Re-imagining Narrative
I had planned to take one or two classes at SFU this autumn, making some more headway in what may be history’s longest undergraduate program, but as I was unable to get space in any of the classes I desired, I abandoned that plan for the semester.
I like taking courses in the autumn and winter. Doing so helps to keep me socially and intellectually engaged at a time of year when darkness descends on the Pacific Northwest like a cold, wet blanket and tries to drive me into anti-social hibernation, so when SFU didn’t work out I looked around for some non-credit alternatives. What I found was a small, informal drop-in writing class operating out of the Carnegie Centre in the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
I have taken quite a few writing classes in quite a few autumns and – if you’ll excuse the sweeping generalisation – I don’t think it is wholly unreasonable to say that they are often filled with middle-class discontents who feel a strong urge to say something but are fearful of digging deeply enough to find out what that is. I suspect that many of us aren’t in these classes to learn how to write as much as we are there to try get past the crippling fear that discourages us from saying what’s in our hearts. Even if only to say it to ourselves.
I’ll go further, and suggest that evening writing classes are, for many, a form of therapy. We have a lot to feel grateful for. Reasonably good paying jobs, a spouse, children perhaps, a comfortable home. We aren’t overly worried about where the money will come from to pay the rent or the mortgage next month and besides, even if there is a shortage, we have excellent credit. We really don’t have a lot to worry about.
So why is there all this existential angst motivating us sign up for writing classes? Why are we, despite having achieved what most people in the world would consider an enviable level of success, still not satisfied? Many will claim that they simply need a hobby, or to get out of the house while their husbands watch hockey (women make up the majority of writing class participants by a wide margin), or because they simply like language. Most of the time, I think these reasons are bollocks.
Whether we take courses or not, we are all writers. Our lives are filled with narratives, every one of which we helped to write. When we go to the store to buy cigarettes, when we try to get someone into bed, when we pay our telephone bill, when we wonder if we should leave our spouse, when we get on the SkyTrain to go to work, when we spank our kids, and when we sit in that little tan cubicle and pray to every god that can be conjured that Friday doesn’t take too long to arrive, we are writing and playing a role in a narrative of our own creation.
The narratives under which we conduct every moment of our lives are not static, written by someone long ago and that imprison us now. Narratives are fully dynamic. Every single word, thought and action customise our narratives, as if there were continuous streams of invisible energy flowing in and out of them from all directions – building, shaping, steering. If it seems to you that the narratives are fixed and static, it is simply because too many of us have resigned ourselves to static images of narrative. Too many of us have become negligent in our innate responsibilities to dream and to imagine freely. Instead, we lazily re-imagine the same narratives over and over.
We aren’t writing. We’re re-writing. We’re copying down “I will not talk in class” one hundred times because the teacher told us to. One hundred times a second. But we are our own teachers. It’s time to give ourselves new assignments.
If you’re skimming this and thinking that, because it seems to be speaking only to those who have a desire to write, let go of that. Though the inspiration comes from my own experiences with a pen and paper, writing in this context is largely a metaphor.
We are all writers. If you ever open your mouth and utter a word, you are expressing something that you have written in your mind, in your imagination. If you have ever smiled, or frowned at someone, you have expressed something that you have written in your heart.
We are all writing and performing at every moment. Whether we perform using dated, dog-eared old scripts that we helped to write in the distant past, or are in every moment attentively writing fresh, new narratives that evolve with life and vigour, we are making a choice.
What does your narrative look like?
Dream 2: The Way We Commute
As I travel about the city, on foot, by bike, or on public transit, I regularly have a very appealling vision. I find myself imagining what life in the city would be like if there were no cars.
Just imagine sitting at outdoor cafes, newly enlarged to take advantage of all the extra space available now that the roads aren’t lined with parked cars, and enjoying your coffee and conversation without having to try to hear your friends over the din of roaring engines. Imagine being able to ride a bike without feeling (quite reasonably, on most streets) that you’re at risk of being mowed down at any moment by two tons of inattentively maneuvered steel. Imagine sitting on a comfortable train car on your morning commute, sipping tea and reading a good book, and arriving at the office relaxed and ready to face the day with optimism, instead of sitting in a car that’s creeping along the freeway at 20km hour, listening to universally dismal traffic reports, and arriving at the office tense, frazzled and ready for whatever other misery may arrive through the day.
I find that this is a particularly difficult thing to imagine for most urban, and especially suburban, people that I talk to. It’s not necessarily a lack of imagination that’s the problem, but negative imagination. People are imagining alright – they imagine what they think the phrase “public transportation” means, and they picture standing on a wet, mouldy bus next to a homeless psychiatric patient who smells of urine, being jostled back and forth as the bus continually accelerates and brakes. This is not necessarily an inaccurate scenario, but it’s not necessarily accurate, either. We do have buses like that, but forget that they don’t have to be like that. We’re provided with insufficient numbers of poorly designed buses by people who never ride them. The design of our public transit system is overseen by provincial government ministers who ride around town in limousines and SUVs. More imagination and committed resources, and less pandering to the billionaire owners of multiple car dealerships, and perhaps we’d start making some progress toward having a public transport system that people actually want to use.
We’re at an interesting point in history right now. The US government has already handed over some $40,000,000,000.00 to auto companies to bail them out and keep them from failing. And they are asking for billions and billions more. And what will come of this? We’ll have car companies that are – stable. That’s it. Oh, maybe we’ll get more hybrid cars and fewer Hummers on the market, but essentially, we’re in for more of the same. A government that is already trillions of dollars in debt is donating billions that it does not have to keep dinosaur businesses alive. It’s like bailing out the horse and buggy industry to keep it going. At the same time, they are asking auto-industry retirees to trade their future health care benefits for stock in the car companies. If I were a GM retiree, I’d be pretty leery of accepting pieces of paper that are almost certain to be worthless for health care.
The time of the private automobile is coming to an end, at least for the urban market, and a new order is coming to replace that tired old, destructive model. A model that is destroying our atmosphere, polluting our lands, encouraging war, ripping apart societies that have the oil to operate the machines, and generally making our cities less and less livable the more crowded they get with private, noisy, filthy, dangerous machines.
I have a more imaginative suggestion for Barack Obama, along with Stephen Harper and other western leaders. Instead of simply handing over all these billions to the auto companies in exchange for minor improvements in fuel efficiency, lets put this money to the most effective possible use. Let’s turn the whole industry on its ear and use it as an opportunity to shift the entire urban transportation paradigm. Let’s pay the car companies to stop simply making and selling cars, and pay them to build and operate a public transportation infrastructure like North America has never seen. Efficient, comfortable buses, streetcars, trams, and light rail for local transport. Rapid transit and conventional rail for longer and high speed routes. Build transit routes in cities so that no one need walk more than two block to access the system. It could be done.
In order to make this work, of course, cars would need to be gradually, but not too slowly, eliminated from city streets, starting with the downtown centres, and expanding in sections or belts to the external limits of cities. The effects of this would be monumental. We would become less insular and more social. Our housing would evolve to become more efficient, in terms of space, resources, and energy. Communities would become friendlier, more child friendly, safer. We would become much more attuned to our surroundings once we’re walking, cycling, skating, or looking out the windows of the bus while someone else looks after the driving than we do when we’re sitting behind a wheel staring at the bumper ahead of us, or trying to avoid being killed at every moment. We’d all relax, and the gods know, we all need to relax a little.
There is precedent for this sort of public works initiative. The Depression of the 1930s was the spark for all kinds of public works initiatives that provided new infrastructure and put people to work when there was little work to be had. We can keep auto workers employed, put more people to work building, maintaining and operating this new infrastructure, and generally end up with a quality of life improvement of which it is difficult even to imagine. But imagine we must.
One of the great things about imagination is that no action is required. We are not compelled to commit to decisions. All we have to do is sit down for fifteen minutes and imagine, just imagine, what life would be like if our streets were car free, and yet it actually becomes easier and more pleasant to get around. That’s all. I’m not asking you to get rid of your car, walk 20 miles to work, or sit in a bus seat that has a puddle in it. Just imagine. That’s it. Just imagine.
Just imagine!
I Have a Dream (Part 1)
I’m no Martin Luther King. I’m not even a Christian – at least, not the capital-C, church-on-Sunday, wait-for-the-rapture, don’t-choke-your-chicken-or-you’ll-burn-in-hell kind of Christian. I’m more of a great-mysterious-nuclear-energy-in-the-universe kind of spiritualist, which (along with my disbelief in the story of Jesus, Mohammed, Santa Claus, and Raelian-alien-rescue) is really a pretty atheistic interpretation of spiritualist, so I guess I’m really not a Christian at all.
If your spiritual house is built on all that stuff about virgin birth (or one of the other deity-based religions), I encourage you to give Zeitgeist: The Movie a viewing. It provides a very interesting interpretation of history on which the Christan church, and other religious institutions, are based. The film is full-length, in documentary format, and contains three distinct sections. After a longer than usual, visual, introduction comes the section to which I referred, Part 1. It is a fairly easy to watch segment, and though it raises major questions about the veracity of religious assumptions, I would think that most viewers would find it somewhat empowering. The following two sections are more challenging if you are not fond of conspiracy theories related to 9-11 and international banking, but they come after part one, so you can always stop watching then, if you like. However, I would encourage watching the whole thing, for though I am undecided on how much of parts two and three I would accept as factual, it is thought provoking. If nothing else, at least watch Part 1. It’s brilliant. You can watch it online for free here, or download it for later viewing for free here. Or, you can order the DVD for $5 from the website, http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com.
Anyway, back to my primary purpose. I have a dream, I’m not ML King, etc, etc. I’m also not a visible minority, unless you count wild-bearded men with pasty legs and knobby knees who run around all winter in shorts as minorities, which I suppose they are, but they aren’t a historically persecuted minority, unless you count not getting laid on Saturday night as a form of persecution. The fact is, I have a great many dreams. I’m not talking about the kind of dreams that wake you up at three AM in a cold sweat, or at nine AM in a warm wet spot, but more like imaginations, instinctive mental images that come in the form of daydreams and subconscious aspirations.
Most of the time, these dreams are not expressed openly, and when they are, unfortunately, they are typically expressed in a more negative form, such as an attack on whatever institution, tradition, power structure, or lummox in a Hummer I believe prevents the dream from becoming a reality. Generally, I feel (accurately or not) that I am encouraged to keep these dreams to myself, and I don’t react all that well to stuffing things inside and forgetting about them. I can either make some effort to release the dreams constructively, or they will come out in unproductive, unpleasant, and perhaps self-destructive ways.
After essentially “dropping out” of the mainstream rat race in 2005, I’m currently in the position of trying to make money, ideally without having to completely and without restraint whore myself out to the Protestant Lords of Capital. I’m not opposed to a little survivalist whoring – the construct of our society and our economy makes it extremely difficult not to participate – I just don’t want to buy into the whole whoring game so thoroughly that I start to think that I’m Princess Goddamn Privilege and forget that I am a corporate whore, trying to accumulate enough wealth that I can start buying up more shit that I don’t want so that I can pretend to be someone that I don’t want to be.
The easiest thing to do, according to popular opinion, would be to find a nice job and learn to like it. There’s a lot to be said for a nice, comfortable tan cubicle in a climate-controlled building with a gym and a bike locker and a lunch room. Many do it, seemingly without major anxiety. At least, not any anxiety that can’t be managed with Xanax or Prozac. Thank Jesus for the corporate “health” plan! I’m not one for medicating symptoms that are completely avoidable, however. Schizophrenics should probably take medication to help them live. Office workers should not take meds to keep them from blowing off their own heads out of despair for their lot. They should find a new path. It’s frightening to think about stepping off the treadmill and following your heart, and the uncertainty that comes with it. But it’s very likely that it’s a lot less frightening than coming to the realisation just what you didn’t do with your life, two seconds before you drop dead for good.
It remains to be seen what my ongoing path will be. I suppose I’ll just throw it out there to the great-mysterious-nuclear-energy-in-the-universe and see what happens. Maybe a year from now I’ll be chowing down on Paxil and smiling broadly for some exploiter entrepreneur as I invest my labour in his children’s leisure, with no hope of a reasonable ROI, watching my days tick by. Or maybe something more magical will happen. Ya gotta dream.
Stay tuned for the dreams.
