Pretty Pictures

Xylaria polymorpha

Neither fingers nor art, these projections come from Xylaria polymorpha, a saprobic fungus.

It is a common inhabitant of forest and woodland areas, usually growing from the bases of rotting or injured tree stumps and decaying wood. It has also been known to colonize substrates like woody legume pods, petioles, and herbaceous stems. It is characterized by its elongated upright, clavate, or strap-like stromata poking up through the ground, much like fingers.

Perception.

I was standing in front of the Tyrell’s downstairs bathroom mirror. It was a June morning in 1970 and I was getting ready to go to convocation day at UBC. That was 46 years and four days ago. I couldn’t get my hair to look right so I went to our upstairs bathroom where there were hinged mirrors that allowed me to see the back of my head.

It sucked the life and breath out of me to see that I was going bald. Six months later, most of my hair was gone. I considered a wig for about a minute but imagining it slipping off during wild and passionate sex prevented me from getting one; integrity trumped being fake.

Many years later and long before computers would change how strangers meet, I was sitting in the Nice train station waiting to meet someone I’d never met. I had made a sign with my name on it but I had forgotten it so I was worrying about how we would find each other when all of a sudden there he was, right before me, asking me if I were me in with a confident air.

As we walked to my apartment along Rue de France on a stretch of sidewalk that’s about a foot wide, we had to walk a block single file and prevented from pointing out the sites, my thinking had me realized that I had probably been described as “the youngest looking totally bald person: he’d see in the station. The thing I most hated about my appearance had become my defining characteristic. And so it is with stuttering.

“Hi. I’m c-c-c-c-calling about my c-c-c-c-car?”

“I’ll get Raj right away, Mr. Loranger.”

I was in my car calling to ask where I should park my car. I could see her through the window. She was wearing her phone on her hip and had ear buds in her ears. She had no call display so I knew my stutter was my aural avatar.

In the 1980s I met a guy who became a roommate for five years and we became fast friends. Ever since, when I have referenced him in conversation, someone has very often referenced his excessive handsomeness. He is classically tall, dark and handsome. That is his defining characteristic. Were he waiting to meet a stranger in a train station, his visitor would be seeking “the tallest, handsomest man in the room.”  

When I wrote my screenplay I was asked to explain what it was about in forty words or less. I found it impossible, so I asked the man who bought the screenplay why he wanted me to do it. He told me what I was writing was a logline — a seductive synopsis of a screenplay used for marketing the film.

I decided I couldn’t do it. I was too close to it. So I asked my editor to write it. I believed my screenplay would get a better logline from an objective whose perception would be far more aligned with that of viewers of the film; my screenplay is autobiographical.

I think knowledge of how others perceive us (or our work) is vital for a healthy personal and professional self-concept. Those who know us well tend to describe us by our values; strangers must use sound bytes and visual indicators to form the “logline” with which they will describe us.

When we are young, we try to shape perception of us with carefully chosen words in our CVs, interviews and applications and in our digital presences. We want positively connoted identifiers. Post-retirement we are freed from all that if we are lucky. I know people my age still addicted to ambition that jars like leggings and long dyed hair on women beyond that certain age.

I consider it a worthwhile objective to have one’s self-concept match objective perception.

We don’t get to choose how others describe us and not everyone is so easily trademarked. Only those of us with striking visual or auditory assets or deficiencies can be so readily identified. 

Have you ever wondered how people describe you? What might they say?

Music, Mechanics & Artistry

The Catholic Church: Morally Bankrupt Fighting Fiscal Bankruptcy

The Catholic Conference for the State of New York  headed by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, has hired the powerful lobbying firm, Greenberg Taurig, to help them fight the passage of proposed legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations for victims of child sexual abuse.

The Catholic Church is paying Greenberg Tuareg's agent, Michael Murphy, $6,000 per month to help them defeat passage of the bill in the New York State Legislature. The church fears that litigating child sexual abuse victims of their priests, who are now adults, will bankrupt the church. Oh dear!

The spokesperson for the Conference, Dennis Poust, has refused to comment on the organization’s lobbying efforts or the reasoning behind them. He has, however, said that the church’s advocacy activities are in compliance with the law.

(This is the same church that placed me in an orphanage for infants wherein babies orphaned by war were deemed “innocent” orphans and were treated better than children “born of sin” (bastards) like me.)

This morning, I Googled “tenets of Christianity.” I wanted to see what the core values of the Christian churches are. I also was interested in the order in which they might be listed. I expected to see words such as “acceptance,” “inclusion,” and “forgiveness,” but no; what I saw were tenets exclusively concerned with the Jesus myth.

For Christians, their number first and foremost tenet is that the route to all the benefits of their faith is through an acceptance of and belief in Jesus. I can’t possibly do that. I think of all the cult founders — Jesus, Allah, Mohammed, etc. — as messengers. Their message is to understand and worship God. If you can’t shoot the messenger, why would you worship one? A messenger is just a messenger.

I’ve always been interested in and confounded by religion. Anthropologists have yet to find a single society without gods, yet none of my close friends ever speak of god, religion or going to church. The best outcome of all my reading and thinking was discovering Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950).  

I greatly admire the man and his philosophy. My simplistic understanding of his teaching is this: By doing good you achieve (or become) the divine. So what is “good?” And what is it to be divine?

Being good, to me, means adhering to fairly basic universal moral tenets. Being divine, again in my estimation, means living in every action and interaction by those moral tenets. Were one to do that, I think you would justifiably feel unfathomable pride in yourself and that is how you would experience divinity. 

And if such a person were actually able to exist, to be exclusively good in every word and deed, everyone around that “divine” person would notice his or her good behaviour thereby extending the state of divinity from the individual to the community.

Sri Aurobindo founded an ashram for his adherents and in doing so created the closest thing I have ever seen to a divine community. But his spirit has been even more spectacularly implanted in Auroville where his philosophy has been very successfully secularized. 

Central to Auroville is the church Sri Aurobindo built. The walls are white marble and there are no lights. It is lit with sunlight that comes in through a giant crystal lens in the roof. There is no altar, nor are there any statues or paintings. 

When you enter, you take a prayer rug as is done in a mosque. It defines the space you can use in the temple to pray and as a citizen of Auroville, you are expected to go to temple every single day. You pray silently in the method of your choice, to the God of your choice; there is no preacher, prayer book, choir nor service.  All you do therein is entirely private and personal.

Sri Aurobindo was a messenger who emphatically said, “Do not worship me! To do so is to misunderstand my purpose. I am a messenger, here to guide you to a relationship with God."

If you go to Pondicherry today, you can easily visit both his ashram and Auroville. I have been to both, twice. Auroville is still a healthy functioning small town. But Sri Aurobindo would die were he to return to the ashram today. His followers create portraits of him in petals every day in worship. He would cringe seeing them celebrating the messenger.

Religions don’t work. They replace a focus on the moral values that gods represent with a focus on the messenger. And when they do that, over time they become so corrupt that they fight legislation that reflects the core moral values they should be defending.

Power of Music

My father, a journalist, had two anti-war books in his library. Both of them were cartoon books and so I was drawn to them as a child. 

As a young adult, I moved to Nice for just over a year. While there, Antoine was my best friend. The stories his family told me about living in France during the war and the many other war stories I heard whilst living and visiting there have made me a veteran's advocate.

My worst life experiences as a Canadian have been the death of Terry Fox and the treatment of veterans by that psychopath, our immediate past prime minister.

A Class Act

Pete Souza is a White House photographer who wanted to document the impact of America's first black President on his fellow African-Americans. His photos show the man, not the President in these shots. They are all terribly revealing and moving photos of a man so many of us greatly admire and they are made more powerful every day by the words and actions of Mr. (and I use the term loosely) Trump.

The Obamas attend a celebration to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches.

In Nelson Mandella's jail cell.

In an elevator on in adjuration night.

Dancing with a 106-year-old woman.

Jacob ­Philadelphia asked Obama if his hair was like his,
so the most powerful man in the world bowed to a child