Strolling

Although winter began quite late, it has basically been cold and miserable here in Toronto since January of this year. It's getting nicer out, so today I decided I would take my son out for a walk.

Here's the thing - although he's six, I still put him in a stroller. I don't always do this, only when I know we're walking quite a long way. And the stroller I have is huge, so he remains comfortable in it.

That being said, people look at my son and I quite strangely - after all, he is six. I, like many others, kind of felt that this is something he would "grow out of". But then, this is because I live in a world where driving is the norm.

The reality is that I walk everywhere - I don't own a car. No one thinks twice about strapping a 6-year old into a car to drive three blocks to a store, and yet putting the same child in a stroller when you're walking 5k seems like coddling.

But I wonder about my own thoughts around this, and how they are shaped by my own paranoia about "raising" a child, and the very idea of child development, and we see how certain things, like putting a kid in a stroller, seem awkward, but driving a child the same distance seems perfectly normal, and one begins to see how arbitrary this process is.

This post is even a kind of parental defense of the abnormal, or an apology for not driving.

Isn't that also kind of odd?

On Running and Running Away

M,

I haven't been writing as much, partly because I've been busy, but also because writing can be, well, difficult.

Did I ever tell you that I took up running again a few years ago? It was part of a personal renaissance, or so it seemed, but which looks, in hindsight, more like a second adolescence. I used to run as a kid, and in running again it seemed as though I took on a lot of the qualities I had back in the day. Like hubris - I felt indestructible. And then I hurt myself and it was all over.

A friend once confessed a dark secret to me and then, later that day, fell down a set of stairs. They always linked their falling with a kind of karmic retribution for having hurt me with her truth.

I dismissed this attitude from my friend. And yet there is a part of me that wonders if maybe the injury that keeps me from running anymore was due to a terrible secret of my own which I have kept to this day, the result of something which happened right before the injury.

And, of course, I was keeping it from the same friend. I mean, our friend, M.

So then it's quid pro quo, right? The last time I ran this friend watched me cross the finish line, with tears in her eyes, and at the time I thought they were tears of pride and of celebration, but now, I see them as tears of sadness, of something that had already been lost then, lost in that secret, a secret she didn't know, but which she understood enough to feel that all was lost.

It was just a matter of time and although I believed that we had all the time in the world, it turned out we had already run out of time. The reality is that this secret had doomed us long before she herself ran away.

M, you know I am being cryptic for a reason - I am always cryptic!

But can you answer one question (I've never asked you a question before!) - did she ever tell you our secret?

I honestly don't know if she did, but I know that, when you read this, you will either know exactly what I am talking about, or you will read this and wonder if I am trying to tell you something the only way I can, which is right here, because there is no other way for you and I to talk, or to have this conversation any other way.

But know this - if you know our secret, then I am glad that you were able to begin with an honesty that eluded us, and if you don't, then maybe you should ask her what that secret might be.

But if you know the secret, you will also know why our friendship is in tatters and it is not simply because I am a bitter old fool. Indeed, maybe know ing our secret is why you and I correspond like this.

It is all too easy to dehumanize our opponents, and our correspondence, if nothing else, shows a desire from both of us to strive toward some kind of understanding. And for that I am grateful, because understanding eludes me nearly everywhere else. Whether you like it or not, this correspondence demonstrates that we mean something to each other.

I mean something to you.

But then I know it is difficult for you to ask her what this secret might be, because it would reveal our secret, M, namely this correspondence. And of course the greatest irony is that I will never know anyway because you will both keep it all a secret! What strange richness there is to life!

But M, honestly, I can't really help you anymore, I can't help you find what you are looking for, even though I know you are looking to me for some kind of guidance. But you will not find your answers here.

Instead, you need to ask yourself why people run, and what they ran toward, and if they might not just begin to run again. Are they just injured, and have found themselves a healer? But then, we only go to the doctor when we are sick, right? So are they still running away, or are they actually running to you?

I don't know the answers any more than you do. Perhaps the problem is that she has maybe set me up as someone who should have those answers, because I kept so much of her. Supposedly.

Do you wonder why we have had this correspondence at all, M? I know why I have, but I do wonder what motivates you - if it's fear, loneliness, even hatred. Perhaps it's just curiosity, but if I know our friend, I suspect it's likely also anxiety. Just please don't let it be jealousy.

M, I am happy to continue to tell you stories, to talk, but if you are looking for answers, you will not find what you are looking for here. Maybe you know, deep down, that you will not find it from me, only from her. I have tried to provide some manner of understanding to you these past few months, but at the end of the day, if you are looking to me for understanding, you are in a much darker place than perhaps you want to be.

Or look at it this way - in a month, suddenly none of this will matter. Hopefully, I won't matter anymore. Perhaps this correspondence is just a feature of the distance between all of us - I have honestly tried to bridge that gap, but you know how unsuccessful that was. And you probably want to believe it to be entirely my fault, but then, we have this ongoing correspondence, so perhaps you know all too well there is another side to all of this.

But you will not find what motivates her by getting a sense of what motivates me, because there's a good chance I've been making everything up the whole time. If she's told you anything about me, it would be that I'm good at telling stories that aren't true.

But at the end of the day, you must know this - if she remains a secret to you, she is a complete enigma to me now.

Some helpful advice on academic networking

Holy Smokes! I'm actually posting on my blog as though there's a blogosphere and it's like 2006 again!

Here's a really nice post from the Tenured Radical on networking in academia. Enjoy!

Happy Belated Women's Day

Had I actually been at a computer yesterday I would have said it then!

Hermann und Dorothea

Perhaps is it just this particular time in my life, but I am becoming increasingly aligned with Goethe's vision of the ideal woman - I have done no reasearch on this, but there is a thread, from Werther to the end of Faust II, of a particular kind of femininity that is so appealing, so powerful, that his uptake of the Romantic idea of salvation through a woman actually begins to take on the character of plausibility.

Now I know in saying this that I open myself to charges of sexism, and perhaps I will disawaow these comments at some point. But today, I just want to enjoy my new favourite work by Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea.

In what is basically a simple love story set in the aftermath of the French Revolution (yes, it does sound silly when you put it that way), Goethe does something magical. Don't want to say much more, when it's better to let Goethe speak for himself:

Da versetzte der Pfarrer, mit Blicken die Sitzende pruefend:
Dass sie den Juengling entzueckt, fuerwahr, es ist mir kein Wunder;
Denn sie haelt vor dem Blick des erfahrenen Mannes die Probe.
Gluecklich, wem doch Mutter Natur die rechte Gestalt gab!
Denn sie empfiehlst ihn stets, und nirgends ist er ein Fremdling.
Jeder nahet sich gern, und jeder moechte verweilen,
Wenn die Gefaelligkeit nur sich zu der Gestalt noch gesellet.
Ich versichr' euch, es ist dem Juengling ein Maedchen gefunden,
Das ihm die kuenftigen Tage des Lebens herrlich erheitert,
Treu mit weiblicher Kraft durch alle Zeiten ihm beisteht.
So ein vollkommener Koerper gewiss verwahrt auch die Seele
Rein, und die ruestige Jugend verspricht ein glueckliches Alter.

Faust I

My life is really taken up with Faust right now - I mean Goethe's of course, if one can say that Goethe's Faust is Goethe's, and not say everyone, but...

There's a lot to say, and I suspect I will say more here, but I just wanted to share some of my favourite moments - after all, a scholarly paper is no place for that, so why not a blog entry.

Am I crazy to think that Gretchen is just unbelievably likeable? I mean, is it just because I'm a man, or is her combination of simple honesty with a kind of humanity in the understanding of her own failings what makes her so compelling?

Nowhere else do we get this than in the scene from Part I entitled Am Brunnen. It's Gretchen and another girl gossiping about a yet another girl who finds herself pregnant out of wedlock, and the horrible social consequences of the pregnancy - the scene comes right after Gretchen's own affair with Faust.

The other girl leaves, and Gretchen says:

Wie konnt' ich sonst so tapfer schmälen,
Wenn tät ein armes Mägdlein fehlen!
wie konnt' ich über andrer Sünden
Nicht Worte g'nug der Zunge finden!
Wie schien mir's schwarz, und schwärzt's noch gar,
Mir's immer doch nicht schwarz g'nug war,
Und segnet' mich und tat so groß,
Und bin nu selbst der Sünde bloß!
Doch - alles was dazu mich trieb,
Gott! war so gut! ach war so lieb!

I think it's the "doch" that really gets me here...if only we were all so capable of this kind of introspection...

Karate Lessons

Like most six year old boys, my son loves to play fight. As I've discussed before (perhaps too often), he loves Star Wars, and, as he has rather cogently noted, "Star Wars is all about fighting" (this wasn't a good thing for him, by the way). But it occurred to myself and his mom that his interest in the Jedi Code and his interest in punching might lead to an interest in martial arts.

When the idea of taking some kind of martial art came up, he was initially very excited to do it. However, for whatever reason, we never got around to signing him up for anything until this past January, and when he went, he refused to do it. And I don't mean refused, he really kind of lost it.

As someone who did karate as a kid, I was genuinely perplexed - his fear was that people would punch him, even though he knew that the entire point of learning a martial art isn't to fight, but to learn how not to fight. Some of the instructors could certainly be intimidating, but you quickly learned that their demeanour wasn't based on aggression but on discipline.

But all he could see was the downside of the situation, and I can't help but think about why - by his own interests, this should be something he wants to do, but in practice...not so much.

Is there a point to this? Kind of - I think it shows how much of a role time plays in introducing these kinds of disciplines to someone, especially children - if he had started when he was 4, it would have probably been OK, but he has enough self-awareness now to see what's going on in there and see nothing but danger.

And maybe he will take it up in a few years. I think something a lot of us do, with kids, and with ourselves, is take life's interests as somehow permanently pre-formed, and perhaps what a 6 year old can't do, an 8 year old would be very much into.

Our lives are dynamic and not static, and maybe the one thing I learned in dragging a screaming child to karate lessons that he never actually set foot in is that there is always hope, there is always a chance that next time, he would set foot into the class, and that would be all the more wonderful thing to see because it was a struggle for him.

In a world where so many people live unhappily in their comfortable lives, the struggle to learn karate, or another language, reminds us that it is life's challenges, and not the latest handbag, that make people who they are, for better or for worse.

That being said, do I intend to drag my son to karate until he finally goes? Well, that's another story...I think instead I'll give it some time, and try again in a year.

Ego Flos Campi

M,

There is a personal irony in the fact that this work, by Clemens non Papa, is something I listen to nearly every day, in a recording by Stile Antico - the sound is so warm and beautiful, and they take it so slowly, revealing a density to the work that eludes the faster performances.

But that's not ironic, is it? Wait, it will come. But I needed to get the beauty of the performance out of the way. At some point, I had decided that I would make this a motet for my wedding, by which I mean of course, some hypothetical wedding, and not one that is actually happening, although I must admit that one rarely thinks about wedding plans unless there was someone with whom they could imagine (or dare I say, fantasize) walking down that aisle, and taking their soft, delicate hand into yours and slipping a ring onto her finger as, oh, something like this unfolds in the background.

Having been married, and having had a choir sing at my first wedding, I was reluctant to do this again. But then I heard this piece, and I decided I would be OK with a choir, singing this work, very slowly, perhaps not as part of a service, but as a musical gift to my then-future-past wife.

Do you know where the words for this piece come from? The Song of Songs, the Bible's liminal space. This piece is like a soundtrack to a wedding that will never happen, or at least, I won't be there. But I can really only talk about this because I'm OK with it - my silence, and you know this, is more often a sign of pain than of joy. And you can rest assured that, as of right now, M, I have never been happier. Honestly.

Oh right, the irony. The words "Ego Flos Campi" means something like I am the flower of the field. Heidenröslein.

I can see your face now - The work that sings of the wedding that will never be recites the very moment when the possibility of that wedding died, auf der Heiden.

It puts a smile on one's face, doesn't it? How did I not know this until today?

Life constantly amazes!

On Conducting

At some point in my life, I wanted to be a conductor.

For myself, one of the more difficult things about wanting to be a conductor was enduring the constant question of what a conductor actually did on stage. I was always kind of lousy describing it, because it's really one of those things that you have to experience, either as a performer or as a conductor, to understand.

At this stage, I would probably say that the role of the conductor is to negotiate some kind of coherent performance between the musicians before them. However, there's a great article in The Morning News right now that does a much better job than I, in part because instead of describing it, the author actually stands in front of an orchestra and conducts it. Moreover, he's an amateur, with the blessings that this status can bestow, like an open mind.

It's a wonderful read, in part because the author, unlike many of the people who asked me that question back in the day, is prepared to consider the possibility that the conductor actually does something. That's a refreshing change!

Snow Day

In defence of my fellow Torontonians, who, this morning, seemed to have completely overreacted to today's snow storm, I would encourage people to take a look and see what this storm did in the US - we appeared to have gotten lucky!