As I wrote the book about Rui, I tried hard to avoid the trap of sentimentality, that sinking into the tar pit of maudlin affection where wallows Marley, but hopefully not me. It's just so easy to be sentimental about cute animals, particularly the furry mammalian ones with big eyes. Why else did the World Wildlife Fund choose the panda for their emblem, or Greenpeace fight to save baby seals rather than factory farm turkeys? Humans seem to be hardwired to feel lovingly protective when we see babies, which is probably a useful evolutionary trait that stops sleep-deprived parents from hurling their mewling infants into live volcanoes, most of the time anyway.

So it's interesting to muse on the meaning of the success of Thomas Kinkade, the self-described "painter of light". KInkade died a month ago and after having been the best-selling American artist a few years earlier. His work grossed $53 million over the eight years between '97 and '05. There were several hundred Kinkade signature galleries, and he had "skilled craftsmen" who would paint light effects by hand onto his posters. His Hallmark cards sold at Walmart. Roughly one out of every twenty US homes had a copy of one of his works.

Kinkade's work is utterly sentimental. He tries to have works that are all light, all cheer, all ups. A typical work has an immaculate old house, festooned with a light frosting of snow, illuminated by the setting sun, and a wreathed gaslight, while bright internal light streams out of every window of the house as though (in Joan Didion's words) the interior of the house were on fire. There is a wisp of smoke curing out of the chimney and the snowman (scarf, carrot nose, coal eyes, top hat) who faces us with welcoming arms extended is illuminated by the sun's dying rays. Overhead, a bird floats through the sky, while underfoot a perfectly cleared path leads the eye between picket fences, past the children's sled, and up to the house.

The Taoist symbol of the yin-yang balances dark and light, and Taoists hold that all yin or all yang is fatally unhealthy. Mountains need valleys, without which they would be merely high plateaus. I remember chuckling as a preteen at the Peanuts’ cartoon in which Lucy screams, "I don't want ups and downs. I only want ups and ups and ups." Lucy would have been one of those with a Kinkade painting on her walls.

I had a student once who tried to write a Kinkade love story, one in which there was no dark, just love cascading over love possibly ad infinitum, but certainly ad nauseum. Romeo might have murmured, "Oh, she does teach the torches to burn bright," when he first saw Juliet, but he knew that it was only the dark surrounding the torches that made their brightness matter. Romeo and Juliet, as a love story, is not lacking in darkness.

Every picture tells a story, and every story has tension. It may be the tension of wanting something other than what you have, whether it's the story of creation in which G_d wants the world to be something other than formless and empty, and makes it so; or a Beckett play in which the protagonists want something, anything, different from what they have. But in any story there is that tension that moves the story from opening to close. A painting too has a dramatic tension, whether it's a Rembrandt or a Rothko.

But not Kinkade's works. Their world is perfect, and static, and therefore dead. A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." There is no shadow side in Kinkade's world; even his snowman casts no shadow. Jung wrote, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Kinkade’s death at 54, of an overdose of valium and alcohol, which would seem to suggest he might have done better to put the dark shadows into the paintings.

The name “Israel” means “He who struggles with G_d”. Genesis tells how that name was given to Jacob after he triumphed over an angel with whom he had wrestled all night. And indeed there is a tradition in Judaism, unlike any other religion with which I’m familiar, of arguing with G_d. A typical example is Abraham, the first Jew. He argues over the number of righteous people there needs to be in Sodom for G_d to forgive them, and talks G_d down from 50 to 10, which is good bartering with anyone, let alone the Creator of the Universe. But when you struggle, you don’t always win. And it seems clearer that the State of Israel, in their struggle with G_d, has lost.

The story of that struggle has been told as a joke, going back to the founding of the state. Uri Avnery says that G_d asked Israel when it was born in 1947 what it wanted to be, and Israel answered that it wanted to be Jewish, democratic, and stretch from sea to sea (Mediterranean to Jordan). G_d thought about this, and said that Israel could have any two of those, but not all three. There was a time, maybe up until recently, when Israel could have settled for democratic and Jewish, and taken the ‘67 borders, and allowed Palestine to be a separate country. But that time has passed. Now the Jewish settlers own so much land in Palestine and use so much of the water in Palestine that it is no longer possible to create any real Palestinian state. “Real” means a contiguous state with enough power to satisfy the Palestinian people. Nor is it possible to pull the settlers out of Palestine, as the power in the Israeli parliament depends on rightwing support. But leaving the settlers there without Israeli protection is also impossible, politically. So Israel will stretch from sea to sea, and now must choose between democratic or Jewish.

It can’t be both because there are more Palestinians than Jews, and the birthrate difference will only increase that numerical difference in the future. So if Israel chooses democratic, it stops being a Jewish state because Jews will be a minority there, as they are in all other countries. But if Israel chooses to remain Jewish, the the Palestinians in Israel will have fewer rights than the Jews, and that is not democracy. It will not be an easy choice, but it has become the only choice, as is increasingly clear to observers world-wide.

There are reasons why this has happened, both because of Israeli and Palestinian intransigence, and because of unwillingness to settle for less than they wanted on both sides. And at this point the reasons why we have gotten to this point don’t matter. In the realistic world of politics there are only two questions that matter: where are we now, and where do we go from here. So where are we?

Carlo Strenger, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been a long time supporter of the two state solution. Now he writes, “There is little use for us to decry the folly of Israel’s policy of the last forty years. We need to look at the situation as it is now: no Israeli politician will be able to retreat to the 1967 lines...The problem is that the longer the status quo continues, the more impossible the two state solution will become. In fact, it may already be dead. Hence the real question for liberal Jews and gentile friends of Israel is where we need to aim now."

Gideon Levy, another Israeli writing for Haaretz, says, “The battle... has been decided. All that remains is to ask what will replace the solution that was put to death. There will not be two states. Even a child knows the alternative: one state. There is no third option.”

In America observers are saying the same thing, though more hesitatingly. Robert Wright, in the Atlantic Magazine, says, “The most common cozy illusion is that, though the time may not be right for a two-state solution now, we can always do the deal a year or two or three down the road. The truth is that a two-state solution is almost completely dead, and it gets closer to death every day.” Stephen Walt quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu, “We are strengthening Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and we are strengthening the Jewish community in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs. But there is one principle that we uphold. We do everything according to the law and we will continue to do so." Walt observes, “So Netanyahu's aim is clear: keeping control of the West Bank forever. And the reference to "doing everything according to the law" is revealing, because "law" here means the law of the occupation, which is the same law that has allowed a half a million Israelis to move onto the territories conquered in 1967 over the past forty years.”

Andrew Sullivan, in The Daily Beast, has a devastating critique of those who defend the Israeli government’s willingness to negotiate a two state agreement, by asking over and over “Why continue to build the settlements?”, concluding at last “The answer is that the settlements are there because the current Israeli government has no intention of ever dividing the land between Arabs and Jews in a way that would give the Palestinians anything like their own state; and have every intention of holding Judea and Samaria for ever.”

So the dream of a democratic Jewish state in Israel is over. What is left? There are, Stephen Walt muses, three possible options. He says, “Once the two-state solution is really and truly buried, then what?... Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to ensure a Jewish majority? Binational democracy and equal rights for all residents of a single state? Or permanent apartheid, with the Palestinians confined to self-governing enclaves under de facto Israeli control?” I see horrible bloody struggles on the path to any of those solutions, but I can not see any path that leads anywhere else. With the waves of Eastern European immigration, Israel is more right-wing now than it has ever been, and the west-bank settlers are there to stay.

So Israel’s struggle with G_d to be all three – Jewish, democratic, and stretching from sea to sea –has been lost. Israel has chosen for a variety of reasons, (historical, strategic, emotional, religious) to stretch from sea to sea. Now it must choose whether to remain democratic or to remain Jewish. It cannot do both. That is a tragedy of historic dimensions, and sadly it will be a long bloody struggle within Israel as well as with the Palestinians till the solution becomes clear. But fantasizing that a two-state solution is still possible does not help. We have passed that exit, irrevocably.

I feel as though I have nothing to say. I sit here and look at the white empty screen in front of me, and I feel a sense of dread. I have done the responses to the Croft that I need to do this week, and I have started the process of gathering the bits and pieces from the internet that will be jigsawed together into this week’s Tikkunista, but so what? By Friday, the new Tikkunista will be out, and the gathering process will start over again. By Sunday, people will have posted on the Croft, and the responding will start over again. You push the rock to the top of the hill, and then it rolls down, and then you get to push it up again. The Greeks thought of that as Zeus’ punishment, back before they’d joined the EU and found out what punishment really was..

Of course there are the dog walks, and the cooking, and the consumption of media. But the walks end, the food is eaten, and the media gets forgotten, increasingly quickly. And I can write about political issues, but so few people see what I write compared to big media, so what difference does it make? My friends who read Tikkunista tell me what a valuable source of information it is, but I am reminded of the passage in the Talmud that says, “The ‘truths’ we desire support what we already know.” I run articles about the inevitable tragedy that global warming is bringing to our poor planet, and those who agree with me feel reinforced in their views. Does this change anything? 

Mostly, I enjoy the work I do on the Writers’ Croft. It is the best part of teaching, trying to help mentor people, to help them shape their stories so they resonate more powerfully. It doesn’t have the judgemental component that high school almost universally does, (You wrestle powerfully with complex ideas, but your spelling and grammar need much more attention. 73%. But it’s still sitting in front of a computer typing words, and while I hope that more Crofters publish, and that their books sell millions, I harbour deep doubts that my responses are making much difference to the chances of that happening. Yes, the butterfly flapping its wings in China may cause a tornado in Kansas, or so chaos theory tells us, but there are a lot of butterflies doing a lot of flapping without all that many tornadoes. Meanwhile, I’m still in Kansas, when what I really want is a yellow brick road to a magical city.

Is this just despair at ageing, noticing how the sun is dipping closer to the horizon today than it did yesterday, of recognizing that it is no longer that long till it becomes Dark? Rabbi Yannai says in the Pirke Avot, (a 2000 year old collection of rabbinical sayings) “Reality is more complex than we would like. If we insist upon it making sense, we will find ourselves despairing.” His conclusion as to what that means for our lives is that “Where we can stand up for justice let us act. Where we are confounded by Truth, let us keep silent.” But when I see injustice in the world, the existence of a system that rewards some people’s work with millions and beggars others who have worked equally hard, is that a truth in the world before which I should remain silent, or an injustice against which I should stand? And there is too much injustice to stand against, given the racism, sexism, religious intolerance, financial inequity, and cruelty that surrounds us all, living even as we do in a better time and an easier place than most of humanity.

In Voltaire’s Candide, Candide despairs of the world and concludes the only solution is to tend to his own garden. And I suppose that the question of whether what I do is enough, or has meaning, is not really an important question. In front of me there lies a space of time within which I can do things, and the only question that is real is what I’m going to do. Whether those actions have meaning or not may not even be a question. 

Tonight the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs start. When I was a boy growing up in Québec, that would have felt passionately important to me. Today, as a older man living in Toronto, it seems a matter of complete indifference. I think that does represent some form of progress; even if I am unsure where meaning lies, I have discarded some of the illusory beliefs I once had. But if you skin an onion, discarding layers as you look for an Answer at the core, you end up with nothing left but a nasty smell on your hands. As I feel less and less passionately about things I once cared about, is that maturity or giving up? Or is that a false distinction, and (as the Pirke Avot tells me) the ultimate goal is to pass beyond clinging to this world? 

These thoughts all seem hugely indulgent. If I were living at a subsistence level, trying to find enough work to get the food that would keep my family alive, or trying to escape arbitrary death falling from drones in the sky, I wouldn’t worry about these issues. But of course I never liked the liver my mother served any better when I was reminded that people in Asia were starving. (I was never even convinced that they would have liked the liver either.) That I have been unfairly blessed in this world’s distribution of spoils is an unquestionable truth, but not an answer to any question. But just as I had to write this piece without the answers it wanted, so I have to live without the meaning. Perhaps I will go and take those layers of onion, sauté them with some garlic and butter, and fresh asparagus. It isn’t the Answer, but at least it’s better than liver. 

I’ve always liked doing things myself. I once sewed a shirt, with no pattern or model, just to see if I could do it. I even wore it, which drew a number of comments from ex-friends. I used to challenge myself to cook a dish after I had tasted it once in a restaurant, without resorting to a recipe. Sometimes I wound up eating crow. I made speakers for my living room, two “Bozo 1201"s, dodecahedral monsters that hung in space looking like a mutant offspring of a twelve–sided desk calendar and the death star. They looked very impressive, but had lousy sound that an equalizer only partially cured. As a teacher I was always drawn to individualized education, and after I left high school, I set up my own online teaching course, where my students and I could choose what we did and how we did it without any supervision. I put out my own magazine, Tikkunista, and no one tells me what goes into it. Some people like my choices and subscribe, and some don’t. But I love the freedom to choose what I think is worth putting in.

The idea of writing a book crept up on me. Diana and I were going on a five week retreat to Gaspé, and we decided spend mornings doing creative work, which meant I had to decide what I would do. And I thought that as I’d been blogging about Rui since we’d gotten him nine months earlier, I could take my blog posts, and meld them together and I’d have a book. That was almost five years, or five drafts ago. What I didn’t know about writing books has filled many books, some of which I now own. But my book, The Year of Living Doggedly, has been to an editor I hired, and came back for rewrites, and is now at a copy-editor who is finding a surprising number of typos I managed to miss, and soon will be ready to head out into the world.

I chose to self publish for a number of reasons. Perhaps fear of rejection by publishing houses was one, or (more likely) fear of an editor wanting major rewrites and changes. But I learned from Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail” that the average first book sells about 100 copies. And my editor, who had previously worked for both McClelland-Stewart and Penguin, suggested that while he liked my book a lot, a story about a middle-aged man and his dog wasn’t what major publishers were looking for. So after mulling it over, learning that big publishing houses pay 5–10% and expect you to do most of your own publicity anyway (until your book takes off, after which they’ll support you. It’s a lot like banks, who will gladly lend you money if you can prove first that you don’t need it.) Self-publishing may sell less, but you get up to ten times as much per book. So it became clear that I was going to self-publish.

There was a drawback, which was that I didn’t know anything about self-publishing. But I bought “The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing”, and promised myself I would look at it as soon as I’d finished the last draft. When I did, and I started talking to self-publishing companies, I gradually learned that self-publishing companies don’t make their money from books; they make their money from authors. Many of them (Ex-Libris, Balboa, iUniverse) have tiered publishing levels. You got more publicity at the higher levels, more design advice, more editorial advice. The costs ranged from $500 to $5000 or even $10,000. How did one choose?

I stumbled onto a link that led me to tipm, The Independent Publishing Magazine. This is a wonderful website, that evaluates what different self-publishers offer, and why one is better than another. Each gets a two digit score, and several pages of evaluation. (Or you can see 59 different self-publisher’s scores compared here.) It became clear that there were two sites that were superior to all the others: Create Space (a branch of Amazon) and Lightning Source (a branch of Ingram). Tipm referred me to The Book Designer, which had an article called “Print on Demand: Create Space or Lightning Source?”which explained the fine reasons for choosing either. The short version is that if you can do layout and design yourself, Lightning Source is better. If you need help with tech stuff, Create Space is better.

So I’m going with Lightning Source. I’ve gotten the application completed, and while there are still several months of work before the book is published, it’s feeling more like something that will really happen, and less like a pipe dream. Lightning source is totally POD, print on demand. That means they don’t print the book until someone buys it. No remaindered copies, no having to buy a thousand copies yourself to flog to friends. Just logon to Amazon, or go into Barnes and Noble or any of ten other stores and order your copy, which will be there two days later. Lightning Source charges about $3 per book, for a 150 page book; Amazon charges $2; the rest is profit, after the initial $50 set-up cost. E-books should pay better, but I haven’t started that exploration yet.

The next question, how to publicize my book to the audience who might enjoy it, is a complex question I expect will take up much of my creative energy for the next year. I have some ideas, and my expertise with computers will be useful. But I remember one of the key moments in the genesis of the Writers’ Croft was my insight (in the heat of a sweat lodge) that it wasn’t about making money. This book isn’t about making money. I want, with increasing passion over the past five years, to publish a book that is professional, and of which I can be proud. If the world falls in love with it, and Rui and I wind up doing coast to coast tours with all the squeaky toys he can tear up, that would be great. But that isn’t the pivot that balances the success/failure teeter-totter. Getting the book launched into the world is the pivot, and now I know how that is going to happen. Beyond that, it’s all gravy. Or kibble, from Rui’s point of view.

Prelude: So, another music piece. I felt a bit frustrated by the Cohen one, in that it tried to cover too much too quickly, and was (to me) not going as deeply in as the works deserved. So this is about a single song, and while I'll post the lyrics below, before the piece, it'll all work so much better if I can persuade you to click here and listen to the song before reading on. Thanks.

(If you really like the song, it's a free, and legal download, here, by the way)

======lyrics============

The Good Old Bad Old Days
Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird

I followed you over the border
down to the Spree
you were standing alone by the water
waiting for me
we wandered along by the river
the towers were shrouded in haze
we kissed by the wire
and they all held their fire
in the good old bad old days

can't you see just lovely it couldn't have been
when the whole world was closed like a door
I remember those nights down in old east Berlin
with the microphones listening under the floor
and every stamp in this passport of mine
was a record of kisses you gave
yes we suffered in style
and it's all in the file
in the good old bad old days

lai da dai...
all the streetlights were waltzing together
crimson and green
and your dress was as gray as the weather
oh what a dream
we built up a city of whispers
and classified war dossiers
i gave you control
of my papers and soul
in the good old bad old days

yes wasn't it miserable wasn't it grand
when the world had an iron divide
and people could take a political stand
just by singing a song for the opposite side
now nobody cares who you are anymore
and nobody cares what you say
it's liberty's curse
but was it really much worse
in the good old bad old days

now Alyosha is gathering flowers
every May
and the statue of Marx by the tower
is facing the other way
by the wall is a souvenir table
with hammers and sickles displayed
on new watches that work
and they're sold by a Turk
in these good boring bad new days

now I'm working for euros and drinking alone
where we used to spend marks at the bar
and weeds have grown over the border of stone
that cuts through the town like a surgical scar
and now so many streets on this faded old map
are like names written over a grave
yes it makes me so sad
cause it wasn't so bad
in the good old bad old days

lai da dai...
so don't look for a final solution
here in Berlin
for capitalist prostitution
comes from within
and don't worry about revolution
we'll just keep the aesthetic clichés
in this market of fleas
selling klezmer CDs
for the good old bad old days

so Genossen, tavarishchi let's make a toast
to a time when the state knew your name
yes we all say na zdrovye, l'chaim und Prost
to that braver old world where we all are the same
where nobody loses and everyone wins
just as long as each comrade obeys
but that's all in the past
so let's raise up a glass
to the good old bad old days
yes that's all in the past
so let's raise up a glass
to the good old bad old days
lai da dai...
===========================

Deconstructing the Wall

"I'm not a klezmer fan. Pushes my shtetl buttons."
Jewish friend, in conversation about Daniel Kahn.

Daniel Kahn, the Klezmer folk punk rock circus musician has a new demo song, "The Good Old Bad Old Days”. It is a post-modern revisioning of both klezmer music and the act of making klezmer music. The song’s lyrics are about history, specifically of Berlin, the city to which Kahn moved from his native Michigan, and a city that obviously has deeper echoes and resonances of various histories and pasts than most cities, if you're making "Jewish" music.

For Klezmer is the music of Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Eastern Europe. It was played in shtetls, the Jewish ghettos at weddings and other Hasidic celebrations (the Hasids were the great dancers of Jewish tradition.) After almost dying out, it became hugely popular about 20 years ago, spearheaded by Itzhak Pearlman's album "In the Fiddler's House" and by a clever and gifted band from New York, The Klezmatics. But most Klezmer music tended to be nostalgic: it was the music of a culture that had disappeared in the smoke of World War II ovens. Even though it became increasingly popular in the 90’s, and got blended with everything from country to folk to gospel, it always felt a bit like a music whose roots had been burnt away, one that was being kept alive in glass vases.

Can this old music be modern, or post-modern or is it only a musical mirror of times and places past? Marc Ribot, an experimental musician who has played with everyone from John Zorn to Tom Waits, says of klezmer,“The musical language of signification is left intact and unquestioned. In virtually all these projects, klezmer signifies “Jewish,” while the juxtaposed genre signifies modern, hip, or American. I haven’t heard much ... that forces the listener to question how klezmer, undeniably the music of some Jews in some places at some times, became a signifier.”

“The Good Old Bad Old Days” starts off like a traditional Klezmer piece. It has the sound of a love song that mourns the passing of a time and place where the singer had a great love, sort of a Jewish, "Those Were the Days." The music is mainly Kahn's accordion, and it sounds like a nice enough traditional song. But the lyrics start in the second verse to get a bit twisted, as the singer asks, "Can't you see how lovely it couldn't have been," a line one might miss, but one that calls into question the very nostalgia the song started by invoking. The verse goes on to mourn the loss of surveillance and oppression, though still staying within the traditional klezmer style, and entering the first of the Lai da dai choruses, choruses that sound so traditional that you might be lulled into forgetting anything strange has been going on.

The third verse calls the past time a dream, a time of whispers and dossiers, in which the singer lost both his papers and his soul to the East German love the song is addressed to. The next verse begins to explore the ambiguity of the chorus line, "the good old bad old days". It was both miserable and grand when you could be political by singing a song, Kahn sings in this political song. Now the song goes on, no one cares what you sing about or who you are... and he wonders if the old days were really all that much worse?

We're half way through the song when the point of view changes. Now we're looking not at the past, but at the present, and where the Berlin Wall once stood, souvenir watches with hammers and sickles are being sold, by a Turk in "these good boring bad new days". Kahn starts to take apart the song he is singing in the next verse, noting that now he's singing for Euros rather than marks, and that Berlin itself has weeds "over the border of stone/ that cuts through this town like a surgical scar". And perhaps this modern world isn't that good, and perhaps the old one wasn't that bad.

We go into a traditional lai da dai chorus, but as we come out of it the music is more punkish, more modern, definitely more angry. The outrageous verse that follows starts by saying, "Don't look for a final solution, here in Berlin" Berlin being where Hitler plotted his "final solution" to the Jewish problem. But this time the problem comes from within, from Kahn himself (and of course, from you, and from me). He's no longer thinking about any political revolution; he's using klezmer which he calls an "aesthetic cliché", and he's in "a market of fleas, selling klezmer CDs". A market of fleas is both a disparagement of capitalism and a flea market, so the song invokes its own music as a signifier of the "capitalist prostitution".

The closing verse mockingly uses German and Russian (and Hebrew) calling on all comrades to toast a time when the things they did mattered, and the State at least felt you were important. But that time is over, so even the toast itself becomes an aesthetic cliché, and the song ends with a mocking acknowledgement of the meaninglessness of saluting what is irrevocably past.

What is so extraordinary about this work is that it does exactly what Ribot observed modern klezmer doesn't do, which is to acknowledge how it is used to signify something that has passed. It questions, sardonically but with a good beat, what the meaning of a klezmer song is. By first using and then discarding a nostalgic music celebrating nostalgia for past times, it meets Derrida's criteria for deconstruction, that there is "nothing outside the text". And it does that while being danceable, meeting Emma Goldman's demand for what a revolutionary work should do.

It is truly an amazing piece of work. Daniel Kahn has moved a long way from the shtetl.

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Let’s start with a metaphor. You and your partner are financially well off. You have good jobs, and a reasonable mortgage on a two bedroom house in a trendy downtown area. You can’t yet afford all the improvements you’d like, but after the mortgage is paid off in five years you hope to. You both have reasonably new cars, you go out to plays, last year you went to Bali for two weeks, this year you’re thinking Iceland would be nice. Most importantly, you’re not in debt, except for the mortgage. Life is pretty good.

Or it was, until your partner developed a cocaine habit. It started as a recreation at a friend’s party, and you both enjoyed it. But while you didn’t like how wiped out you felt the next day and stopped after the first time, your partner felt the going up was more than worth the coming down, particularly if there were a few lines more of cocaine to help. Flash forward a few years, and your partner is spending a huge amount of your joint income to maintain his addiction to coke. You almost missed the last mortgage payment, your credit cards are perilously close to being maxed out, and – to understate it – there’s a lot of tension on the home front.

Then your partner sits down and says he recognizes there’s a financial problem and that it’s time to do something about it. He’s had a talk with his old pal, the economist Don Drummond, and Drummond has come up with a solution. You’ll both move into a shabbier house that’s out in the ‘burbs, cut those foreign vacations back to a week at a local cottage, and get by with a single car. And that will solve your problem. What do you think?

I’m guessing that you think what I think, which is that it doesn’t even address the problem. The problem is the cocaine addiction, not how you pay for the addiction. And if your partner won’t talk about his addiction, and says that’s not on the table then, sadly, your relationship may be near its end.

Don Drummond is an economist, from the Toronto-Dominion bank, who was appointed by the Ontario government to look at how the $16 billion deficit Ontario currently has might be eliminated, “without considering any alternative sources of revenue”. So he came up with a list of what could be cut, from pensions, from government housing, from education so as to balance the budget, just as he did for your partner and you. But over the past 15 years the governments of Ontario, both Liberal and Conservative, have issued cuts to capital, corporate and personal income taxes totalling $15 billion per year. The problem isn’t that the government is spending too much on social services; the problem is their nasty addiction to supporting the 1% by giving them tax breaks. And the question of how spending can be cut to balance the budget doesn’t address the real issue any more for the government than for you and your partner.

We’ve seen this trick often enough before. When John Snobelen become Minister of Education in Ontario (1995) he famously said, “We must create a crisis in education.” (He thought the microphone was turned off.) And he did create a crisis, and there were huge cuts to education in an attempt to fix the crisis, which was just what he had planned. Naomi Klein used Snobelin as an example of what she termed, “The Shock Doctrine”, the creation of a crisis so as to allow unpopular “reforms” to be forced on a population as a solution. Other examples she cites include Margaret Thatcher, who used the Falklands War to push through Conservative reforms; and the Iraqi war, after which Western oil companies were granted 64% of Iraq’s oil reserves. What is currently happening in Greece is another example.

When I was a young man of twenty-one, I moved to England for a year. My first week wandering through the streets of London I happened on a card game, one I would later learn was called “Follow the Queen”. You put down £5, and watched the dealer move three cards around, pointed out which one was the queen, and won or lost. I watched two men somehow lose the game, and each time I knew where the queen was. So I put my fiver down, and just as the dealer was moving the cards, one of the confederates jabbed me in the ribs and shouted, “Hey, look at that!” I took my eye off the cards for a second, and that was that. By the time I figured out that it was all a setup, all three were long gone.

As the old saw goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” I certainly never played “Follow the Queen” again. But the shock doctrine is just a larger scale version of the same game, one that gets us to take our eyes off what’s really going on at the critical moment of a created crisis. If we look at how to balance the budgets by cutting social services, and take our eyes off the tax cuts that our governments have been doling out, we’ll be standing in the streets scratching our heads and wondering where all our money has gone. The answer to the question of what spending cuts should be made doesn’t matter, no more for Ontario than for you and your ex-partner. That’s not the question. The question is how to cure that addiction, whether it’s to cocaine or to tax cuts.

I was 15 years old, on a YMCA summer canoe trip to La Verendrye provincial park, about 500 kilometers north of Montreal. The jagged Canadian shield was seriously remote, stunningly beautiful, and left me with a permanent love of wilderness canoeing. This trip, my second, went into the Cabonga reservoir, a lake of 677 square kilometers, created a few years earlier by a new dam. Our tripper, who was in charge of the five teenagers and two canoes, was a 22 year old. He thought we could navigate the newly flooded reservoir and get to where our next food cache waited, using a 5 kilometers to the centimeter map, about 1/20 the resolution of a standard canoe map. He was very wrong. We reached the place where we had hoped our food would be, and found instead a dead end bay. That meant we were out of all food except tea and brown sugar. We paddled back for two days to try another bay. A day later, half way down that bay, we met some American fishermen who told us where we needed to go. The dehydrated Lipton onion soup they gave us may well be the best soup I’ve ever had.

As with a number of incidents in my adolescence, it wasn’t until several years later that I realized just how close to major disaster I had been. But I was left with a deep sense of the importance of maps, and of researching the territory into which one was heading. Perhaps that fear of being lost without a map was what drew me to science, which is the name we give to many of the maps that explain to us how our world works. Science supplies the way to navigate through our world. It certainly isn't the only valid map. Religions are maps of humanity's wisdom traditions, and wisdom lives outside of the world of science; magic is a useful label to stick on science we don’t yet understand. Our own emotional experience provides another map, one I wouldn't learn to read till years after my canoe trip. But science is both universal and testable, and offers us all a map of how the physical world can be navigated.

A map, as Wittgenstein famously observed, is not the territory itself. Any map leaves out most of what is there, and simplifies the complexity of the world so as to be a useful schemata. We use different maps to navigate different problems: a map of the political ridings in my city is not the map of streets which is not the map of rivers and hills. Each of those maps might be essential if I am running for office, or running to an appointment, or running from a flood. To be lost, whether it is in the city, in love, or in your life, is to be without a map that tells you how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Until recently, I had not known that anyone would deliberately choose to be lost.

But now people are. The Canadian government is making a strong effort to muzzle its scientists, forbidding them to talk to anyone about the results of the work they are doing. The same government has cancelled the PEARL northern research group, which last year produced studies showing that the ozone layer, the layer of atmosphere that protects life on the group from UV, was further degraded than ever before. The long census, which measures who Canadians are, and how they are living has been eliminated. The research network into immigration and settlement programs in Canada has been eliminated, so there will be no accurate reporting on how immigrants to Canada are managing to fit in or not. As the founder of that group observed last week, “If you want to make policies based on opinions instead of what the facts are, you get rid of the facts.” Our government may not be able to eliminate reality, but it is working very hard to make sure that we don't have accurate maps to navigate through it. Why? Because, as Stephen Colbert famously noted, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”

Sadly, this isn’t just a local psychosis. In the United States, the Republicans are financed by large corporations who don’t want to have to pay for cleaning up the pollutants they dump into the rivers, bury in the ground, or blow away into the sky. So they support candidates who deny global warming, evolution, carcinogenic effects of pollutants, or the efficacy of birth control. These corporations, and their political figureheads, want to steer the ship of state without using any maps beyond a spreadsheet of what will maximize their profits in the immediate future.

If these people wanted to navigate their own canoes without maps, heading into the wilderness of the future, I would wish them godspeed. I would look forward to reading the dramatic stories that would eventually report on how the few survivors cannibalized one another in a desperate attempt to survive in the uncharted swamplands.

But we are all aboard together. As Chesterton wrote, “We are in the same boat on a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.” Mutiny on a boat has been a capital crime, except when the orders one disobeys are unlawful. When the captains of our ships start giving orders to destroy the world in which we live by polluting it till we cannot breathe, by heating it till its waters rise and drown millions, be selling foods that poison us, is it still mutiny? If the driver of your car decides to close their eyes because they don’t want to see reality, is it mutiny to replace the driver? Blindness in pursuit of profit is not a useful map, at least not for 99% of us. I've been down dead end bays in flooded wilderness, and have no desire to go there again.

My book about the first year of living with Rui, The Year of Living Doggedly, ended with the story of my letting him take me for a walk. He was on leash, but he got to choose where we went and the pace at which we went there. That the first time I let him lead a walk happened a year into our relationship says something, I admitted in the book, about the extent to which I was deeply in touch with my inner fascist. I ended with what I thought at the time was merely a clever trope, that Rui was probably pleased with how well his training of me was coming along. But four years later I have come to see how far he still had to go, and how well he has succeeded.

In describing the first time I put Rui on a leash, I commented on how he leapt around like a fish on a lure. That was a good metaphor for how I believed training a dog had to go. The fisherman doesn't move, and by alternately letting the line out and reeling it in, he pulls the fish closer and closer until – exhausted with the effort of resistance – it lies placidly at his feet or walks by his side as they go down the street to the park.

Much of the book (particularly in the early drafts) was concerned with Diana and me trying to shape Rui into a dog who heeled, and came back – consistently – when called. Now I recognize how hard Rui was working at shaping us into owners who would accept both his exploration of any interesting scent near the sidewalks, and his decisions on whether there was some real reason to come. Both the humans and the dog have largely succeeded in reaching their goals.

If I take a tight grasp on Rui's leash and say “heel”, he will heel as we walk. But any play in the leash brings out the play in the dog, and he will explore and sniff, and stop to mark those things that need to be marked. His decisions are based on evidence far more subtle than my coarse human senses can detect; he will stand and sniff a post intently for over a minute before deciding whether it does or doesn't need any further additions. He will leave an investigation if I tug, always, and leave if I say, "Let's go," sometimes. Left to his own devices, he would move down the street in about the same time I take, but at a faster pace, with more stops.

Unfortunately, I can't let him off leash on the streets. While there's no chance he'd hurt any sentient creature, he might well wander into an open house, or dash across the street if something caught his attention. So we walk as much as possible where he can be off leash, in back alleys, along rail lines, or in parks. There I can walk at my plodding pace, while Rui dashes ahead, or lingers to explore things more fully. If a car or train appears he will come when called unless something is hugely fascinating in which case he will remain where he is. If I put my hand in my left pocket, where the chicken strips are, he will abandon his exploration and come immediately. He is correctly indifferent to my hand going into my right pocket.

The High Park off-leash area was fenced in last summer, so that the legal area for dogs to be off-leash now consists of gravel paths or paved roads with 3 foot fences on either side, neatly separating that part of the park in which dogs can roam from that part in which there are living things. I meet a community of friends there at 7 a.m. (7:30 on weekends) and we walk along the paths, staying within the fences. Rui has become an expert leaper since the fences were installed, and will wander through the underbrush of the forest, paralleling the human walk, but separate from it. Generally, our dogs fall into two groups: one group prefers to leap the fences, the other to wriggle through them. However, the fences do appear to do an effective job of keeping both dog-owners and joggers on the paths, so they're not completely useless.

There are days when I want to be in nature rather than wandering through a nature zoo admiring the captive trees on the other side of the fences. (Or perhaps it's not the trees who are captive?) On those days Rui and I wander off-leash through Toronto's larger parks, risking the $350 fine that we'd incur if caught. On such walks he could in theory run off, but he is absolutely unwilling to let me out of his sight. Usually he'll stay within about 20 meters of me, but if I disappear, he will race to where I last was and search frantically until he finds me. Hiding behind a tree is thus an effective way to summon him.

It's a curious resolution of our early walk conflicts. He lets me choose the paths and will follow, absolutely, wherever I choose to go. In return, he will investigate whatever is interesting to him along that route. Unless I want to play a game, we will thus take parallel walks, staying close together but not involved with each other’s walk.

However if I want to play the right game, he is eager. His game of choice remains, "stick", the rules of which are that he has a stick and I have to get it away from him. Rui may substitute other desirable objects, such as squeaky toys, for the stick. The game of "fetch" is of far less interest; he will retrieve a ball once or twice, but then gets bored. I had once hoped to have a frisbee-retrieving dog, but while Rui will chase a frisbee enthusiastically, once he has picked it up the game reverts to "stick", (see rules, above).

Rui is endlessly curious about the world. He is forced to spend about 21 hours a day either in our house, on the front porch, or in the back yard. I'm at home much of that time, and sometimes we play with each other. But it makes sense that when he's outside, he wants to investigate all the smells that he can't explore most of the time. Why would he prefer to walk along side me, really? So we do "heel" when we cross streets, or when we walk through a group of children, or when a car or train is passing by. But increasingly I’ve been unable to see any reason to suppress his desire to explore and force him to walk my walk, rather than his.

Yesterday we were walking through McGregor Park, when the border collie lady came in. She trains border collies for the City of Toronto, so that they will chase Canadian geese off the park lands. (This is a goal universally approved of by everyone who has ever walked across a park from which the geese had not been chased, and thus had to clean their shoes afterwards.) Rui and I watched her collies run to precise spots, then to other spots, then lie down, and wait for the next command. They stared at her fixedly, before responding, individually and instantly, to her hand motions. Even given that border collies are the obsessive-compulsives of the doggy world, it was hugely impressive training.

It will forever remain an unresolved question whether Rui could have become an equally well-trained dog. Yet somehow, I'm glad that he isn't. Our expeditions are more mutual, with discussions and debates at moments of decision. He is less subservient, and I am less demanding. Or, he is less well-trained by me and I am better trained by him. But as a wise friend once observed, in this life you sometimes have to choose whether you want to be happy or you want to be right. Rui and I are happy. And it feels right.

My earliest memory of cooking is when I was five years old, and I would wake up in the night, and sneak into our kitchen to make jello. I particularly remember my joy when I discovered that I could mix different flavours. There weren't just four of five different kinds of jello; there were also all the mixtures that could be made with those. How exciting that there were new unnamed tastes just waiting to be discovered at the intersection of grape and lime. It was love at first bite.

When I was nine years old, I learned how to make candy, by melting brown sugar and pouring the slightly caramelized mixture out to harden. For a nine year old to be able to transmute common sugar into real candy was every bit as magical as it must have seemed at first to King Midas when he learned he could change things into gold. My neighbourhood friends were amazed that I could produce candy, and that it was good!

And so I set out on the path of food, and I followed it, pursuing the breadcrumbs deeper into the forest of cuisine, and finding ways to make even breadcrumbs more interesting (sauté with garlic and butter.) In the MIT dormitories, students were allowed to cook in their rooms. I had a hot-plate, a rotisserie, and a fridge as my tools, and started learning recipes beyond candy and jello. I remember fresh artichoke hearts seeming very stylish, and a spicy peanut butter and rice dish that I was very proud of. I even invented a new cooking device, by soldering nails to the bare wires that lead to a plug. When the nails were inserted into opposite ends of a hot-dog, and the plug was inserted into the wall, the hot-dog would cook in about 30 seconds. My fellow students seemed very impressed at the device, though none of them ever felt any need to copy it.

I've gone through crazes and obsessions over the years. I remember a housemate in the 70's noting bemusedly that roasted peppers seemed to be a part of everything I cooked at that time. A brief phase when I scorned cookbooks, and decided I could duplicate anything by taste alone ended after a few minor disasters, such as the time when I tried to use corn starch to thicken the sauce for a duck à l'orange. But bereft of instruction I didn't realize that one had to cook corn starch, so I kept adding more and more, until the sauce finally thickened. When I heated the mixture, it instantly became a solid block of orange flavour that a knife could barely cut. The duck was good though, even without the sauce.

I have always loved strong flavours, and it was when I was living in England in 1970, that I first met Indian food. At the time, it seemed the only interesting and cheap food there was. So I started cooking Indian, learning to blend cardamon, turmeric, coriander, cumin, chilies, as I once had blended jello flavours. But it wasn't until I became a vegetarian, that I really started into the mysteries and magic of Indian, Chinese, and Thai cuisine.

I can trace my history by remembering the cookbooks I was sequentially obsessed with. There was the Hot and Spicy cookbook, a cross-cultural set of recipes subtitled, "Food so good it hurts". That was where I learned the concept of mouth hunger, the hunger that is only satisfied by flavours and not by volume. Later my bible became the first Greens cookbook, Deborah Madison's vegetarian opus. The foods in it were all magical, though they did take hours to cook. It became the cookbook I would pull down when guests were coming, and I wanted to show the richness and complexity of flavour that a vegetarian meal could have. When I first visited San Francisco, I remember my pilgrimage to the actual Greens' restaurant as a Muslim might remember journeying to Mecca. The earth literally shook when I tasted the first bite, though it was due to a minor earthquake rather than the food. The other patrons, hardened San Franciscans all, were casual about a minor tremor. To me, it seemed only appropriate.

And now I've fallen in love with a new cookbook, and a new cuisine. Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-born chef who cooks in London, and whose column "The New Vegetarian " I discovered in The Guardian. I read the list of recipes, and started to salivate, like one of Pavlov's dogs.. The first three were for roasted sweet potatoes with figs; mushrooms, garlic and shallots with lemon ricotta; and braised leeks with goat's curd recipe. Unable to wait for the arrival of the cookbook I ordered in a one-click moment, I printed some, and started cooking.

Ottolenghi’s food is world cuisine, with flavours, spices, and techniques from all traditions. The first dish I cooked had eggplant was at its heart. But I covered the eggplant halves with chermoula, a Moroccan spice paste I had previously only used as a fish marinade. And Ottolenghi's version of chemoula was richer and more complex than mine, using pickled lemons rather than lemon juice, and roasted coriander seeds rather than fresh coriander. Baking the eggplant under chermoula was just the start. Then came a bulgar based salad, with green olives, mint, coriander, and lemon. When the eggplant was tender, I covered the halves with the bulgar. On top of that went Greek yogurt, and over that was a slight drizzle of olive oil. (All this was according to the recipe. First time through, I wanted to see what his tastes were like.)

It was mind-blowing. The tastes played against one another, and the textures worked, and my taste-buds jumped up and down screaming, "More! More!" Since then Diana and I have cooked about a dozen dishes, all of them brilliant. Some have been less sparkling because of  poorer ingredients; I don't know why I tried to stuff tomatoes at a time of year when tomatoes are mushy and flavourless. But the herb stuffing was memorable, and will find its way into ravioli, and appetizers and vine leaves in years to come. Over and over again, there are strong flavours played against one another, and introductions in which the ideas explode off the page as he suggests a half dozen possible variations one might try on a specific recipe.

For example, he suggests... but it's dinner time, and his herbed Iranian rice with an Indian based yogurt raita sits waiting in the kitchen, and I can't hold out any more. And this time there will be no mixed jellos for dessert.

“How terribly strange to be seventy
...silently sharing the same fears”
Paul Simon, “Old Friends”

This is the year that both Paul Simon and Bob Dylan turned seventy, which does indeed seem terribly strange. But in age they trail Leonard Cohen, who is seventy-seven, and who has just released his latest work, Old Ideas. The title is ambiguous, as is much of Cohen’s work: it can refer both to the album’s exploration of his old themes of love, desire, suffering, and faith or to the perspectives on these themes of an old man. Are there commonalities to the recent work of these three aging Jewish bards, all at one time considered folksingers, all of whom have produced music and lyrics that transcend simple categorization or interpretation?

There is some overlap. All three seem to be writing more songs about death, and about God. Dylan has evolved into the Jackson Pollock of lyricists, laying verbal lines and meanings across one another such that it becomes impossible to say a recent song is about a unique topic. But songs such as Tryin’ To Get To Heaven (“Every day your memory grows dimmer/ It doesn't haunt me like it did before/ I've been walking through the middle of nowhere/ Trying to get to heaven before they close the door”) or Not Dark Yet (“I was born here and I'll die here against my will/ I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still/ Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/ I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from/ Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/ It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.”) suggest a fading sense of presence in this world. Dylan maintains a staunch abstinence from the kind of specific statements about God that he once had in his Christian period. Indeed, in Ain’t Talking (from “Modern Times”) it seems as though God Himself is gone: “As I walked out in the mystic garden/ On a hot summer day, a hot summer lawn/ Excuse me, ma'am, I beg your pardon/ There's no one here, the gardener is gone”. But Dylan, after being stuck up on too many pedestals by too many fans, guards his hidden core. He’s no longer interested in being a leader, if indeed he ever was.

Paul Simon’s album of 2011, “So Beautiful or So What” has a lot of songs about God, and death, and love. The opening song “Getting ready for Christmas Day” juxtaposes Simon’s light-hearted song about Christmas preparations and family history against samples from a 1941 sermon by Reverend Gates entitled “Will the Coffin be Your Santa Claus?” (All three singers, though Jewish, show an impressive willingness to sample religious symbology from Christianity.) The second song, “The Afterlife” (Watch Simon perform it here.) tells about his dying, going to heaven eager to meet God, but finding heaven is just as bureaucratic as everywhere else. (“Then a voice from above sugar-coated with love/ Said, “Let us begin”/ You got to fill out a form first/ And then you wait in the line”.) And when finally he does meet God, words disappear, and all he is left with is fragments of old pop songs. God appears in two other songs on Simon’s album; in “Love and Hard Times” He and His only Son visit the earth. But God is dissatisfied and eager to leave (“‘Well, we got to get going,’ said the restless Lord to the Son/ ‘There are galaxies yet to be born/ Creation is never done/ Anyway, these people are slobs here...’”). He is recognizably the same God from whose perspective “Love Is An Eternal Sacred Light” is sung, one who muses “Big Bang/ That’s a joke that I made up/ Once when I had eons to kill/ You know, most folks/ They don’t get when I’m joking/ Well, maybe someday they will.” as He drives His “brand new pre-owned ’96 Ford” down the highway, searching the radio dial peevishly for Gospel music.

Against this porous image of divinity Simon counterposes a solid belief in love. It is love that can “build a wall that nothing can break through”, love that sustains the singer during hard times, when God has left, love that God Himself says is “the eternal sacred light”. The damaged Vietnam vet in “Rewrite” is rewriting his life story so that it culminates with his saving his children and holding them in his arms, rather than abandoning them after his breakdown. In “Afterlife”, all that Simon reveals of his vision of God is that “you feel like you’re swimming in an ocean of love.” And it is love that in the title song makes the difference between life being “So Beautiful or So What.”

And what of Cohen? He starts with “Going Home” a song from the point of view of God, who is musing about Leonard Cohen. (You can hear it here). God says, “I love to speak with Leonard/ He's a sportsman and a shepherd/ He's a lazy bastard/ Living in a suit.” I sympathize with God; I’ve often felt that way about Leonard Cohen. I’ve enjoyed, and sometimes loved, much of his work since discovering his first poetry in the mid sixties. But I’ve been painfully aware of the extent to which almost all his work follows the same structural pattern: an assertion of the magnificence of love or passion of a transcendent nature, followed by an elegant apology for the impossibility of maintaining that stance. It has felt like watching a great actor whose career has been built upon variations of a single character. As opposed to say, Randy Newman, (a sixty-eight year old Jewish singer and songwriter) whose characters are anyone but himself, one always feels that Cohen is singing about being Leonard Cohen, or of wearing the mask of Leonard Cohen.

Perhaps that is what makes “Going Home” so powerful. The chorus, sung by an ethereal choir (Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters) anticipates a time when he can lay that style aside and go home (“Going home/ Without my burden/ Going home Behind the curtain/ Going home/ Without the costume/ That I wore”). After God saying how much He loves to speak with Cohen, the second song, “Amen” offers us Cohen begging God to speak to him, to tell him he is wanted. It’s a powerful and dramatic confrontation of two songs. (Listen to “Amen” here.) In the song, Cohen itemizes the horrors of the world, begging to hear God’s voice “when I’m clean and I’m sober” to reassure him he is loved.

There are a number of songs in which Cohen acknowledges his age, such as “Darkness” (“I’ve got no future,/ I know my days are few/ The present’s not that pleasant/ just a lot of things to do/ I thought the past would last me/ but the darkness got there too”) or “Crazy to Love You” (“I'm old and the mirrors don't lie”). But if he acknowledges his mortality,he holds out a hope for the resolution of earthly despair and conflict, nowhere more than “Come Healing”, a hymn or song of praise about the possibility of healing all the aspects of life in which we have been wounded. (Hear it here.)

After several recent (to my ears) sterile studio albums, Cohen emerged from five years in a Zen monastery to the discovery that his manager had both absconded with his life’s savings and spent them, so that the court ruling that they were to be restored was useless. This forced him to tour again, with huge success, both critical and popular. He says of this time, “Suddenly I was dealing with living musicians and then with living audiences and, yes, it did have a great effect. And I think it warmed some part of my heart that had taken on a chill.” That warmth permeates this album. The production is both lush (ethereal choirs cushion and line the stark gravel of what’s left of Cohen’s “golden voice”) but also stark. Different instruments step aside in turn for one another, and the result is an album that is enjoyable without listening to the words, which is something not generally true of his albums.

I’ve been listening to each of these three men singing their songs for over half a century now. I remember writing out their lyrics when I was a teenager, working to decipher the meanings and instructions that I was sure they held, hoping to find clues to the meaning of life. I can’t say that there’s any one song that ever gave me all the meaning I was after, though I did learn not to need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. By now I can see clearly just where it’s blowing, and it feels good to have companions singing such songs as these as we prepare for our going home.