Structures of Governance

Most liberal democratic governments are given a four-year term to make good on their promises. After that, its back to the polls -- but not before a couple months of campaigning.

Nowadays, politicians never stop campaigning. As for the polls, some politicians believe -- and have invited us to believe with them -- that polls no longer hold the voice of the People and have been tampered with to produce an outcome inconsistent with their -- and our -- ambitions.

Like politics, climate change effects our lives at a minute level. Unlike politics, we can't vote it out of office if we don't like it. Any serious commitment to de-accelerating climate change will require a commitment longer than a four year term of office. But within our increasingly non-non-partisan democratic systems, four years is all you get.

So my question is this: Would you accept a governance structure that came to power dishonestly (undemocratically), but was committed to slowing climate change, saving the planet, etc.? And if so, what is your limit when it comes to living under the rule of benevolent dictation?

I haven't stopped thinking about this since I saw The Black Panther (2018) and marvelled at its depictions of everyday life in the kingdom of Wakanda: an amusement park concourse punctuated with Starbucks patios.

South-Facing House at the 1300-Block East 20th

Some houses have pleasing faces that make you want to look at them. Other houses not so pleasing, though I pay attention to them because I wonder why. And then there are houses like the one pictured, where something seems ... off.  

Second Place (2021)

I am exactly halfway through Rachel Cusk's Second Place, enjoying it for the most part. The story begins on a train with a nameless narrator telling a story to someone whom I first thought was her butler ("Jeffers") -- not only because of the person's name, but in the way she speaks to him(?), which, in the "nature" of British class relations, feels scripted (Jeffers's role, like the passive reader, and not unlike the Lacanian psychoanalyst, is to listen).

Sure enough, as the story moves along, the narrator's character modulates, broadens. In some instances I get a whiff of narcissism, at other times a self-reflexive, agency-seeking, slightly pathetic condescender eager to transcend(?) -- but more recently someone with a troubled past who is in the grips of a Baudelairian conundrum, never sure whether to act or remain silent, motionless. 

Cusk includes a note in the back that alludes to D.H. Lawrence's stay at the home of a New Mexican arts patron as the inspiration for her book, and I see shades of Lawrence's Hester Grahame in Cusk's narrator. But instead of "more money," "there must be more" attention paid to her. In this instance by L, whom she has invited (sight unseen) to stay at the sprawling marsh ranch where she lives with her husband Tony. L is a painter who sounds a bit like Francis Bacon (at least early in his career), but whose landscapes the narrator has fallen for and have led her to believe that he might appreciate, or at least understand, in a way that might unite them, allow her to be at ease with her life?

As a reader who writes, I admire the way Cusk has set up her story, not just the details, but the decisions she makes about what to show and when. A very controlled form of writing, one that parallels the narrator's own need to control her situation -- in order to stay sane? But of course there's more to it than that, and the story at this point could go in any number of directions, which would no doubt upset the narrator ever further. 

"Moments of Being" (1922-1941)

"What need had she of pins? For she was not so much dressed as cased, like a beetle compactly in its sheath. Blue in winter, green in summer. What need had she of pins --"

Is that rain? I wonder. Pecking at the apple leaves? I look up at the oystered sky. Must be. I start at the beginning, determined to read until a raindrop dots the page 

a game I am playing, a game of one's own

then splat, a raindrop. Turning grey the page. In the middle of "summer"!

I look up again, and there she is, from the back this time, her hair done up in a bun.

The Boulevards of My Impending Retirement

With their home gardens perfected, many are venturing onto boulevards to create new worlds, new sensations. That most are getting on in years is also a factor. One septuagenerian told me she doesn't want to be mowing the boulevard when she's ninety. This is the same woman who, a moment earlier, complained of the presumptuous Millennial.  

Garden Picture Vignette

A herd of potted begonia fleeing a crowd of angry Monk's Weed, protected by a Miss Kim Lilac, cheered on by a chorus of California poppies.

Villa Maris

The Villa Maris (aka the Pink Palace) and its sibling the Shoreland Apartments have been West Vancouver mainstays since the 1960s. Like neon, the BowMac sign and certain examples of municipally-funded public art, affection for the Villa ebbs and flows.

The architects who were so influential in bringing modernism to Vancouver (Arthur Erickson, Abraham Rogatnick, Ronald Thom, et al.) would have loathed the New Sensualism that gave us the Villa Maris; but there are many my age (late-born Boomers) who saw not aberration but kitschy fun. I for one love the way the Villa lights up as the summer sun approaches the setting position. Always from a distance though. 

Yesterday, while on a break from my duties as a pallbearer, I found myself driving along West Van's Bellevue Avenue, when suddenly I was at the foot of the Villa. Quite a sight, all that pink, but for something so radiant, I was shocked by how rickety it felt. A metonym for West Vancouver? A place that looks great from a distance?