An almost perfect day. I taught a yoga class early this morning on line, a weekly practice I enjoy. (My classes are archived here.) And then I spent an hour in my on-line weight training class with the wonderful Katherine DeBoda focusing on my arms with just enough sweating anguish to leave me exhausted by the end. I am so grateful for my yoga practice that combines movement, shapes, breath, and suspension of my worries for an hour or so. And I am grateful for my strength training over the last year that has enhanced my physical well-being and my functional movement. It is a wonderful companion to yoga asanas. Like a canoe and a paddle. Each propels me forward.
And so it begins
After my morning practice, I bathe and dress to visit my neighbours who gather once a month together. This time we arrive one by one at Kyla’s house surrounded by woods and gardens. The creativity of her front room is devoted to her weaving and textile work. And it is reflected in the vibrant painting hanging above her dining table that awakens in me a longing to visit the banks of the North Saskatchewan and the cliffs along its edge. We gleefully demolish her French Apple Cake that is moist and fragrant with two different kinds of apples. I am grateful for these long and new friendships and the meandering conversations that move between local news about our neighbourhood and city to the lives of our children in far flung cities to the latest health crisis.
In my case, I report on the lamentable but remarkable heart attack experienced by my brother while he was bicycling on a country road. He fell onto the road when the attack struck. And his Apple Watch called 911. An ambulance and the police arrived. Ward was not interested in going in the ambulance to the hospital but fortunately the watch also called his emergency contacts. My sister-in-law on the other end of the line insisted Ward go to the hospital where he was diagnosed with the serious congenital heart condition Aortic Stenosis. He will be having a pig’s valve inserted into his chest in the two weeks. I hope to travel to Toronto to stay with im during his hospital stay during and after his surgery. All in all, a wonderful illustration of the positive aspects of Artificial Intelligence.
Ordinary Notes
I leave my friends after an hour in this comforting setting to go to the university for a noon-hour Canadian Literature Centre event in Rutherford Library South at the University of Alberta. While I’m stricken by disastrous effects of the one-third budget cuts, I feel a flutter in my heart after 32 years of teaching and researching and writing on campus before my retirement in 2019. The speaker today is the Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe who is visiting from York University where I completed my PhD. Sharpe is interviewed by an exceptional UofA English & Film Studies colleague Michael Bucknor. The focus is her brilliant work of fragmentary writing and images she calls Ordinary Notes. As Bucknor quips, these are “extraordinary ordinary notes”. The room is welcoming and crowded, abuzz with excited talk between students, faculty, and community members.
Sharpe reads from a few of the notes and talks about the images, one a beautiful photograph of her grandmother and mother dressed for Halloween at five years old. The commentary is touching and moving. And searing. She describes how her mother taught her about beauty. Discussion weaves in and out of memoir, memory, hermeneutics and politics.
Sharpe describes how she interpreted a museum’s memorialisation of lynching. The subject turns to the differences between spectatorship and witnessing. How one becomes a spectator in the act of looking or a resistant witness. “Spectacle is not repair.” And I think about how I can no longer tolerate watching the Gaza genocide unfolding in Palestine these days. Two years have passed since it has been named a genocide and nothing has changed but the body count and the spaciocide – the appalling destruction of a people and a place. What is the point of me masochistically looking over and over and over again at another emaciated child or a corpse being carried through wails of grief and loss.
I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult to both name and to narrate. – Ordinary Notes #83
A young man sitting beside me asks a powerful question: “Is it the case that fascism transforms witnesses into spectators.” And Sharpe agrees. Discussion turns to how witnessing is an act of resistance. And how today in Trump’s world witnesses are banned from spaces and it is now illegal to photograph ICE and other police arresting immigrants in the US. No more witnesses to document the horrors.
Afterwards at the end of a long line of waiting interlocutors, I go up to thank Christina Sharpe for her talk and confess that at my age, I’m disappointed things haven’t progressed in a more positive direction. Events are disastrous for so many at the moment. Later I think about how this commentary drew a connecting line between the history of lynching and the many murders of Black men today. I reflect on how my disappointment in Second Wave Feminism’s progress in light of the centuries of African American history is to be at the very least naive.
Earlier I had also confessed to Sharpe how difficult I find it to bear witness on the suffering around me. Nonetheless though twice a month I stand with other women in a silent vigil at the market witnessing with Women In Black the violence in the world, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, and elsewhere. “I can’t bear witnessing any longer,” I say, surprised at what sounds like depression in my voice. Sharpe smiles and gathers up her papers to leave as I am last in line and it has been a long and demanding speaking event. Later I read about Sharpe’s 2018 visits to two landmarks in Montgomery, Alabama, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial documents lynching in a powerful sculpture and explores the relation between slavery and the prison industrial complex. While Sharpe visits the exhibition, a White woman approaches her crying and apologizing. Sharpe doesn’t respond and later she writes that this stranger “tries to hand me her sorrow … to super-add her burden to my own. It is not mine to bear.”
Around a table
After the talk I walk five blocks to my car and drive home where I go to bed to read and think and finally fall asleep in a nap that is longer than anticipated. Awakened with a start I return to the university where I meet up with other dear friends. Dinner is wonderful. Shared stories with committed and engaged women and a discussion of Fiona’s new course which educates people about the perils of gambling especially after the celebrity promotion (especially to young men) and popularization of digital gambling that is imprisoning too many in chronic addiction and impoverishment.
Universal
After dinner we walk to the Myer Horowitz Theatre newly renovated with a swoosh of scarlet wrapping the upper gallery like a large logo of red tape. The speaker is Alex Neve, lawyer by training and the former twenty-year head of Amnesty Canada. This is the third in a series of five lectures on Human Rights that will become an Ideas series on CBC Radio. I remember how Phyllis Webb, my favourite poet co-founded Ideas in 1965 – her intellectual and poetic insights were prodigious.Tonight’s talk is on the concept of universality and how that aspect of human rights is often not respected. Neve’s stories from his work around the world are gripping and his analysis is powerful.
During the question period there are repeated references to Gaza and genocide. And I think about how just as I arrived in the theatre friends texted me that the humanitarian flotilla of boats approaching Gaza has just been stopped by Israel. The boats are boarded and there are arrests. The fact of the genocide is brought home just beyond the shores of the devastation.
The question period turns to Trump’s America and Linda to my right whispers under her breath that we Albertans too easily pass over what is happening at home in Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party province. How is it that we Albertans continue to turn to the US as the demon state while ignoring our own backyard with the UCP book ban, vaccine denial, public healthcare destruction, Trans persecution, lack of education funding, Christian Nationalist extremism, and environmental destruction.
During the questions, one hesitant young woman asks how she can follow in Alex Neve’s footsteps and he describes how important the human part of human rights is. He suggests she can study human rights law but parallel to this must be the volunteer work and immersion in the human rights community as well.
no mud
no lotus
Filled with ideas and inspiration, I return home to my pup and my bed. I am working on more of my yoga classes and watch an old video of a zoom yoga class I taught last January to see how my teaching has developed.
In the class I retell the classic Buddhist teaching story of the Lotus and the Mud. You can’t have the lotus without the mud, writes the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han. Beauty in this Buddhist tale is in the startling brilliance of the lotus blossom, the flash of enlightenment, and the bliss always rooted in the those moody bloody roots.
And I think about how Christina Sharpe’s mother inspired her with beauty. On Sundays, the mother and daughter would sit together reciting passages of Black writing and sharing cake. An image of love, mentorship, and artful beauty. Sharpe describes how beauty inspires her to this day.
I return home with my thoughts and this writing.
Truly it was a good day.
Note: This blog post is also published on my RiseUpYoga.CA website.
No Gate No Lock 