Beware the Poet!

There is something about this time of year that makes me want to read poetry. Something in the fading of summer into autumn, the coolness in the air makes me nostalgic and want to read verse.  Truth be told I have found only two poets that I really like to read although I have tried others. Pablo Neruda, who writes love poetry like no one else, he profoundly understands that love is not in trite sentimentality but occurs in everyday things. and the second is Robert Frost who seems in every word to capture the feeling you get on a long walk in the country or the woods on a fall day when the afternoon sun is warm but you know that the evening will be crisp and at the end of your walk you will put on a warm sweater and sit by the first fire of the season. Frost to me is autumn. 

Perhaps it is just my nostalgia for the romantic autumns of my youth, I always remember being happiest in the autumn, the weather and the general collective mood always suited me best, the crisp weather, warm sweaters and whiskey by the fire. I even remember listening to the song “Puff the Magic Dragon” and thinking that he frolicked in the Autumnus, which was a place that I imagined where it was autumn all the time, with warm afternoons and cool nights, and the trees perpetually wearing their fall colours, I was disappointed as an adult to learn that the song was actually referring to the autumn mist and was a veiled reference to pot smoke. Nevertheless I still continue to believe that somewhere there is land called Honolee where it is autumn all the time.  

So why write about poetry? It seems anachronistic in our digital world. Is there time for poetry in the computer age, and is there time for poets. I think it would be hard to imagine sitting around with our friends and reading poetry to one another and debating Wordsworth versus Whitman and even if we did we would be unusual and our efforts would likely feel forced rather than a natural compulsion of our human spirit; even more so if we were to tackle any contemporary poets, which to be honest I am not sure I can name any, much to my sadness, (perhaps P.K. Page, or Leonard Cohen might redeem me). Poetry, it seems requires a certain languidness even when it is short, like a limerick or a Haiku (nobody loves a good limerick better than me, something about a man from Nantucket.....). For me anyway it requires time, it is forces me to slow down and relish the words on the page, to think about meaning that is not obviously stated.  I particularly enjoy reading poetry out loud, or having it read to me. I can imagine if I lived in India in at the height of the mogul empire being part of Urdu poetry circles, hard to imagine the same things these days. 

It’s equally hard to imagine a time when poets were considered revolutionaries and incendiary, the words they were the lightening rods of social activism and often imprisoned for the words they wrote on the page. Beware the Poet! Consider the recent 99% demonstrations that have been going on, there is nary a mention of the poets. 

But perhaps poetry is not as far from us as we might think. Facebook and Twitter are now the mediums of social change and we might argue that the 140 characters allowed by twitter is a sort of modern Haiku. Perhaps our facebook wall is a sort of Renga between ourselves and our circles of friends. Poetry is not about form but substance. Similar to the renaissance man who is not about style and from but of substance and character. Poetry is not something we create but something we seek. 

I asked a colleague to read this blog, shamelessly I might add, and after reading it she was both surprised because it was not the image that she had of me, but more relevant she asked me if I was a poet. I never thought about this blog being poetic, it does not follow any poetic form that I know of, this forced me to expand my notion of poetry beyond form and function. The lesson I learned of poetry is not to seek it in libraries or books but to look for it in the everyday to see it in my day to day. Poetry is a state of mind, and an expression of that state of mind, whatever form it takes. My blog doesn’t rhyme but it comes from my soul and hopefully speaks to yours; is that not Poetry? 

Malthus, Calhoun, and the Technology of Urban Design

I was thinking this week about condos, I was showing off my own and pointing out the design elements relative to the majority of condos that are being built in my city right now, which are largely all glass and have as a key design element that they are long and narrow, somewhat like bowling alleys and in the main have only one bedroom, perhaps with a closet masquerading as a den.  Now I am not an architect or a designer, but I have an eye for good design and what particularly interests me is the impact of design on human life and interaction. One of the many quotes that I have often admired from Winston Churchill is, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”. Churchill recognizes how the design of our buildings impacts our social and political culture and how they shape us into who we are for good or for ill. What culture then do I live in where the buildings we are shaping are ones where people want to live in isolation and what future are we shaping where our primary choice of residence is alone narrow and exposed to the world through floor to ceiling glass? 

All this isolation got me thinking about my grade 10 biology class and a video they showed us when we were studying Malthus, the great granddaddy of population and demographic thought. The video concerned the Rodent experiments by John Calhoun, where he created an fixed space environment with ample food, water, nesting and protection from predators for as many mice as they could reproduce. There were some shocking findings; firstly the rodents never actually reached the capacity that had been provided and once overcrowding set in massive psychological disruption and significant socially deviant behavior occurred and rather than retreating to a place of greater equilibrium, the entire population died off They were not able to recover from the psychological damage. 

In the later stages of the experiment before annihilation of the population there was always something that struck me about the behavior of the rodents, there were some that became very aggressive, sexual deviancy became the norm and the majority of the rodents withdrew psychologically and lived highly isolated lives in the midst of massive population. (I am summarizing significantly the findings of the study, but I think the point is made). This brings me back to one bedroom bowling alleys in the sky, and the not insignificant statistic that single resident dwellings are the fastest growing dwellings in Canada and most of the western world. Part of me has always wondered if we aren’t entering the later stages of of Calhoun world.  

Now if I was a hippy and an “end of the worlder” I would latch on to this study as proof that world is coming to an end in our time, we need only look at the warnings of Calhoun. But I am neither, so I did some further research on Calhoun and found that he felt that his research was misunderstood, in fact most of his research was in the design of better systems to enable healthy population growth in situations of overcrowding. His objective was to demonstrate how over population would destroy the world but rather to show how design can actually make living in overcrowded populations not only possible, but possibly pleasant. What his research highlights is not the end of the world but one that is actively designed. 

For Calhoun there is no “invisible hand” that will always ensure that the world is hovering around an equilibrium, that markets will always be in perfect balance and distribute the goods of the world, both material and psychologically in a perfectly rational way. He is far from a socialist of government control, for it is through the elements of design and systems design that we must regulate our behavior, not through government ownership. But what I think he would argue is that through the design of our living spaces, our urban spaces we shape our future just as Churchill suggested, and to take an active role in such is not a question of ideology but of survival and if we don’t want to be as dramatic as to suggest survival let us say at least a pleasant existence. 

When we decide what condos to build, how to design our cities, our transportation, all of these are decisions about who we want to be as a culture, as a people, we can not leave these decisions to the developers alone to do so is to abdicate our moral responsibility for our role in the human development, for we are not independent of our structures, and human life exists in cities and buildings. The Chinese call it Feng Shui, we call it urban design but whatever you want to call it, it will determine our future 

Reading Dr. Zhivago

I enjoy Russian Novels. I think more than any other writers they simply understood the great storytelling capability of the novel. They are epic in every way, in both page count and narrative, I have re-read War and Peace (Not to brag, I read it first when I was eighteen and I needed to re-read it some years later to decide if I really liked it or whether it was just teenage intellectual pretension, happy to say it was better the second time) and Anna Karenina and will probably tackle the Brother’s Karamazov again soon. If it wouldn’t burden him with a lifelong risk of teasing and having to explain his name I would probably name my first born Alyosha. 

So recently staring at my face in the window of the used book store that I frequent was a very renaissance version of Dr. Zhivago. Now I’ve seen the film and I’ve recently been debating with a friend whether it is a more romantic movie than “Love Actually”. I’m not going to rehash that argument here, but let’s just say watch both and you will might get a glimpse into the difference between romanticism and sentimentalism (perhaps a future post). 

There is, as is typical of the Russian novel, lots going on and I could probably write a book about the book, and Boris Pasternak writes with such poetic ease that I wish he would never stop writing, but I am going to hone in on a particular thought which is not even the main point of his book but helps to develop his theme of revolution and has intrigued me enough to spend some thinking about it. 

The book takes place in the foment of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War and the gentry have been taken down a significant notch from where they had stood prior to the revolution. Zhivago upon his return to a Moscow in mid-revolution comments on his friends and acquaintances which I will quote at some length

"His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past. 

It had been easy enough to do so, as long as the order of things had been such that people with means could indulge their follies and eccentricities at the expense of the poor. The fooling, the right to idleness enjoyed by the few while the majority suffered, could itself create an illusion of genuine character and originality.  

But how quickly, once the lower classes had risen and the rich had lost their privileges, had these people faded! How effortlessly, how happily, had they given up the habit of independent thoughts - which at this rate could never in fact have been genuinely theirs!" 

I am struck by this quote for a number of reasons and I think this blog shares a theme with what BP is expressing. Who are we when we are stripped of the comforts of our existence. Would we still maintain our character? And while we may, or may not, experience upheaval like the the Russian Revolution and our way of life may not come to end in our times, it is a relevant question, because it asks who we are when stripped of the outer circumstances of our lives. 

I have always been fascinated by this idea of true character being revealed in adversity. In the Gone With the Wind I was always struck by the fact that Ashley Wilkes the son of the leading family in the region was destroyed and became a shell of a man when the world in the South collapsed and Scarlett picked up the pieces of what was left and built something new. Prior to the civil war Ashley was educated and measured man and Scarlett was brash and impetuous; when the world collapsed all of Ashley’s learning was unable to help him survive in a new reality, but Scarlet’s spirit caused her to soar and thrive. Similar to Zhivago’s friends, Ashley had become “dim and colourless” without the trappings of civilized southern society. 

Who are we without our iPhones and our gadgets and a corporate world that rewards some pretty unusual behaviour and where selfishness poses as post-modern self-actualization. If civil society collapsed who would we be. I like to think, and admittedly I am blinded by love, that all of my friends have bigger characters than their paycheques, but truth be told none of them have been put to the test to my knowledge, nor have I. Who among us would survive as independent thinkers and who would fade into the woodwork? It’s a scary thought and hopefully none of us will ever have to contemplate it.