sandbox

Time to dip back into the vault of vignettes of my earliest memories. This one I called "Sandbox":

Mara and I are sitting in the sandbox in the front yard. She's sitting in one corner and I’m sitting in another corner. Mara's face is white and serious. An animal runs into the sandbox between us and stops. We stop digging to look at it. I don't know the word rat but that's what this is. The rat is dark-colored with a long bare tail. It looks at me with one eye and Mara with the other.

We watch as the rat runs out the other side of the sandbox. It's quick and quiet. It runs across the grass and up the stairs toward the kitchen door. It stops on the stairs for a moment, then runs in the open door.

Mara and I watch the house. We hear Mom yell. It's a loud, low sound without words. Then we hear her say, "Get out!" There's a quiet thump. "Get out!" Thump again.

The rat runs back out the door. It runs straight down the stairs, quick and quiet, and across the grass through the fence. Mom comes out the door holding her broom. She watches the rat go. She's breathing hard. Mara and I still watch. Why did Mom yell at the rat?

clouds

Yesterday was the Remembrance Day holiday here in Canada. Kimmie and I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon walking in East Vancouver, marveling at the windblown trees in the low light of the sun. Storms knocked out power for many thousands of people, but we saw our lights flicker only a couple of times.

Today I thought I would offer up another one of my lifewriting vignettes of my earliest memories. This one I called "Clouds":

I'm standing beside Grandma in the living-room. Grandma wears sweaters and pants, and scarves on her head. She has big eyes and she blinks hard. She stands with her arms crossed in front of her. She doesn't talk like Mom and Dad. Sometimes words are hard for her. We're looking out the window over the table. There are white clouds in the blue sky.

"Look!" I say. "The cloud's moving!"

When I turn I face the side of her pants.

"Yes," says Grandma. She is calm. She is not surprised.

"Why do they move?" I say.

"The wind...blows them," she says.

"Where do they go?"

Grandma unfolds her arms to move one of them in the air.

"Around the world," she says.

I feel something deep and big and mysterious. I turn to look up at Grandma. I am in awe.

"Grandma, do you know everything?"

"Oh no," she says. "No!"

Now she's surprised. I'm surprised at how surprised she is. I don't understand how she doesn't know everything. She knows where the clouds go.

book as cornucopia

Yesterday I pressed forward in my morning writing session, typing more into the document I call "Draft 2 Notes". I've decided to move my note-making to this document, since my thoughts are ranging over the whole range of my story, and, for one thing, I want to be able to find these ideas later when I go looking for them. If they're all buried in the notes for one of my chapters (30 currently), I might not.

It was tougher going. I'm investigating the ancient idea of the Twelve Tribes of Israel as it may have been used by the Essenes in their community. I feel a bit frustrated, since I seem to be retracing the same ground over and over, crisscrossing over my own tracks, like Pooh and Piglet in search of the elusive woozle. But I know the feeling when I "get" something: there is a click of insight, and I know I've got it. Until I get there, I have to keep fiddling with it. Another analogy: working at a large jigsaw puzzle, and repeatedly trying pieces in one spot. Inadvertently, you try the same ones over and over again, in and among a few new ones.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy this process. My fear is that I enjoy it too much. I might rest in a place of happily footling with bits of historical information, forging connections, finding symbolic links--and never move on to actual writing. Very little of this material will wind up in the finished piece--there's just too much of it. But, as I've said before, having so much groundwork under it will lend that all-important quality of richness: the feeling that the writer has selected details from a superabundance of possibilities, rather than laid out everything he's got.

The image just popped into my mind of visiting, with my granddad Alexander in March 1982, a "supermarket" in Soviet-era Riga. Even in that relatively well-off "republic", the shelves were meagerly stocked: a few root vegetables, some canned goods. It was a depressing sight.

"When we hear there is going to be toilet paper," he said in his very good English, taken up only when he retired, "people come rushing--with broom handles, or pieces of rope, to put the toilet-paper on."

"Stringing it on like beads?" I said.

"Yes!"

Well, I don't want my story to be any Soviet supermarket. Neither do I want it to be like my own Save-On Foods, however: a palace of packaged goods, with a few unpackaged things ranged around the periphery. No, how about the central market in Barcelona, as I remember it from 1979, when Tim and I were driving through Europe. It was the biggest and most impressive of all the many markets we visited on our travels: a maze of tables banked with fresh produce of every kind. I remember masses of fresh fish of many species laid on beds of ice, their scales scintillating under the bright lamps that hung over the stall. All the fresh, tender pork chops, sausages, green-leafed vegetables, bread. We wandered through it hungrily. What to choose?

Yes: let my book be like the Barcelona public market! Vast, fresh, wholesome, delicious.

politics and the artist

One point I wanted to reach yesterday was to raise the question of what the artist's relationship should be to politics.

It's a complex question. My first instinct is that an artist should not really come out as supporting any particular political view or party. For one thing, as well put by my late brother-in-law the artist Fred Douglas, "I don't see why other people should be interested in my opinions." (Although Freddie was not shy about spouting his opinions at length if you actually happened to be in his company--but still.)

To me, a liberal or a conservative, or a communist or a fascist, artist, seems like a limited thing--sort of the way I feel about, say, Christian rockers. In a sense, you're selling someone else's message, and to that extent are bankrupt as an artist.

At the same time, an artist may have, as anyone may have, political views. Should one then conceal them? Isn't this just mystification--the self-conscious attempt to generate a mystique around oneself, to keep people guessing?

On the other hand, the artist is also an economic entity, someone trying to earn a living. Should one risk alienating potential buyers by exposing one's political views? I think about the Dixie Chicks, and how they landed in hot water with many erstwhile fans when Natalie Maines made critical remarks about George Bush. At the time I thought this was foolish, since the Dixie Chicks' work has nothing to do with politics; the outburst was a taking advantage of the fame of the Dixie Chicks, and the fact that the opinions would get a lot of publicity. Natalie Maines found herself with a soapbox, so she used it. But what, if anything, was the benefit to anyone?

Then again, one doesn't want to be too much of a slut. I recall Michael Jordan's infamous comment that "Republicans buy sneakers too"--invoking his role as shoe salesman to beg off helping a Democrat in North Carolina defeat the notorious Republican incumbent Jesse Helms in 1990. Of course, Michael Jordan is not an artist--but you get the idea.

Then there's the question of what is meant by the very term politics. I remember my late friend and mentor Harvey Burt distinguishing between politics in general and partisan politics--the politics of specific parties. Politics in general has to do with relationships of power between people, and therefore, one would think, is naturally open for comment by artists. And one might naturally incline toward one political or social philosophy over another. Harvey also told me, for example, that Malcolm Lowry, his friend and neighbor in the squatters' camp at Dollarton, was very idealistic about the squatter's life, and romanticized it as being a kind of Thoreau-esque statement by the Common Man against the evil and dehumanizing forces of Civilization. The squatters were the oppressed, decent, principled proletarians up against the faceless State.

As for me, I have for many years now seen partisan politics as being inherently puerile, even as I see the necessity, or anyway the inevitability, of political parties. The public statements of most politicians are embarrassing, flatulent banalities, when they are not outright prevarications or lies. If this behavior wins votes, then that fact reflects on us, the electorate: as a group we are credulous sheep, and therefore must expect to be treated as such. It's depressing to think that a candid, honest politician would be punished at the ballot box. In general, I am suspicious of artists who take partisan politics too seriously.

Can I draw any conclusions? In the last analysis, one should not sacrifice one's integrity for any reason. If you have strong political beliefs, then so be it. But I think artists should tread carefully. Natalie Maines's exclamation that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas was, in my view, a pointless gesture. Sincere, no doubt--but empty of content. In effect, she was using her personal stardom as a vehicle for selling dislike of the president. I support her freedom to do so, but I believe that she did no good for herself as an artist, or for society.

That said, I hold musicians and actors to a lower standard in this respect than I do writers. Mostly they're performing other people's work--other people's writing. When the performer is also a songwriter, as the Dixie Chicks are, this still doesn't make too much difference unless they deal with political material in their created work--which they usually don't. Musicians like Billy Bragg, who pump out paeans to social activism and such, I tend to lump in with Christian rockers. They're marketers of ideas conceived by others.

I suppose my advice to myself is: if you have a political statement to make, be sure it's calm, cogent, well supported, objective, mature, and wise.

Is that asking so much?

a tortoise on Everest

The computer is still working. (Might be more than I'll be able to say today, having woken at 2:30 and never returned to sleep--mind too hyperactive.) I was able to write four pages yesterday, which is tolerably near my daily target of five. Three pages I regard as an adequate output; two is disappointing, and one is a sign that I have struggled to make even a token advance in my work.

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with my mother. One of the things we talked about was work: some people like to work. Kimmie is one of these: she gets positive, recreational-style pleasure from working at tasks, like painting rooms or making gourmet meals. My niece Chella seems to be another one: thinks nothing of helping paint a friend's place or digging a flower-bed. Through their willingness, ability, and a sense of responsibility, these people also tend to be exploited by employers, working extra hours without pay and generally being the willing horses that get the whip.

I don't have a taste for work for its own sake. I don't get a recreational pleasure from working, in the sense of needing to be busy. I think my father is somewhat that way: while vacationing he wouldn't be among those lounging around on blankets or sunning themselves on the deck of a sailboat; he'd be polishing brass, mending things, barbecuing. His hands craved activity. He's an inherently productive person.

I'm not the same way. I do enjoy effort--but it needs to be effort in some direction that is meaningful and interesting to me. In order for me to enjoy it, it also needs to be on my time-frame. I can't stand being rushed, pushed, or driven. The way I apply effort is slowly, steadily (or sometimes intermittently!), and thoroughly. I can work fast when I want to--but I usually don't want to.

Also, I tend to spread my effort out so that it is not focused too intently at any one time. My reading, which I do for pleasure, is actually also work--I read almost nothing that is not related to some project or other, and I rarely read without a highlighter. Most people would regard this type of studious reading as punitive--as work;, but I positively enjoy it.

One creative area where I do like to work quickly is in drawing. I was born with quite a bit of drawing talent, but the drawing I like best and am most drawn to is cartooning. Capturing the essence of a person or expression quickly, in a few strokes, is what I find most satisfying. Among more serious types of drawing, I've found that I like media that let the image develop fast--especially charcoal. In the visual world, I'm not fond of fussy, exacting techniques.

But in writing, it seems that I am. I'm the tortoise heading up Everest. I may very well make it--it's just that most people won't live long enough to see it.

the worldly artist

A quasi day off yesterday. Kimmie took the day off to celebrate Robin's birthday; we took her out to lunch at Milestones in Park Royal. It was a sunny day, like summer, and we dined outside on the wide, closed-in patio by the parking-lot. Robin is now 26, the age I was when I first formed a serious relationship with her mother. She is a self-composed independent adult; who knows how I might have changed in the same period?

I'm still looking to provide breathing-space for The Mission. For more than a week I have just been ticking over with my research reading. Yes, I need to work on how to balance my various responsibilities--any copywriting or other revenue-generating work I might have along with my artistic project. This has always been a challenge for anyone involved in the creative life. There is no simple way to solve it; it's a personal matter.

In my case, I'm relatively practical, hard-nosed, and bourgeois for a creative type. I'm attracted to business, science, and political affairs, especially public policy, and especially as this affects people on a global scale. Although I'm strange and eccentric and somewhat neurotic, I've never been an otherworldly aesthete who has no head for practical things or for figures or business. On the contrary, I'm generally a shrewd and inventive negotiator, and I positively enjoy putting together deals (although I'm not by nature a salesman or a trader in any sense). I like finding mutually beneficial arrangements bounded by clear agreements and rules. I like structure and clarity.

I'm interested by money and am very good at handling it. For a layman I have a solid grasp of capital markets, investing, and finance. I understand interest rates and compounding, and have a pretty good knowledge of the Canadian tax system. I hate wasting money (or anything else) but I'm not stingy; I like getting good value for money, and I can live on very little--indeed, I tend to be interested and stimulated by the problem of living within my means. I believe that the best value for money is a good charitable donation; when I was single I dedicated 10% of my earnings to CARE Canada to feed people who weren't eating enough--a cause that still haunts my heart and to which I still donate.

As a result of all this, although I'm an artist by nature, I own my own house and am debt-free. I can talk business with worldly people and enjoy it. In an important sense, I'm one of them.

keeping the jury out

For the past months, or even years, I have written this blog by simply sitting down at the keyboard and starting to type. When I first launched the blog I used to worry about what I was going to write about. I kept a separate Word document with ideas for blog-posts. I've long since given up that idea; usually I never went back to it to look. The blog is too informal and too unpaid for me to worry much about its content. I have a few regular readers, a larger circle of occasional readers, and a still larger circle of people who visit the site after making a search for some item of information, such as "writer's lifestyle" or "Mumbai mafia".

I hope that at least some of these people find what they want--or at least something that interests them. I feel a certain sense of responsibility (and guilt) that people might be looking to this blog as a source of accurate factual information. I can say that at least some of the information offered here as factual is also accurate--but that's about all I can say.

I began this post with the vague sense that I'm hitting a dry patch, or at least maybe running out of fresh ideas for blog-posts. Yesterday I was talking with my brother-in-law Mike, who had come down to Vancouver from the Okanagan as part of a Mothers Day get-together with my mother. He has enrolled in a truck-driving course for the summer, and as part of his research into the world of trucking has read a number of truckers' blogs, of which I understand there are quite a few. The process of reading each of these blogs came to the same end: he saw what the attitude of the writer/trucker was, and the posts then simply continued in the same vein.

When I pressed Mike to explain what he meant, he said that each trucker tended to have either a positive or a negative outlook on his or her experience, and then, whatever happened, each event would be seen and interpreted in light of that outlook. A "positive" trucker would see an event in a positive light, as confirming his or her viewpoint on life; a "negative" one would see it in a negative light, also confirming his or her view.

"When I got to that point I would just stop reading," said Mike.

Of course my first thought was: Uh-oh, what about my blog? What category am I in? Am in a category?

My next thought was: What would have to be different about those blogs to have encouraged Mike to keep reading?

Clearly what would keep him reading would be some kind of freshness, unpredictability. He was implying that for each of these blogs there was no need to keep reading. He had already got the "message" of the blog, the message of the writer, and all the rest of the material was simply further examples of that message. I'm guessing that had Mike found a blog whose writer had not already made up his or her mind that life was positive or negative, but who was still investigating the issue, weighing new evidence each day, as it were, he would have stuck with the blog a lot longer. As readers we don't want to leave the courtroom, so to speak, while the jury is still out.

I get the feeling that there is something very important here, not just for writing but for all of life. The writer--or the person--who has made up his or her mind about life, about experience, has ceased to become interesting, in a sense; he or she is now selling a product. Just as I don't need to watch another commercial to learn that Colgate regards oral hygiene as important, and that the best way to promote it is to use their product, I don't need to hear anything more from someone whose view of life has already been reduced to a few set ideas or slogans. All future experience will simply be further evidence of that. And interestingly, in the case of the "positive" and "negative" truckers, the same experience will serve as evidence of opposite conclusions, depending on who has it.

The interesting writer then, or the writer who continues to be interesting, is the open-minded one, the one for whom the jury is still out.

In terms of a single work, the interesting one is the one whose outcome you can't foresee. You don't know which value is going to triumph in the end. It looks like it could go either way, so you stay tuned to find out.

Have I "branded" myself? Have people figured me out? How many visitors to this blog have moved on, thinking, Oh yeah, I see where this guy's coming from?

Right, Paul: open-minded it is.

Adele "Dodie" Lloyd: 1913 - 2007

Yesterday my mother phoned me to tell me that her mother had died on Sunday morning. Dodie had been in hospital in Orillia, Ontario, for a couple of weeks, recovering from surgery to repair a broken femur. Since the fall and surgery she had apparently been in some pain, and in the last days had stopped eating--an invariable sign of the approach of death, according to Warren's observation when he worked briefly as a cook in an old-folks' home. At 93 it seems that Dodie was at last ready to go.

With her I lose the last of my four grandparents. I visited her only twice, once in 1979 when I was on my way home from a six-month European journey with my friend Tim, and we detoured north from Toronto to stay with my kin for a few days; and once in 1994 when I was again in Toronto, with Kimmie, as a nominee for a Gemini for my work on The Odyssey. Both times were at the farmhouse owned by Michael, a horse trainer and one of the middle members of her 14 children (my mother was second child, but her elder brother Hugh died as a young man of a congenital heart condition). I remember phoning her when I got to Orillia in March 1994. When I identified myself she said with amusement, "You sound just like your mother."

"Ah--a compliment!" I said.

She laughed, caught off guard. "Yes, I suppose it is."

At 80 she still kept her hair dark and still held court in the kitchen which had been her throne room since, I suppose, the 1930s, although by this time she was no longer cooking, even for the relatively minuscule household that consisted of just her, Michael, and Michael's veterinarian wife Jenny. I remembered my visit in 1979, when there were still a couple-three sons still living there, as well as my grandfather Dorsey: Dodie still spent much of each day cooking, dropping a platter of fried pork chops on the picnic-table-like kitchen table, complete with benches, at which Tim and I sat along with a few other uncles and friends who showed up suddenly to eat.

Kim, enchanted with all things family, was delighted to meet Dodie, and I think the feeling was mutual. When we arrived at about noon she offered us a beer--Labatt's 50, her perennial favorite--which we accepted.

"Would you like a glass?" she said.

"Oh no," said Kimmie, "the bottle's fine."

"Good," said Dodie, with some suggestion of relief. "I like someone who drinks from the bottle."

While we nursed our brown noontime stubbies at the kitchen table, and Dodie, on her stool, had a smoke while she drank hers, Kimmie deepened the favorable impression she was making by describing the gown she had worn (and made) for the Geminis. For although Dodie was dressed very casually for her kitchen tasks, she was an ardent believer in good dress for women, and liked nothing better herself than to dress up and go out on the town, right up to the end of her life. The idea of a formal-dress awards ceremony appealed to her a lot, although this had to be divined through her laconic, understated, and unemotional way of speaking.

We had a good time, the conversation turning to things such as the fact that Dodie kept a loaded rifle under her bed, and enjoyed getting out to play bingo and gamble at the casino on the Rama Indian reserve. By and by a couple of uncles turned up and it was a regular kitchen get-together like the many thousands she had presided over before.

While I made only two pilgrimages back to Orillia to see my grandparents, I'm glad now that I at least made those two. I met all of my grandparents--by no means a given for someone born into an impoverished household thousands of miles from all them except my father's mother, who lived with us when I was a young child. My paternal grandfather was still marooned behind the Iron Curtain in Latvia, and it would be another 16 years or so after my birth before he would signal his existence by sending a letter to my father. I journeyed to visit him in Riga in 1982, when I was 23.

Anyway, Dodie Lloyd, nee McConnell, lived a life that was, until her later years, quite hard. This was partly by choice, since she came from stock that was not badly off. She was headstrong in her insistence on marrying the feisty young Dorsey Lloyd, as she was headstrong about everything else in life. Her body eventually started to fail her, but her mind was sharp and clear to the end. If you want to make it to age 93 in comparable shape, you might want to try her lifelong program of butter, beer, cigarettes, and childbirth.

Or you might not.

In all, I reckon I'm probably damned lucky to have some of her chromosomes floating in each of my cells. And I send my warmest regards to her, wherever she is.

ecogeddon

Still not much in the way of direct (or indirect) work on my book.

For the past couple of days I have been sunk in gloom over global warming and the environment. It was triggered by reading a news piece mentioning James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia, a work in which the famous maverick geophysicist states flatly that it is too late to avoid environmental catastrophe in the coming century. The best that humanity can do is try to mitigate the worst of the effects. He apparently states that there will be a massive die-off of humanity (no doubt among many other species), leaving survivors numbering in the hundreds of millions--no more. Even if our most radical efforts at curtailing carbon emissions were to be implemented immediately, it would be to no avail; and of course, they will not be implemented.

In my heart I've been an environmentalist since at least 1971, when the U.S. conducted a nuclear-bomb test on Amchitka Island, as I mentioned in an earlier post. I felt frustrated and angry that pollution was being poured into the world's air and water. I remember mentioning it to Dad once while we were driving over the Lions Gate Bridge.

"All these cars are just sending pollution into the air," I said. "They've got to stop people driving so much."

"A car like this is not a problem," said Dad. (He was driving a red 1971 Triumph sedan.) "Four cylinders, very little pollution."

I felt a little better, but we were still putting out some pollution.

I worried about it, just as I worried about nuclear war. (In fact the second film I made in high school was a short, apocalyptic drama about two teenagers being killed in a nuclear blast.) I thought that the oil embargo of 1973-74 was a good thing in that it got people thinking about how to conserve gasoline and not drive so much. I remember too feeling good about attending a presentation in my high-school social studies class in 1975 given by a passionate, curly-haired Brit, connected with the upcoming Habitat conference in Vancouver, about the importance of sharing the world's wealth with its starving inhabitants. I hoped that Habitat would help make a difference, and I was glad there were people who felt as strongly about it as this man did.

As the years wore on I mainly joined the inertia and indifference of society. I was always environmentally aware, but I did not make major personal efforts to effect social change. I was naturally thrifty in any case, and believed in getting the most use out of resources; I never liked waste.

Kimmie and I became environmentally conscious shoppers in the 1980s, and participated in recycling programs before these were brought to residential curbsides. I never wanted to own a large or inefficient car. In the 1990s we became members of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and more recently regular donors to the David Suzuki Foundation. I've even voted for the Green Party.

But behind it all there has been a sense of a great wave or tide, human behavior in the mass, to which each of us contributes very little but in which we are all carried. This mass behavior arises out of the values we hold, the collective sum of our values--our mythology. Our relationship to the Earth, to our environment, is dictated by our mythology. Whatever catastrophes we face are the direct result of holding the myths we live by. There is nothing that forces humans to consume or to grasp for wealth; many people do not and most cannot. It is our beliefs about the universe and our place in it that governs our acts.

Lovelock's eco-catastrophe of the 21st century is already in progress, he says. We are fish swimming in the sea of our daily lives, unaware of the tsunami we ourselves have created. I think of the great tsunami that hit the coast of the Pacific Northwest on 26 January 1700 (timed exactly because of the meticulousness of Japanese record-keeping at that date), product of the most recent subduction earthquake in these parts. It was so violent that whales were thrown onto hillsides, where their skeletons were found centuries later. There was a catastrophic die-off of sea creatures, abruptly and unexpectedly flung from their element to their deaths.

Is this us?

lunch in town

The sun is back, streaming at a 45-degree angle, barring my blue office wall through the venetian blinds.

I had lunch downtown with my sisters--all three of them: Mara, Lisa, Shannon. We seldom get together as a group (the last time was about three years ago, at Lisa's instigation as always, to have a photo taken to give to Dad), but I really enjoy it.

We met at the Steamworks Brewing Company in Gastown, right by Granville Waterfront Station where I get off the SeaBus. It's a busy, popular place with dark wooden tables and bars in a remodeled 19th-century building. The little table was barely large enough to hold our four large plates. Without intending it, the three women all ordered the same salad--some kind of Indian-influenced thing that came with papadum. I had the special chicken and blue cheese on a baguette.

"I'm not ready to be one of the girls yet," I said.

The talk first of all was of Mara's elder daughter Chella, who had just found an apartment downtown after weeks of searching--apparently a real find in a newish building at Howe and Davie, a ninth-floor suite with full utilities, hardwood floors, and granite counters. Not bad for a 22-year-old and her roommate. Interestingly, Mara's younger daughter Clare had also found digs in Vancouver just days before--a suite in a house in Kitsilano, shared with three friends.

Shannon, the youngest, also has two daughters, aged three and one, and I got to talking about one of my favorite subjects, astrology, answering questions about their charts (I have these loaded on my Palm). It was all very animated, with much back and forth--a lot of fun. I'm an Aquarius, Mara and Shannon are both Libras, and Lisa's a Leo. But I was getting into the intricacies of reading the Moon sign and rising sign, and how these reflect our emotional nature and our coping skills respectively. Shannon seemed delighted to hear about how her girls reflect their astrological signs: her moody and emotional eldest, Emily, the Cancer; and her impulsive go-getter one-year-old Chloe, the Aries (right on the cusp of Pisces, so also compassionate and caring, tenderly tucking in her little plush toys).

Lisa had a meeting to get to back at Environment Canada, and Shannon had to return to her mites, whom she'd left with a neighbor and her daughters. Lisa had a busboy take a photo of the four of us, and we headed into the cool sunshine of October.

Lisa and I walked together as far as Waterfront Station, where we were surprised to see a chase: a short, rumpled, long-bearded homunculus of a man sprinted across Cordova Street with first one, then two more, security guards in hot pursuit. The thief (I'm assuming it was a thief) was running as though for his life on his short little legs. The lead guard, a short, stocky man himself, in black, was also running as fast as he could, with adrenaline-charged energy. The thief dashed in front of cars on Seymour Street, right across the flow of traffic. I thought that would give the guards pause, but not so--they dashed right after him. The fleeing man then cut onto Cordova, again plunging right out into traffic, and out there, at the yellow center-line, the little black-clad guy caught him and hauled him down. The other guards ran up to pin him to the pavement while cars crept around them. I admired the lead guard, because the grizzled little thief had done his best to escape. It was a raw physical contest, and he lost fair and square.

Lisa and I embraced, and I went in to catch the SeaBus back to North Van.

quiet

Another day devoted more to copywriting-related chores than to my book. There was the patter of rain in the dark when I removed my earplugs after the alarm.

It's been a quiet day. Mom phoned before lunch; we talked about the visit of two of her sisters early this week (now returned to Ontario). Kim and I had an excellent time on both our visits out there, Sunday and Monday. For me it was an unusual feeling: being among family. Usually I'm not, except for visiting Mom and her sister Jackie, and occasionally seeing my own sisters and father. My aunts--short, rather dark-complexioned women, smokers, and with the earthy intelligence and barbed sense of comedy that characterizes my mother's large clan of origin--were delighted with their sister's new house in Cove Cliff, and I think also happy to see me and Kim again after 12 years (we had popped up to visit them while I was in Toronto to attend the Geminis award ceremony as a nominee). The four sisters together were almost a complete set--only my youngest aunt Jan was absent (there are a large number of uncles as well).

Except for the roar and honking of aggressive traffic on the street outside, the house is quiet. I'm reminded of other times in my life when I spent a lot of time alone, reading, writing, fixing myself basic meals in a space so quiet I could hear the faint high singing in my ears. Soon I'm engaged to pick Kimmie up from work to chauffeur her to a hair appointment. Then, for me, it's reading-time.

Yes: quiet.

working with symbols

I'm back.

Lately, as I rehabilitate myself after my long hiatus, I have been confining my blog posts to weekdays. Yesterday I missed again due to a time squeeze in the afternoon: Kimmie and I were to head out to my mother's place to join two of her sisters, here on their first visit from Ontario, for dinner. Mindful as ever of getting my reading-time in, I went to my reading-chair early and never got to the blog.

I haven't been doing much on my book for the past week or so, focusing mainly on this copywriting gig. In a burst just before lunch yesterday I did manage some more notes in my steadily growing Notes document for chapter 25 (49 pages and counting, I'm almost embarrassed to admit--though quite a few of those are extracts from research books). I just repeated and consolidated to myself some of my thoughts about the imagery and symbolism of this chapter and therefore of the work as a whole.

And what exactly is a symbol, anyway? I must have some definitions of it around...

I turned to the bookcase and pulled out my old hardback copy of Jung's The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. I checked the index for "symbol", and, among many other entries, there was this in the chapter called "Spirit and Life" (slightly compressed):

By symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in language. Spirit that can be translated into a definite concept is a psychic complex lying within the orbit of our ego-consciousness. It will not bring forth anything, nor will it achieve anything more than we have put into it. But spirit that demands a symbol for its expression is a psychic complex that contains the seeds of incalculable possibilities. The Christian symbols’ power changed the face of history.

In this context he is talking only about symbols of the spirit, but what he says goes for other symbols too--they express the inexpressible. They are the best way of saying something that cannot be said. Their very lack of explicit meaning makes them more meaningful than conventional signs--"symbols" in the everyday sense.

Since, in storytelling as in all true art, nothing is as it appears, this means that everything is a symbol. And therefore symbolism is another rack of tools in the writer's workshop. These are the tools I've been working with lately.

straying from fidelity

Today was to be a day of traveling over to Sidney on Vancouver Island to visit my father, but I had to beg off when I realized that I seem, despite all my prophylactic efforts, to be developing cold symptoms. I thought I had dodged the bullet, having fended it off for so long after Robin and Kimmie came down with it, but seemingly not. I phoned Dad and rescheduled for the Canada Day long weekend.

Kimmie and Robin are off to Metrotown to do shoe shopping. I had them drop me here; I can't face Metrotown.

This morning I indulged myself by allowing myself to explore a new story idea. After working for years on one idea, and following it down so many byways, staying more or less faithful to it, this is like forbidden fruit: the excitement of new romance. In fact, each stage of a writing project has its joys, I think. But there is the initial intoxication of an idea that captures one's imagination. "What if that did happen...?"

Before I finally committed to working on my current opus, I was "dating" a number of different story ideas. My idea was to try to follow my inspiration: which of the ideas captured my imagination most? Which one was calling to me?

It turned out to be less clear-cut than I'd hoped. Eventually I decided to commit to The Mission because I had already invested so much effort and emotional energy in it, and because it does represent the culmination of my thinking and wondering over the past 20-odd years. Everything else is only a passing infatuation by comparison--a story crush.

This idea is set in the future: the opposite of what I'm working on. I'm naturally attracted to big, strange ideas with wide-ranging consequences. That's what gets my juices going. So I'm playing with that, having some recreational fun. It may crystallize in another book.

adventure from cradle to grave

Goodness gracious. This blog's birthday came and went yesterday, and I didn't think of it until just now. Happy birthday to it.

Is it possible to generate any kind of excitement or interest around a life of the mind? Worldly adventures have their own undeniable appeal. My niece Clare is adventuring in Central America right now (and is running her own blog of the adventures). Snorkeling in lagoons, canoeing down Belizean rivers, bouncing in Guatemalan buses--these are adventurous.

What about the mind--the place where I now do my "adventuring"? Can I convey any sense of that adventure? Indeed, can I feel that adventure?

Yes, I can. Conveying a sense of it is perhaps another matter. In a small way, I've tried in this blog. I haven't engaged in physical adventure for some time now. I don't travel; I scarcely manage to get out of the house. If I did, though, I would have a nagging feeling that I'm missing the action. The action, for me, right now, is in books.

Yesterday I read further into Daniel Goleman's Vital Lies, Simple Truths. He has moved from discussing the unconscious restrictions of attention that we all unknowingly engage in as individuals, to discussing how this phenomenon--the selective permitting of only certain data into awareness--operates at the group level. Here is a Goleman's description of some of the effects of groupthink:

The first victim of groupthink is critical thought. Typically, talk is limited to a few courses of action, while the full range of alternatives is ignored. No attention is paid to the values implicit in this range of alternatives, nor does anyone stop to consider the drawbacks of these initial choices. The ignored alternatives are never brought up, no matter what advantages they might have. Facts that challenge the initial choice are brushed aside. The group expects success, and makes no contingency plans to deal with failure.

As an example of groupthink and its effects, Goleman presents the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The Kennedy administration appeared to sleepwalk its way into this botched adventure in Cuba, much to its own embarrassment. I couldn't help but draw a connection to the current war in Iraq. It shows many of the above-named signs of groupthink. Has the U.S. sleepwalked its way into another blundered adventure--this one vastly larger than the 1,500 Cuban exiles who landed in the Bay of Pigs?

Having read (and reviewed) Gwynne Dyer's Future: Tense, about the implications of the Iraq war, I also had this thought: Is Mesopotamia, often called "the cradle of civilization", also to be its grave?

This is a sampler of some of the recent thoughts in my life of the mind. It is its own kind of adventure--no less so, and indeed I think more so, than jumping into the water with the barracudas when I was in Belize as a young man in 1979.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Heavy rain on a dark day. Kimmie and I were out in doing errands, and walking through the neighborhood at Lower Lonsdale: out on the pier (alone except for one other umbrella-clutching walker), then through Waterfront Park, where we were completely alone with the grayed-out vista of the city across the water and raindrops pelting the dark-green water below the seawall.

I lay awake for some time in the night, but then fell asleep and slept in till 7:30. Kimmie had been up since 6:00; the house was already warm, and she was in her sewing-room, sewing. I keyed an entry in my journal:

7:55 a.m. Yesterday I felt a deepening of moroseness as I contemplated my life, my career. It welled up as I talked to Mom about the meaning of my current transits, and how these feel to me:

"I feel like Jack and the Beanstalk: I've given away the family cow in exchange for magic beans, and my mother has yelled at me and told me I'm a sap. I feel right now just the way Jack felt at that moment."

"But the beans are magic," said Mom.

"I turned my back on a conventional career in 1979," I said. "But I felt I had the talent to be able to find success on my own terms. The feeling is that I should have something instead of wealth and fame. Those are the things I pushed away, in favor of an artist's life--so there should be compensations."

"Like what?" said Mom.

"Like completed works that have found their audience. Or like results for all the learning and research. I read Joseph Campbell--he's done so much learning, and his learning produced results in the form of insights, ideas that he could point to. I'm not there. As Saturn transits my tenth house, it's harvest-time. I look in the basket to see what I've harvested."

"And what's there?" said Mom. "Not wealth and acclaim."

"No. Not wealth and acclaim."

"So what's in the basket?" said Mom.

"I don't know. It looks empty."

"Magic beans," said Mom. "That's what's in the basket."

As I lay awake in the dark of morning, from 3:45 till, who knows, maybe 5:00 or so, I thought about "Jack and the Beanstalk". I felt a kind of magnetism or inspiration: this story is speaking to me somehow--that's why I thought of it. I do know just how Jack felt when he was berated for being a fool. The beans aren't magic until there's a beanstalk reaching to the clouds. Jack wakes to find that the beanstalk has grown overnight: so he loses consciousness. In his state of disgrace and shame he goes to sleep, and in that state of unconsciousness the magic beans do their work. It's almost as though the beans have been planted in his own mind. Beans are seeds: hardy little capsules of sleeping life. They drop like a ferment into his unconscious—the source of imagination, and there sprout to life, to gigantic life.

The beans create a ladder from the earth to heaven: a breakthrough in cosmic plane, as Mircea Eliade would say. This was the function of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, or the sacred function of mountains: to move earth up to heaven, the realm of the gods.

Jack, who has nothing to lose, is motivated to climb the beanstalk. After all, he's bet everything on it already, and his social prestige isalreadyy lost. He may feel partly vindicated as he climbs, since the beans were magic, after all--just as advertised. But he still doesn't have a cow's worth of wealth to show for them.

In climbing the beanstalk Jack crosses the threshold of adventure. His story is a reminder that in the lore of the hero, often one who is cursed, blamed, failed, or lowly is in fact the redeemer, the one who can bring boons to society after all--as though being rejected by society helps the hero to leave it behind so he can journey to the realm of adventure.

Up in the clouds Jack will discover a giant's castle and the flesh-eating giant who lives within--as well as a golden-egg-laying goose. Again: gigantism. I think about the large, giant scale of my work, and of the ambition that must underlie it. Will it kill me? Does it want to kill me? I draw my inspiration from things like the Great Pyramid--gigantic projects. I think back to the hothouse program I was in: Major Works. Am I really up in the clouds already, in the giant's castle? Or am I just climbing the beanstalk? Is my work in progress the ladder to the clouds? A long climb...

I do have a feeling of "long climb": as I approach half way, it's equally far either up or down. What awaits me at the top is still unknown. It's not merely a jackpot up there: a bloodthirsty giant awaits, who guards the golden goose. In a sense, the hard part only begins when the long climb is done. The long climb is merely the price of admission to the zone of adventure, the realm of the gods. There I'll have to fight for my life. But I will be maximally motivated, since I have bet everything--not just my own cow but my household's--on this gamble. The golden goose is the wish-fulfilling jewel: it bestows boons, wealth, inexhaustibly.

On one level, I think of the goose as the connection with the audience, kept jealously hidden by the gatekeepers to that audience--in the case of a written work, the publishing industry. I can't let them kill me.

out with the old

I'm running out of 2005--although not as much as others around the globe, since anywhere east of about Germany is already in the new year. Vancouver is one of the world's "latest" populated places. So be it: I'm usually the last to accomplish anything.

We'll spend it quietly, as ever. Robin is going out to dinner and on to a house-party; I hear the shower running upstairs as she prepares. But Kimmie and I have not gone out for New Year's in some time. I believe the last time was when we joined her brother's family down at Pasparos Taverna for a Greek dinner, probably before going on to her niece's place to actually usher in the new year. A few years before that we went to Pierre's, a nearby French restaurant (now gone, alas) and had an excellent dinner before being served champagne and party hats for midnight.

Years ago I had a clear memory of exactly how I'd spent every new year's eve from about, well, 1972 on. That ended sometime in the late 1980s, when Kimmie and I were living together and our new years became quiet and indistinguishable. I have spent two new year's eves away from home: in 1978-9 I was with Tim in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, fighting to stay awake till midnight in our 1970 Volkswagen Westfalia, possibly even having some Spanish sparkling wine to celebrate. The ships in the harbor all blasted their horns at the stroke of midnight, just as they do here in Vancouver. In 1981-2 I was in Tel Aviv, Israel, and by chance was invited to a private party by a girl who ran a snack bar where I'd had lunch. I was delighted, since my fellow hostel-dwellers were stuck at the hostel with each other. I brought in 1982 dancing and swigging scotch in an apartment somewhere off the beach. The hostess paid me the compliment of appearing at midnight to give me a kiss to bring in the new year. Wow!

I have long been interested in the symbolism of the new year, and indeed, in my earlier (unpublished) novel, Truth of the Python, the story opens on New Year's Eve, 1990, which was also a full moon (I made it into a lunar eclipse as well). Mircea Eliade discusses the symbolism of the ancient new year, as exemplified in the great festival in Babylon, in The Myth of the Eternal Return. The end of the year was the destruction of profane time and the elimination of the accumulated sins of society for the past year. The initiation of the new year was a rebirth of society, when all its citizens and institutions would start afresh, stamped out anew from their pristine cosmic models. In ancient Rome it was the Saturnalia, festival of the winter solstice, in which public gambling was permitted and masters served their slaves--an inversion of society to show that it had become scrambled, chaotic, and ready for rebirth. This myth still underlies our modern new year's parties (decadent, chaotic) and our custom of new year's resolutions: leaving one's sins behind and starting afresh as a new person.

Tonight Kimmie is making seafood chowder as a treat, and we'll watch the next installment of Paul's Rom-Com Festival: Bridget Jones's Diary with Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth.

But first: I'll build a fire, drink some tea, and do some reading. Now that's what I call fun.

dialogue on the purpose of life

I rose with good intentions before 6:00 to get to work right away on continuing to draft chapter 19. Wet gray fog continued to swirl in the darkness outside. I opened my chapter documents, but couldn't resist also opening the file in which I'm investigating my own life: "The Hero with a Thousand Faces--annotated" file. In this I have been going through the turning-points of my own life, looking on it as a story: my myth.

Five years ago, under the influence of my mother who was embarking on writing a memoir, I bought a book called Your Life as Story by Tristine Rainer, a TV-writer-producer-turned-writing-teacher. This is a good book, and I was immediately excited by it. Rainer, like me, was a TV writer, but she specialized in made-for-TV movies, and particularly in those that told the life-stories of real people. She had learned to use her training as a scriptwriter to discover the dramatic structure of true stories, and when she branched out into teaching "lifewriting" to others, this was a large part of what she taught others--those who wanted to write about their own lives--to do.

I had a headstart, since I had already received similar training in creating dramatic structure, so I leaped in, doing the exercises in her book and inventorying the events of my life as dramatic turning-points. Excitedly I created Word files, listing events and arranging and rearranging them. I became passionate about learning more about my parents' lives, how their lives had led to mine and influenced it from before the time I was born. (I believe my enthusiasm for this infected my father and influenced him in a "roots" exploration of his own which eventually resulted in a memoir of his early life, from his birth in Riga, Latvia, in 1934, through his experiences in refugee camps with his mother in Germany during the war and in Red Cross "DP" camps afterward--a document which he shared with his children and which I treasure.)

I was excited by the idea of getting away from fiction-writing with its limitations (as I have written about before in this blog), and turning to nonfiction with its potentially greater inherent richness. The material was already there to be written; I just had to structure the events into a dramatic line.

I made several attempts. I wrote a number of vignettes of my earliest memories--looking for images, clues that might offer a ray of light into my story. I divided the events of my life into groups according to different storylines: the search for truth, my vocation as an artist, the search for love, and so on. But, as ever, I found the dramatic shaping of the events, even when the events were already given to me, as these were, difficult. If I were structuring a fictional work, I would be asking, "What is the main story? Which is the A-line?" Which was the A-line?

That question is tantamount to: what is your life about? What is the theme of your life? Or, starkly: Why were you born?

I thought I knew. Then I didn't know. Then I thought I knew again. Then I didn't again. I fiddled, I rearranged. I created new documents and rearranged the beads yet again, paring them down, relabeling them. I didn't feel I "had" it. My own story was eluding me.

I put it away. Or rather it drifted away from me, as things do: more days would stretch by without my working on it. I had made a few tries, written a number of pages about a couple of sections of my life (and my prelife), but these were only guesses. I didn't know what my story was, even though I knew all the events in it. A peculiar and in its way instructive experience.

Developing and sustaining the will to finish my current project, this book, is calling for all of my powers of concentration and commitment. The project itself is asking the question: What is your life about? Or: "You're burning up your life to write me, so I must be saying something that you very badly want to say."

This morning as I burrowed deeper into my investigative document I keyed some material from Liz Greene's excellent book The Astrological Neptune:

When Neptune aspects the Sun in the birth chart, the need for individual self-expression and the longing for the formlessness of prebirth are forced into dialogue. The subject of the conversation, conscious or unconscious, is the purpose of one's life.... Because the Sun symbolizes those values and goals which develop fully at midlife, forming the bedrock of the individual's sense of personal destiny, the Sun-Neptune individual needs to include the Neptunian world in his or her chosen path in life. Otherwise, nagging discontent, disillusionment, and apathy may undermine everything one tries to do.

Yes! For I am that Neptunian individual--in spades. Neptune in the 1st house, where it is inherently strong and dominant, and square my Sun: a strong, stressful aspect. There it is: the dialogue on the purpose of my life, and the advice that this purpose may clarify only at midlife--where I am now. The need to include "the Neptunian world" in my chosen path--the world of redemption.

Here's more:

Sun-Neptune may signify the musician, the actor, the composer, the playwright, the writer of poetry and fiction.... Neptune's empathy with human suffering and longing marks the Sun-Neptune individual's creative endeavors with a quality of universality. These forms of expression are solar as well as oceanic; they have body, although they are fluid; they necessitate conscious effort, dedication, individual choice, sensual contact and imagery. Neptune makes the Sun-ego porous, open to the waters of the unseen world.

And finally this:

Enormous imaginative and creative potential is reflected in Sun-Neptune contacts. But if one is to express that potential, one must build a strong vessel to contain the sacred wine.

As I reread this material, I started to feel better again about my project. It does indeed bear the theme of my life in some way, is the message I am bringing back from the mythological journey of my life so far.

myth and suffering

Awake at about 2:45, and lay roiled in energetic thoughts till the alarm went off at 5:30. I think I dozed for a few minutes before 6:00, when Kimmie was up and the radio went on. (It was news. The song that launched me from bed: "The One I Love" by REM.)

Robin had the early shift, starting at 7:00. She belatedly stumbled down the stairs to the basement to put on her runners, with a travel-mug of my freshly made coffee. I saw her out the door to the garage so she wouldn't have to use time locking it with her key.

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," I said. "What it does for women I'm not sure."

Robin did laugh.

"It makes them grumpy," she said.

For my part, I was working not on my research notes, for which I had no stomach, but on a document I created last night: an annotated file of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I simply saved my existing typed compressed version (which runs 38 pages in Word) under a new name, and started reading through it, typing in any thoughts that came to me as I read.

It started last night at teatime--time to push on with my research reading, which I have been enjoying very much lately: works such as A History of Warfare and entries in Peoples, Nations and Cultures. But last night I felt distracted, uninterested. I thirsted for something else--something to remind me that there are deeper, more important truths. So I turned where I usually turn now for inspiration: to Joseph Campbell. My vague plan: to apply his insights to my own current life-problems, questions. Here is paragraph 2 of chapter 1:

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.... [M]yth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Consider the boldness of what he's saying: what he's calling myth is antecedent to everything we call knowledge, art, or culture. I next wanted to remind myself: apart from metaphor, what is myth? Webster's gives this:

1a: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon

Fairly pedestrian. I turned next to S. H. Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology, where, I remembered, he has a useful analysis of myths by way of introducing his subject.

First, the Greek word mythos itself comes from temple rituals, which had both a physical-action part and a spoken part. Mythos referred to the spoken part of a temple ritual.

Hooke stresses that myth is above all intended to do something, and therefore the right question to ask of it is not "Is it true?" but "What is it intended to do?" With this functional definition in mind, he sorts myths into five categories: the ritual myth, the myth of origin, the cult myth, the prestige myth, and the eschatological myth.

Interesting, but really only taxonomic, rather than cutting to the heart of the question. For this, I turned back to Campbell himself, this time Creative Mythology, volume 4 of The Masks of God series. Yes: this was what I was looking for. He introduces his topic with a recap of what mythologies are (this is my own compressed version):

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

Those three sentences could easily be the basis of a lifetime of contemplation--as they are the product of a lifetime of study and reflection on myths.

Campbell goes on to describe the third function of a mythology as the enforcement of a moral order: shaping the individual to the requirements of his social group. In this way it is a map of how society is supposed to be.

This is what he says about the fourth function of a mythology:

The fourth and most vital function of a mythology is to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity, in accord with d) himself (the microcosm), c) his culture (the mesocosm), b) the universe (the macrocosm), and a) that awesome ultimate mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things. Creative mythology springs not, like theology, from the dicta of authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an adequate individual, loyal to his own experience of value. Thus it corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out.

On reading that, I felt a fresh surge of energy, vitality, flow through me. A functioning mythology enables--in fact is that which alone can enable--an individual to live in accord with his or her world. This is why I do what I do. To serve this function, I turned my back 26 years ago on worldly achievement and success. I have not always lived in integrity with that choice. And for not living in integrity those times, I am now suffering.

There's much more that could be said on this topic, but I'll leave it there for now.

interruption of service

A quick post to let you know I'm going away for the (Canadian) Thanksgiving long weekend--visiting sister Mara and family in Summerland, B.C. I should be back on duty for Wednesday 12 October or thereabouts.

Me? Today? Low productivity. I did manage a few notes this morning. Otherwise, I'm taking some days off from my project to commune with the quiet and autumnal, fruit-tree air of the Okanagan valley.

notes, illness, and bears

This morning, the slow, halting process of launching chapter 19. I opened the notes document and also a number of research documents: documents with titles like "Rome - 48 BC", "Rome - Jews", "Rome - Tiber Island", and "Festivals". I started reading through the material I've keyed, occasionally copying and pasting a germane section into my chapter-notes document.

Meanwhile, Kimmie took today off work, feeling unwell. She has lower-abdominal pain, and it hurts for her to walk. I made her schedule the next available appointment with her new doctor (tomorrow morning), and saw that she had an extra-warm blanket, heating pad, tea, and so on in bed where she has stayed most of the day. A chance for her to read the next Laurell Hamilton vampire book, and a number of magazines with Halloween baking and decorating ideas.

I scooted out to my mother's house on an errand, listening to the car radio, enjoying the brilliance of the sunshine and its contrast with the ever-darker blue of the shadows. It's bear country out there: a bear has been consistently raiding her garbage container and even tore into the outdoor freezer, robbing it of all its contents.

The bear issue here in North Vancouver is a growing one, with passionate feelings, most vocally expressed by those saying that the bears are a wonderful part of our local culture, and we should respect them because they were here first. My own view is that British Columbia is not deficient in wilderness habitat; we are a few people sprinkled on a vast wild landscape. The idea that bears are or should be part of our urban environment, the way crows or squirrels are, is to me clearly absurd. Local bears used to be wary of humans--but no more. I predict that the public tolerance for bear activity (that is, a ban on shooting them) will undergo a sea-change when the second or third child is mauled. As of now, only the odd dog has got it. The healthiest thing for everyone--bears included--is for them to start being afraid of us again.