To thine own self be true

Air quality 7 Sat. evening in Edmo. Distinct burnt forest fire smell. Ironically, this past week’s situation is much worse than all the fires heavily reported by the media back in July. At no point in the past week has most of the local media said anything beyond humidity and haze. (Lone exception the Sun who had a small piece about incoming smoke from forest fires in B.C. and the N.W.T.) The California fires have sent smoke into B.C. and western weather systems have pushed this over. It would be nice if local meteorologists were less superficial, indifferent, and openly acknowledged to the public what is causing the breath-risky, ashen ‘haze’.

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ps/The PCs continue to be in denial/double-thinking the public as usual, running “Remember to breathe” ads this week.

ps2/The new meteorological word for smoke appears to be haze. More doublespeak; the weather types are in denial and can no longer call a spade a spade.

All this recent muggy, sweaty weather in Edmo has reminded me of the summer of 1967 in my hometown. Mosquito fogging trucks out in the early mornings. Temps between 30 and 35 more often than not. And then those steamy nights without a breeze.

I used to work as an orderly (remember them?) at Winnipeg General that and the following summer. The day shift was a zoo–as today, way too many people–nurses and doctors–too many chiefs constantly telling you what to do. Evening shifts from 3 to 11 were busy, too, in some ways busier what with supper and back care/rubs. I can remember getting off at 11 and then going to my friend’s to listen to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on his impressive stereo, then wandering home 1-2 to fall asleep exhausted; waking up around 9 or 10, having a few hours to do whatever in daylight before gearing up for a non-stop-perspiring-return-bus-ride to the hospital. That shift seemed to have no real life or ample time to it.

Easier was the 11-7 night shift which I ultimately worked the most of. Patients would be ‘down’ or asleep when I came on the ward. The small staff would have a short meeting–there was always one to start a shift to hear the reports on patients–day shifts were fun with meeting rooms crowded and people standing–there were so many people on the floor during the day! Then it was mainly a matter of staying awake all night–often reading, off somewhere by myself in a small tv room at the end of a ward. The head nurses usually left you alone.

In the morning, I would sometimes help putting out early-arriving breakfasts before the day staff hit the floor, though generally, they put out both breakfast and lunch. (Incidentally, what made any shift longer and more exhausting would be working in one of the old original wards, which lacked A/C. Working on a new A/C’d ward was always a break from the long hot day outside.)

I remember walking into the hospital from the side, staff entrance–heat still rising from the sidewalk on a typical oppressive night. In the morning, the air often was as stale or the same, a few degrees lower, though I always felt the freedom of a prisoner moving forth into daylight. Sometimes I would ride that high and do errands or go downtown shopping, staying up till totally exhausted I would fall into a recurring heat-induced sleep, waking up around 7 or 8 for a belated sup. Sometimes, I’d hook up with friends before heading sluggishly for the hospital. (Those fogged, muggy mid-days were a time of great musical learning and freedom. I remember buying songbooks and soaking up folk and folk-rock songs that I would go on to play in public for decades.)

No, there has never been anything quite like those strange sultry Winnipeg summers. Entering the working world, unconventionally–no one else I knew worked evenings or nights–to make some dough for first- and second-year university.

Imagine, though, the great privilege and relevance of reading Blaise Cendrars’ poems or T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes” at 5 a.m., looking out onto the quiet dawn of vacant city streets:

The morning comes to consciousness/Of faint stale smells of beer…

One thinks of all the hands/That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms…

And when the world came back/And the light crept up between the shutters/And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,/You had such a vision of the street/As the street hardly understands.
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A very formative time, indeed. I will write again of the hospital and my first encounters with death up-close, down the road. Another privileged view which removed any romantic notions of what happens to all of us after death.

there are many people in our society who wake up, restless again, as they start the day, palpably feeling missing pieces and rather uncertain about themselves and others. And then there are a good many, too, who wake up ready to make their first complaint or to initiate the first argument of another decidedly negative long day.

A nice, strangely gentle, romantic drama in WW2. A nun and a U.S. marine are stranded alone on a Pacific island and go through various struggles to survive. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr are perfectly cast–her genteelness, his roughness. A little easier to take than the histrionics of The African Queen by the same acclaimed director John Huston. A 1957 Cinemascope classic. “Will they stay together if they’re rescued?”

at the Edmo Fringe. Recommended if you enjoy very good high school productions. Of most interest is the one-act-play itself written by Tom Stoppard before he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his first hit. It is a layered spoof of numerous whodunit conventions with many satirical jokes, so is quite entertaining.

The Majestic (mini) Theatre at the provincial museum in Victoria. Playing everyday is an excerpt from Chaplin’s Gold Rush. Above, on screen, the iconic potatoes/shoes scene. Air conditioned movie theatres–why so many of us still go to summer movies on muggy days like this one in Edmo.

He was, most of all, a man of words, spoken and written. Arisen from comic-book and popular song worlds with epiphanies of the possibilities of poetry and Roget’s Thesaurus (1962) thrown in some ten years later.

Through long-term serious reading and teaching, an ever-growing awareness of words as conciseness, practicality, nuance, irony, humour, associativeness, connectedness, and words as ‘basic usage’ via sound, meaning, ideas, and consciousness.

On the home stretch, there was nothing but comprehensiveness, integrity, richness, complexity, intensity, unlimited discriminations, great depths of beauty and truth, considerable knowledge and wisdom, in addition to innumerable, unexpected possibilities of infinite or transcendent kinds.

So much of these two have happened simply because of territorial disputes and wars based on greedy, opposing political and economic agendas. Much of the world’s unnecessary violence and suffering of peaceful innocents arises from the above. No, war and the collateral damage of displaced, exterminated peoples have long been too much with us. Something there is which is hugely blind in male war-mongering types. As Dylan Thomas wrote, “Hands have no tears to flow” (“The Hand That Signed the Paper”)–a distinct fundamental lack of empathy and compassion where inconvenient others are concerned. (“Outa my way.”)

For me, that remains as large a fundamental, inconvenient truth as Al Gore’s planet alert. Those who want power and control will do anything to get it as the Holocaust and Stalin’s dead millions proved. Of late, the rest of the world is largely helpless as Putin does his thing in the Ukraine. The nuclear weaponry arsenals are too many and stockpiled for more peaceful countries to take a serious moral stand as the Allied powers once did against Hitler in WW2. Dr. Strangelove that close all over again some 5 decades later.

“Man’s inhumanity to man/ Makes countless thousands mourn!” as Robbie Burns (1759-1796) once wrote. And so the so-called lessons of history and literature continue to be ignored by the evil, greedy, and power-hungry. In a large global context as well as many country contexts, that continues to be the main story and truth about how and why humans suffer and mourn.

John Schlesinger’s wonderful study of a restless, uncentered modern woman in the mid-60s won Julie Christie her well-deserved Oscar. Here is a portrait of a free-love spirit who loves to play and have fun, but hasn’t the remotest clue of who she is or what would truly make her lastingly happy.

The movie is an English version of La Dolce Vita with many of the same themes: willy-nilly hedonistic sleep-arounds, tv journalism, fashion photographers, paparazzi, commercialism, decadent well-to-dos, hollow religiosity, and no understanding or appreciation of art and civilization. Diana (Christie) even becomes a princess like Grace Kelly or Princess Di in one of the movie’s many enduring timeless strokes.
Aside from Christie’s letter-perfect, nuanced, shifting portrayal of the borderline personality protagonist, there are very fine spot-on performances by all the latter’s men, especially the sleazy Laurence Harvey and sincere Dirk Bogarde who is finally ‘corrupted’ by Diana even as he exacts his mixed-feelings-revenge when least expected.

At one point his character talks about convention, and there is so little of it here beyond surfaces. The movie was made at a time of massive change and is one of the most insightful satires ever of ’60s English society, hitting all the right, hypocritical, phony notes. This is also one of the first movies to present gay characters in a realistic, casual manner upfront amidst the chaos and indecision of Diana’s progression-descent into her ‘compensating fall-back’ role as an Italian princess.

The cynical pet fish symbolism is worth a viewing by itself, and speaks most highly of the satirical movie’s deserving-Oscar-winning screenplay and the hollowness of the uncommitted, faithless lives it reveals.

Darling is an excellent one-of-a-kind document about women’s increased freedom in the 1960s, and looks ahead to the other memorable Schlesinger films–Day of the Locust, Midnight Cowboy, Far from the Madding Crowd, and, arguably his best English film (about an unusual love triangle)–Sunday Bloody Sunday. No, England would never be the same again after this film and Antonioni’s cool, clever Blow-up, filmed at the height of swinging London Carnaby Street culture, amazingly the following year.

Everyone has their favorite Lauren Bacall movies. I remember her best as sexy Marie in To Have and To Have Not: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” Also as the truly annoying Mrs. Hubbard in Murder on the Orient Express. Best known to some, perhaps, as the prettier half of Bogie and Bacall. Like Bogie and Robin Williams, we’ll not see her like again. Most of the current actors out there today couldn’t hold a candle to any of these truly talented three.