Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Page 11
191 Who might begin, as they frame their methodology, with the notion of “thick description.” Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 1–37.
192 Although originally from Woodstock, Ontario, Ron Leary has spent much of his life in Windsor, which is where I extracted this song. I would like to point out here that Mr. Leary has been a great help in my journeys, often messaging me to let me know about new possible informants and singers. He has even been so kind as to let me open for him as a lecturer, which, however, I will be the first to admit, was not in his best interest.
193 See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
194 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971).
195 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York, NY: Verso, 2004).
196 See Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969).
Part Three: Songs of the Cloud
Strange Things Done
Dozens, if not hundreds, of songs and stories have been written referencing the midnight sun, that poetic moniker for the durability of daytime in the north in the spring and summer months, produced by the shape and position of Earth in relation to the sun. For residents of the Arctic Circle, the rhythm of the region’s solar calendar is stamped into the sensorium as early as childhood, one imagines, thus forming a general gestalt, or landscape of life; in the winter there is darkness, and in the summer, light. But for intrepid voyagers like Jack London or Robert Service, the transgression of late afternoon into night, though initially invigorating, leads to all manner of psychic and somatic disturbances.197 Which have been transformed time and again into lasting literary art.198
Precise explanation of the phenomenon is beyond my area of expertise. My best hypothesis is that the midnight sun discombobulates because it erases a fundamental certainty of society as it exists in London, Paris, or Dresden. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed, the human brain operates by mapping binary distinctions onto the diverse, variegated tissues of reality.199 And what binary distinction is starker than that between day and night? To lose this anchoring landmark is to feel truly adrift, like ice-skating in a cyclone. Yet, the relative immovability and distinctive functioning of chirographic linguistic systems have performed as salvation, or cure.200
When I spent several weeks in Dawson City as part of a self-directed personal retreat in the late spring and early summer of 2013, the wide range of emotions and energies generated by the midnight sun overcame me at various points and in varying combinations. The first week spent in Whitehorse, for example, where I waited patiently for my driver to finish some undisclosed business before transporting me on the six-hour ride to Dawson, was literally awesome. Wandering the rustic streets and cavorting in the local taverns, dipping my feet in the coolest and clearest of streams, and then stumbling back to my hotel room by the airport—everything was illuminated, a shadowless bounty of grasses, trees, and sky. It was nearly possible to leap atop the firmament itself.
If one fast-forwards to my final days in the Yukon, roughly a month and a half later, one finds a very different child of the sun. Having spent the preceding weeks building a technological system that would substantially challenge hegemonic modes of folk song collection, I was by then frazzled, completely frayed. To be clear, the manic, solar energy was still flowing, but the oscillations were almost impossible to control. They finally exploded in Dawson vis-à-vis my housemate and ally, Mirek Plíhal, the consequent wounds of which have been, to this time of writing, unfortunately unable to heal.
More research and greater sample sizes are required, but I have a provisional thesis as to why the creative labour in which I engaged in Dawson with Mirek was incapable of quieting my distressed mind. Writing and print, as Livingston well knew, fostered the fixity, categorization, and linearity that define modernity. Computers instead revel in recombination, modularity, and liquidity; therefore, the binary foundations of digital machines (ironically) thus do not determine the epistemological confidence determined by books, and even sound recordings, in their prime.201 In other words, and in spite of the great obstacles within both artificial intelligence and folkloristic theory hurdled by Mirek and myself in Dawson, a cataclysmic and positive feedback loop was additionally engendered among myself, others, and environment, which by design spun quickly out of control.202
Staunton R. Livingston’s claim to the 1968 gathering of the Canadian Folkloristics Association—“If you want to make an omelette, you are going to need to break some eggs”—offers partial but not complete consolation.203 Is it not sometimes better to instead allow the chickens to live, and to grow, and to hatch their own eggs?
* * *
I Wish I Was a Cat in the Tree204
by LIVINGSTON™
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark,
And sometimes in the light.
Cats, they’re like a flower
Called “Lily of the Valley.”
Small and sweet
And there are so many.
And cats, they’re like a river
Flowing through the country.
They bend and they fall,
And came from something.
And cats, they’re like a movie
In the theatre.
They begin,
And there’s an ending.
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark,
And sometimes in the light.
And cats, they’re like a fruit
Called “peaches.”
Soft and sweet,
Hangin’ in warm breezes.
&8*&############6969205
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark.
All cats are grey in the dark,
And sometimes in the light.
* * *
I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray
The reader of the present text should know that I was not exactly in tip-top shape when my plane touched down at the Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport. There were pains in my chest whenever I permitted myself to think, for example, about the always-already elusive meaning of my life; my immediate problems were simultaneously scholarly, creative, and personal.
In terms of professional standing, I was able to rebound from my defeat against Bronnley. Departmental policy permitted a second attempt at the dissertation proposal defense in the event of a failing grade; and although there was not a policy explicitly permitting the alternation of advisors after a first attempt, and such a move was highly unusual at this late stage of the progression, neither was there a policy prohibiting the practice.206 Bronnley and I would thus meet only one more time as advisor–advisee, he not having realized beforehand that this was the end. “First, you are going to need to read “A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity” by Richard Dyer, which I hope will give you some idea as to what analysis looks like in this field,” he said, flagrantly impatient since our public crisis.207 Dr. Bronnley suggested several other titles as well, each of which I wrote down for old time’s sake, each of which has proven useful.208 During a natural break in his pontification on the inferiority of the Chicago citation style, I stood and shook his hand, the performative closing of both the conversation and our relationship.209> “Your service is no longer required,” I said. And that was that. I no longer needed his input—nor his signature.
I am not sure that my subsequent dissertation advisor, one of the wisest and kindest people I have ever met, would be comfortable with discussion in t
he present text of their highly influential scholarship or warm personality.210 I will state that, although their criticism of my approach to Livingston was similar to that which Bronnley had consistently offered, something about their demeanour helped me, gently, to draw conclusions on my own terms. Over coffee during one of our first meetings at the Grad Club, my new advisor simply pointed out that it is difficult to analyze the work of a theorist who did not write anything down. This, after I began to really think about it, seemed unavoidably true.
What, then, could I research? I was in my final year of funding and tuition remission. Even though I had not yet needed to take on any debt as a graduate student, living for free as I was in my subterranean dwelling, I was running out of road—and ideas.
Things were going no better for me in the folklore department. I had released my second anthology, Folk Songs of Canada Now, which consisted of the strongest field recordings I believed myself yet to have gathered.211 I had toured the recording, lecturing about and presenting my findings in all sorts of venues across the country, from pubs and coffee shops to libraries; the Globe and Mail had even declared the recording their “Disc of the Week.”212 The project also received the standard CBC coverage.213 However, I was beginning to grow uncomfortable with the entire premise of the project. Had I really managed to collect the folk songs of Canada? My inherited ambitions were starting to seem impossible, even insane. Staunton R. Livingston’s techno-fetishistic and communistic praxis had offered an aestheticized way of sidestepping pressing questions of culture, if not class and solidarity; I believed—and believe to this day—that there is a latent political potential within Livingston’s anti-institutional and magical approach.214 But faith in my ability to translate his philosophies into a complete folk song anthology was shot, to such a degree that I did not even bring a microphone or recording device with me to the Yukon.
To be clear, I had not lost confidence in the folk, only in myself. It might be most accurate to state that I had lost confidence in the position of folk song collector. I had captured sublime songs, met interesting people, and done my best to cover as much territory as possible. But had I gone far enough? For example, had I not spent too much time in Southwestern Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and not enough time in, say, Calgary? Not to mention Yellowknife? Had I not contaminated the performances of my informants with my irrepressible personal preference for balladry? Were my ears and eyes not too irredeemably contaminated by the patriarchal settler-colonial nation-state of Canada to conduct the complex, sensitive work of folk song collection? Further, could one person—could I—ever go far enough?215
The frailties of human life (my own) and the limitations of individual perspective (my own) had never been more apparent to me than in those weeks of early April 2013 that I spent confined to my basement, coming up only for sandwiches at the fascist coffee chain across the street.216 Mould grew not only on my walls and carpets but also, it very much seemed, on my spirit. Therefore, as the Forest City’s speckled snowbanks finally finished bleeding out, I decided I needed a vacation.
To top it all off, dear reader, I had fallen into a dark, heartbreaking kind of love. Corinna and I were continuing to see one another, but she would not tell her partner, nor had she expressed any concrete willingness to seek a separation. Which meant we were having an affair. We met in London or Toronto, or any nearby town to which we could secure a cheap flight, screwing and embracing in hotel rooms, or in my basement, laughing and weeping. It was the most suitable relationship for this freewheeling folk song collector who longed—and longs still—to be free. But sometimes the culturally constructed desire to couple weighed me down, and the melancholy would rise.217 I was like a wide receiver on a quick hitch pass; at bottom, despite the pleasures and joys of flesh and contact—in general, of communication—I was completely alone.218
For the record, I was dating other people. My missing front teeth had by now been replaced. Coupled with my new weightlifting regimen, and the appropriately sized clothes that I had begun to purchase, piece by piece, I was, according to Corinna, an attractive and vivacious young man. It was indeed getting easier to meet people. Curators, bartenders, assistant professors, hairdressers, custodians, fellow folklorists… I will refrain from further detail, for my frequent flings around this time had little bearing on the trajectory of my folk song collecting practices. The point here is that I was not heartbroken over Corinna simply because I was starved for human touch.
I had last seen her in mid-February, two months prior to packing my bags for the Yukon. She had flown to Detroit to give a lecture. Her partner was scheduled to join for a few days afterwards, but she had forty-eight hours free at the start for me. Thus, I took the Greyhound south across the rolling, snow-covered fields, and reminisced about our time in Banff, and about how I wanted my life to look—trying to think harder, perhaps, than I had ever thought before. I wiped away my tears with Subway serviettes. But as we crossed over the bridge toward that iconic concentration of surplus-value extraction, a colony of industrial cathedrals, my mind remained blanker than a fresh reel of magnetic tape.219 I had no idea what I could, should, or would do. And I had no idea what was coming.
* * *
Bury Me Not on the Prairie220
by LIVINGSTON™
I am a lonesome idiot;
Just can’t get rid of it.
I been to oceans, I been to ponds,
Been to the prairies and to Yukon,
And I ain’t no one;
And I ain’t got no one.
One time, in the back of my belly,
There was a longing in me;
It wasn’t mine.
I pulled it out and I threw it;
It didn’t have nothing to do with
The empty and the echo that I am.
X
X
You only get one life,
But you gotta live it till you die;
It doesn’t matter what you try.
At the end of the road there’s a hole
Where they put your body when it’s gotten too old,
Sometimes even before,
If you’re lucky, then before.
And one time in Alberta
I got to thinking how fertile
Earth can be.
It lasted all of a minute,
Till I came clear through it,
Grounded by a darkness and Calgary.
You only get one life,
But you gotta live it until you die;
It doesn’t matter what you try.
At the end of the road there’s a hole,
Where they put your body when it’s gotten too old,
Sometimes even before,
If you’re lucky, long before.
* * *
In the Wilderness
On the ground in Dawson City, it was my old friend Matt Sarty who found a short-term sublet in town, a room in the Macaulay House, a heritage home presently occupied also by a computer programmer named Mirek Plíhal. The latter detail was not discovered until I was dropped by the front steps and wandered inside. “Is it a house? Apartment? Condo???” I had messaged through Facebook in frustration while waiting for my last connecting flight. These were the kinds of questions to which Matt Sarty rarely responded, or to which he responded with cryptic symbols.221 I am unsure whether or not I would have gone to Dawson for my vacation, however, if I had known I would have a housemate. This is significant.
Predictably, my initial week with Mirek on the corner of Princess and Seventh Streets was no honeymoon phase. In order to establish boundaries, I decided—or perhaps this choice was less logically deduced than subconsciously summoned—to mark a disconnect between my life at the house and my life in the public sphere.222 For example, my first evening in town, after our earlier curt introduction, I passed Mirek in the kitchen but did not say a word, walking directly past to the mudroom, out to meet Sarty and hi
s cortège for an open mic event in the ballroom by the river. When I ran into Mirek later at that very gathering, he expressed regret that we had not gone together. “I was going to invite you, but you rushed off,” he said. I shrugged my shoulders and went back to the bar.
I also made it clear that we would not be sharing any silverware or dishes. Assembling a short stack of plates and cutlery by the edge of the counter, my claimed utensils carefully covered with a dishtowel, I verbally indicated the next morning that these items were to be used by me and me alone.223 After that, there was a tinge of bitterness on his part during our brief and silent encounters, he making tea or toast, for example, while I prepared one of my steadily improving stews. Aside from the soft sounds of clinking, cutting, wiping, or simmering, the sincere din of the local community radio station was the only noise in the downstairs common area.
In casting my mind back to this period, it is as though I was seeking to resist the fortuitous currents of destiny, propelled as I was by pure chance or my own interpersonal inadequacies. Our talents were exactly opposite but complementary, our attitudes and demeanours overlapping and synergistic; together, we had the equipment to accomplish something beyond anything in either of our oeuvres to date. I only needed to accept.
This happened one slow afternoon; I believe it was a Tuesday. Less than a week in, I had already grown bored, not of Dawson’s wild nights, but of the daytime hours, when the gold miners and reality television crews plugged away within their respective métiers on this final frontier. I found it onerous to endure until happy hour. I had taken every lunch so far at the Downtown Hotel, ordering the daily special, which lasted a good sixty minutes, an hour and a half with dessert.224 One day I spent the afternoon reading at the public library; I spent a couple of mornings sitting in the courthouse, where a local man was defending himself against the charge of attempted murder.225 A disappointingly dull afternoon was whittled away in the local archives, where I searched through short texts published in and around the area, looking for forgotten folk songs.226 Had I lost even my passion for stacks and piles of documents?227 I was intrigued by the menacing woods beyond the town’s perimeter, but too afraid to leave the settlement. I therefore bounced in this way from establishment to establishment, across the dirt roads and along the antique boardwalks. When I returned to the house that aforementioned Tuesday around four in the afternoon to find Mirek sitting on the living room couch, holding a Coors Light and watching my favourite gameshow, my cold armour was adulterated with one decisive blow. “Is this new?” I asked, eying the screen. I sat down.