In the Dark of the Night

I

After a shower in the evening, I look for the hairdryer. A wind chill warning in effect, I don't want to walk the dog with wet hair even under a hat.

My hair is long and takes a long time to dry. I'll blow dry it a little and wait. We have time.

As I stand in the bathroom at the mirror, I disappear. The apartment is torn from the world.

I move like a blind woman through the rooms, searching for candles. At the window I do not see any lights, except distant cars. I phone my son at work. The grocery store where he works part-time has its own back-up generator.

Darkness retreats from the candle flame, leaving small globes of golden light.

II

Our apartment is heated electrically. Base board heaters line every room, and every room has its own thermostat.

My daughter keeps her room at 10C; I like mine about 22C. We keep the apartment at 17C. Tonight we plunge into frigidity together.

III

As the temperature drops, holding a candle, I look for my soft-fabric snowpants made by the Sundown lady who lived on Toronto Island and ran a cottage industry making warm bright down coats for babies, children and adults. She knew how to make coats for Canadian Winters. The snowpants are as warm and supple as they were 20 years ago when I bought them at her little store in a house on Richmond Street.

Or perhaps I am already wearing them when the lights go out, I don't remember.

IV

The first night is slightly exciting. Bravo and onward. My son insists his room in the basement is warm, and I go to sleep on my bed fully dressed, with wool socks and the snowpants, two down covers and a huge faux-fur coat from the late 1990s.

I talk to my brother who works nights for a couple of hours, till perhaps 2am.

The air is cool and yet faintly damp, like there is a cold fog.

Do I sleep? I don't remember.

V

My daughter is out of town, and I'm glad. In the morning I discover we have hot water and make a drink out of chickory and barley and a drop of table cream, something akin to coffee.

When I go downstairs to wake my son for his classes, I am overwhelmed by the smell of gas. He's alright. Upstairs my old Northern Telecom phone that's plugged into the jack works fine. I call the landlord and am on hold for 5 minutes before I hang up, find the Consumer Gas number and call and report the smell of gas. Men are here within the half hour, and they are downstairs about that long before I am asked to sign a form saying that they discovered one of the water heaters was leaking gas and so they turned off the gas and capped it.

This team only responds to emergencies; they don't do repairs. That's another appointment and another team.

Is it my hot water tank? Mine is the only new one of the four in the basement, having leaked last Summer and been replaced.

It's too dark to tell.

I don't know.

VI

The power failure and the leaking gas are two unrelated events. It is a bad day.

VII

At some point I sleep in my nest of a bed with its layers of covers. I don't know when, but wake groggily.

By then, my son is home, having missed his first class due to the bus service taking the place of the subway that isn't running due to the power failure which occurred because a major transformer station was flooded.

Flooding and heat.

Like my heart.

VIII

I buy a coffee at a Second Cup that has just had power restored. It's patchy, who has power and who hasn't.

My superintendent lives a few blocks away and though his house is in the blackout grid, he had nonstop power. He's sympathetic. He's glad I called the gas company. Because each of us rent hot water tanks for our units and pay our own heating bills, he says he can't put in an order for Consumer's Gas to come and fix the tank that was leaking, the tenant has to. We don't know who the tenant is.

In the roulette, it could be me.

IX

Fully weather-proof, I have only to put on mitts, hat and jacket to walk the dog. The neighbourhood is empty, save for a few other women walking their dogs.

It's unnatural.

X

I send updating tweets out over Twitter that go to my blog and to Facebook and friends there leave comments that come back through my email.

Obsessively, despite my cell phone being nearly dead. I siphon battery power from my netbook to feed the cell phone which gives me internet connection.

I feel dislocated from the world. Yet without lights, computers, TV, radio, the hum of electically-powered living, I am located in the world that is the world.

XI

Evening, and the inner temperature drops. The apartment is getting colder. I am wearing my full-length faux-fur coat with the hood on all the time now. I am shivering.

I call my other brother, who isn't home, and my mother, who forgets what I'm calling about and talks about the bank books she has for all of her grandchildren.

I phone a "warm house" and am told they can send a car round to pick up my dog and I right away. Thank you, but I'll wait and see later in the night. Okay, you have our number.

My son's friend phones to offer us warm refuge at her parents' place. She is very sweet. He and I are more comfortable with family, though. We'll wait for my brother, his uncle, who will surely rescue us.

He doesn't.

XII

Severe weather bulletin. A wind chill warning in effect. Temperatures are between -20C and -30C. Only 25% of homes originally affected by the power outage are still without power. That's us.

Warmth! Heat! Wherefore art thou?

Inside is like outside without the wind.

It's like winter camping, without the tent heater or the fire. Late one Christmas about 30 years ago I was in a bachelor apartment in a rooming house that had lights but no heat. The landlord and his partner had gone away and hydro cut the heat. I remember this particular type of coldness, its fog-breath. The ceiling cracked and paint fell all over the apartment that night and I broke my lease and moved within weeks. I put some of that broken ceiling paint in the journal I wrote, didn't I.

I sit on my bed wrapped in layers of clothes and the large coat under two down sleeping bags, my dog in a fleece coat beside me. I'd be gone if it wasn't for the dog, to a friend's or family or even a coffee shop. My breath is foggy.

My son will not leave. I am determined to stay, too. I buy a thermos-carafe of coffee while he picks up pizza. We eat by candlelight. He says he's tired and makes his way downstairs. I don't want him down there and to his protestations insist I will check on him later.

XIII

I only know this. I struggled and then lapsed into meditation, deeper and deeper, intoning a mantra, finding layers of calm beneath the water flooding the transformer station, finding what I'd forgotten, when, flash, the lights blinked on as if they'd never been off. The world began. Again.

___
When a Hydro crew arrived at the Dufferin transformer station, a relay station that turns high voltage electricity into usable energy in our offices and homes, they discovered dangerous flooding. The station was filled with water up to knee level and rising. They immediately cut power to 100,000 homes in Toronto. Power was restored gradually over the next day or so as they pumped the station and dried the electrical components. The blackout began around 10pm on Thursday, January 15th, and power was fully restored around 9:30pm on Friday, January 16, 2009. In the last area to be restored, we were without power for nearly 24 hours, a severe wind chill warning in effect for our region throughout.

Beginings of a Treatise on Performance Poetry

What I wish to do is develop techniques for videotaping and presenting performance pieces.

The writer, poet, artist, composer usually works alone. It is the solitary nature of creativity. While there is a great dissemination of work on the Internet, poetry is not mainstream. A century ago people memorized poetry, recited poetry in their sitting rooms, poets, like Byron, or Tennyson, were best sellers.

With the advent of media, poetry has disappeared into obscure journals, or Internet sites of individuals and groups dedicated to poetry but who really only read each other. The culture-at-large has all but forgotten poetry.

Poetry is beautiful, where language is most astounding. Most songs don't achieve the simplicity, richness or depth of a finely written poem. Poetry is honed language reflecting and shaping the concerns of the milieu in which it comes to be.

Yet poets are not singers, if they were they'd be out there like Leonard Cohen, or Joni Mitchell. Nor should it be necessary for a poet to add to their years of study of literature by having to also study film-making. There is no reason why a film of a poem has to be illustrated by images and carried with music, though, of course, these filmic components can add to the piece. My point is that the poetry itself should be enough, as were Dylan Thomas' lyrical readings on stages across America in his time.

Not just the words of a poem, but the reading of it can be magic. Poets can recite their work. There are poetry readings all over the world. Poets can perform their own poems.

What I would like to develop are film and editing techniques whereby the solitary poet, writer, artist, composer may capture their work in a solitary fashion on film and present it in video format to a multi-media world. I don't want to turn the poet or composer into a director at the centre of the collaborative venture a film is because this runs contrary to the solitary and introspective nature of most poets or artists.

By nature, the creative process is solitary. Poets are not collaborative. They read; they write. Alone. Surely a camera can be set up and a film created in the solitary world that the creative spirit works in for sharing with others. I am, therefore, exploring how the single camera on a tripod capturing a single performance can be edited to create a charismatic film of poetry that may be appealing to wider audiences and thus bring poetry back into the mainstream.

In this way poetry may become available to the masses who may find many poets, writers, composers superlative and celebrate and support them in the ways that they should be doing and would be if their work was presented in a format that the culture favours.

The Waxworks by Ai!R

Today I found this on Jamendo (a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses), 'Waxworks,' by Ai!R, a Russian band. This music touches me in deep places. Perhaps I may find I am able to put some prosepoetry and movement to music like this (the license looks okay, a first hurdle, and of course I'd ask for permission from the musicians and credit them):

twittergadget emoticon tweet

The ♫ was ♨, you know, ♀♂, even the ☃ melted & the ☆ came out in the ☼.

(TwitterGadget emoticon tweet.) ✉❤

(the music was hot, you know, man + woman, even the snow melted and the stars came out in the daylight)

Sold All My Classical Music in a Fit of Poverty

Once upon a time I sold all my classical music in a fit of poverty. Downloading all Bruckner's symphonies, 31y261d! Will I be alive still?!

Today on Jamendo (a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses), I discovered this artist, Grace Valhalla, French, unique:

And then downloaded other techno, like a few albums of Project Mahlen Goscht, to paint by...

My kids were: Why are you listening to techno? And then I began dancing the dance of the pneumatic drill, the hammer, the screwdriver...

(they laughed as they shook their heads, crazy-mummy)

Yeah, I'm falling in love: with Jamendo. The entry of the Russians rocks my soul.

Slideshow

Find more photos like this on Creative Crossing

A slideshow that I posted to a site that a friend, Klara Elek, invited me to join. Not to replace my art website, but sometimes one should contribute to a site.

Looking at these pieces, I realize I haven't yet begun to paint. There was a very long hiatus of perhaps 20 years, and then a slow reunion to painting. These pieces are 'to regain my hand.'

The only one that's closer to 'painting,' for me, is the Landscape Figure. I painted this in November 2006, and shortly after began a series of contract positions in reception at the executive offices of a bank, and, while I'd hoped to follow the energy in this piece and produce a series of larger size, between my relationship at the time, my daughter, who went into crisis, full-time work and desperately searching for a larger place for us to live, I neglected to push myself to produce, always thinking, 'later, when time opens out.' But the emotional energy had dissipated when perhaps there was finally and again time.

Message: when 'it' happens, go with it, push your life aside, follow your art. They'll all understand, they always do.

Rubies in Crystal blog banner

I've put up a new banner and changed the colours in the blog.

I took the photograph, a self-portrait, last Fall, after reading Peter Handke's, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.

(Click on photo to see it at full size, which looks better to my eye. I had to shrink the image for the blog header.)

Or this, which I... don't know what to say about.



The original photo, and don't ask how I did all the colour and whatnot, I did so many things in Photoshop Elements I can't remember!