On vacation

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H. and I are currently in beautiful British Columbia — visiting our oldest son and his wife and their four children. We don’t see them nearly as often as we’d like — this time the absence had stretched from Christmas — but every visit is a wonderful experience and somehow we’ve managed to stay closely bonded. The children are at the age now where they make cards and welcome posters for us, so it’s all very heart-tugging and warming indeed!

Tomorrow H. and I set off on a cruise to Alaska, the inside passage. We’ve never done anything like this before, so we’re looking forward to experiencing ship life and to seeing the “sights.” Then it’s back for a few more days with the kids, before we return to Manitoba to pick up our regular routines of work and writing. The first week after our return contains Canada’s first Truth and Reconciliation Commission public events, to be held in Winnipeg. I’m hoping to take in as much of that as I can.

All this to say I may not post much for the next week or two, or even check in, unless I’m inspired with some thoughts post-Alaska. But the next weeks belong first to us and to our children and to the relaxation of vacation. Until later then….

Alone, but connected

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Most avid readers don’t need much by way of motivation for what they do. Still, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a thoughtful meditation on reading by Daniel Coleman, professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., provides good reasons to keep reading.

Coleman considers what’s going on in the practice of reading, and posits it as both countercultural and spiritually beneficial.

He doesn’t present a romanticized view of reading, however. People can be damaged by it (even by the “Good Book”). And, he says, “readers can be insufferable.” But what’s both countercultural and spiritual about reading is its slowness, its emphasis on critical alertness, and its way of humility. “The desire to read emphasizes a basic generosity toward the Other that is the condition of all language.”

One of the strongest arguments Coleman makes is that reading, although private and solitary, actually brings us outward toward others.

…reading does a painful and positive thing at once. It creates the isolated individual who extracts herself from the group, but that isolation is not as alienated as it looks, for reading is also a connection to others, an imaginative connection to the writers and to other readers by means of the tracks the writer has left on the page.

Coleman discusses the “right posture” of reading (charity, as per Augustine), how we encounter the “absent Other” in reading, and reading’s “wide-ranging social and political effects.” The latter are especially emphasized by stories from Ethiopia and the context of slavery in which people gain literacy for the first time.

In summary of this aspect of reading, he says,

[R]eading is a process that simultaneously individualizes us by placing the words on the page between us and the world and connects us by drawing us out of ourselves through imaginative projection toward the thoughts and experiences of others. At one and the same time, reading is a technology of alienation and a maker of new community…. For reading can give us a role to play, a direction for our energies, a way to channel our spiritual hunger that takes us into the social and political worlds in which we live.

I believe he’s right.

Mourning the oil spill

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I’ve changed the header image of this blog as a way to reference — and to remember — the Gulf oil spill. It’s a another postcard “slice” from my grandfather’s album, this time of Baku, currently capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, indeed of all the Caucasus, a port city on the Caspian Sea, which he travelled in and out of while serving as medic on the Russian troops trains during World War I. There are 11 scenes of Baku in the more than 80 postcards in his collection.

This one is of “Black City,” the industrial oil belt established in Baku. “The Black City was a cluttered landscape of oil rigs, metal storage tanks, refineries, heavy industrial manufacturing buildings and housing for workers,” says one source. The name came from “the heavy, black pall that hung above it and the smell of oil so thick that its taste lingered in your mouth.” Incidentally, the oil company that first came to prominence in Baku was founded by the Nobel brothers (one of them being Alfred, of Peace Prize fame). The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company started extracting oil there in 1874 and dominated the European market until the Russian Revolution. Worldwide it was second largest after Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

Black City, near Baku. Postcard about 1914.

I don’t know how much my grandfather, Heinrich Harder, actually got to see of the city. In an August 31, 1914 letter written from Baku he says,

Today we spent most of our day unloading, brought wounded men from Sharekamesh to this place and tomorrow at 8 in the morning, we begin to load again and take off to Derbent and Petrowsk Harbour. Thus it has been now for the last month — load, unload, disinfect, then load again…

On March 3, 1916, in another letter from Baku, he writes,

Today I watched three maneuvering birds, soon up in the air, then swimming on the sea — a beautiful picture! Too bad that inventions like that are used to destroy life and culture.

It was a coded message, it seems, about war planes.

These are just bits of trivia, but they bring me round to the Gulf oil spill, which for many of us seems far away. But we keep being reminded of it, and realize again it’s not a movie, and then it grieves, worries, angers us anew. This morning on CBC Radio I heard two photographers being interviewed about what they were seeing. They couldn’t help describing some of the scenes as beautiful. But it’s the beauty of destruction, like the “birds” on the Caspian Sea, and the reality, much like Baku’s Black City, beyond grim. (Baku, in fact, is still, according to 2008 data, the world’s “dirtiest” city in terms of pollution.)

Of Baku back in its Nobel oil-empire glory days, Fuad Akhundov writes,

At that time, the view of chimneys and pipes was a symbol of progress and mankind’s achievements. No one was concerned about environment and ecology.

It’s sometimes said we have a love affair with oil. Yes, and it’s a sordid one. And now, again, though hardly able to shake our oil dependency (I speak for myself), we mourn the failure, the terrible damage. I go about my daily tasks, and then I’ll remember the gallons of oil shooting from the ocean floor, and the suffering of humans and creatures in the Gulf states. Will today’s attempt, apparently risky, finally plug the spill? It finally occurred to me that I might keep this more deliberately in my prayers. Oh God, may it work!