as if she stood on a celebrity red carpet. She strained to hold back tears from ruining layers of mascara.

I had been hatching plans all winter to leave Edmonton and move back to Texas. Becoming Canadian had been a strategy to hedge my bets against the cruel realities of the American job market, not the fulfillment of a sentimental dream. But here I was, in front of these people, moved by their emotion, their genuine happiness, moved to tears myself by their faith in the abstract promise of “Canada.” I couldn’t look at my wife.

The recent re-election of barack obama took me back to the dark days of Dubya, back when some Americans were having serious conversations about moving to Canada if George W. Bush got re-elected, and back when I would have laughed out

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d Free.

Why a liberal Texan is still in Canada.

loud if you had suggested I’d one day be living in Canada. In 2004, I was dating a Texas union organizer who spent the months before the Bush vs. Kerry election travelling around the country, rallying people to support Kerry. She was confident Kerry would win and we spent election night at a party that was supposed to be a victory celebration. She had even bought streamers and balloons. Around midnight, when it became clear that Bush would be re-elected, she made a bold pronouncement: “I can’t take these rednecks anymore! I am moving to Canada!”

For a while, in Texas’s only liberal stronghold—Austin—the city was abuzz with talk of a mass migration. Also around this time the “Jesusland” map started popping up on the internet, breaking up North America into two countries (Mexico didn’t seem to count): Canada and Democraticleaning states on one hand, and Republican states—Jesusland—on the other hand. Almost everyone I knew wanted out of “Jesusland.” Yet the more my girlfriend

talked about moving to Canada, the more incensed I became. Not because I sympathized in the slightest with Bush, but because I lived here, in Texas.

“I’m not coming with you to Canada,” I told her one night at a party. “This is my country, damn it. If you don’t care enough to stand up and fight to change it, then you should leave.” A fight ensued. She was the labour organizer and I was the navel-gazing intellectual. What right did I have to sermonize? Had I ever walked a picket line? No, I hadn’t. Had I ever organized prison guards? No, I hadn’t. I’d never been to Canada either, but I suspected it wasn’t the liberal paradise she had in mind. Did she even know who the Prime Minister was? No, she didn’t.

We broke up soon after the incident. I think she moved to Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, I started dating someone (my current partner) who shared my affinity for Texas food, music, and football—even if we both felt excluded by the state’s politics.

I continued to disparage liberal migration to Canada, until—sweet irony—I received a job offer at the University of Alberta during the last year of the Bush regime.

Despite having spent a good deal of my twenties roaming around the world, I had never been to Canada. I am embarrassed to admit it now, but I was one of those Americans who thought about their neighbor to the north, whenever I thought about it all, as an undifferentiated mass of ice and snow, populated by wild game and naïve people who ate lots of donuts and drank lots of beer. My entire Canadian knowledge base was derived from SCTV, Neil Young, and Kids in the Hall.

Around that time, I had become friends with a Canadian from Ottawa who told me to t ur n dow n the Edmonton job and stay in Texas.

“You’ve seen Strange Brew, right?” he said. “Then you know what a hoser is.

Well, Edmonton is Ground Zero for hosers. It takes a special kind of troglodyte mentality to live that far north.”

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I ignored him. He lived in Houston, after all, and Houstonians have no right to feel superior to any city on the planet.

I packed up my things and made the trek north. At the border, a guard asked to see my resumé, which was not something I had thought I would need on a road trip.

Without my resumé, no work visa could be issued, and I was not allowed to enter Canada as a Skilled Worker. I had to enter as a tourist, get the university to fax me my resumé, then drive back across the border. I re-entered with my resumé in hand and sat down on a bench to await permission to enter the country on the proper grounds. A German man sitting next to me was called in and I heard him being interrogated. The agent eventually turned down his request to renew his permanent residency.

In a polite voice, the German was ordered out of the country. I think the agent may have even said he was sorry.

The same agent emerged fifteen minutes later and waved me into his cubicle.

I was shaking with fear but liked his uniform. The CIC insignia seemed ornate and poetic, especially in French. He wore cool, chunky black glasses. In fact, everyone in Canada seemed to have hip eyewear. This country was already an improvement on the hotheads who greet you on the U.S. side. He shuffled through my documents and then addressed me in Spanish: “Why do you want to come to Canada?”

“En español?” I asked.

“Sí, señor,” he said.

I started in about my dissertation, specifically my research into an interesting episode in the Cold War in which Cuba…

“Enough,” he said. “My Spanish actually isn’t that great. Here’s your work visa.”

My heart was racing, and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d gotten away with something as I pulled out of the border station.

Life in Canada did bring about some minor culture shocks. In December of 2009, the temperature dropped to -38 Celsius, a number for which I had no frame of reference, until someone explained that Celsius and Fahrenheit converge at -40.

During this time, I started to experience sharp chest pains, and I imagined the worst-case scenario: heart trouble. All the men in my family have had heart disease, most of them dying from some form of it 24

before reaching the age of fifty. I was approaching my late thirties, and this pain seemed to augur my fate.

What to do? In the States, you do your homework: find an in-network specialist from your insurance provider, while researching what kind of co-pay you will incur. This, I found, is a foreign language in Canada. I went to a Medi-Centre and saw a doctor within five minutes (the magic words if you want to get in quick: “chest pain”). The doctor listened to my breathing for a few minutes and I told her how it had come on. I had been out for a jog during the morning when the temperature plunged to -40.

“You had an allergic reaction to the cold,” she said. “Take it easy when it gets that cold.” She turned and walked out the door. I looked around, unsure of what to do. I asked the nurse at the front about my co-pay.

“What’s a co-pay?” she asked.

I couldn’t wait to go back to the States and brag about Canada’s health care system to all my Republican friends and extended family. (Two years later, when my wife waited all night in the emergency room with our feverish toddler to see a doctor, I wanted to take it all back.)

Last summer, as I toggled back and forth between Canadian and American coverage of the Olympic games, another subtle, yet significant, cultural difference became apparent. Canadian networks focused on the international competition almost as if they had no dog in the fight, whereas American channels were resolutely focused on American athletes winning gold medals. Even more tellingly, any showing at all for a Canadian athlete seemed to be respectable for the Canadian commentators, while anything less than a gold for the Americans was a disappointment.

I followed a Facebook post from a Canadian friend who posted: “WE WON! WE WON WE WON!” I scrolled through the comments to find what the hubbub was about: the Canadian women’s soccer team had won a bronze. A bronze? The enthusiasm for sub-gold medals was repeated on CTV. Announcers went over the top when the Men’s Eight won a silver in rowing. On the American side, meanwhile, it appeared that a national tragedy was unfolding when McKayla Maroney bungled

a landing from the vault and wound up with a silver. There were tears and hushed tones. Americans just don’t do silver.

Canadians, meanwhile, seemed content just to be a part of the Games.

I find the Canadian approach a humane alternative to the cut-throat American attitude I was raised on from my first days in Pop Warner football, when my sixth-grade coach yelled at me to stomp the other player’s “dick in the dirt.” From an early age, I wondered why America had to dominate the world. When I was in elementary school, I remember Ronald Reagan invading the tiny island nation of Grenada in something called Operation Urgent Fury.

Later, Clint Eastwood made a movie about it—Heartbreak Ridge—portraying the invasion as heroic. Dealing with all this was embarrassing when travelling abroad. It’s no wonder so many Americans stitch a maple leaf on their backpacks. When I traveled across Latin America in 2011, I often claimed I was “from” Canada, even though this was a half-truth.

In Peru, my cover blew up in my face: the Canadian gold mining company Barrick had been accused of causing a massive water shortage in the north of the country.

One protestor had died while trying to enter a Barrick mine. Canada’s reputation in Latin America, it turned out, was not quite that of the sane “Third Option” it used to represent during the Cold War.

After two years on a work visa, I was ready to tackle the mountain of paperwork that accompanied the application for permanent residency. First, I had to account for every single address I had ever occupied since I turned eighteen. There were the police reports from all the foreign countries and all the states in which I had lived.

Some states—Iowa and Texas—emailed me back with a police report without ever checking to see if I was who I really claimed to be. Other states required some legwork, such as going to Police Headquarters for a thumbprint to be sent to the FBI. All of this seemed reasonable to me.

If you want to be part of a foreign country, it makes sense the country would want to know if you’re a con artist or a serial killer before granting you residency. At times, however, I was tempted to lie. I had lived in Spain for a year in the nineties, and having spent many fruitless days trying to accom-

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culmitzsch

We practiced signing our names in a small box on a sheet of paper. When the real form finally came I was gripped at evening sheep corrode with panic. I took a deep breath and out over the fallow acreage, birds came the signature. She seemed redescend as plump snow & darken. . . lieved to see that nothing was outside but beneath the rubble the box. the homesteads are still warm. spoons “ You now have the rights and lay by spoons, the grease responsibilities afforded to all Canadistains on boots & the boot room beyond ans,” she said. “There are only three the dwarfed half-door which things that differentiate you: one, you can now bring you to tears. mother of spoons cannot vote; two, you cannot run for elected office; and three, if you commit if i came home we might hash it all out. a felony, you may be deported back to your dead-march trick, the your home country.” scabies, the stunted livestock, your off-trend When my Permanent Residency knitting & a resurrectional card came in the mail in the spring, I smell in the air; couldn’t resist showing it off. One aftersaltpetre-thought, saltpetre-speech. noon, over beers with some friends, I the humidity in the pillow fell into a reverie about my day at Canunder their dreaming heads ada Place What a moving experience a white breath of fungi: the cool it had been, united with these people clay trickling into from all over the world. What an authenmy lungs in deep sleep . . . tic display of multiculturalism in action! see you above, safe night Canada really was a mosaic! mother of spoons, princess of the apron; shone “Bullshit,” my friend Eddy cut in.

“You’re buying a line of government on by no source & never rightfully lit, you propaganda.” The gist of his argument yourself were lantern see you above was that Canadians don’t like to face the safe night drunk mothers. homecoming reality that feel-good multiculturalism is inhalation & ingress rhetoric masks a basic fact: immigrants dust’s role-reversal & hushed are treated as nothing more than the as if at a distance sum of their labour, which, to make the clay slides back, slow matters worse, often results in “brain into the enduring straw & around waste”—highly skilled people toiling ghost joinery a grid away in menial jobs. of joists clings assembling Eddy told me about Jayesh Prajaitself, oh pati, an Indian immigrant in Toronto. homestead ascending into night’s timber frame. Prajapati had a Master’s degree in the dog is a head-case, the booze chemistry but was unable to find has kick work in his field after immigrating the shadows of birds to Canada in 2006. He took a job as a slide over the debris; night-shift cashier at a Shell station. here in the stone age of villages One night in September of 2012, a customer started to drive off without – Lutz Seiler (Translated from the German paying his $112.85 gas bill. Prajapati

by Ken Babstock and Eva Bonne) ran out to stop him but was killed after being struck by the man’s SUV. Later interviews with friends and family seemed rather perfunctory until the final Finally, the day came. Last March, after stage: the signature that would be printed suggested that Prajapati might have run out to stop the criminal not out of loyalty making our way through the weepy hap- on our Permanent Residency cards. It was to the Shell corporation, but because of the utmost importance, she said, that we piness of the citizenship office waiting sign inside the box. If any part of the signa- many individual gas stations force their area, we were led into a windowless room where a middle-aged woman with a slight ture went outside of the box, the signatures employees to pay back theft out of their own paycheques, an illegal but common would be invalidated and we would have Indian accent questioned us about recent practice in the industry. (Shell has stated to “land” all over again. “Here,” she said, criminal activity. No, we hadn’t committed it’s conducting a full investigation and any crimes in the past few months. It all “practice a few times.” plish something rather simple—like renewing a student visa—in the Spanish bureaucracy, I knew that getting a police report would be a challenge.

I feared bribery might be necessary, but hundreds of dollars and many months later, I had the police report in my hands.

The last step was the medical exam. I booked an appointment to see a doctor on the southern fringes of Edmonton. He went through a long checklist of things that—and I’m extrapolating here—the Government of Canada did not want to see in its new residents: drug addictions, genetic mutations, HIV-AIDS, cancers, smoking. I confidently answered “no” to all of these and he seemed satisfied until he got out the otoscope and looked in my ears.

This, he said, needed to be addressed immediately. He’d practically yawned his way through my family history of early-onset heart disease and cancer, but it seemed my excess earwax had finally accorded me a little respect.

I sent the whole dossier—police reports, medical exams, employment histories, financial statements—to an immigration processing centre in Ontario and waited. Three months passed and one day I came home to find my wife in tears: they had rejected the entire application and we would now go to the back of the line.

I had somehow omitted one month of my life between June 1, 1994 and July 1, 1994. I have no recollection of what I was doing during that time, but I could have easily said I was travelling and would have been fine. But I left it out completely, and for that reason I was looking at another four to six months for the processing of my application.

I started over.

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has reiterated in its press statements that, “the Ontario Employment Standards Act prohibits employers from deducting wages because the employer had property stolen.”)

Behold, Eddy argued, the reality of the Canadian Dream. The pageantry of the citizenship ceremony was bread and circuses for deluded folks like me. This was a grave charge: it cost serious money (I spent approximately thirty-two hundred dollars on forms and applications) and the government demanded a serious commitment to become Canadian. For an American like me, the cost was a hardship. For a working-class immigrant from the developing world, it was a lifetime of savings.

There is certainly emerging data to support the notion that Canada has a growing problem with brain waste. A recent report from Citizenship and Immigration Canada found “deteriorating” conditions for skilled immigrants over the past ten years. According to the government’s own data, skilled workers face more obstacles in gaining employment in their field than unskilled workers.

And the proverbial tales of PhD’s driving taxis? As of 2006, (the latest year surveyed), “very recent immigrants” (those who have immigrated in the past five years) who drove taxis were about three times more likely to hold a doctorate than Canadian-born taxi drivers. Furthermore, forty-four percent of immigrant taxi drivers hold a postsecondary degree, which would certainly seem to make them overqualified to be driving a cab.

Once Eddy had burst my new Canadian bubble, it seemed that I couldn’t open the paper or turn on the radio without hearing yet another story about immigrants exploited by Canadian employers. Most recently, an Alberta company pled guilty to a charge of falsely luring a group of Polish welders to work in the energy industry, paying them about half what they should have been paid, while procuring them visas under the false pretense of being students.

Under the plea agreement, the most serious charge of human trafficking was dropped.

The Poles, who earned ten to twelve dollars an hour, will never see a dime of the twenty-four dollars an hour or more they should have been making. What’s more disturbing than the exploitation of these workers by a rogue Ukrainian Orthodox 26

CAN.ICONS THE MAPLE LEAF The Canadian maple leaf is a powerful and positive symbol, unique in the world as a national emblem. Instead of abstract shapes, often stemming from outdated symbols of nobility, this country honours an everyday concrete object from lowly nature. In other words, our national symbol is also simply a leaf on a tree.

And that’s it, really: Canadians hold nature high, and we reflect this shared love in our official visual identity. This duality of emblem and object is the essence of the maple leaf’s enduring popularity. We proudly display it on t-shirts and hats, ski gloves and knapsacks, sports jerseys, Canada Day cakes and sugaring-off candies. And among our best-loved annual rituals is the witnessing of the maple leaf’s stunning autumn display.

The maple leaf has been Canada’s favourite unofficial symbol since the very beginning.

Canada’s First Nations enjoyed maple syrup long before the first European settlers arrived, and they shared their food craft with the earliest settlers. By the early 1700s, the maple leaf was a popular symbol in the new communities along the shores of the St. Lawrence River.

By the mid-1800s it was the official emblem of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and was referred to in the Toronto press as “the chosen emblem of Canada.” It’s been featured on the Canadian penny non-stop since 1901.

But it wasn’t until 1965 that the maple leaf became the nation’s main official symbol with the introduction of a new Canadian flag. Part of its incredible popularity today is because, that year, we officially chose our own emblem instead of using borrowed symbols from other lands. Since that time, the maple leaf has become part of a new, more overtly proud, extroverted, and sometimes even strident Canadian national celebration.

A recent survey selected the maple leaf as Canadians’ overwhelming choice as their favourite national symbol. And one in five said they’d consider getting a maple leaf tattoo.

– Clive Holden

priest and his associates is the fact that the workers themselves were left with nothing to show for their troubles. Most of the immigrants chose to return to Poland, even though a few have stayed behind, hoping to be granted permanent residency.

In some ways, then, immigration to Canada may be starting to look more and more like immigration to the United States: A high-stakes game that often involves significant amounts of money and corruption, with an uncertain payoff at the end. You could just as easily end up like Tony Montana as Horatio Alger.

All of this—the two-sided treatment of immigrants, the inconsistent health care system, the compromised environmental record—might mean that Canada isn’t quite the socialist paradise American liberals like my ex-girlfriend dreamed of immigrating to in 2004. In fact, many of its deepest problems mirror those south of

the border. Still, in my four years here, I have yet to meet an immigrant to Canada—including refugees from the Mexican drug war, and political refugees from Zimbabwe and El Salvador, not to mention various Indians, Chinese and, yes, Americans—who thinks he or she would have been better off back home, wherever home happened to be. For all the horror stories, financial costs, and paperwork, there remains the promise of landing in a country that not only tolerates but encourages immigrants.

According to Jeffrey Reitz, a University of Toronto sociologist, support for immigration—even in skilled jobs—is widely supported across a broad swath of the Canadian population. Most Canadians— even the unemployed—do not believe that immigrants are “stealing” jobs.

Canada is the outlier among industrialized countries in its attitude towards

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immigrants: fewer than twenty percent of Canadians think there are “too many” immigrants in the country, according to a 2010 EKOS Research poll. Compare that with the United States, where a 2007 poll found that three-quarters of Americans wanted further restrictions on immigration. And in Britain and France, immigration is even less popular than it is in the United States. Whereas Canada long ago adopted bilingualism, many Americans increasingly see Spanish as a threat to its “Anglo-Protestant values,” wrote Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in his recent book, The Hispanic Challenge. The results from the 2012 presidential election reflected this sobering fact. The Republican party has calcified into a mono-ethnic tribe of old, white, well-off, Christian men. “The demographics are changing,” said FOX News pundit Bill O’Reilly on election night. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

Anecdotal evidence tells me that the emphasis on multiculturalism as a core value in Canadian life is filtering its way into the belief systems of its immigrants.

One Colombian student of mine remarked that while her home country is a mix ofAfrican, Spanish, and indigenous stock, multiculturalism is not seen as a virtue. José Antonio García, a petroleum engineer from Venezuela, considered immigrating to various countries, including Spain (where he has citizenship), but was intrigued by an ad in a Venezuelan newspaper that read: “Canada Awaits You!” He did his homework, and, despite his dislike for the cold, picked Canada. “I researched the Canadian standard of living and learned that it occupied fourth place on the Human Development Index,” he told me. Apart from the difficulties of learning English, García has had little trouble integrating himself into Canadian life and continuing his profession.

For Americans, Canada has the added bonus of providing a social safety net that liberals can only dream about. Guaranteed parental leave and universal health care are two aspects of the Canadian social compact that my friends back in the United States envy. When considering my long-term employment options, I received a number of job offers in the U.S. that would have allowed me to cobble together a living wage, but none could guarantee health insurance or long-term stability. Staying seemed the only logical option.

Still, none of this obscured the fact that I had moved to a city so far north that most American maps don’t even register its existence. Three-quarters of Canadians live within a two-hour drive of the U.S. border. I had moved to the northernmost city of over a million people in North America. What was I doing here? Yes, there had been a lot of observable change in our lives: I had a job, my spouse had a tuition break, we had our new fancy permanent resident cards, we had access to health care. But the most profound change lay in the intersection between my identity and my new nation. I still felt somewhat out of place, yet had become unexpectedly attached not just to Canada, but to the idea of Canada. In a kind of personal citizenship exercise, I was now trying to gauge just how Canadian I’d become.

To be sure, there are times when I am still truly perplexed by my new country.

Canada, I must report, is a strange place in many ways. On my walk to work, there is an intersection where a busy four-lane street meets a quiet two-lane side street, which rarely has any traffic. Nevertheless, if there is a red light, pedestrians wait patiently at this intersection, looking into the middle distance, a few quick steps away from the next corner. When I approach, I glance both ways, and then skip across the side street on my merry way. I feel the eyes of my fellow pedestrians on the back of my neck, tsk-tsking me for jaywalking.

One of my great pleasures in life is the feeling of hamburger juice running down the back of my hand as I plow into a pink, juicy patty. This—like jaywalking—is illegal in my new country. A federal law mandates that ground beef must be cooked to eighty degrees centigrade for everyone’s well being; E.coli has been linked to undercooked beef. (Of course, as the recent scandal at XL Foods in Brooks, Alberta, has demonstrated, cooking meat at high temperatures won’t always save you from E.coli.) What’s more interesting than the legal status of hamburgers, though, is that Canadians want their burgers well done.

Pink hamburgers, the National Post declared recently, are a “Canadian taboo.” I had a barbeque in my backyard a couple of years ago, and a Canadian friend—a foodie, to be sure—took a burger I served her and put it back on the grill. What the hell? I thought at the time. That’s ruining the flavour!

This is the thing about Canada. For all the talk about a cultural mosaic, diversity and multiculturalism, there is a broad consensus on all sorts of social conventions lacking in the United States. You eat your hamburgers well done. You don’t cross the street if the light’s red. You stop for pedestrians. You provide health care for all citizens. You allow your children to walk themselves to school. And you always say “sorry,” even if you don’t mean it.

These were things I’d learned to love and shake my head at since coming to Canada, and I thought of them in March when we were called to formally sign on to this national project that had been so abstract to me as a Texas liberal a decade before. Now, at the drop of a toque, and for reasons I can’t fully explain, scenes of Canadian patriotism often emotionally overwhelm me. I have cried at bad renditions of “O Canada” before Edmonton Eskimos games.I cried when I heard a Canadian version of “This Land Is Your Land,” even though the music was the worst kind of folky kitsch. During the Olympics, I was done in by the most heavy-handed, sentimental portraits of Canadian athletes on CTV, even as egregious displays of bellicose American patriotism (USA! USA!) left me unmoved.

I remember one particularly brutal winter day last year, shortly after I became a Permanent Resident. I sat at a communal lunch table in downtown Edmonton with an immigrant from India and another from Haiti. All three of us bitched about the weather. The Indian shook his head, and then went back into the kitchen to bring us out some chai. The Haitian guy explained that the two had become friends when they moved to Canada ten years ago. They had met while living in a cramped north side apartment building, slowly working their way out of poverty. It had been the Indian guy’s lifelong dream to open up his own café. Now, he had done it. His voice was full of pride and undeniable feeling.

As the three of us sat there, watching the wet snow come down, I felt the urge to cry, the emotion, again, welling up inside up as I thought about what they must have endured to get here. I was moved by their struggle, the faith they put in the promise of something new and better.

It’s one year later. Winter is here again.

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IN PR OFILE

Burden In late 2011,

no longer able to provide FOR

its inhabitants the basic necessities of life— clean water, adequate shelter, proper sanitation—the Attawapiskat native reserve is James Bay, Ontario, declared a state of emergency.

The squalor and third-world poverty depicted in newswire photographs shocked the national and international communities and triggered intervention by the Red Cross, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper was less sympathetic. “This government has spent some ninety million dollars million since coming to office just on Attawapiskat,” he told the House of Commons.

“That’s over fifty thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the community.”

That statement sent Sun Media pundit Ezra Levant, among other Canadians, into an outburst of righteous indignation. “What the hell are they doing with thirty-four million dollars a year?” he said on television, after conceding he hadn’t heard of Attawapiskat until a few days earlier. “We let them get away with corruption and waste that we would never let a non-Indian get away with.”

But Harper, Levant, and even Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente—who a couple of years earlier had described pre-contact indigenous culture as “neolithic” and therefore incapable of integration with the modern world—weren’t doing anything unusual or surprising by endorsing negative mythology about native Canadians. It had already existed for at least two hundred years and been manifested in government policies like the residential school system, which was designed to “get rid of the Indian problem,” as Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott candidly acknowledged in the House of Commons in 1920, during an examination of Indian Act amendments. Then and now, part of what seems to be our guiding philosophy can be distilled into a single sentence: Canada’s indigenous people are a liability.

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As the Attawapiskat crisis was unfolding, a thirty-four year old Métis woman living in Montreal was following it online. Chelsea Vowel read comment after comment filled with racist, knee-jerk responses. On huffingtonpost.ca: “They get lots of money, but much of it is simply stolen by the chiefs, and much of the rest goes to booze and big screen tvs etc instead of to looking after their children [sic]. They are addicted to welfare, and do nothing for themselves.” On cbc.ca: “It all comes down to two things 1) incompetence in managing tax dollars properly, 2) abuse of tax dollars for self serving purposes.” On the globeandmail. ca: “Time and time again, the natives destroy the houses through neglect and destruction during alcoholic binges.”

Vowel began supplying factual rebuttals to what she read. “Look at the financial statements for Attawapiskat,” she wrote in one characteristically analytical reply, attaching a hyperlink, “and show me where you think money is being wasted and/ or stolen. Thanks.” After a couple of days of this, she found it difficult to keep up with the steady stream of willful ignorance. Instead of composing unique replies to individual commenters, she started to compile references for a blog post that would allow her or anyone else to challenge uninformed remarks with a single link. “Where do you even begin,” she wrote in that post, which was titled Dealing with comments about Attawapiskat, “when the people making these comments do not seem to understand even the bare minimum about the subject?”

But she did begin. Methodically and dispassionately, she dismantled Harper’s ninety million dollar claim. She referred to financial statements and gave primers on relevant sections of the Indian Act and the Constitution, which stipulate that funding for healthcare, education and social services—all part of the provincial budget off reserve—is a federal responsibility on reserve. She broke down the amount

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en of Proof What a native blogger found out about her country, and herself, in the wake of the Attawapiskat scandal

By CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY Photograph by Marc Rimmer

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allotted for housing (just two million dollars of the 17.6 million dollars advanced annually by the federal government; the rest of the thirty-four million dollar figure tossed around by Levant and others was comprised of 4.4 million dollars from the province and twelve million dollars from band coffers), and reported that the cost of a building a new house in the remote James Bay community was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, twice that for the same house in a southern community (due mostly to the costs associated with transporting the materials). She quoted from a June 2011 Auditor General’s report that pointed out deficiencies in program planning and delivery for First Nations. Her ten-page rebuttal of the party line took a full day to research and write. Vowel, known then only by her blogger identity, âpihtawikosisân, wrote with authority because she’d done the background work. Satisfied, she posted Dealing with comments about Attawapiskat on her blog and went to bed.

When she awoke the next morning, she turned on her computer. Prior to the previous night’s entry, her six-month-old Cree language blog averaged one hundred daily visitors. One of the first things she read the morning after she posted Dealing with comments about Attawapiskat was a note from a Facebook friend who told her that a tweet about her post had multiplied itself many times over in the Twitterverse. She logged on to her site and saw thousands of hits and the beginning of the 1,019 comments that her cataclysmic post would receive, including this one from the Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden, who is of Métis heritage: “âpihtawikosisân, I think I love you.” She was online for three days, answering as many emails and responding to as many comments as she could, watching the hits roll in, until the counter exceeded 46,000. Exhausted, she had to turn off her computer. “It felt like a tsunami,” she told me in a recent interview, “and I wondered how the hell I’d managed to tap into something so raw by accident. I felt like, who the hell am I to be answering these questions? But I was able to, so I did.”

Her real identity was still unknown.

“Who is this mystery blogger?” wrote lawyer and legal publisher Susan Munro, on the Canadian law blog Slaw. Vowel had chosen a separate blogger identity partly 30

out of a desire to avoid sharing personal information on the Internet and partly because she was worried her online activities might be viewed as unprofessional at the law firm where she was working. “The interest in this blog was exceptional,” wrote Munro, “given that, as far as I could tell, the author had no previous profile… it was an effort that warmed my legal publisher’s heart: she provided an excellent synthesis of the topic and supported it with primary authority. She took exceptionally difficult material and made it understandable.”

An invitation arrived to meet with Justice Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Manitoba’s first aboriginal judge. CBC radio

the University of Alberta, had recently divorced, and was raising two young girls on her own), Vowel began investigating online discussions about Plains Cree and eventually joined the conversation. “I was going to geek out about Cree language and once in a while have a rant,” she told me.

She wanted her daughters to have a strong sense of their native identity, and the early blog entries reflect that. But âpihtawikosisân was no mommy blog.

Among the posts about appropriate dress for a recent pow-wow, bedtime stories and songs in Plains Cree for her daughters, and linguist-calibre language lessons, are musings on identity and the relationship of language to power, which were the seeds

It felt like a tsunami. I wondered how the hell I’d managed to tap into something so raw by accident. called. “What bothers me about it,” Vowel mused on air, “is that I don’t think my blog post should have been remarkable at all.”

She pointed out that the attention on her in fact represented an absence of investigation on the part of the mainstream media.

“People should have already had this information.”

On a Friday evening in September, Vowel, wearing a black t-shirt printed with ᐯᔮᐦᑕᑫᔨᒧᐃᐧᐣ, Cree syllabics that translate as peace, had put in a full day at the Ulluriaq Adolescent Center in Montreal teaching teenaged Inuit girls under social services protection. A self-identified language geek, she was careful to point out that the shading of the Cree word on her shirt meant wholeness, oneness, balance, not ‘peace, man’ or even contentment or inner calm. Plains Cree, a second language in which she’s fluent enough to write songs, has different words for those sentiments. More than semantics is at stake. If anyone understands the role of language in identity preservation, it’s Vowel. “Most of the monolingual speakers have died,” she says of indigenous languages in Canada. “When you lose that, you lose an insight into the culture that you can’t recreate.” Âpihtawikosisân (pronounced ah-peeh-du-wiGO-si-sahn, Cree for ‘half-son’) began life in early 2011 as a language blog. Newly transplanted in Montreal and feeling culturally isolated (she had just finished law school at

of the blog it would become.

Three days after posting Dealing with comments about Attawapiskat, she was back with a new post and an admission that the “unreal attention” left her struggling with what to write next. She felt pressure to use the spotlight to get a message out, and agreed to requests from rabble.ca and the Huffington Post to blog for their sites, too. The next dispatch from Vowel exemplified âpihtawikosisân’s growing focus: it was another accessible, meticulously substantiated lecture, this time on First Nations taxation. She took common refrains and countered them: To “Indians don’t even pay taxes,” she responded with the fact that most aboriginal people don’t get tax exemptions. To “Whoopdeedoo, so a few of them pay property taxes,” she gave a detailed breakdown of exemptions, fewer than most people believe. She detailed policies about point-of-sale exemptions. “Some provinces waive the enforcement of the delivery rule on the provincial portion of the sales tax,” she wrote, “allowing a First Nations person to transport goods to the reserve him or herself. Part of the reasoning here is that requiring delivery to be made by an agent of the vendor has the potential to negate the exemption, as any savings incurred are eaten up by delivery fees… However, the issue is what the legal exemption actually is versus what many believe it to be. It is important

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to understand the actual legal exemption rather than characterising the issue by the instances of ‘cheating’.”

She wrapped up with thanks and an invitation to the reader to investigate the history of First Nations taxation via the links she’d provided, a common theme in her posts that underscores the general misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding First Nations issues. Do the work to understand, her links and photographs and excerpts urge her readers.

Look deeper.

Two days later the National Post published her name with the Attawapiskat piece as an apology for misattribution; they had initially published it under the name of the reporter who’d forwarded Vowel’s blog post to his editor. Her desire for privacy, as it turned out, was well founded: armed with her real name, people tracked down her email address and sent hate mail that described her culture as diseased, a thing to be obliterated. Some indigenous readers accused her of being a ‘fake’ and trying to protect Band Council.

Her fiancé, Tomas, still sometimes fears for her safety. “I worry a little bit about it,” she told me. “But the cat’s out of the bag.

I’ve just got to deal with it.”

She keeps a list of future potential topics based on the negative mythologies she dealt with growing up Métis. “I try not to be reactive,” she said of the blog’s current direction. When she has a day off from her current teaching position, she often spends it researching and writing a new post, averaging six to eight hours of work for each one. She has a clear idea of the kind of conversation she wants to be leading. “I wrote this article so that I could get out of the adversarial environment of the [online] comments sections,” she wrote in a postscript to the Attawapiskat post.

“Keep it classy, nitôtêmitik (my friends).”

This could have been advice to her younger self. Flashback to Canada Day, late nineties, University of Alberta undergraduate days. Sick of the racism toward native people she’d heard all her life, Vowel was often angling for an argument.

She headed out for the student bars where she was sure she’d find people, hands over hearts, professing love for the country. It usually happened as expected and Vowel would close in. What about Talisman Energy, with its crappy environmental and human

rights record? she asked them. How can you be proud of Canada’s involvement with something like that? She knew where this would lead, and it did: Well, came the response, conditions are better than they would have been without Canada’s involvement. She countered with specifics about brutal tactics being used by the Sudanese government to push people out of areas that Talisman wanted to explore for resources.

Then she brought it home, to the residential schools, for instance, whose truths were not yet widely known. Vowel set out to rectify that with examples and dates anyone could check later. The last school closed in 1996, she said. The bar patrons were horrified, or they blustered, or called her a deluded bitch. But she knew she’d left a mark.

She was like a lion in the grass, her friends told her: her interlocutors underestimated the significance of the swishing tail. Today, she readily admits to being shrill on indigenous issues during that period of her life. “I would eviscerate arguments because I was prepared. And it really turned people off. I had people telling me, ‘I didn’t hate natives before, but now I do’.” Vowel paused as she told me this. “Which is a cop-out thing to say. Oh, I wasn’t a racist until you made me a racist.”

Law school, which she entered after she’d been teaching in the north for several years, reformed her tactics, but the lectures had little to do with it. With its Latin and its authority, legal training can make you shrill, too, she says. But after-hours debate remained a sport and a pastime; it was in the pubs with law-school peers that the change began. She had a classmate whose values were more conservative than anyone she’d ever met. She found some of his opinions abhorrent but thought he was a “legitimately nice guy. He really tried hard to listen to what I had to say and take it into consideration, and then give his opinion.

He didn’t lecture me.” As her classmate and his friends became less combative, she became more interested in explaining instead of ranting. “All they’d heard was rhetoric. Rights, rights, rights. They didn’t know anything about native culture at all.”

The information she supplied “opened their minds.” They still follow her on Facebook and still occasionally challenge her there. “When I want more government involvement in something, that’s where

we disagree, but it never gets insulting or rude.” She thinks of them as allies, though they were not willing to be interviewed for this article (one of them declining as a media-shy “paranoid right-winger”). When she writes posts for her blog, “in my mind, I’m still talking to them.”

Vowel makes a point of writing when she’s feeling calm. Her anger and sorrow are always just below the surface. Her children come home with stories of schoolyard taunts that include war whooping and indictments of their heritage as stupid, backward, and ridiculous. She herself was called ‘white bitch’ and ‘neechi lover’ (Cree for my friend, but used in her youth as a pejorative by non-natives to describe someone who had sympathy for natives).

“Do other parents want to know when their children are calling other people ‘white bitches’ and ‘stupid Indians’?” she wrote, in her June 2011 post, Dealing with racism.

“Why do we accept this?”

Vowel became interested in the law while teaching in Inuvik, where she’d gone after finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta. She and her fellow teachers, all young and female, were being verbally abused by the school’s principal; he would vent his racism toward the school’s aboriginal students by screaming obscenities at his young teachers and physically intimidating them. She can still recall how “extremely frightening” it was.

She prepared a grievance, only to pull it at the last minute because she wasn’t sure her union could protect her against his wrath.

He got away with it and she decided she’d go to law school to make sure it would never happen again. “I was sick of always feeling terrified and small and stressed out every time I ran up against something legal.”

She told me this story as we sat in her Montreal apartment, eating slices of bannock (pahkwêsikan) still warm from her pan and spread with apricot jam. She recalled the reaction of her hometown Métis community in Lac Ste Anne, Alberta, to the news that she planned to study law. People around the communities where she grew up told her she’d be locking up her own people. Even members of her own community weren’t keen on the idea. It had been okay for her to study education, even admirable, but to pursue law with a B.Ed. already under her belt? It was a step too WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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far. Vowel was the first in her family to go to university, never mind pursue a second degree.

She went anyway, and there she met Shaun Emes, who became her friend.

Both wanted to effect change. Emes, now a Crown Prosecutor in Edmonton, remembers citing Vowel’s ability to parse arguments without batting an eyelash.

“There was no fooling her.” Once they finished law school, they remained friends, but no longer agreed that the change they wanted could originate from within the system. Emes stayed in and Vowel went the other way.

“What happens with some students is, there’s a belief that if you get the law right, it’s going to foster justice in the world,” says Professor Val Napoleon, Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Justice and Governance at the University of Victoria. A disillusioned Chelsea Vowel was her student while Napoleon taught at the University of Alberta. “The law is two-faced, right? On the one hand, it’s an instrument for people to use for equality and aboriginal rights, but at the same time it’s seen as the instrument that dispossessed people of it in the first place.”

Midway through her law degree, Vowel’s common-law marriage fell apart.

She finished her LL.B. while raising two young children on her own, and then considered their future. Edmonton didn’t feel like home, and the Lac Ste Anne area didn’t seem the right place to raise her girls. Once the site of a spiritual pilgrimage, the lake itself was by then so polluted by nearby industry it could no longer support the local fishing economy. “The ones that are there are mired in poverty, quite often dealing with serious addiction problems. They’re struggling to hold on to something and it’s not working. Me being out there is not going to revitalize it,” she said. “I can’t do it by myself with my kids. There’s too much set up against me.”

Persuaded by her fiancé, she moved to Montreal. Once there, she landed a job at a law firm that specialized in land claims and Aboriginal law. The work on a two-hundred-year-old land claim was initially exciting and professionally satisfying, and although she wasn’t practicing as a full lawyer (she had yet to be called to the bar in Quebec), it was her “dream job.” But when the case was settled out of 32

court with compensation instead of land, Vowel lost faith in the system. “That was a quarter of a century of one guy working on it really, really hard,” she said, “and that’s what they’re coming out with. That’s not reconciliation.”

Working inside a system that would require her to deliver such news to her client wasn’t something she could live with. She decided to return to teaching and found a position through First Peoples’ House at McGill working with Inuit youth. The teenaged girls in the program are under the protection of social services. Vowel is fond of them. A calm, regular classroom would be nice, she told me, but she likes the way this group keeps her on her toes (she’s never sure how many will show up because of their many appointments, so she plans flexible micro-units). The stakes are high.

“These aren’t the at-risk kids, these are kids already at the edge. They’re often selfharming and sometimes suicidal. They are youths who’ve been forced to cope with extremely difficult situations and who are struggling because of this. Sometimes keeping them in education is impossible.

You’re just trying to keep them alive, give them enough so that later on they can come back and become the people that they want to be. Helping keep them safe is my main goal. I can’t stress how resilient they are in the face of what they’ve had to deal with.”

Research has consistently shown that indigenous people have a shorter life span than non-natives, and the suicide rate in regions with high aboriginal populations like Attawapiskat is more than double that of areas with low aboriginal populations.

The problems run generations deep. “If we don’t have people working with them who actually care and love them and understand the limitations,” Vowel said, “we’re going to lose a lot more.”

Sitting across from Vowel on the backyard patio of a Montreal café, one can glimpse the university-days leonine character her friend alluded to: her green-eyed gaze is steady, frank, subtly challenging.

Her roller derby alter ego is Louise Riel, and the sport seems a good fit. “I am willing to talk to people about these things. I am willing to spend a lot of time doing it,” she wrote, in No offense but… in January 2012. In addition to her lengthy posts, she takes time to engage with many of the

comments left there. “But I am not willing to have someone waste my energy when they don’t actually care about the issue.”

Opposing her on a courtroom floor would be a formidable challenge: her arguments are informed, watertight, and spoken in paragraphs. “One of the things I want people to understand is that colonialism still exists,” she told me. “It’s not something that happened hundreds of years ago. It’s not just residential schools or the Sixties Scoop. We’ve got more kids in foster care than were ever in rez school.

They couch it in liberal terms of equality and everybody is the same and they make it sound humanitarian. It’s worse now because it’s hidden… This is not just echoes of the past, this is today.”

She tries to remain patient, but she wants people to catch up on First Nations issues, fast. The sense she has that things are becoming worse, legislatively speaking (as examples, she cites the massive cutbacks to native programs and renewed interest in assimilation via legislation like the First Nations Property Ownership Act), is only part of the reason.

“I feel like I’m on a clock,” she told me, and added that it has been so since she was a child. “So when I realized I couldn’t be a sniper because of my poor eyesight, I couldn’t go join the revolution in Nicaragua or anything, I was crushed. Seriously. I decided that whatever I did with my life had to have meaning.”

Being part of ‘the seventh generation’ (an indigenous concept described variously as an optimistic prophecy, a metaphor for farsighted living, or a generational responsibility, depending who you talk to) also has something to do with her angst.

“It’s supposed to be a thing of pride and acknowledgement of traditions,” she said.

“But for a lot of us, and I’ve talked to my peers about this, it feels like an awful lot of pressure sometimes. Seven generations past, there were all these restrictions and abuses, and now it’s up to us to bring back the language, the traditions, to fix the communities, make them healthy again, bring back nationhood. How the hell do we do that, when our parents and grandparents don’t speak the language?”

Difficult, yes, but it’s a responsibility she accepts, even though the voice she’s chosen to do the answering, âpihtawikosisân, does not evoke someone with a sense of ob-

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ligation. “For me it’s pretty joyful. I’m doing it in a way that I’m still healthy.”

Justice Sinclair subscribes to and reads her blog regularly. “She’s a bright, surprisingly upbeat person,” the Justice told me.

“She has a commitment to understanding things and is not afraid to confront racist thinking.”

Fellow indigenous blogger Wayne K Spear, who reads and is read by Vowel, describes her posts as “briefing notes.

She does something that’s badly needed.”

Spear, who holds a Master’s in English from Queen’s University and has a book on the residential schools forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press, acknowledges the inherent challenge. “It’s a constituency problem. All of the people that fall under the aboriginal umbrella are keenly aware of the fact that most Canadians bear a lot of misunderstandings.

They’ve been poorly educated, even miseducated. Some people choose what Linda McQuaig called the right not to know: they just bury their heads.”

Sometimes it’s more than simply choosing not to know. During a bicycle ride with Vowel and her family along the Lachine Canal, municipal politics came up. The mayor of Toronto had recently been to court on charges of conflict of interest, to which he pleaded ignorance. “That’s politics!” she snorted, and then grew thoughtful. “That sort of stuff happens all the time. But when it happens in the native community, the media jump all over it. It’s depicted as racial weakness.”

In the period before Canada became a confederation, when native and settler often stood shoulder to shoulder in battle, a symbolic representation of the existing peace and friendship emerged. Later beaded into wampum belts, and thought of by scholars as the philosophical foundation for all of the treaties, the simple ‘two-row’ design signified two vessels, a European boat and a native canoe, traveling side by side on a river. The notion was captured in an 1895 letter to the ‘Honorable Government of Ottawa’ from members of the Six Nations. “Brother, it is very extremely hard to cease of our original Treaty which is to be perpetuated as long as the sun shall give light and water runs and grass grows.

So we cannot see why that we should be treated as minors… 1st the Government

has made an illustration that they shall abide in their vessel, 2nd that we Indians of the Iroquois also remain in our Birch Bark Canoe, 3rd that the Government shall not make compulsory laws for the Indians, but the treaties are to be unmolested forever.”

But the original agreements did not remain unmolested forever. Amendments to the Indian Act, first established in 1876 and, in the words of John A. Macdonald in 1887, designed to “do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people,” began with the introduction of a ‘Pass’ system in the early eighteen-eighties, which required natives on reserves to obtain permission from government agents to leave the reserve. In 1884, new legislation prohibited ceremonies such as sun dances and the yearly potlatch, a traditional gathering held in the fall to redistribute wealth.

The pattern continued with legislation for residential schools (1920), against raising funds to make land claims (1927), and the Sixties Scoop, which lasted from the midnineteen-sixties until the mid-nineteeneighties and caused native children to be taken from their homes and placed in nonnative families.

The path down the river, as history shows, was no longer parallel. During the talks leading to the patriation of the Constitution in 1982, native groups such as the National Indian Brotherhood (who later became the Assembly of First Nations) petitioned to be part of negotiations with the Crown. They were repeatedly rebuffed.

Nevertheless, section 35 of the new Constitution Act recognized their aboriginal and treaty rights, and defined ‘aboriginals’ as North American Indian, Inuit and Métis for the first time in Canadian history.

Almost fifteen years later, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down a decision seen as a turning point in treaty negotiations. The 1997 decision, known as Delgamuukw, confirmed that aboriginal title—rights to the land itself, not only for hunting or fishing use—existed in British Columbia.

Cases like this, says Vowel, are “having small cumulative effects. But where the work needs to be done is in people’s minds.

You can’t expect that a whole body of law is going to trickle down into people’s consciousnesses and change how they think about each other.” To wit: the federal government’s decision to appoint a third-party

manager of Attawapiskat’s band finances in the midst of the crisis. In the judicial review requested by the band, Attawapiskat prevailed; the judges could find no evidence of mismanagement or incorrect spending, but did cite ignorance of the community’s needs. “The problem,” wrote Judge Phelan, in August 2012, “does not lie at the feet of the political masters but in the hands of the bureaucracy.” Vowel’s post, Attawapiskat: A study in the need to openly address misunderstandings, examined the way “this kind of misunderstanding becomes reinforced in the public consciousness as an obvious truth. For me it merely highlights how important it is to keep chipping away at the lack of understanding between native and non-native in this country. Lives depend on us doing so.”

According to the 2006 census, 1.1 million residents of Canada identified as having aboriginal identity, out of a total population of 31.2 million. Slightly less than two-thirds identified as First Nations, one-third as Métis, and just over eighty thousand as Inuit or a combination of these groups. Some live on reserves, many don’t, some have an indigenous mother tongue, some don’t speak a native language at all. First Nations people in Canada are not a homogenous group, which has historically been one of the stumbling blocks in negotiations with the federal government.

“Within the North American imagination,” wrote Thomas King, in his 2003 Massey Lecture The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, “Native people have always been an exotic, erotic, terrifying presence. Much like the vast tracts of wilderness that early explorers and settlers faced. But most of all, Native people have been confusing. The panorama of cultures, the innumerable tribes, and the complex of languages made it impossible for North Americans to find what they most desired. A single Indian who could stand for the whole.”

If you passed Chelsea Vowel on the street or spotted her in the schoolyard of her children’s school, you might notice her beaded earrings or Cree-language t-shirt, but her indigenous identity is otherwise invisible. She wears her light brown hair an inch from her scalp with a fringe of blue-green bangs that match her eyes. The obstacles for indigenous WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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people, she has said, are so entrenched that they affect daily life. Why, then, doesn’t she just ‘pass’?

In fact, it might be her indigenous invisibility that spurs her on. Recently, she tweeted that one of her daughters reported having heard a so-called Métis story at school that featured monkeys, pythons and lions. When a friend expressed shock at the teacher’s ignorance (the story and its fauna were more Kipling than indigenous Canadian), she replied, via Twitter, “Honestly I think we don’t exist for these teachers because they don’t learn about us in school.

S’why I agitate.”

There’s a tattoo on the pale, freckled skin of Vowel’s right shoulder blade, a sinuous, fringed curve that bisects parallel lines representing wings. It’s a stylized raven, which in Vowel’s culture invokes a wily, intelligent creature, a survivor. Her godfather, a Dene artist, once signed his name with this symbol. After she’d drawn it for years, he gave her permission to use it, and she had it inked into her skin. The time to ‘pass’ is over, but the struggle for recognition and identity isn’t, and the solutions aren’t simple.

“I have enormous respect for her,” says Val Napoleon, whom Vowel refers to as mentor. “She creates space for complex conversations. The fatigue … is what happens when you hear the same old, same old. It’s also what happens if you’re expecting easy answers. She insists on the fuller and deeper conversation.” Âpihtawikosisân now receives anywhere from six hundred to a thousand views a day.

Rabble.ca describes her columns as among their most popular, though she doesn’t consider it a stepping stone. Asked about political ambitions, she laughs. She has enlisted friends to talk her out of entering politics if she ever seriously considers it. “I think it would be soul crushing,” she said to me. “You try your best in a bad system, but you don’t achieve your goals unless they are petty and awful. The politics in the native community are so poisoned by colonialism that you’ve got people who’ve internalized colonial attitudes and are doing it to themselves and to others.

It’s so hard to fight that.” Shaun Emes describes Vowel as “comfortable working outside the lines. She’s going places lawyers can’t go. She’s going to be able to effect change.”

Vowel told me she has her old lawschool peers in mind when she writes as âpihtawikosisân, but she remains aware 34

she’s addressing a largely hostile audience.

In Alberta, her home province, the “hostility toward natives spills over into violence on a shockingly regular basis” and the verbal vitriol she’s heard over the years whenever natives are discussed in the media is troubling. Ezra Levant, initially so harsh when the story first hit the national media, agreed to speak to this magazine about Attawapiskat. In reiterating arguments he has made in print and on television, Levant said that when the story broke he’d reviewed Attawapiskat’s financial statements and consulted “a leading accountant with over 50 years of practice” who told Levant there were “many important questions raised by the financial documents.”

Attawapiskat, Levant claims, should be one of the richest towns in the north, but is one of the poorest, and the blame “can only fall on its political leaders.” More to the point, Levant was asked to consider Vowel’s post that addressed these matters. He declined, saying it was “too verbose,” and that he “didn’t have time to sift through her spin” or her “attempts to justify” what had transpired there.

Perhaps therein lies the problem. If, prior to merely repeating earlier judgments, he (and other members of the media) had taken the time to read the post in question and gain a deeper perspective—which is all Vowel asks of her readers—he would have found that she’d addressed balance sheets and band management, pointing out, for example, that “federal control of expenditures is exercised through a variety of very restrictive funding mechanisms, a major one of which is contribution agreements...

Bands must submit regular and detailed reports to continue to receive funding.” As an example, she quoted from the Health Canada Contribution Agreement, which delivers health services to First Nations and Inuit people. “Health Canada cannot issue a payment until you properly account for expenditures through a claim submission and progress report.” She compared the salary of Attawapiskat’s chief with that of other municipality leaders, linking to a list of more than one hundred Ontario public sector employees. She quoted from the Auditor General’s report, which concluded that, “structural impediments severely limit the delivery of public services to First Nations communities and hinder

improvements in living conditions on reserves” and went on to list the complex reasons for this situation, which extend far beyond the balance sheet.

“I ask that you learn all of the histories,” she wrote, in Canada’s closets packed with skeletons, in April 2012. “Perhaps when we clean out all the skeletons, we can pack those closets with sweeter smelling things.” It’s not about laying blame, she says. It’s about seeing what went wrong and trying not to repeat it.

The hate mail has made her seriously question why she started a blog and whether she ought to continue it, but she’s dedicated her efforts to indigenous readers. “It may be that you are tired of hearing what happened,” she wrote, in reply to a commenter on Undermined at every turn: the lie of the failed native farm on the Prairies in May 2012. “But learning what actually happened is what makes all the difference in changing the narrative from ‘stupid, lazy, inferior’ to ‘strong, capable, equal.’ That narrative, internally and on a national level, absolutely has to shift before we can heal the many wounds our communities have suffered.”

The misery is real, she says, but outsiders don’t see that there’s hope and celebration, too. “We have high rates of suicide for a reason. But we would all be dead if that’s all we had. Other native people see this and recognize it. We laugh about things, the jokes about rez cars and rez dogs, stuff like that. It’s funny because it’s what you do to survive. We know it’s ridiculous! You’re holding things together so it works a little longer, and it’s awful.

But you have to laugh at it!”

What she’s working towards is nothing less than a regeneration of positive indigenous identity—from within. “I want to celebrate our strength. When I revisit old history, as I’m sometimes accused of, it’s not to wallow in victimhood. It’s to say, ‘See? We survived even that, isn’t that something? We are freaking amazing!’”

The re-education of a nation is no idle diversion. But she’s not looking for handouts or waiting for someone else to do it. She wants it in the water. She’s working the fringes. She’s talking it up in the bleachers. She’s beading pow-wow regalia for her daughters and writing songs to sing to them. Songs written and sung in the language of her ancestors. EB

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000EB5-

UPCOMING EVENTS Brown Bag Lunch Reading Series These noon-hour literary readings with guest authors have become an Edmonton favourite. Coming up in 2013: Lorna Crozier, Stewart Lemoine and Alice Major.

Author Cabaret & Reception This annual event will once again showcase an evening of stories with popular Canadian authors at the Art Gallery of Alberta on Monday, April 15, 2013.

Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Now in its 7th year, the lecture will feature acclaimed writer Esi Edugyan at the Timms Centre for the Arts on Tuesday, April 16, 2013.

The Canadian Literature Centre (CLC) at the University of Alberta is the western hub of the Canadian literary community, bringing together authors, scholars, publishers and the reading public to celebrate the strength and diversity of Canada’s written culture. The CLC serves as a main source of information on Canadian authors and their works, and promotes greater knowledge, reading, appreciation and study of Canadian literature of all genres, languages and regions.

Visit us at 4-115 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta website: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/ phone: (780) 492-9505 email: cdnlit@ualberta.ca

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• HUMANKIND

WHY KNOT? One writer’s look into the unexpected evolution of marriage.

By Max Fawcett

Photograph by Pedersen

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D

istracted driving laws are common across North America, but few to my knowledge cover talking about marriage with your sixty-eight year old father while behind the wheel. Still, as my rented black 2009 Chevy Impala shuddered to a stop on the Santa Ana Freeway in early September, just short of the expensivelooking silver SUV in front of me, it occurred to me this was perhaps an oversight on the part of lawmakers.

I’ve never been in an accident, yet this discussion nearly caused an embarrassing and possibly even dangerous collision. It was distracting in the extreme. The drivers behind me were paying better attention than I was— and were probably not listening to

t he id ios y nc r at ic rel at ionsh ip opinions of a parent—so a collision was avoided. I managed to veer into the open lane to my right, narrowly missing a car merging left, and we carried on our way.

We were driving the sixty or so kilometres from Santa Monica to Anaheim to take in a Los Angeles Angels baseball game, and while the prospect of leaving the beach and heading inland to watch teams fading out of the playoff picture might have otherwise sounded like a waste of time, both my father and I knew it was worth it to get a look at the Angels’ exciting rookie centre fielder, Mike Trout.

I was in Los Angeles to visit my older brother Jesse and his newborn daughter Matisse, but I’d also wanted

to spend some time with my father.

The baseball game had seemed the easiest way to make it happen—the sport has always been a language we use to communicate. He’d taught me how to throw a baseball and coached my Little League team, but our relationship with the game ran deeper than that. We’d routinely quiz each other on the sport’s statistical highlights, trying to stump each other on who held the record for the most doubles or the lowest earned run average in a season. (His go-to question was always Ty Cobb’s career batting average, and to this day, for some reason, I still can’t remember it.)

Mike Trout, however, was something of a red herring, because the trip, for me, was not strictly about baseball.

It was also about marriage.

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Of all the relationships that I’d grown up with, the one between my father and his fourth wife Leanna was not one I expected to end in divorce. But it had, which was why I wanted to find out what kind of shape my father was in. Based on the increasingly negative tenor of the phone calls and emails we’d exchanged over the preceding few months—as what looked like an amicable separation turned into an acrimonious divorce (a war, he called it)—I’d expected to find a broken man when I circled around LAX’s Terminal Two looking for him.

I’d already made one pass through the arrivals level, but I hadn’t seen anyone who looked like my dad. On the second pass, I slowed the car down for a closer look, and spotted someone who looked a bit like my dad, only if he were being played by an actor. As I pulled up, I was immediately reminded of one of Louis CK’s stand-up observations. “Let me explain something—divorce is always good news.

I know that sounds weird, but it’s true, because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. It’s really that simple.” Judging by the appearance of the man who finally approached the car after I’d honked at him two or three times, Louis CK had a point.

It was my father, not an actor. He’d lost at least forty pounds, and with his white hair, a partially unbuttoned turquoise dress shirt, an Armani sports coat, and a pair of Italian looking amber-tinted sunglasses, he looked more like a Hollywood director than a marital war-zone refugee from Toronto.

I popped the trunk. He deposited his bags, slammed the trunk shut, then quickly opened the passenger door and got in.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Good to see you. What’s new?”

“Me? Not much,” I said. “You’re the one with stuff going on, remember?”

He reluctantly did up his seat belt at the car’s ding-donging insistence, and turned towards the window. “Yeah,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

I had prepared for this trip, this moment, by doing something I’d sworn I’d never do: read Gender Wars. It’s a book my dad wrote (the fifteenth of his twenty-twobooks) when he was going through his last divorce about twenty years ago; it’s a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction that covered, among other things, proper 38

oral sex technique and the intricacies of the male orgasm. More broadly, it was an attempt in the early nineties to explain what heterosexual males were thinking at a time when society—literate society, anyways—wasn’t very interested in the subject. I’d read almost everything my father had written and enjoyed most of it, but had been warned off Gender Wars by my mother, who is clearly the inspiration for one of the characters in the book (and who, mercifully, has no sex scenes) and my friend Stephen, who I’d asked to read it for me some years ago.

In retrospect, I wish I’d read it sooner.

It’s by no means my favourite of his books, but while reading Gender Wars exposed me to the unpleasant fact that my father had opinions—strong ones, even—on subjects like group sex and erections, it also gave me my first glimpse into what things had been like for my parents, and why their relationship had fallen apart so quickly.

Because they had broken up years before my brain started to form long-term memories, I never had any sense of what their marriage had been like. They met in 1976, married in 1978, and were done by December of 1980, before my first birthday.

The only evidence I had that they’d been together at all was a few grainy photographs.

One had them sitting on a sandstone beach on Gabriola Island, my mother pregnant and visibly radiating contempt at my father sitting next to her, shirtless and petulant.

The other is of their wedding day, with everyone clothed in the hideous palette of brown and earth tones that was popular at the time. Neither looks particularly happy to be getting married.

T hose pictures were all I’d ever known about their relationship before I finally read Gender Wars. One passage describes the relationship between Ferris, a character based on my father, and Annie, who is even more obviously a riff on my mother. “Most of their friends, separately, had been vocally against it [the marriage]. It became a joke between them—to the point where they made a list of objectors and tacked it onto the kitchen bulletin board. But when it came down to planning the wedding reception, they kept the guest list short.” In retrospect, they probably should have listened to those friends.

I knew the drive to the ball game would take at least an hour, and I wanted to use the time to ask my dad why he was getting his fourth divorce, and whether he’d be willing to put himself in the position of risking a fifth. I suppose I was also hoping that in the process, I’d learn something about myself, about whether I’d ever be able to tie the knot, about why, after everything that had gone on in my family, I was still living with the hope that one day I’d marry.

For most people that might seem like a silly thing to think, or say, given that the only legal restrictions on marriage cover fairly common-sense things such as not being allowed to marry your sister or your pet gerbil. Yet my uncertainty has more to do with my own capacity for success (whether that capacity is genetic or learned) than my ability to try. When I visited him in Los Angeles, my father was on the verge of signing off on that fourth divorce and my mother has herself been divorced four times. If you draw the circle wider to include my two aunts and my two uncles, the number of divorces in the family increases to sixteen. Six adults. Sixteen divorces. A stark reminder that whatever traits I may have inherited from both sides of my family, whether nature or nurture, the capacity for getting married is very high but the ability to stay married appears to have been erased from our gene pool.

Growing up, I treated this mutant family tree, all stunted branches and crisscrossing limbs, as a badge of honour, the familial equivalent of owning a snake or having an uncle in the circus (true story: my father’s first three ex-wives worked, for a short period, at the same time at the same small college-turned-university in North Vancouver). I was never jealous of friends whose parents were still together, although I didn’t actually know of many. It was simply the way things were, and I never considered the possibility that it had, or would have, any material impact on my own life.

Yet for all the colourful examples I’d seen of why marriage didn’t work, it was always clear to me growing up that there was not necessarily a logical connection between these failed marriages and my own odds of getting married. Whenever I tried to imagine my future, what I’d be like twenty or thirty years down the road, it always included a ring on my finger.

Yes, I built in the assumption that it was

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possible I’d get divorced once or twice along the way, but I never soured on the idea of marriage.

It’s possible this is willful blindness or simple human optimism, or a combination of both, but what is clear is that I’m not alone. A great deal of attention in our society is paid to the declining number of people who make it to the altar, but insufficient attention is devoted to the fact that, despite what seems a growing number of reasons not to, many people still walk down the aisle.

It is true that, as Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, points out, we have witnessed a radical transformation in the role marriage plays in society. Fundamentally, he writes, marriage has evolved from an obligation to an option. Co-habitation has become a viable and widelyaccepted alternative, and those who choose it are not subject to the same kind of punitive cultural shaming they would have experienced two generations earlier.

But given that marriage is now optional, it becomes even more intriguing to consider why it is that the majority of people still take it up. As a 2011 article in the Journal of Family Issues noted, “We find little evidence of a decline in the importance of marriage among young people during their prime family formation years. Overwhelmingly, young people insist they value marriage, and the unmarried respondents express a desire to wed at some point in their lives.”

In Gender Wars, with a third divorce under his belt, my father had been understandably cynical about the institution of marriage. “In the latter part of the twentieth century,” he’d written, “most marriages are short, banal experiences or long, obscure co-dependencies. The institution is fouled by obsolete romantic expectations that are generally exhausted before the marriage vows are mumbled, and the rituals have been supplanted by legal statutes that sanctify little more than the accumulation and disposal of property, tax avoidance schemes, and wildly insensitive procedures for protecting children when the marriage blows apart.”

I wanted to ask him how he could square that perspective with his decision

to get married a fourth time—and dedicate the book to that fourth wife, no less—but I had begun fighting a pitched battle with my car’s GPS. It kept forcing me off the highway and onto side roads that would immediately re-connect with the freeway, and while I was tempted to ignore its advice after the third such incident, my nearaccident made me unusually co-operative.

Still, we had a good twenty minutes before we got to Anaheim, and after the GPS told me to go straight for eleven miles I figured I had time to ask a few questions about the apparent discrepancy between his words and his deeds.

“I’d been married all those times,” he told me, “but I just went along with it because the people I was living with needed that. But in a curious way, I bought in with Leanna. I really felt married, and I stopped screwing around and stopped looking around, oddly. I fell in love at forty-eight. Who knew?”

He was hurt by the divorce, and full of both anger and frustration over what the marriage had cost him personally and professionally. But he was also, surprisingly, less cynical about the idea of marriage than he had been in the book he’d written before he’d gotten blindsided by this latest divorce. “Sure, I could have been a bit more suspicious,” he told me, “and I wouldn’t have gotten hit so hard.

But if you live that way, you might as well go shoot yourself. Sometimes you’ve got to let it all hang out. And I did, and for ten years it was pretty fabulous.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get married again,” I asked him, purposely (and purposefully) keeping my eyes on the road.

“If it was the right woman,” he said, pausing briefly before finishing. “And with a pre-nup.”

Census data is rarely an occasion for controversy, but when the 2011 Census data on households was released in September 2012 it made its way to both the front and back pages of most newspapers in Canada. On the front, the stories talked about the radically changing face of the average Canadian family, with the percentage of Canadians living in common-law relationships on the rise and the proportion of traditional nuclear families yet again on the decline. The op-eds and columns in the

back pages spoke to the meaning of this change, speculating as to whether or not it spelled the end of marriage as the predominant means of familial organization.

What the pundits failed to consider, however, is the institution of marriage’s demonstrated capacity for evolution and adaptation. Over the course of the last century, marriage has changed from a method of either transmitting or acquiring social, cultural and economic power to an opportunity for self-determination and expression. It’s been a radical and speedy evolution. Furthermore, where marriage was once a form of social and political repression that limited the rights and capacities of women, it has recently been adopted as a tool by certain marginalized groups, such as the gay community, who have used it to advance the cause of functional, legal and moral equality. Marriage may stake claims on being enduring and eternal, and sometimes perhaps it is, but in reality it is proving to be an adaptable and even pliant social tool.

Few people understand this better than Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Washington State. Coontz is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and has written or co-edited a number of books on the history of marriage and the family. While the latest census data is in keeping with trends she’s noticed in her research, she doesn’t think marriage deserves a spot on the endangered species list just yet. “We’re certainly never going to go back to the kind of stability you had when there were few options outside of marriage and women were economically dependent on men, and there was a lot of social stigma attached to being outside of marriage,” she said, when I reached her by phone earlier this fall.

“But one of the interesting ironies—unexpected, to most people—is that as women have gotten more clout, and to the extent that men have changed along with them, you’re actually seeing an increase in marital satisfaction and longevity.”

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divorces in both Canada and the United States are initiated by women), that number has started to come down in recent years. According to Coontz’s research, every generation since the Baby Boomers (those born roughly between 1946 and 1961) has had a better chance of reaching their fifteenth wedding anniversary than the one that came before them. In other words, census data may reveal that fewer people are getting married but the ones who do seem to be making it last longer.

The single biggest reason for this decline in the divorce rate, according to Harvard’s Dana Rotz, is that people are waiting longer to tie the knot. Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, the median age at which people first married began to rise noticeably, increasing by almost five years from 1970 until the early aughts.

For example, in 1979—the year that I was born—the average age at which men and women got married was 24.4 and 22.1 years old, respectively. By 2011, those had increased to 28.7 and 26.5.

This is partially a function of higher costs of living and a greater emphasis on post-secondary education, factors which, when combined with the growing social acceptance of cohabitation, have encouraged young people to be more cautious about getting married. But it’s also a reflection of the fact that, for people my age, marriage is increasingly coming to be seen as a reflection of adulthood rather than a prerequisite to it. Today, couples often delay marriage in order to pay off debts, advance careers, buy a house and do any other number of things, including having children, that used to happen after the wedding ceremony. Marriage, Cherlin says, has become the capstone to adulthood, not its foundation.

That wasn’t the case when my mother, Leslie, first married in 1969, to a manic depressive poet named David. Nor was it the case when she divorced him and married a swinging Gastown lawyer named Ted Seifred, who turned out to be a much better friend than husband later in his life (he died in 1989). It wasn’t the case when she divorced him and ended up marrying my father, Brian, in 1978.

And while the capstone trend had probably been established by the time she married for the fourth time in 1998, to an indifferent fifty-something graduate 40

CAN.ICONS SAME SEX MARRIAGE Canada was the first country in the world to perform a legal same-sex marriage. On January 14, 2001, Elaine and Anne Vautour, and Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell were married in Toronto in a double wedding. Initially, the ceremony was legally contested, but it was affirmed by the Ontario government two years later. It was a milestone in Canadian civil rights history.

After Ontario’s same-sex marriage decision, and numerous cross-country constitutional challenges, other provinces followed suit. In response to these changes in provincial law, and to growing demand from Canadians, Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced that the federal government would present a new marriage act. On June 28, 2005, same-sex marriage was legalized across the land.

The legalization of same-sex marriage had many implications for Canada. But among these was the proof that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, brought into law in 1982, was gradually guiding the country towards greater justice for all.

Many Canadians also experienced this as a new beginning for the country. The shift in national attitudes towards majority acceptance of same-sex marriage revealed a heightened level of national confidence. It seemed Canadians could make up their own minds. We took the first step forward, boldly leading the world instead of looking outward for guidance. In fact, same-sex marriage has become a major political issue in the U.S.A., where both sides now seem to gaze northwards—whether to declaim or to praise Canada’s maverick ways.

– Clive Holden

student with a propensity for suspicious internet activity, it was too late for it to be of much use to her.

I’d never asked my mother about her marriages or divorces, but when I visited her in Vancouver two weeks before going to Los Angeles I decided it was finally time.

“There’s no reason for me to have been married four times,” she told me.

“It defies logic, it’s absolutely ludicrous, and if there’s anything I was ever embarrassed about that would be it.”

I asked her why’d she’d done it, then, get married time after time.

“In those days just about everyone we knew got married. Everybody started out living together and they ended up married. It was just what you did.”

The statistics about marriage and divorce at the time reflect what she said, but, as I pointed out to her, not everyone— in fact, hardly anyon­­e—did it four times.

“I think you get married,” she told me, “because you think it will stabilize your relationship or make it more mean-

ingful or give it more substance, but it doesn’t.” She’d gotten married, she said, because, in part, she thought it would make her first husband more stable, her second more grounded, her third (my father) more faithful, and her fourth more interesting. She’d been wrong each time.

If we view these as less than sound reasons to get married today, it might be because we have grown accustomed, in not much more than a generation, to viewing marriage as a deliberative rather than a pragmatic act. This was not the case when my mother first married. In a 1967 poll of American college women, two-thirds said that they would consider marrying someone they didn’t love if that person met other key criteria. The average couple of the day married after knowing each other for just six months, and many approached it with the same sense of dutiful resignation as a trip to the dentist. “There was this sense that marriage is what you do,” said Stephanie

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Coontz, “and if they seemed to be a good provider and a kind person on the one hand and good wife material on the other, you might as well go for it.”

Young couples marrying today tend not to see it that way. Rather than a pragmatic domestic alliance between stereotypes, marriage has become, or at least is moving clearly towards becoming, a mutually beneficial partnership between equals. Not that that makes it any easier. Coontz pointed out that these new, modern marriages among the younger generations can be more fulfilling, but they also take longer to build.

“I think most young people do want to get married,” she said, “but they no longer feel it’s socially or economically necessary. So they’re going to be much pickier.”

My mother, for her part, doesn’t necessarily regret any of her marriages— the first three, anyhow—though she’d be quite capable of ranking them in order of personal preference. But would she marry each man again today, if given the choice and the chance?

“No,” she told me, adding for emphasis, as if I hadn’t understood, “no way.”

Mathematically-driven explanations of the universe have always held great appeal for me, which may explain my lifelong interest in baseball. But I did not expect to find, in my research, a mathematically derived explanation for why some marriages succeed and others fail, much less a predictive model based on one. True, I’d come across a group of Swedish researchers who’d discovered a link between levels of arginine vasopressin (a hormone in mammals that helps them retain water and which has been linked to mate stability in prairie voles) and certain marital outcomes. This discovery, such as it was, raised the interest level among many observers that someday human beings (let’s be honest here: men) could be tested for a monogamy gene, but researchers quickly dismissed the idea that there was a casual relationship that could be mined for predictive purposes.

Indeed, the futility of the search for a scientific basis for marital success was unintentionally underscored by New York Times journalist Tara Parker-Pope’s 2010 book For Better: How the Surprising Science of Happy Couples Can Help Your Marriage Succeed. The book was, in a way, a metaphor for the entire industry—and

it is an industry—of marriage-oriented self-help literature, more heavily weighted towards pseudo-scientific quizzes and regurgitated conventional wisdoms than any actual science. In her assessment of the book, Washington Post reviewer Carolyn See described the book as being full of “kooky non-knowledge.” Not exactly The Origin of Species, in other words.

But perhaps looking for a predictive genetic or cultural marker is the wrong approach, like trying to isolate which single ingredient makes a good stew taste the way it does. Maybe a good marriage, like good food, is a holistic phenomenon, and efforts to break it down into its constituent parts are doomed to fail from the very beginning. Maybe instead of looking for the crucial ingredient, a pinch of salt or sprig of thyme, we should be trying to create a recipe. That’s what a University of Washington psychologist named John Gottman, now retired with professor emeritus status, has being doing for more than two decades, using his laboratory as a kind of test kitchen to develop the recipe for a successful marriage. And if the results of some of his studies are any indication, his palate has gotten very, very good.

Gottman’s work attracted the attention of Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about him in his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Gladwell describes Gottman’s unique approach to studying marriage, one in which he videotapes couples and assigns codes to the emotions expressed during their interaction. “Disgust, for example, is 1,” writes Gladwell, “contempt is 2, anger is 7, defensiveness is 10, whining is 11, sadness is 12, stonewalling is 13, neutral is 14, and so on. Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people’s facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue.”

The product of those accumulated scores (along with physical indicators such as body temperature and heart rate) was, Gladwell wrote, an ability to actually predict the likelihood that the marriage under study would end in divorce or not.

“If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.”

Gottman runs a for-profit therapist training school called the Gottman Relationship Institute, and, rather than enrolling, I decided to speak with someone who had. Dr. Peter Williamson is one of two Gottman-trained therapists in the downtown Vancouver, and I met him in his small north-facing apartment in the city’s west end. His living room doubles as a second office, and looked as if it had been outfitted with a therapist’s all-inone starter kit: Eastern spiritual influences (statue of Buddha), plush leather couch, wall of framed diplomas, absence of accessible stabbing implements. Dr. Williamson himself was straight out of central casting, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, tan slacks, and a slight paunch.

But t hese appea ra nces proved deceiving. Dr. Williamson was forthright and charming as he explained why he believed in Dr. Gottman’s research. He’d had his eye on Gottman’s work for many years before deciding to embrace the approach after realizing something was missing from the so-called conventional approaches. “The research he had done knocked me over,” said Williamson.

One of the most pointed aspects of Gottman’s research—his recipe, if you will—was the idea that conflict and a healthy marriage aren’t mutually exclusive. “Expect problems and differences,” Dr. Williamson told me when I asked what single piece of advice he’d give to newlyweds. “One of the biggest spikes in divorce rates comes four to seven years in, and that’s the time when people have let down their hair enough. Everyone puts their best foot forward in the beginning.”

More interesting was the fact that trying to downplay differences or even refusing to acknowledge that they exist—a feature of many marriages—is an almost certain path to failure. “When people break up, when they’re broken up, they’ll say that they had too many differences—if they’re being civilized—but in fact that’s not usually what it was, because everyone has differences,” Dr. Williamson said. “What Gottman’s research shows is that people who stay together often have just as many differences as the people who split up. The difference is in how they handle their differences.”

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law with his current partner, then told me to abandon the idea of finding that one true meant-for-me soul mate. This concept had always given me trouble, partly because the odds are so clearly against it, and partly because there’s no way to ever objectively confirm it. “There are many, many people out there who would be better than fine for us, and with whom, if we’re both putting our best foot forward, would seem like soul mates,” he said.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting to hear from a marriage therapist. I suppose I thought he would be slightly less dispassionate about it all, although perhaps even the most optimistic person would eventually tilt that way if they had to work with dysfunctional couples every day. But if his advice addressed some questions, it raised a larger one: If it’s all a matter of just getting over differences in a mature way and choosing one person amongst many who suit you—all of which sounds perfectly sensible—then why doesn’t everyone do it that way? If the best way to construct a successful relationship is through pragmatism and communication, why do so many people still go through the process of getting married, a process highlighted by a symbolic act of communion that is anything but pragmatic? Why do we still do it? And why, despite my intimate knowledge of all this, do I want to as well?

These questions were still with me when I landed in Los Angeles, not least because before heading there I’d done my own internal cost-benefit analysis of marriage that didn’t exactly recommend it. Yes, there are some economic benefits associated with cost-sharing, along with the social support that comes from sharing a home and a life with someone. But these are just as easily achieved through cohabitation as marriage.

The benefits of a marriage on one’s health, both physical and emotional, are also tenuous. There is, for example, some circumstantial evidence from studies of married couples that it can lower your blood pressure, reduce your risk for dementia and strokes, and even make your immune system stronger. But there’s also evidence that a bad marriage can be detrimental to your health. A 2000 study published in the Journal of the American 42

From the maud poems I Was Just Frosted

Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered.

No, you never see me have one with olives – your father likes olives but I can’t stand them.

No, cocktail onions are just picked small. Turn that down, Dan.

Avocados, toothpicks. Coleus, root sprawl.

The diffident glints of a late-day sun, rays

splintered by leaves: they shake and, in their

shaking, streak the light. Transparent murk

of glasses at the glass.

Would you move just one inch over? There. The light was in my eye.

Medical Association found that women who reported marital strain were nearly three times more likely to die of heart disease or suffer heart attacks than those in healthier relationships. Those findings were backed up by a 2006 study that was published in the American Journal of Cardiology, which also showed a correlation between marital distress and physical ailment.

A lasting marriage won’t necessarily create emotional benefits, either. Michigan State University psychology associate professor Richard E. Lucas (aided by colleagues) parsed a study of more than 24,000 German individuals that took place over the course of fifteen years, and they discovered that while those who got and stayed married were happier than those who didn’t, they also reported a high degree of happiness prior to tying the knot. In other words, while there might be a correlation between marriage and happiness, it’s not clear that it’s the getting married part that produces

the happiness.

Moreover, while Lucas and his colleagues noted a boost in the reported happiness levels associated with getting married, it was both small and short-lived.

According to the original study, married couples saw an increase in their reported happiness levels of just one-tenth of a point on an 11-point scale, a bump that disappeared before the bills for the wedding were paid off. The study’s authors wrote, that, on average most people were no more satisfied in their lives after marriage than they were before marriage.

In “Reexamining the Case For Marriage,” a paper published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Cornell University’s Kelly Musick and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Larry Bumpass found little to recommend marriage over living common law. “Where there were statistically significant differences,” they wrote, “marriage was not always more advantageous than cohabitation: The married fared better in health

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Splitting Hairs

I learned how to make ring tum ditty when your father and I didn’t have

two cents to rub together.

Well, these Saltines are a little stale.

You don’t have to finish it, but no dessert if you don’t.

You want the sound turned down, wound

low, the dial on the dash cranked off. You

want no utterance, and peace, and a clear,

unwheezing breathing.

He was sick as a horse this morning but now he’s just feeling a little punk.

Don’t you wash that down the sink!

than cohabitors, but the opposite was true of happiness and self-esteem.”

The institution of marriage, then, would appear to offer no clear financial, emotional, or physiological advantages over cohabitation. And yet, marriage remains an overwhelmingly popular choice among people my age. Why? For all the cultural commentary around the waning popularity of marriage and the rise of alternatives, Stephanie Coontz points out that more than eighty percent of people still report a desire to get married, and better than eight in ten will end up acting on that desire at some point in their lives. That’s certainly down from the highs of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, but it’s not as low as one might expect either given the loosening of cultural norms and the growing acceptance of common-law relationships. “Marriage has really lost its privileged place in people’s lives, and cohabitation seems to have been accepted as a real long-term alternative to it,” said Coontz. “But I think in most western soci-

eties, and particularly in the United States and most of Canada, marriage continues to be people’s shorthand for the highest expression of commitment that they can make.”

Perhaps this is the key point, most particularly for a younger generation now entering the marrying years: is marriage today “the highest expression of commitment” people feel they’re capable of making? And if so, why? Is it because our world has become so torn and fragmented at every level—with the fear of terrorism, climate change, tribalism, digitalization, financial turmoil, career impermanence— that we are now hungry for ties that bind, for the kind of connections and certainties our world used to provide for us? (Whether or not these past connections were themselves authentic and trustworthy is a topic for another day.)

It certainly seems, to my eye, that the search for a higher expression of commitment is why my older half-brother Jesse decided to get married a few years ago. It

was something of an unexpected development, given that he wasn’t exactly an ideal candidate for marriage in the first place.

He liked to travel, he valued his independence, and, of course, he was carrying the same compromised marital heritage as me (although his mother has one fewer divorce than mine). He’d even been in a successful rock band at one point and spent the better part of his twenties and thirties chasing waves around the world, neither of which are alluded to in the literature as predictors of marital stability.

And yet, somehow, the relationship he has with his wife Carla is about as close as you can get in the twenty-first century to an ideal marriage. Before they decided to get married they had tended to their careers, hung out with their friends, built their investments, and waited patiently for the time to come, whenever that would be.

They’d even battle-tested their relationship by spending a year traveling around the world together. While in Los Angeles, I asked him how, exactly, he’d managed to end up in what appeared, from the outside, to be a happy marriage. It was not a comfortable conversation. Pressing one’s parents on a subject as emotionally fraught as marriage—their failed marriages, to be precise—might be difficult, but at least those were past experiences. My brother’s marriage, on the other hand, was still a going concern, and my worry lay in the fear that he’d tell me things weren’t as good as they seemed.

We sat on his third-f loor deck in Santa Monica while he watered his plants and worked on his tan. I wasn’t surprised when he told me that his marriage worked because he’d met the right woman, given that she was sleeping on the futon in the next room with the window open. But his body language said he was telling the truth. What he said next surprised me, until he’d finished, by which time it seemed obvious. “It’s actually easier being in a married relationship than an unmarried one,” he told me, “because it isn’t like you’re negotiating every day to be in a relationship. You are in a relationship—there’s no question about it any more. It’s actually a great freedom.

I didn’t expect that. I thought it was going to be the opposite, that it would come with all these obligations. But it’s actually quite liberating. And enjoyable.”

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Wild Goose Chase

Oh dear. Would you pick that up, I dropped it.

Ray, don’t make it too stiff. Myr’s coming over to drop off the blueprints

and she might like to join us.

He’s been a real pest all afternoon so he’s in the doghouse. Dan! You can

come out, but watch your p’s and q’s or –

Stanchion where a rope marks off the object.

Wallpaper, striped: a slippery floor. A

guard. In his element. Indices. And the

long, slow tumble of snow.

Good Lord, it’s hotter than Hades in here!

–Susan Wheeler

The notion that marriage could be enjoyable wouldn’t be as surprising to many as it was to me. Jesse and I had internalized our parents’ various divorces in different ways, he by being loyal to the women he formed long-term relationships with, and me by assiduously avoiding ever getting into a long-term relationship. I’ve never even come close, and have always found a reason to end relationships before they truly get started. When I couldn’t find a good enough reason, I’d behaved badly enough that the other person did the dirty work for me.

Later that evening, after the ball game, heading back to Santa Monica with my father, I told him about how Jesse had defined a successful marriage, or at least, his.

“Jesse’s right,” my father said. “For any relationship to work at this point in history, the easy shit has to be easy, because the hard stuff is really fucking hard.”

My brother isn’t necessarily an outlier, either. Indeed, his relationship with his 44

wife is an ideal representation of what’s best about the new marital paradigm. It’s one that, for all the cultural noise about the fact that fewer people are getting married today than a generation ago, should give the marital cynics pause. Today’s marriages might be fewer, but they’re almost certainly better. Case in point: While men with the most rigid patriarchal beliefs used to have lower divorce rates than so-called “unconventional” men, today that’s been turned on its head. “Marital satisfaction,” says Stephanie Coontz, “is higher and divorce risk lower among couples who have more egalitarian, flexible gender attitudes.”

All of this has created a fascinating paradox, she adds. The things that make a marriage potentially fairer, more rewarding, more intimate, more sexually satisfying than ever before, also make it “much more fragile.” Put differently, the existence of alternatives, of choices, of negotiable roles and flexible arrangements, and the opportunity that both partners have to

exercise them—the very things that can create the conditions for a divorce—are also what make a contemporary marriage worth staying in. And the fact that more and more people are managing to do so speaks to our improving ability to make peace with this paradox. The institution of marriage, writ large, is undeniably less common, and therefore possibly weaker, than it was even a generation ago. But, ironically, the marriages of today appear to be both better and more durable.

For people my age this is particularly true. Marriage is no longer the main course in our social and cultural lives. Instead, it’s an elegant but entirely optional garnish. Yet the fact that it is no longer an economic or cultural obligation makes it mean more, not less. Unlike my parents, who felt dragooned into getting married by cultural and social pressures before realizing that they had made a mistake (or, as it happened, another one) I get to make that choice—when, to whom, or not at all—unencumbered by their expectations or anyone else’s.

And like so many people my age, I’m still looking forward to making it.

Possibly that’s because marriage has evolved from an economic necessity into an aspirational exercise, a challenge willingly met rather than a process silently endured. Or maybe it’s because I want to defy my background and do what my parents couldn’t. Perhaps it’s because, in our splintered, random, deracinated world, it actually is the highest expression of commitment one person can make to another.

I was thinking about all of this when I dropped my rental car back off at the airport, headed through customs and tucked into a mediocre breakfast at LAX while waiting for my flight home. It had been three years since my father, my brother and I had been in the same city together, and with Jesse and Carla’s new baby it seemed likely to be a while before it happened again. As I listened to the speakers blaring out gate changes for travellers heading all over the planet, I couldn’t help but wonder if the next time I saw my father and brother together would be at another wedding. I hoped it wouldn’t be my brother’s, but could easily imagine it being my father’s. Maybe it’ll even be my own. I’m not ruling it out. EB

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NewEBA

Congratulations to our authors and creators for their sterling work in 2011, recognized at various awards ceremonies earlier this year.

We at Eighteen Bridges are honoured to be publishing you, and we thank you for sharing your talent and vision.

2012 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Awards

Category: Science

Finalist and Winner -Omar Mouallem, “Cover Up” (EB2)

Category: Best Photo

Finalist -- Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness” (EB3)

Category: Best Article - Alberta/NWT

Category: Best Alberta Story

Finalist -- Omar Mouallem, “Under the Veil” (EB2)

Category: Arts, Culture and Entertainment

Finalist -- Tim Bowling, “On The Rails” (EB3)

Finalist and Winner -Don Gillmor, “All In” (EB2)

Category: Best New Magazine

Finalist and Winner: Eighteen Bridges Magazine

Finalist -- Tim Bowling, “On The Rails” (EB3)

Category: Best Alberta Magazine

Category: Environmental Writing

Finalist and Winner: Eighteen Bridges Magazine

Finalist -- Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness” (EB3)

Category: Western Magazine of the Year

Finalist -- Greg Hollingshead, “The Drug-Friendly House” (EB3) Finalist -- Romesh Gunesekera, “Hazard” (EB2) Category: Human Experience

Finalist -- Jessica Fern Facette, “Cover Up” (EB2) Finalist and Winner -- Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness “ (EB3)

2012 Western Magazine Awards

Category: Fiction

Finalist: Russell Cobb, “Up in the Air” (EB3)

Finalist: Eighteen Bridges Magazine

2012 National Magazine Awards

Finalist -- Tim Bowling, “On the Rails” (EB3) Finalist -- Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness” Category: Fiction

Finalist -- Greg Hollingshead, “The Drug-Friendly House” (EB3) Category: Humour

Finalist -- Caroline Adderson, “How I Lost the War Against War And Learned to Love Arnold Schwarzenegger” (EB2) Category: Personal Journalism

Finalist -- Russell Cobb, “Up in the Air” (EB3) Finalist -- Don Gillmor, “All In” (EB2) Finalist -- Jane Silcott, “Threshold” (EB3) Category: Society

Finalist -- Omar Mouallem, “Under the Veil” (EB2)

Category: Arts & Entertainment

Finalist -- Jane Silcott, “Threshold” (EB3)

Finalist and Gold Medal Winner -Don Gillmor, “All In” (EB2)

Category: Public Issues

Category: Travel

Finalist -- Chris Turner, “Bearing Witness” (EB3)

Category: Essays

Finalist and Silver Medal Winner -Alissa York, “Class Mammalia” (EB2)

For a list of retailers who stock Eighteen Bridges, or to subscribe, visit

www.eighteenbridges.com

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11/27/12 11/28/12 10:15:22 4:44:39 PM AM

Ryan Girard

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FICTION

I Feel

By Caroline Adderson

THAT WAS AS MUCH AS ELLEN COULD GET out of Yolanda, hovering above her in bathroom, holding back her golden hair while she retched. “Maybe you should stay home,” she said.

Yolanda lifted her face, pink with misery, out of the toilet and let Ellen wipe it with a cool damp cloth. “I can’t skip Inorganic Chemistry, Mom. It’s unbelievably hard.”

“Fine then. Just don’t spread it all over campus.”

Later, she wondered how she could be so dense.

ELLEN HAD FINISHED. SHE’D SEEN HER TWO

Ryan Girard

daughters into adulthood, Mimi Bolting head-long into it, arms outstretched. Yolanda

she’d had to drag, but anyway, she’d done it, raised her girls all on her own, except for that nine-month blip when they were seven and ten and Larry came back. Before that, he’d been out sowing his wild oats, which he kept in a little bag between his legs.

This was untrue. In the beginning, he was there, when he and Ellen and Mimi absconded to Cordova Island in search of freedom. To be free in a place where feral sheep and deer roamed the forest trails, the locals, too, because it was quicker than the road. Free like the Free Store, which was really just a glorified recycling depot. And anytime you looked up, anytime you consulted the sky, there would be a bald eagle or a turkey vulture high above in a tree, watching your every move, like God.

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Within a few days Yolanda’s flu settled into a regular pattern. Violent vomiting first thing in the morning. Violent vomiting if she didn’t eat. Violent vomiting if she ate anything but bread, potatoes, or mushy, Dalmatianed bananas. She walked around the house with these offensive bananas tucked under her arm. While she studied, she kept a bunch within reach.

“So what do you plan to do?” Ellen asked from Yo’s bedroom door.

Yolanda glanced over her shoulder at Ellen and immediately shrunk down, like she was still a little girl afraid of her mother’s rages despite the fact that they were never directed at her. Or rarely.

Unlike Mimi, Yolanda had been a model child. “I’m going to have an abortion,” she said.

Just like that.

Ellen bowed her head in case there was any sign of what she was feeling on her face. What was she feeling? A lot of contradictory things. Relief, for one, but also a painful, almost menstrual spasm.

“Okay. Have you made an appointment?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, you have to get on it, don’t you think?”

“I’ve been studying.”

Ellen threw up her hands and even this small gesture set Yolanda wailing.

“Tell me what I should do!”

“Isn’t there a clinic on campus? Make an appointment. Get a referral. For God’s sake, you’re in Pre-med!” She stormed off, sure of what she felt now.

Two hours later she came back unangry. Something about the matter-of-fact way Yolanda had communicated her decision troubled Ellen. It sounded like she’d been chanting it to convince herself. Or maybe he was making her do it. The culprit, whoever he was. Either way, Ellen wasn’t going to get involved, but she thought Yo could use a hug, and she was right. Yolanda was still bent over one of the massive tomes that threatened to pop the pegs of her Ikea desk, feverishly highlighting whole paragraphs, flayed peels strewn every where.

When Ellen drew close, Yolanda flung her arms around her waist. Her glasses were all smeary. She was too preoccupied to clean them, or she’d been crying.

48

“You’ll come with me when I do it, won’t you?” she whimpered.

And a great cloud of fruit flies lifted off the half-rotten bananas and swarmed them both.

Ellen phoned her friend Georgia with the news. In the background Gar y, Georgia’s husband, the last Marxist left standing and an inveterate eavesdropper, asked, “What now? Mimi’s up the pole?”

Georgia shushed him. “For once it’s not Mimi.” To Ellen she asked the obvious question, the one Ellen refused to ask. “Who’s the guilty party?”

Yolanda had never even had a real boyfriend, not that Ellen knew of. Last year she took the smartest, gayest boy in the whole school to Grad. “I have no idea who,” Ellen said. “I don’t want to know.”

“But you think she might have been coerced? Or is being coerced?”

“I hope not. But it’s not like I want her to have it either. Because I’m the one who’ll get stuck with it. I know I will.

What do I want a baby for?”

“They smell so good.” Georgia herself had two sons, Jacob, who was twenty and away at university, and the precocious Maximilian, just four. At two, Maximilian would stand on the coffee table during parties and recite, “Religion is the opium of the people,” to guests who were either shocked or delighted, depending on who had invited them. “I’d have another if I could,” Georgia said. “But I can’t.”

“I had my tubes tied,” Ellen said. “Ten years ago.”

“What I mean is, I need to know that the kid I currently have is going to be all right before I commit to another.”

“He’ll be fine!” Gary called from another room.

“I don’t multi-task with my maternal responsibilities. How did you, Ellen?”

“I made a lot of mistakes,” Ellen told her, “as you well know.”

She remembered something as soon as she hung up. How when Mimi and Yolanda were in elementary school they kept coming home with lice. The school was good and right in the neighbourhood, two blocks away. A good school but lousy at the same time. Every year, four or five notices would come home requesting a scalp check.

“Fuck!” Ellen would roar, which cued the girls to duck and cover before she hurled the comb. Every infestation a toxic ordeal, a nit-picking torture. Both had silky Rapunzel tresses that took hours to properly de-louse. Mimi had to be tied down, but Yolanda would sit paging through a picture book.

During one of these sessions Ellen noticed that Yolanda had been crying, that her whole chest was literally bibbed with tears. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Am I hurting you?”

“I feel so sorry for them.”

“For who?”

“The baby lices.”

“You seem uncertain.”

“Do I?” “Well, yes.”

Spring, the window partially open, letting in a bright green scent. It seemed to be coming from Yolanda when she sighed in the dark. They were in Ellen’s bed where Yolanda sometimes liked to come and cuddle in the middle of the night. She only started doing this last year, after Mimi left home. Mimi, who had once slept between two loving parents, while Yolanda, from birth, had been banished to a crib.

After a long silence, Ellen asked how she was feeling. “Awful,” Yolanda answered and Ellen gathered her up. It felt strange to be holding a smaller adult in her arms. How many men had she invited into this bed? Too many. Very few who counted and none recently. “Yo? You don’t have to.

You can do whatever you want.”

“Can I?” “Of course. But I’m not raising it.

That’s the last thing I’ll say about it.”

“What about school?”

“What about it?” Ellen said, meaning a baby was an inconvenience, not an obstacle. A ll over the world women squatted in fields and pushed them out, then strapped them to their chests and hoed the afterbirth into the ground. Look at Ellen. She started Ellen Silver Promotions when Yolanda was a baby and Mimi three. Before cell phones! Nowadays any woman could run a successf ul business from a playground, but back then? No.

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But telling Yolanda this would be getting involved, so Ellen held her tongue.

Also, it would sound like she wanted Yolanda to have the baby, which she certainly did not. If Yolanda had that baby the door to Ellen’s life, which had only just swung open letting in this delicious, irresponsible breeze, would slam shut for eighteen more years. Ellen was forty-two and only twenty pounds overweight. She was going to tackle the excess poundage, really, and then, who knew? Who knew what delights awaited her?

“How could I keep going to school?”

“No comment.”

“Have you ever?” Yolanda asked.

“What?”

“Had an abortion.”

The day of the appointment, Ellen went in first to explain the situation, leaving Yolanda in the waiting room. “She says she wants an abortion. Obviously we have to act quickly because—Well, you know. And see what you can find out.

How this happened. I’m appalled.”

“Ellen,” said Carol, the doctor, whom Ellen had been seeing for so many years they were practically friends.

“What?”

“She’s eighteen.”

“She sure doesn’t seem it. I mean, if it wasn’t for her scholarship, I’d think she was retarded.”

“Ellen. Go. Tell her to come in. And by the way, you are way overdue for a mammogram.”

She shouldn’t do it.

Why did she always do it?

Ellen winced and changed the subject. “You weren’t forced or anything?

Tell me you weren’t.”

“No.” “No you won’t tell me, or no you weren’t raped?”

“I wasn’t raped!”

“Okay. Then I don’t need to know anything else unless you want to tell me about the man.”

“What man?” Yolanda said and Ellen let go a sigh of her own. Actually, in the case of Yo, it could have been Immaculate Conception. She seemed so innocent.

Also stupid, the way really smart people sometimes are. Socially hopeless and befuddled and shy. Not that she didn’t understand sex, far from it. Ellen had made sure of that, always tucking condoms in with the sanitary supplies.

Finally, Yolanda clued in. “Oh, him!

You mean him? He was more of a boy.”

Yolanda slept with Ellen the next night TOO, and the next, so Ellen reasoned that, since sharing a bed was de facto involvement, she might as well make an appointment for Yolanda to see the doctor, Yolanda apparently being too busy studying to do the responsible thing herself.

While Yolanda was in with the doctor trying to determine the date of conception, Ellen opened the biology textbook Yolanda had brought along. The highlighter pen was stuck in the chapter on ferns. Ferns, she read, reproduce with spores instead of seeds. The pretty diagram showed the released spores developing into a little heart-shaped gametophytes. Gametophytes had both male and female sex organs. Convenient!

There were photographs, too, that filled Ellen with verdant memories of those hidden paths that criss-crossed Cordova Island and sometimes opened into spectacular waist-high ferneries.

“I’m ready,” Yolanda said and Ellen looked up with a start.

“Hold on. I want to talk to Carol again.”

“No,” said Carol when Ellen nabbed her in the hall to ask what Yolanda had said, “you are incorrigible,” which forced Ellen, who really did not want to get any more involved, to ask Yolanda outright in the car, “So? So?” “She did an examination. She made me pee on the stick just in case.”

“It’s not the flu then?”

“Ha ha.” Yolanda opened the textbook and resumed reading. Ellen asked how

far along she was and when they would call about the referral. Yolanda replied in monosyllables. She pulled off the cap of the highlighter with her teeth.

“What else did she say?”

“We talked about being a doctor. How important experience is compared with knowledge. I feel like I have a lot of knowledge, but almost no experience.”

“That’s funny,” Ellen said. “I’m the opposite.”

Abr uptly, Yolanda groaned and hugged the textbook. “Oh, honey!” Ellen said. “Do you need a banana?”

“It’s why I did it, Mom.” Then she was sobbing her heart out.

Ellen pulled over into a loading zone, cutting someone off. She answered his reprimand, a honk for a honk, and turned to Yolanda collapsed over the dash. “What are you saying, honey? Please. Tell me what’s going on.”

Yet Ellen hadn’t told Yolanda what had happened to her, even when she asked.

To Ellen, Yolanda was a daughter in trouble confiding in her mother. They were not yet two grown women sharing private aspects of their lives. It was still a oneway street for Ellen, a street Yolanda had driven up in the wrong direction, causing the two of them to crash.

Yolanda was seven and Mimi ten when Larry came back. Some woman he’d been besotted with had dumped him at the same time the television series he wrote for was cancelled. Raw with these failures, Larry called from L.A. to say he wanted to see his children. Ellen allowed it and, watching him get out of the cab a few days later, seeing his overgrown black curls, his wrinkled chinos and sad pouched eyes, the way he set down his suitcases and checked every pocket of his pants and jacket to come up with the fare, drawing out a wadded bill here, a bit of change there, she immediately forgave everything. And Larry did the same, though he had much less to forgive.

She thought they were happy, like during those two crazy, hippy years on Cordova Island living off the grid. Larry had seemed happy. They’d had great sex.

He and the girls formed an instant mutual adoration society. He even made their WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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lunches—better lunches than Ellen’s, cheese melts with raisin faces, R ice Krispie squares that weren’t square, but stamped out with cookie cutters.

Normally, the girls walked themselves to school. Ellen was the only mother who didn’t escort her kids and for her negligence she received a wide range of disapproving looks, askance all the way to deploring. Now Larry walked them and picked them up and, in between, he wrote a play. He would stand at the stove stirring the Rice Krispies into the marshmallow goop, muttering snatches of dialogue. Before getting sucked into television he’d been a playwright. Ellen told him he didn’t need the money any more. Ellen Silver Promotions was thriving by then, so he could be true to his art again.

“You make me puke,” she told him when he announced he was going back.

the grand finale, The Reading. He asked straight out, “Did you love my book?”

“I did,” Ellen said. She’d only read the beginning and the end and some of the middle bits. “It’s brilliant.” It was middling, actually, but you don’t feed two children on honesty. “Before I forget.”

She slid her business card across the table to him. “Anytime you need to, call.”

He looked at it. “ESP. Cute.”

“Silver isn’t even my name anymore.

I’m divorced.”

At first, his reply didn’t register. She was on autopilot, miserable for having shouted at the girls that morning. All through the meeting she kept picturing herself hauling them, wailing and unbrushed, into the school. What he’d said was, “Good.”

Now she looked up and really saw him, the antithesis of Larry. Tall, even when seated. Also full of himself, though

Ellen lost it. “Daddy isn’t coming back! Daddy used up all his chances!”

The girls couldn’t understand his inconstancy. Mimi was too young the first time to remember he’d abandoned her before. Yolanda had been unborn. It was on their behalf that she raged.

At the time, Ellen had been hired to promote a novelist on the Vancouver leg of his book tour. She heaved herself out of bed, got the girls up, their cereal dumped in and around the bowls.

“When’s Daddy coming back?” they asked. Again! Again, again, again!

Ellen lost it. “Daddy isn’t coming back! Daddy’s never coming back! Daddy used up all his chances!”

That went over well. It was one of the few mornings she walked them to school. Well, she dragged them, sobbing, Ellen in tears herself saying, “I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. But I have to be downtown in twenty minutes. Believe me, I would like nothing better than to stay home with you and cry.”

She met the novelist in the restaurant of his hotel to review his schedule.

Interviews, bookstore signings, then 50

that was more a point of commonality.

He would have been gorgeous but for the blond hair ebbing off the promontory of his forehead. But who was Ellen to be critical? Parts of her were too prominent.

Fortunately, she was sitting on them.

“Do you have ESP?” the novelist asked.

The business was done, his breakfast consumed, their coffee cups thrice refilled. Ellen relaxed. “Let me see.” She closed her eyes and touched her temples.

Under the table, the novelist placed a foot over hers implying, not pressure, but closeness. A shudder ran through her, half-thrill, half-warning. She felt very slightly ill. “The bill will come,” she intoned, “and you will offer to pay it. But I will insist and you will succumb.”

“Succumb?”

The waiter appeared. Just before she closed her eyes, Ellen had noticed him in her peripheral vision making his way across room. The novelist threw back his head and laughed a weird, high-pitched laugh, almost a seal’s bark. “I’ll get it,” he

said, before the waiter even opened his mouth.

“I insist,” Ellen said, reaching for her purse.

The novelist laid the back of his hand across his Gibraltar forehead, behind which all his novels were plotted, his conquests, too, no doubt. “Oh, I succumb!”

Had his publicist in Calgary succumbed? In Toronto? At eleven-thirty in the morning? She shouldn’t do it. Why did she always do it? To spite Larry? He wouldn’t care. To prove to herself that she could collect lovers, too? That she was still desirable, even though Larry didn’t want her? Or just to keep opening her wound? She felt so wretched afterward.

She always felt so lousy.

“We could go upstairs. But I warn you, I’ll want to hear more about my book.”

“I could read it out loud,” Ellen said.

“While I do delicious things to you.”

The waiter, who had vanished with her credit card, returned with it on a tray just in time to hear the novelist in mid-seduction. He quickly stepped away. Ellen, blushing, leaned over the bill, dizzy with embarrassment and desire, trying to calculate the tip. Fifteen percent, plus five for discretion.

Click.

Something dropped onto the bill, right onto the blank line she was staring at. A crumb or a speck of dirt.

She hoped.

Not alive. Not a living thing.

Yes. It definitely moved, was probably on its back, kicking its imperceptible legs in the invisible air. You needed the magnifying glass that came in the nit kit to actually see their legs.

In an instant, her whole scalp was crawling. She glanced at the novelist, to see if he’d noticed; no. He was signing her copy of his book. Ellen swept the whole tray onto the restaurant floor, oopsed and picked it up.

“Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

She barely reached the bathroom in time. Vomited, rinsed her mouth in the sink, scratched her whole head hard enough to draw blood. With the comb, she made herself presentable again.

Back at the table, she told him. “Sorry.

Suddenly, I’m not feeling so hot.”

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Deep inside her, a factory was churning out cells. Of course, she had to have it, the assembled product. A sister or a brother to her girls. A living thing.

She was in the tub in the middle of the day, having stopped at the drug store for shampoo and a home pregnancy test.

Suds dripped down her shoulders, over her breasts. It took ten minutes to kill the lice. Then you had to comb out the corpses and the eggs.

Except Larry would accuse her of doing it on purpose. To lure him back. She didn’t have to tell him. She could claim it wasn’t his. Thank God she hadn’t slept with the novelist or she’d have him to contend with, too.

But how could she have another baby on her own? She wouldn’t be able to work for months. Larry had no money. She didn’t qualify for Unemployment Insurance. She’d have to sell the house. And, as if the judgmental looks she received on Parent Teacher Day weren’t bad enough, imagine if she sauntered into the school pregnant with no obvious father around?

She didn’t care for her own sake, but it wasn’t fair that Mimi and Yolanda should be stigmatized.

That had to be ten minutes. Eyes watering, stomach twisting from the smell, she lay flat on the bottom of the tub, just her face and knees out of the water, legs bent like she was already in the stirrups.

It was her only option. Then she’d start volunteering on hot dog day.

When they got home from seeing Dr. Carol, Ellen brought Yolanda a piece of bread and a glass of water and sat her down on the couch for a proper talk. Yo, crosslegged and swollen from crying, tore off the crusts, rolled some of the soft part into a pill and swallowed it with the water.

“Come on,” Ellen said. “ Tell me what’s going on.”

Yolanda lifted her face, which was pretty yet always naked and defenceless. Only the glasses protected her. “I thought I should know what it was like.”

“What?” Ellen asked.

“Sex.” “Don’t tell me you didn’t use a condom. After how I brought you up?”

“It broke.”

Then the inevitable complications. She liked him. Especially after the sex. “I read about it,” Yolanda said. “Your body releases a hormone during sex to make you bond.”

“Maybe he likes you, too,” Ellen said.

“Men don’t have that hormone.”

“Ah,” said Ellen. “That explains a lot.”

Yolanda rolled herself another bread pill, washed it down. “Also, I hardly know him.”

“So what do you really want to do?”

“I’ve never had any kind of operation.

It would be another experience. Except, I have. I have these—feelings.” Her glasses misted over again.

“That’s hormones, too,” Ellen said.

“I already love it,” Yolanda announced.

Ellen remembered her glass of wine on the kitchen counter. When she came back, Yolanda’s UBC t-shirt was hiked up, her hand on her belly, which looked more sunken than anything. Ellen set the glass down and light moved through the wine and shone on a magazine, the opposite of a shadow, a burning spot so fierce it seemed the magazine would ignite. Why can’t we feel that purely, she wondered. Always mishmash, contradiction. She wasn’t a sentimental person. She really believed that Yolanda should have the abortion and get on with her life. Yet when Ellen was in the same predicament, she hadn’t been able to do it either. The hospital had called with the date of her procedure and she’d cancelled it in a gush of tears. “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”

“No problem,” the woman said.

“There’s a waiting list.”

“What should I do, Mom?” Yolanda pleaded. “What would you do?”

Ellen took a sip of wine. “No comment.”

A buttinsky. Where did that come from?

Probably Esther, Ellen’s former motherin-law, an odious person, yet charmingly stuffed with Yiddish bons mots. “I’m curious,” Ellen said in the car, in her own defense, to no one. What mother wouldn’t want to get a gog at the boy who had deflowered her daughter? Who had impregnated her?

She found parking just off campus then asked directions to the liquor store.

Right next door was a café. “You call it Tall,” Ellen told the girl behind the counter, “but it’s actually Short. It’s Small, yet you call it Tall.”

The girl sighed.

“I’m just saying,” said Ellen. “Some people have it figured out.”

She took her coffee outside and, at one of the metal tables, pretended to read Pride and Prejudice, holding it upsidedown for fun. He wasn’t there. Yolanda had said he always was. After a few minutes she turned the book the right way and that was it. Completely absorbed by the Bennett family’s delightful problems, she forgot the stake-out. In the middle of Chapter Three, a sound like a train clacking over the rails returned her to her proper task.

Him for sure. As he pirouetted to a stop, the skateboard took flight, its coloured underside flashing. He caught it in one hand.

Dreadlocks, dirty jeans barely clinging to his hips, a bad cough. His name, Yolanda had said, was Sean.

From behind Pride and Prejudice, Ellen watched. He rooted through his pack. Out came crocheted juggling balls, a cigar box. To warm up, he flipped two balls in each hand and coughed. A university liquor store was not the most lucrative place to ply his trade. While the coloured balls orbited, frat boys went in and out for beer, ignoring him. “Hi!” he kept saying. “Hi!” The cough sounded like a chair being pushed out, scraping the floor. Occasionally he’d cajole someone into tossing him a set of keys, or an apple, for a few turns with the balls. Or he’d look at his watch without altering his rhythm. “These balls have been in the air for thirteen minutes. Only your generous donation can keep them going.” Yolanda must have donated. Ellen pictured her scooting past, hurling change in the Romeo y Julieta box. The bus stop where she waited was just across the street. When you see a person every day, you start to feel connected. You start to worry when they’re not there, or when their cough won’t go away.

Ellen gave him a t went y, which was stupid, because he watched it flutter down on the mosaic of pennies and dimes in the bottom of the box, then looked at her, amazed. And smiled. Very WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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boyishly. All the while the balls kept circling. Blushing, her cover blown, Ellen slunk off.

“Hey, awesome! Thanks! Good karma to you, lady! That lady just gave me twenty. I didn’t put it in my—” He broke off hacking.

Later that night, delivering rotten bananas to Yolanda at her desk, Ellen noticed she was highlighting every word in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

So, she thought. So. She made no comment.

But then the feelings jackbooted in and they were not at all what Ellen had expected. Almost faint with them, she took to her bed with a cold cloth over her forehead and a box of tissue balanced on her stomach. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even relieved that Yolanda had finally made up her mind.

Back then—ten years ago—Ellen had been all business. She’d had no time to feel anything but nausea. She took on extra contracts, wrote grant proposals for arts organizations, too, just to earn enough money to get them through the year after the baby was born. Ironically, it made her an even worse mother. Where once she’d rationed the T V—thirt y minutes a day, no more—now it babysat Mimi and Yo. Or she farmed them out shamelessly to Georgia and picked them up late. No time to patiently comb every strand. Off to her hairdresser they went, the girls bawling in side-by-side chairs while Tony lopped off their infested ponytails and tossed them to the floor, making a face.

“Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby,” Ellen told him. “Remember? As short as that.”

“Mama?” Mimi said afterward. “I’ll hate you forever and ever now.”

Little did Ellen know she would hear those words so often they would eventually have no effect, but that was the first time and they felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. Back then, in the sunshiney world of childhood, where forgiveness was dispensed like lollipops, she made everything right just by taking them to get their ears pierced.

Later in the week, one of the mothers from school, whom Ellen had assumed 52

despised her, came up to her in Shopper’s Drug Mart. “Mrs. Silver? I just wanted to say that your two girls?”

Ellen braced herself.

“Well, you have the most elegant children in the whole school.”

Carol sent her for a twelve-week ultrasound. The technician buried the transducer so deep into Ellen’s fat it hurt, then suggested a transvaginal scan. For this Ellen had to clamber off the table, put her pants back on and go empty her bladder, which she’d painstakingly filled on Carol’s orders.

She shut herself in her bedroom and sobbed until, hours and hours later, four hours to be exact, Mimi and Yolanda crept in and woke her up. “Mama,” they whimpered. “We thought it wasn’t ever going to ring.”

Somehow Ellen managed to put that grief away. She also took measures to ensure she would never feel it again. Until now, with the cold comfort of the cloth across her forehead and the tissue box her belly, weightless as the very thing her body would never again contain.

What could you do at a time like this but crack a joke or fake an orgasm?

“Well, that was a relief,” she told the technician after she had dumped all those cups of tea. “This? Not so much.”

She meant being penetrated with a cold, KY Jelly slathered rod. What could you do at a time like this but crack a joke or fake an orgasm? Except the technician seemed so humourless.

Because it was dead. She didn’t say that. She called it blighted.

On the phone later, Carol said Ellen could wait until she miscarried naturally, or she could have a D&C. Really, she shouldn’t have cared. She’d been ambivalent, anyway. Yet after the procedure, after Georgia drove her home from the hospital, Ellen made Mimi and Yo peanut butter sandwiches and an enormous bowl of cheese popcorn. She set a travel clock on the TV and started the cartoons blasting. “When the alarm rings, come and get me. But don’t come until it rings.

No matter what.” “ W hat i f we’re hung r y? ” Mim i asked.

“Eat something.”

“What if we’re thirsty?”

“You know how to turn on a tap.”

“What if the house catches fire?”

“Run out the back. Don’t worry about me.”

The next time, he remembered her.

“Last week.”

“No,” said Ellen.

It was actually just four days ago. Yolanda had an exam today and Ellen offered to drive her. She had to drop off some posters anyway. She wanted to take another look.

Birthmarks, eye colour, et cetera. Things she hadn’t looked for the first time, when she’d been merely curious.

So there wouldn’t be any surprises.

So she would know what to expect.

“Do you want something from me?”

Sean asked.

“Absolutely not!” Ellen said.

“But you gave me a twenty last week, too.”

“I must have a doppelganger. This tall? This wide? A lot of money to throw around? I’m taking it back.” She retrieved the twenty and, when she straightened, he was laughing. The chair pushed out in his chest, scraping his lungs, yet the balls didn’t fall, or even slow or falter.

She was impressed. Quite won over. She noted blue eyes. Ellen had blue eyes but Larry’s, nearly black, had trumped hers.

Larry had blotted the blue right out of his daughters. “ What else could I do for twenty dollars?” he asked.

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Ellen, normally unfazable, drew back.

“I give a good back rub. Or I could teach you to juggle.”

It would seem Oedipal if he touched her, even if by “back rub” he actually meant rubbing her back. Juggling? Ha! They went for a walk.

“How does your meter work?” Ellen asked. “Am I paying by the minute, or by the yard?”

“I’m easy,” he said.

A nearly eight hundred-hectare forest grew right up against the university. In Ellen’s day, when she was a student here, it had a different name. Barely anything on campus was recognizable. Over there, a familiar building—Chemistry?—but it lacked all context. What context! She’d met Larry here, got pregnant, dropped out, ran off to Cordova Island.

They turned onto Westbrook Mall, Sean clacking beside her on the board, clacking and coughing. The hospital looked the same but the old frat houses had been torn down and replaced by frat condos.

As they entered the forest, Sean stashed his skateboard in a tree. It was easy to get him talking then. His whole story he offered up, how he’d got pneumonia tree planting and ended up in hospital. Afterward, he didn’t want to go back home.

“Where’s home?” Ellen asked.

“Ontario. My brother’s there, but he doesn’t give a shit about me.”

Orphan, Ellen noted with a pang.

Also, weak in the lungs. “Are you living on campus?”

He flipped the dull ropes of his hair back and smiled. “For now. I was staying with friends, but they went planting again and sublet their place. What about you?

Where do you live?”

“The North Shore.”

“Mountains. Awesome. Here. Let’s go this way. I want to show you something.”

He tried to take her hand, but she plucked it back. Had he led Yolanda off the marked trail like this, into the thick of the green where no one would hear them? Ellen followed, freshly appalled at Yolanda’s stupidity. Yet here was Ellen moments later with no idea where she was. She stepped over logs, kicked

through salal. The ground, wet and humusy, sponged underfoot. Eventually they came to an enormous cedar, its limbs shagged with moss. Great hanks hung all over it like green tangled hair.

What interested Sean was how the tree had grown over a fallen log, its roots partially above ground, elongated, like a pair of straddling legs. “Doesn’t that look alive?” he asked.

“It is alive.”

“I mean, doesn’t it look like it could walk and talk? It’s the fucking Lord of the Rings in here. There’s nothing like this in Sudbury. I can tell you that much.”

All around ferns clumped, their outrageous crowns like giant Copacabana headdresses. Ellen turned over a frond and saw the tiny regular circles roughing up its underside. They were pale green now, but as the spores matured they would darken to a powdery brown.

“So sperms and eggs are, like, floating all around us?” Sean asked when she explained it.

“Yes.” He gazed up, squinting, and the d readlocks sl id heav i ly dow n h is back. Ellen looked up, too, at the light penetrating the canopy of branches.

Something moved. A very fine filament, a silken tail, tracing an otherwise invisible trajectory. Then the molecular burst of connection.

Probably a spider web. Probably a water droplet snagged on the afternoon.

Sean said, “Awesome.”

And it was. It filled her with awe until she remembered that she’d only paid the parking meter for an hour.

“This way,” Sean said, striking off ahead of her. “It’s faster.”

“Would you say you’re generally a happy person?” Ellen asked.

“I’m really happy,” he said, coughing.

“That’s so comforting to know. One of my daughters gets really low. Because of her father. Of course, she blames me.”

He pointed deeper into the trees.

“There’s my pad.”

He had rigged up a tarp, green to camouflage it. “Can I?” she asked and he gestured to go ahead.

Ellen bent and peered inside the plastic shelter where Yolanda had probably

lost her virginity and gained more experience than she counted on. Butane camping stove, sleeping bag, some mildewed paperbacks. Things in garbage bags, but everything else damp looking and not very clean.

“Cosy,” she said, though already she was fretting about his cough. This was a rain forest. What he really needed was to dry out. And the other thing—she’d been avoiding thinking about it, trying not to notice how often he wormed a finger through the dreadlocks to scratch his scalp.

As he sauntered ahead of her in the tree-dappled light, a song came to her.

Her mother used to sing it when Ellen was a little girl. Nature Boy. By somebody famous.

There was a boy. A very strange enchanted boy. A little shy, and sad of eye, but very wise was he…

“Is there a place you can shower?” she asked.

Nat King Cole.

“The pool’s too expensive. I found a shower in one of the science buildings.

Then, last time? I got caught.” He lifted one arm and sniffed. “Sorry.”

Some people have it figured out, but plenty are meshugeners. Back at the car, a sixtydollar parking ticket decorated Ellen’s windshield. Plus twenty for Sean.

“You don’t have to pay me,” he said.

“You’re letting me use your shower.”

She stuffed the bill into the pocket of his t-shirt, over one weak, rattling lung.

“We have to stop for some bananas on the way.”

“No problemo.”

What would Yolanda say when she got home? Ellen would deal with that after she made some calls. She was going to call a few old friends and see if anyone had an empty cabin. He could chop wood, do some construction. He was probably strong when he wasn’t sick. Or he could teach juggling at the Waldorf School.

Almost everyone had a cabin out back, or a shack they used to live in while they built their permanent place. A lot of people still owed Ellen. They owed her for the oats they let Larry sprinkle all over their beds. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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SOUNDINGS Taking the measure

CONSUMPTION

That’s Naturetainment // By JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING

O

n a recent stroll in the woods, I came across a leafy bramble loaded with small dark fruit. Recognizing they were blackberries, I extended my arm and grabbed a handful. Moments later, I encountered a straight but flexible tree branch. I fashioned a fishing pole and dipped the hook into the nearby pond. Three quick jigs, and the pole arched. Soon I had a nice-sized perch dangling at the end of the line. I was really doing well. I was living by my wits and instincts! Maybe I’d take my forest booty back to my shack—built by me—and make some sort of blackberry-perch fricassee. Gross? Who cares. I wouldn’t actually be eating it. The whole experience was courtesy of the two-minute trailer “with footage from the current game prototype” of the forthcoming Walden, A Game.

The idea was that soon I could enter the world of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 pond-gazing classic Walden; Or, Life in the Woods via Walden, the 3D videogame. I would “follow in the footsteps of Thoreau” as I conducted my “own experiments in living deliberately,” all the while sitting at my desk in my downtown condo.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I was left wondering who would find it interesting, entertaining or rewarding to sit at a computer pretending to fish, fake-build some fake-fire, and going for a slow walk in the virtual reality woods of a laptop screen?

In the first place, Walden, a book that includes a chapterlong, blow-by-blow account of growing beans, is a rather odd choice of source material. It’s as earnest and plodding as its thesis promises. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” writes Thoreau, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The

book is a chronicle of Thoreau’s days, spent alone for the most part, seeking simplicity and self-reliance in the woods for two years, two months, and two days. He wanted to reconnect with the very basics: shelter, food, warmth, and clothing. It was by no means a best-seller in its day, but Walden lives on, even today, because of its subject matter, an ideal that most of us can identify with. Thoreau wanted the kind of unmediated, authentic experience of the natural world that he found was missing in modern life in urban Massachusetts.

So let’s turn that into a video game?

Sure, why not? Who, after all, could have predicted the success of fake farming on FarmVille? And we’re already busily turning the natural wonders of the world into consumer products. Have your photo taken professionally on the Grand Canyon Skywalk! Dine with Shamu at SeaWorld for $29 per person! Coming soon: Columbia Icefield’s glass viewing platform! We love nature, but we love it more at a distance, keeping ourselves safe from any unpredictability or even danger. Even better if we can press pause and fetch some snacks and drinks before resuming our ramble through a 3D forest.

The problem is that actual contact with actual wilderness is not merely one entertainment option among others, it’s more important for our happiness than we may think. Journalist Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, spent ten years speaking to parents and children across the United States about their interactions (or not) with nature prior to the book’s 2005 publication. Two years before the first iPhone was released, he identified how the creep of screen-time into our children’s lives was already replacing outdoor play.

“As likely as not today, ‘summer camp’ is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear—to ignore,” writes Louv.

Our interactions with nature have a positive effect on our mental and physical states, and a lack of contact with nature will have a negative effect on us.

He followed Last Child in the Woods with The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age in 2011. Studies are now emerging that contact with nature is not just helpful to a child’s well-being, it is essential. One study shows that even adults experience demonstrable reductions in stress levels when they simply look out a window as opposed to nature scenes on a screen. Dozens of studies document the fundamental shifts away from nature-based recreation towards digital entertainment that takes place indoors and the corollary effects of increases in obesity, mood disorders, attention deficit disorder, and so on. Those high-definition channels of pristine beaches and calm meadows just aren’t going to cut it.

I mentioned my concerns about Walden, the game, to a very outdoorsy friend. She loves multi-day hikes with just WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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a backpack and a pup tent. She’s not the target market for Walden, the game. “What I love about hiking,” she said, “is that it reminds me that I’m so insignificant and small. There’s nothing I can do to control whatever nature wants to throw at me.” How else do you experience the heady, existential freedom of realizing yourself as being puny on nature’s scale to matter? Might as well enjoy the rising scent of the hot forest floor, as you squint into the sun to watch a bird of prey ride afternoon thermals.

Nora Young, host of CBC Spark, points out in her new book The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives are Altering the World Around Us, that as our lives go digital, our instinct is to cling to those primal, sensual, physical things that root us, like cooking, working with our hands, gardening, and even yoga or running. “We are animals,” she writes, “and yet we are failing to acknowledge just how vital a grounded, deep, embodied relationship to the world is to our well-being.” She offers the personal example of how she started “gardening and cooking in earnest” when her life became more digital, and she points to other “digerati” who look for analog, handson, handiwork in their spare time.

This summer, a two-hour midday walk with a friend turned into a six-hour twenty-five kilometre march after she

and I became lost in the hills in the southern British Columbia interior. But with some plucky backtracking and a few basic wayfinding skills, we eventually met up with our intended trail. As I planted an overly demonstrative kiss on the wooden signpost, my friend started to giggle. As did I. Soon we were laughing uncontrollably. In actual fact, we hadn’t been in the slightest danger that day, but the rush of noradrenalin and serotonin was real.

Walden, which includes a blow-by-blow account of growing beans, is an odd choice of source material.

As we returned back to the trailhead parking lot, even the joy of taking off our hot, damp and dust-caked hiking boots and socks was disproportionate to the actual effort. The day was an unfiltered, unscripted sensory bonanza. “Well you won’t get any of that playing a video game,” I thought as we heaved ourselves into the car. No matter how 3D a game like Walden might be, there is no substitute for a real walk in the real woods. Nobody codes like Mother Nature. EB

S o l o S h o w: R o o m 5 6

CAROLYN CAMPBELL

The EnD OF THE AMBERSONS, 2012

tralala, 2008

Carolyn Campbell has exhibited her work throughout Canada, and has taught painting, drawing and design at the University of Alberta.

Her work has been featured in numerous publications and she was a finalist in 2009 for the Kingston Prize National Portrait Competition.

She works from a studio in downtown Edmonton.

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MUSIC

Thanks for Nothing, Pop // By SCOTT MESsenger

P

op music remains amongst the most accessible and inclusive cultural conversations because, for the past halfcentury, it hasn’t really changed. In 1967, for example, I Think We’re Alone Now took Tommy James and the Shondells to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and then twenty years later, with negligible updating, Tiffany to #1. Then there’s Lana Del Rey— if she’s not the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, who is? Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound approach to producing persists as a load-bearing pillar of modern commercial rock. How did Oasis rise to the fame of the Beatles? By mimicking the Beatles.

And so on. The genre is built on patterns endlessly repeated, but for good reason: for generations, they have elicited favourable emotional, and therefore retail, responses. For many critics, this is pop’s artistic failing: It lacks imagination, innovation, and ingenuity.

This summer, that viewpoint was validated, at least quantitatively, by a study published in Nature. Through analysis of the Million Song Dataset (a library of song descriptions created, in part, to encourage investigation of the

human relationship with music), Barcelona-based researchers announced that pop has indeed been virtually static for decades.

In fact, the group concluded, its variety has never been more restricted: “Much of the gathered evidence points towards… blockage or no evolution in the creation and production of contemporary western popular music.” Looking at songs from 1955 to 2010, they discovered that melodies and arrangements have become simpler, variation in instrumentation and other aspects of tone has decreased, and, somewhat obnoxiously, songs have become louder.

What this means is that, on the whole, the industry has recognized people don’t expect much of pop music. Instead, it makes a promise that’s easily fulfilled: it will simply always be there, prattling on in the background, noticeable only when we choose to notice it, rather than ever reaching to grab our attention. And we’re probably all better off because of this.

We hum along to familiar (even if new) songs during the commute, talk above the innocuous satellite stream over drinks after work, and essentially treat modern music as a WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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homogenous soundtrack to the unfolding of lives spent building foundations for starting families then raising them, paying down mortgages, and fattening up retirement portfolios.

But what if you don’t get pop, and so fail to connect with what the researchers call “a key cultural expression”?

This worries me, to the point of advocating for musical misfits of the future to embrace pop, or at least to not let themselves be badly distracted by its alternatives. The Spanish study has helped me reach an unwelcome conclusion: My anti-pop sensibilities, and so my exclusion from that broader conversation, are to blame for my mountainous mortgage, an assured and significant delay of retirement, and current priorities that promise no foreseeable resolution for either.

Looking to my earliest musical memory, when I was eight, how it’s all come to this point surprises me. On Christmas morning, 1983, my parents gave me what I now see was a guide to better living, encoded on a spool of magnetic tape.

Maybe it was because I’d been spending so much time flipping through their LPs, carefully dropping the needle on the likes of David Bowie, Prince, even dad’s copy of In-A-GaddaDa-Vida, that Cindy Lauper’s She’s So Unusual lay waiting for me beneath the tree. They’d noticed I’d taken an interest, but perhaps thought mainstreaming was in order—Lauper’s record was poised to sell sixteen million copies, with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun on worldwide repeat.

The irony is that none of it pointed me toward an epiphany I could capitalize upon, in the way that an artist, equipped with sensitivity and intelligence, might.

If all had gone well, that tape would have led me to Huey Lewis, probably Bon Jovi, maybe the hits off The Joshua Tree (certainly nothing from its shadowy latter half). Come the nineties, I’d slide into the sonic safety of Counting Crows, Spin Doctors, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and, if feeling feisty, Pearl Jam, as well as everything else looping on the radio station favoured at the office where I ought to have been working by 2000 or so, but wasn’t.

For that, I blame a 1981 K-Tel compilation I found in the glove box of dad’s GMC Jimmy after I’d set aside Lauper and started searching again. On this compilation was Closer to the Heart by Rush, the track that sent me down the path less travelled. I ingested the band’s back catalogue, picked up bass in high school because of it, and spent much of those three years in friends’ basements failing to learn riffs note for note. The intricacy of the music demanded that of me, demanded to be felt physically in the tips of my fingers. Thereafter, I craved the same connection with everything I heard; pop couldn’t provide that. College radio did, with its complex indie rock.

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Like Rush, these bands elevated the art of music for me, gave it a corrupting depth and richness. And in that way music can define you, it made me expect the same of everything else in life. In the same way I lost time to seeking out the extraordinary in music (and, to this day, trying to create it in a series of hopelessly unpopular bands), I was lured into thinking this applied to other aspects of life. I travelled to search for the extraordinary months at a stretch, pointlessly putting off a stable career.

The irony, of course, is that none of it pointed me toward an epiphany I could capitalize upon, in the way that an artist, equipped with sensitivity and intelligence, might. So here I am, extraordinary only because, as a nearly forty-year-old nine-to-fiver, I’ve yet to save enough money to support a single year of retirement.

I admit these are perhaps the problems of the privileged, but a preference for pop music probably would have prevented them just the same. In his 2006 book This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin sees art as having the “power” to connect us “to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.” Music is part of that. To lose yourself in music, then, can be dangerous; it means losing yourself in those truths, or in the search for them. Pop, to its credit, lets the listener in only so far, because of its rigidity and limited capacity (which is not the same thing as abundance). Pop music allows you to wade through it in relatively safety, even feel refreshed or invigorated by it, without ever worrying about being carried away by a strong current.

And so what, I wonder, awaits the future misfits of antipop allegiance. My wonderful and well-meaning wife, thirtyseven weeks pregnant as I write, has been exposing our daughter to the joyful chaos of Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, of Montreal’s sonic acrobatics, and to George Harrison Beatles’ songs—the outliers, I’d say, of that Spanish study.

Levitin also describes in his book how we arrive at musical preferences. Newborns recognize songs heard while in the womb, from as early as twenty weeks. That familiarity, he explains, can determine what music we’ll ultimately understand and prefer.

As parents, do we not want to save our children from the ignominy of ending up just like us? Is this not a guiding directive, lest our own mistakes have been made in vain? What’s going to happen when, a few months from now, those songs play again? I worry our new little girl will turn to the speakers and, with one toothless grin, one mischievous giggle, deny the power of pop music to gently carry her towards common, sensible, respectable goals. At that point, what more will there be to do but wait to see just how complicated, how consuming, she’ll need her truths to be?

Part of me hopes not very. But another part of me—the same part my parents may have been trying to save me from, the part that still makes life seem so rich with possibility as to be kaleidoscopically unfocused—can’t wait to hear what she chooses to hear. All the same, I’m going to keep the glove box empty. EB

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BOOKS

Something of Silence // By JOCELYN BROWN

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ne glorious fall night a year ago—trees blazing yellow, air charged with promise—I rode my bicycle onto the High Level Bridge, in Edmonton, hit something and catapulted face first onto cement. When I came to, the world was silent. Sound and sensation returned, but quietly and one-byone, like passengers from an overnight flight emerging into a vast empty airport: taste of blood, mouth full of teeth, car horn, traffic, a single thought: Things have changed.

I’ve always been hungry for silence, but until that moment, it has been a break or retreat from noisy life. Never before had I felt silence as a vast container, as the space from which all sounds and sensations emanate.

Absolute silence cannot, of course, be experienced. To be alive is to have a beating heart. The idea of pure silence, though, makes for robust conversation at the very least, and no one seems to have had more fun with that idea than John Cage. “Every something is an echo of nothing,” Cage famously said in his “Lecture on Something,” the precursor to “Lecture on Nothing,” which opens with this line: I am here

,

and there is nothing to say

.

Colton Ponto

Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage includes these and twenty-one other Cage works from 1937 to 1961, and has been recently reissued in a handsome 50 th anniversary edition.

Composer, musicologist, and former music critic for Village Voice, Kyle Gann has written extensively about Cage and provides an excellent introduction to this new edition. Silence, he says, shows how Cage “thought his way out of the twentieth century’s artistic neurosis” and “gave us all space to breath again.” The book still has great appeal, partly because Cage is a wonderful writer, his voice so eager and full of delight, you can almost hear isn’t-this-fun? throughout. In “Music Lover’ Field Companion,” for instance, he writes, “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting

oneself to the mushroom.” (For more on Cage’s mycological leanings, see “The End of Silence,” in Listen to This, a collection of essays by the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.)

What makes Silence compelling, though, are the questions it raises about its subject matter. Gann asks them with a certain urgency: “What is this nothing that must be taken as the basis then? The Heideggerian nothing, the Eckhartian Ground, the heroism that accepts whatever comes, a rightbrain absorption in sonic experience?”

Although Cage has been called a cheerful existentialist, he was more musician (and writer) than philosopher. That’s where Gary Cox steps in, offering up another helpful boost of nothingness in The Existentialist’s Guide to Death, the Universe, and Nothingness. Nothingness, he explains, “needs being even more than gin needs tonic because nothingness is nothing more than the nothingness, the denial, the negation, of being.” (“What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking,” Cage wrote, with several long spaces, in “Lecture on Nothing.”) With gin and tonic in mind, Cox’s readers can make a fairly painless walk to the next big point, that nothingness is considered by some to be the root of consciousness. Was Cage playing with this idea when he said, “Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music?” Was his nothing the big blank existentialist Nothing? It doesn’t sound like it: “I learned that the intervals have meaning; they are not just sounds but they imply in their progressions a sound not actually present to the ear.” (When performed, there’s a long pause between “sound” and “not.”)

Oh, those pauses. Several of the Cage works are composed like music and arranged on the page with spaces to denote silence. Reading them is not easy. The pieces are meant to be performed, though, the ideal audience being “heroic” in their willingness to accept all sounds, and silences, with equanimity.

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directly, without projecting values and emotions onto them.)

Cage has so many pauses, pauses that feel awkward, potent, ridiculous, poignant, vulnerable and tense. Acutely human, in other words. It’s no wonder that, at a performance of “Lecture on Nothing,” Cage’s friend Jeanne Reynal said, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” And it’s also no surprise that some listeners find the piece moving. Music critic Alex Ross, for instance, called it “unexpectedly touching.”

The ultimate pause, in Cage’s oeuvre and perhaps modern music, was performed in 1952. David Tudor, a gifted pianist who shared a lifelong artistic bond with Cage, sat at a piano looking at a stopwatch and turning blank pages of music for four minutes and thirty-three silent seconds. Then he stood for applause. (It was mixed). In his book No Such Thing as Silence, Kyle Gann champions this work, titled 4’33”, starting with an account of his own performance of the piece at seventeen, his high school audience likely listening “to the hum of the school H-vac system” as he quietly sat. No, 4’33” was not a joke, Gann tells us (that joke having already been made by Alphonse Allais in 1897, with Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man). Perhaps it was an avant-garde inevitability, the musical equivalent of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, and perhaps it was the pinnacle of 20 th century music. Gann’s most emphatic point is that 4’33” does something. He believes the work frames silence, thereby redefining it for listeners as something—not nothing. 4’33’’ continues to be widely performed—in 2004 the BBC performed an orchestral version— and there are dozens of professional recordings of the piece.

Cage’s prediction came true: 4’33” “moves in all directions and will be received in unpredictable ways.”

Poet and philosopher John O’Donohue loved the traditional music Cage wanted freedom from, but shared Cage’s views on music and silence. “One of the great thresholds in reality is the threshold between sound and silence,” he writes in Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World. Music “constellates and extures” silence, and brings out its “hidden mystery.” Also influenced by Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger, O’Donohue’s deep, musical voice makes the audio recording of Anam Cara feel like the best of conversations.

Like Cage, O’Donohue speaks of “true listening.” For him, silence is a sacred place, and he agrees with Heidegger that “true listening is worship.”

Is Cage’s silence charged with the divine? Perhaps. To some extent, he was influenced by Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki.

And 4’33” had a precursor entitled “The Silent Prayer.” Gann claims this “self-contradictory” work never truly existed and 4’33” was not a Zen prayer or meditation practice. What Cage’s silence surely holds, though, is the possibility of equality: among sounds, among people, between art and life.

He failed, of course. Many of his works involved stage and audience, thereby continuing to split art from life, and even, perhaps, widening the gap. According to GegenSichKollektiv’s Marxist essay “Anti-self: Experience-less Noise,” Cage “reinforces rather than questions the division of labour between the musicians and the audience.” Instead of opening the ears and 60

minds of his audience, GegenSichKollektiv scolds, Cage limits “access to the reality that is.” Published in Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, the essay claims that when silence is used as an “aesthetic palette,” it becomes a commodity: “the silence is no longer silence but someone’s property.” Esoteric, yes, but he had a point. In 2002, Cage’s publisher sued Mike Batt, an English composer and producer, for plagiarizing Cage’s music. In his new biography on Cage, Music Professor Rob Haskins writes that Batt donated an unknown sum (rumoured to be six figures) to the publisher to avoid further proceedings. The work was 4’33”.

Cage’s friend Jeanne Reynal said, “John I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.”

The “willingness to make unfortunate mistakes along with sublime discoveries” is necessary for revolutionary art, Haskins concludes in his incisive and comprehensive John Cage. He points out that Cage first publicly expressed a longing for silence in political terms. At fifteen, Cage won an oratorical contest and spoke against the American exploitation of South America, ending with, “For we should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn that other people think.” What Haskins’ rich biography does especially well is explain why the crucial aspect of Cage’s music—the element often ignored by critics—is the actual sound. “I am unabashedly and intensely moved by Cage’s music,” Haskins writes, “although I confess that I cannot always describe the feelings that it evokes for me.”

Several months after my accident, I joined the memoria bike ride for Isaak Kornelsen, a young man who was killed while cycling down Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue. At the end of the ride, hundreds of cyclists stood in silence, a silence full with loss, grief, and the sounds of traffic. Also, though, it was the “life-giving nothing” Cage spoke of—that sustaining silence I felt a year ago on the High Level Bridge. Perhaps I smacked my head hard enough to become a “heroic” listener, if only for a few moments, and perhaps I heard the sound of things directly. Who knows. What matters to me now is the sense of shared humanity that silence can contain, humanity without the drapery of personality and ideology. I sometimes imagine spontaneous performances of 4’33”, in the shoe department of the Bay, for instance, or on the LRT at rush hour. I rely heavily on the silence-experts, those poets and musicians who, in O’Donohue’s words, “are dedicated to the threshold where silence and sound meet.” However silence is evoked, implied, or performed, it feels important to be part of the audience.

As Cage said, “We need not fear these silences, -we may love them .” EB

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ART

Photography, Then and Now // By DANIEL BAIRD

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ne of the remarkable features of the history of photography is that, less than a century after its invention and less than fifty years after film replaced the unwieldy photographic plates of its early years, it became the medium of choice for many whom we now regard as major artists: Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and many others. Photography evolved from an intriguing and even magical technology to a major art form at break-neck speed, and in what might be thought of as its classic period, from the late nineteentwenties through the nineteen-seventies, an aesthetic standard was set that has proven difficult to match, much less surpass.

A good example of what photography was capable of achieving relatively early in its not especially long history (oil painting was perfected some five hundred years ago) are Berenice Abbott’s images of New York City from the nineteen-thirties, some of which were on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario last summer as part of Berenice Abbott, a collaboration between the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. Abbott was a former assistant in Surrealist artist Man Ray’s commercial studio in Paris and a friend of Walker Evans. Her pictures of New York are by turn stark, dense, and hallucinatory: here is a city that is not just a particular place at a particular time but is monumental, iconic, and ultimately transcendent. In “Rockefeller Center, New York City” (1934), for instance, the foreground is a pitch black, rooftop silhouette, the suite of high rises soaring in a thin, washed out wreath of light. In “McGraw-Hill Building, West 42nd Street, New York City, May 25” (1936), the foreground is a sharply defined but rickety-looking elevated subway station, the skyscraper rising majestically beyond; beneath the subway platform one can just glimpse the city receding downtown at street-level. And in the strikingly beautiful “Cedar Street from William Street, New York City, March 26” (1936), a police officer hovers at the lower left corner of the picture, while the foreground is a solid block of white light, the length of cavernous Cedar Street cast in shadows. The taller buildings halfway down the street rise up into an ethereal gust of light.

Berenice Abbott was not exactly what we have come to think of as a street photographer, though she explored New York’s streets and avenues and underpasses in great detail: “El, Second and Third Avenue Lines, Bowery and Divisions Streets, New York City, April 24” (1936) is shot directly under the great iron understructure of the old elevated subway line in Manhattan, a slat-work of light leaking down onto the street. Abbott’s images are too formal, too specifically invested in the pictorial tradition, especially that of the still life, for her to be considered strictly a street photographer, and in any case her finest work concerns itself less with documenting the city than with embodying a larger idea. She was not just interested in skyscrapers but with what skyscrapers say about human life.

And while Abbott was an adept portrait photographer—her portrait of a tense, brooding André Gide in 1927 is especially compelling—figures in her work are almost always subordinate to the built environment; the children playing on the light-washed street in “Willow Place, nos. 43-49, New York City, May 14” (1936) are dwarfed by the scale of the apartment block behind them. But the idea that photographers documenting life in the twentieth century—from Walker Evans to W. Eugene Smith to Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston—were more concerned with the impulsive moment and gritty realism than with composition within the western pictorial tradition is itself a myth. If anything, photographers from the early twentieth century onwards have been more invested in classical aesthetic values than painters or sculptors.

The photographs Walker Evans took in Alabama in the late nineteen-thirties and which were included in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are straightforwardly iconic: a baby with a bound foot stretched out on a towel beneath cheese cloth on a rough, grainy wood floor; a pair of old, worn out work boots on a patch of hardened mud; a fresh grave mound with a white dish sitting on top. In W. Eugene Smith’s stunning image of two US marines during the battle of Saipan in 1944, one figure is close up and in profile, his face mud-spattered and dripping sweat, swigging from his canteen, while his buddy stands with his back to him gazing in the opposite direction, rifle barrel jutting up over his shoulder toward an empty sky. In an image Robert Frank took in 1955 of a Fourth of July party in the American Midwest, part of The Americans series, two little girls in white dresses holding balloons skip toward a massive American flag hanging from somewhere beyond the upper edge of the photograph; the flag is threadbare and transparent, its tears and patches clearly visible.

In Harry Callahan’s moody “Wabash Avenue, Chicago” (1959), a man and a woman walk in opposite directions on the sidewalk in a bright triangle of light, the rest of the street sunk in swarming, glossy darkness, bits of light from street lamps and apartments glimmering through. And in William Eggleston’s colour photograph “Outskirts of Morton, Mississippi, Halloween, 1971” (1971), a young woman decked out in pirate attire stands with two boys on an empty, dirt-smeared road, dark trees pitching on either side, the sky a livid, twilight purple. All of these photographs document a moment, a place, a time, but they also thrum with metaphor; like paintings, they invite being read. And like paintings, standing in front of the actual photograph and looking at it at length actually matters. Photographic prints, especially when created in the darkrooms of masters like Smith and Eggleston, have a density and tonal range that reproductions, whether digital or in books and magazines, lack. If one has only seen a reproduction of a great photograph, there is a very real sense in which one has not experienced the work of art.

Photography did not unfold at the same pace or address the same issues as painting and sculpture in the twentieth century, in part because photography itself is a creature of modernism and in part because of the nature of the medium itself. It would have been absurd for photographers to worry about the artificiality of pictorial illusion or the nature of representation, as modernist painters did, since photography is an idiom that in some sense WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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literally records the world as we see it. The fact that photographers deliberately frame and compose their images, and that Smith’s smoldering chiaroscuro and Eggleston’s’s spooky, hallucinatory colours are as much the product of the darkroom as reality, is beside the point. Our everyday perception of the visible world is, after all, delimited by our senses and constructed by our brains. This has given photographers an aesthetic license to both mine the pictorial tradition and explore human life in ways readily accessible to most viewers—hardly anyone could fail to respond to Smith’s war photographs or register the menace and alienation in Callahan’s “Wabash Avenue, Chicago”—while other artists have often retreated into esoteric disputes hardly anyone cares about. Photography has done more to interpret the world in the last half century than any other art form save film. And even when photographers of the nineteen-seventies, shaped by conceptual art, became more self-conscious about the character of their medium, they more often than not cleaved even closer to the painting tradition: think of Cindy Sherman’s intense, theatrical, large format colour photographs of the early nineteen-eighties, or Jeff Wall’s sublime “Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona” (1999).

But there is a sense that photography, co-opted by digital technologies and in a world saturated with images, is now at a crossroads. In this context, can photographic images still retain their power? What is the future of photography?

One might expect to find at least a partial answer to this question by looking at the finalists for the Grange Prize, Canada’s most prestigious and lucrative award for photographers. Selected by a jury of historians, curators, and critics, the four Grange Prize finalists, two from Canada and two from a participating country (last year it was India, this year England), are all given an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario; the winner, chosen by popular vote and announced on November 1, receives $50,000. The 2012 winner was the British artist Jo Longhurst. Unfortunately, this year’s Grange Prize finalists confirm the suspicion that contemporary photography has hit a creative wall and is backsliding into the kind of academic issues that have plagued other forms of visual art for decades.

For the series To Everything There is a Season, Toronto artist Annie MacDonell drew from Canadian photographer Roloff Beny’s 1967 book of the same name to create intricate and allusive photo-collages. In “Mount Waddington/Drumheller” (2011), for instance, MacDonell pasted over sweeping, aerial views of snow-caped mountains with an image from a desolate badlands, presumably intending to undercut Beny’s propensity for mystical reverie. But whether or not Beny’s ecstatic relationship with the Canadian landscape is cogent or a sentimental, nationalist fantasy, MacDonell’s collages are by turns purely deconstructive and purely decorative; they don’t propose any vision of their own.

Montreal artist Emmanuelle Léonard’s series Dirty Business addresses the respective conventions of police and tabloid photography. In “Drowning, Rivière-des-miles-îles, Laval” (2007), one sees a police car and part of an ambulance from the other side of a bridge pulled up on a road beside a frozen river. Although one assumes that someone has broken through the ice and drowned, a search of the image for details is fruitless: Léonard resists both the voyeurism of tabloid photography and the clinical view of 62

police photography. But while her point about these two ubiquitous types of images is well enough taken, the picture is more a comment about photography than the world. Did anyone ever really doubt the limitations of police photography, much less the pictures taken by tabloid ambulance chasers?

Wales-born photographer Jason Evans’ images are quirky and amusing and often strikingly beautiful: striped cups stacked on a red table, slats of light filtering down; a pink and yellow plastic ball atop a half-full glass decanter, velvety shadows extending across the table. But then these images seem more like photographs for an eccentric design magazine, or sophisticated pranks to be posted on Facebook.

The most accomplished of the four Grange Prize finalists, and rightly this year’s winner, is Jo Longhurst. In her project Other Spaces, she explores the idea of bodily perfection and its myriad meanings among Olympic level gymnasts. In “Suspension (1)”(2012), she captures a young woman afloat, horizontal, mid-air, one hand lifted, hair streaming, face tight in concentration; in the background are other, even younger gymnasts training. “Peak” (2012) has a woman on tiptoe bent over with her hands flat on the floor, her taut muscles bulging; the background is a dark, blank grey, her shadow just barely visible. None of Longhurst’s images, however, are stand-alone, in part because none of them are sufficiently compelling or representative—they are dispersed in various fragments across the gallery walls.

Photography has the ability to embody an encompassing vision—as any compelling and necessary art must—in a way that is singularly immediate and accessible. That is surely why Abbott’s New York and Frank’s Americans, Smith’s soldiers and Eggleston’s gothic South (and, for that matter, Dianne Arbus’ last images of residents of a home for the mentally disabled decked out for Halloween and standing in a blustering, autumn field) can have such a hold on us. The work of the finalists of this year’s Grange Prize is, by contrast, analytical, specialized, and at the service of narrow theses that are hardly challenging in and of themselves. It’s the kind of art one forgets almost immediately upon leaving the gallery. This is perhaps an expression of distrust among contemporary photographers of the capacity of the photographic image to embody a larger vision, a response to a world inundated with images that are more often than not deceptive, manipulative, beholden to troubling ideologies, and directed broadly toward us as consumers.

But while skepticism and self-consciousness can be virtues, here they feel more like a failure of nerve, courage, vision, and imagination. Art can do better than deconstruct the illusions of past artists, or riff on genres no one ever took seriously, or present cool objects, or even underscore our collective obsession with bodily perfection, and it has. Consider W. Eugene Smith’s harrowing pieta “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, Minemata, 1972” (1972), the light reflecting down both on the mother’s face, aglow with love, and on her child’s ravaged body, the liquid dark flowing all around them. Here is a photograph that encapsulates art history and is still about two people in a particular time and place. This is what photography can do. There is a print of the photograph made

by Smith himself in the collection of the Ryerson Image Centre in downtown Toronto. Ask them to pull it out of the archive. Be warned: You might be there contemplating it for hours. EB

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film

Might As Well Live // By paul matwychuk

DUCK SOUP MARX BROTHERS

T

he new film version of Anna Karenina, scripted by Tom Stoppard, directed by Atonement’s Joe Wright, and starring Keira Knightley, has just been released. To prepare, I’ve been watching older adaptations of Tolstoy’s novel. Well, not the entire films; actually, I’ve just been watching the last few minutes of each of them to see how they handle the climax, the famous scene where Anna commits suicide by hurling herself under the wheels of an oncoming train. Everyone plays this moment differently. In the 1997 movie version, Sophie Marceau goes limp and lets herself fall onto the tracks like someone taking the Nestea Plunge. There’s a 1977 TV version starring Nicola Pagett, who does a hesitant little stutter-step before she falls—poor Anna thinking twice about her decision a fraction too late, just as gravity takes over. I really like the expectant expression on Greta Garbo’s face in the 1935 MGM version—her eyes go wide just before she jumps, as if to say to herself, “Oh boy, here we go!” I wonder which one is the “right” way to do it. As a film-obsessed human being, I naturally wonder how I would play it if I were an actress. Or if I were depressed enough in real life to jump in front of a train.

None of these films actually show Anna’s body being destroyed upon the tracks, and there is no sign that the Keira Knightley version will be any different. (The trailer seems mostly intent on reassuring viewers that the film contains a lot of ballroom dancing.) I suppose that throwing yourself under a train—like most methods of suicide—seems fatefullly romantic provided you don’t have to contemplate the messy aftermath.

But what would happen if you did? Contemplate the suicide-by-train aftermath, that is. Look no farther than the opening scene of the 2001 Japanese horror movie Suicide Club, which treats the idea as a cathartic, Grand Guignol

comic spectacle. Things start out slowly; for the first minute and a half, all we see are mundane images of people milling around a Tokyo subway station. There’s no music, and the sequence is so muted that the occasional cutaway shot of a subway train approaching the station doesn’t register as being all that threatening. Maybe you subconsciously notice that there are an awful lot of Japanese schoolgirls filing into this particular subway station, but that, I’m guessing, is probably not an unusual sight in Tokyo.

It’s only when these schoolgirls—and there are several dozen of them, at least one for every movie version of Anna Karenina—spontaneously gather together to form a line along the edge of the subway platform that you begin to suspect something strange is going on. As a merry Irish jig plays incongruously on the soundtrack, the girls join hands and swing them back and forth and recite a schoolyard chant before blithely leaping in unison onto the tracks just as the train roars into the station. There’s a shot of a girl’s head exploding like an overripe pumpkin, followed by outrageously gory images of horrified bystanders getting variously spattered, sprayed, and drenched with the girls’ blood. (It’s the rare film that makes witnessing suicide seem almost as ghastly as committing it.)

Is this scene tasteless? Oh my, yes! It’s a violent mass tragedy staged like the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy’s epic pie fight in Battle of the Century.

But then, what is this “tasteful” depiction of suicide we have in mind that makes this one “tasteless” by comparison?

I imagine it’s something like Robert Sean Leonard’s iconic, excruciatingly protracted suicide-preparation scene in 1989’s Dead Poets Society. It takes a full three minutes of screen time for Leonard to strip to the waist and locate the gun he’ll then use to shoot himself in the head.

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On the one hand, you can’t deny that director Peter Weir pulls off an artful bit of cinematic ellipsis here by cutting abruptly from Leonard to his startled father waking up in bed while omitting the actual sound of the gunshot. On the other hand, the scene’s artfulness is appalling: Weir photographs Leonard so tenderly that they’re essentially endorsing Leonard’s decision to kill himself (and with one of the flimsiest rationales for suicide in movie history, to boot—his father is forcing him to attend medical school instead of letting him pursue acting).

Dead Poets Society made 235 million dollars around the world—100 million dollars more than Die Hard the year before. Would it be reckless to guess that this scene was playing inside the heads of hundreds of teens who committed suicides over the next decade? Weir (who also made the deeply romantic female mass-suicide film Picnic at Hanging Rock—what is it with that guy?) here presents a seductive suicide fantasy for sensitive boys: a beautiful, bloodless martyrdom, unfolding in exquisitely rendered pools of bluish moonlight.

No matter how low I got, I knew I’d never want to miss the next Robert Altman movie.

I have, as have many, wondered at various times over the years what it would be like to commit suicide, although I never felt much of a kinship with Leonard’s character—especially not the emotional sadism he directs toward his father. I identified more with Woody Allen’s hypochondriac TV producer in Hannah and Her Sisters. The character has had a medical scare, and at one point he talks about how he considered shooting himself if a recent round of medical tests confirmed that he had a brain tumour. “The only thing that might’ve stopped me,” he confesses, “is that my parents would be devastated. I would have to shoot them also, first.”

Not that I was ever a true candidate for suicide. No matter how low I got, I knew I’d never want to miss the next Robert Altman movie. (I mentioned this to my girlfriend the other day and she said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” “Well,” I wanted to reply, “only if the movie was Dr. T and the Women.”) Now that I think about it, for a man who presented such a panoramic view of human experience and whose films contain such a large and teeming gallery of characters, there is surprisingly little suicide in Robert Altman’s movies. When Altman’s people die, it’s usually because someone else shot them, not because they shot themselves. Famously, Altman chose a song called “Suicide Is Painless” to serve as the theme to M*A*S*H, but he makes a vivid case for the proposition that depression is no match for dirty jokes and the vulgar appetites of the flesh. The movie’s sexually confused dentist, Painless, stages an elaborate suicide ceremony for himself, but ultimately opts to go on living and have sex with a pretty nurse instead.

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The Altman characters who go through with suicide prefer to drown themselves. I’m thinking of Lori Singer’s depressive cellist, her long, lean, athlete’s body floating naked in her swimming pool in Short Cuts; or Sterling Hayden’s alcoholic novelist striding drunkenly into the ocean in The Long Goodbye, his Doberman later emerging from the waves with his master’s cane in its teeth, the movie’s most haunting, least smart-alecky image. Altman always liked dissolves instead of cuts; maybe drowning seemed the closest thing to dissolving gently into the next world.

To throw yourself from a tall building, on the other hand— that’s the equivalent of a smash cut. Directors tend to treat these kinds of suicides as fodder for comedy: think of all those timid businessmen who have had to get talked down from ledges over the years. In Lethal Weapon, the man on the ledge is a drama queen who gets his bluff called by Mel Gibson, who in one fell swoop proves himself to be both more manly and more suicidal than the guy he rescues. In the prologue to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, a man attempts suicide only to be shot accidentally on the way down by his mother: suicide attempt as cosmic joke. And in The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers have great fun with the cliché of the bankrupt businessman jumping out of his office window. The Coens are frequently criticized for the heartlessness they show towards their characters, but here, when Tim Robbins leaps from the top of Hudsucker headquarters onto the sidewalk forty-four floors below, the Coens literally stop time and halt Robbins’ plunge in midair, suspending him safe and sound above the New York asphalt. Here, the comedy comes from the sheer brazenness with which the filmmaker gods elect to intervene and engineer a happy ending for their story.

Compare that sequence to the clima x of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, in which a suicidal person actually hits the ground. Polanski himself plays the title character, a mousy civil servant who moves into a spooky Paris apartment. Once there, his malevolent neighbours drive him so far into madness that he winds up hurling himself out of his window. Having miraculously survived the fall, he crawls, in agony, back up the stairs and throws himself out of the window all over again.

There’s something grotesquely comic about the character’s Sisyphean efforts to annihilate himself. It strikes me how these two scenes, both showing a man falling from a great height, are not as different from each other as they might appear. Polanski and the Coens both find mordant comedy in the spectacle of a man trying unsuccessfully to kill himself.

Polanski, who never likes to release his characters from misery if he can help it, chooses to let him keep on trying, while the Coens decide to cut him a break—not, one suspects out of benevolence or empathy but because it simply happened to strike them as a funny trick to pull on the audience: a screenwriter’s idle goof masquerading as a deus ex machina.

Something in me rebels at movies like these, in which one feels the filmmaker standing coolly back and “allowing” a suicide to happen (or not happen, if the whim strikes him). I don’t think it’s too sentimental to state a preference for movies

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that unfold in a world in which suicide doesn’t seem quite so inevitable, in which a character may come right to the brink of suicide, only to have some song or joke or junky bit of cultural ephemera convince him that life might be worth living after all. Think, again, of Hannah and Her Sisters, where Woody Allen abandons his plan to shoot himself when he stumbles into a movie theatre showing the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup.

Similarly, in the “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” sequence from Follow the Fleet, Fred Astaire comes this close to blowing his brains out with a pistol. (The film makes the disturbing implication that Astaire always keeps a firearm stowed in a secret pocket of his tuxedo.) Luckily, he spots Ginger Rogers at the last minute and elects to dance a duet with her instead. These moments represent the flip side to the suicide scene from Dead Poets Society. They are seductive fantasies of optimism, not martyrdom, in which gloomy thoughts can be dispelled merely by surrendering to chance aesthetic pleasures.

That’s why my favourite movie character of 2012 is Violet, the persnickety coed played by Greta Gerwig in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, who presents a sunny comic alternative to tragic Anna Karenina. Violet is an aristocrat too, but she is liberated, not straightjacketed, by her position of privilege. She is the ringleader of a group of fellow preppies who have made it their endearingly presumptuous mission to give lifestyle guidance to their benighted fellow students. Violet’s group has taken over the campus suicide prevention centre and remade it

in their own breezily confident image. They treat most of their clients by feeding them doughnuts and giving them tapdancing lessons. Halfway through the film, though, Violet experiences her first-ever encounter with true sadness when the boy she’s seeing breaks up with her. Depressed and numb, she wanders away from campus and checks into a Motel 4 on the outskirts of town. For the first time in her life, Violet knows what it feels like to want to kill herself. She’d throw herself under a train, provided she knew where the station was, and where to find a schedule.

But she doesn’t. As she explains to her friends later on, she took a shower in her little room and was amazed when she sampled the free bar of soap—a much nicer-smelling brand than she ever expected to find in such a cheap motel. She’s herself again.

“This scent, and this soap,” she says (and Gerwig’s delivery could not be more earnest or endearing), “is what gives me hope.”

I’m sure I’ll wind up seeing Anna Karenina. (Hey, I like ballroom dancing as much as anyone.) I’ve grown out of the morbid fantasy of what it would be like to kill myself, which means a kind of empathy gap has opened up between me and characters like Anna. I welcome the prospect of watching Anna Karenina and blithely failing to understand where the main character is coming from. I will gaze at Keira Knightley poised on the edge of the train platform, and I will silently mouth the words painted on the poster hanging in Violet’s suicide prevention centre. “Come on, Anna,” I will whisper. “It’s not that bad.” EB

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BRIDGES

Song for the Causeway T

he Canso Causeway was built in 1955, removing the ferry service from the Canso Strait and forever linking Cape Breton Island to the rest of the world. At the time of its grand opening, organizers of the big day had wanted to make a splash, and called on one hundred bagpipers from this island of proud Scottish heritage to cross the new bridge while playing the ol’ crowd pleaser “Road to the Isles.” One of said pipers, Roderick MacPherson—known as Big Rod the Piper—backed out at the last minute, declaring that he could not celebrate a bridge that would only bring tourists driving fast cars and take Islanders themselves away. He saw a change coming he did not like.

Panicking, (and can you blame them? only ninety-nine, quelle horreur) the organizers begged and at last convinced the rebellious piper to cross with the others, but on one condition. The compromise was that Big Rod would join the procession, but he would not play. In the end, one hundred pipers crossed the bridge in the celebrations of August 13, only ninety-nine playing.

That was a story I read when I was young and worked in a community museum on Cape Breton, greeting visitors. I tried to interest them in local culture and history, and maybe show them something underneath the images of fiddles and fishing boats that probably drew them there. I wished, because I was eighteen and could think this way without any sense of futility, that I could give them something beautiful and sad and real. But, inevitably, most would enter what was clearly listed in their guidebooks as a “museum” and find what looked more 66

// By KATE BEATON

like a small, cluttered, and underfunded room, and they would find their way towards the door again in no time, despite the bounty of school projects on the walls and the attentions of one lone, unnervingly enthusiastic teenage employee. I couldn’t blame them for leaving in such a hurry, and, not long after, I left too.

I once watched a travel show where Billy Connolly, the Scottish entertainer, journeyed across Canada. In Halifax, he expressed a distaste for the whooshing tartans, skirling pipes, and other superficial expressions of Scottishness, which he deemed tawdry and inauthentic. It was disheartening, because if he really wanted authenticity he could have just called me up. I would have recited one of those tragic old Gaelic songs that have been a Cape Breton staple ever since Authentic Scottish People everywhere decided our national emotion would be “unspeakable longing.”

Would you like one where someone dies at war, I would have asked Billy, or one where someone dies at sea?

I guess this is why the story of the Piper has stayed with me, like a prophecy we all stepped into. We leave the Island in droves, we’ve done it for years. Like in so many rural places, this is the way things are. It’s just a bridge. There are thousands like it. But we cheer when we come back across it, we punch the roofs of our cars, we take pictures, we update our Facebook pages. “Three more days till Cape Breton…Two more days…Home tomorrow.” The ninety-nine pipes play for you on the way in. It’s only on the way out that you hear the sound of Big Rod the Piper playing nothing. EB

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She is a thing of beauty.

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