I rarely go to church but last Sunday in Vancouver I attended the occupation of Saint Andrew's Wesley United Church by survivors of Canada's residential school genocide.
About twenty aboriginal men and women entered the church just as I was sitting down, and lined up in front of the altar holding a banner calling for the return of the 50,000 missing children's remains, and a proper burial.
The church, which had been humming with pre-service chatter, suddenly became silent. After conferring quickly, the minister and one or two other robed officers approached the group and talked with them. For a few moments, the atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable.
Then the minister addressed the congregation and welcomed "our friends" who had a message to deliver. He did this in a superficially friendly and grandstanding way that showed he was on top of the situation and knew exactly how to deal with it.
The native men and women stood holding their banner. In contrast to the minister, none of them were smiling. They looked as if they had just absorbed another insult. No one in the congregation moved or responded. All eyes were focused on the visitors and the minister who stood awkwardly rubbing his hands together in one of those ritualized gestures expressing benevolence and Christian tolerance.
The church seemed suddenly filled with the disappointment and anger of the native people. I felt tears welling up, inside and around me.
When they all slowly turned and began silently filing down the aisle towards the front door, it was as if they had had enough of this place. I felt like running after them, but a family had just sat down next to me, blocking my exit.
Once the natives had disappeared, the minister was all smiles again, calling on the congregation to "wave your hands wildly" and shout requests for favourite hymns. The heavy mood had lifted, and now we were going to be entertained by the Holy spirit. For the next hour, I squirmed in my seat as he nimbly ran through his scripted Sunday routine. First came a children's pantomime about Christ healing a paralyzed man, performed with stuffed bears and children led by the pastor. Next, a sermon about his weekly struggle to make his sermons relevant to parishioners.
At times he raised his arms and threw back his head as if receiving inspiration from heaven. He digressed briefly into a commentary on the "guests" who had interrupted the service, and from there he talked about "illness" and the case of the paralyzed man who was saved by the holy spirit descending through a hole in the roof. He talked about "sin" as the root cause of sickness -- an ancient belief that still has meaning today. Never once did he address the theme of guilt, or atonement for crimes against humanity. The United Church has nothing, apparently, to say about that.
When we were asked to turn to the people around us and shake hands and greet one another in the "spirit of the Lord," I was forced to look into one smiling face after another. As mouths repeated the ritual line, eyes told another story. They were eyes I would instinctively have avoided, filled with coldness, fear, secrecy.
I started to think there was something strange about this church and its congregation. I turned my head once or twice to look at them, standing in their rows, astonishingly alike in Sunday clothes, as if they knew what was expected of church goers. In his struggle to be relevant, the minister seemed almost like a marionnette, calling on us to stand up again and make a "joyful noise to the Lord." It was, he said, our time to "rock." The guitars came out and the middle-aged choir put on a pathetic show of belting out a few "contemporary expressions of faith." The minister joined in the rapture, shaking to the Muzak, letting it all hang out for Jesus.
How people manage to go through these motions week after week without choking, is beyond me. It takes a stronger person than I to take part in an orgy of phoniness, and walk out feeling at one with God's love and light.
By the time it was over, I understood my place in the universe: out on the street with the native people who must know by now to expect nothing from a church that has been taken over by latter-day zombies.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Loving thy neighbour
I have been watching a slow change come over some of my friends. It has probably been happening over decades. and it's connected to the political evolution of the state of Israel.
I actually used to defend Israel, back in the 1980s before the politics of that country hardened into present-day policies that now seem to include genocide of Palestinians. While Israel was drifting towards extremism, my friends were drifting into the psychological equivalent of gated communities. Many now live behind their own version of the Wall that separates Israel from Palestine. For some, children of holocaust survivors, it's a well-earned state of peace.
Psychologically, it also can be a no man's land where if you squint, you can see barbed wire and heavy artillery. An arid landscape that does not lead to flourishing friendships. So these days few people I know ever bring up the subject of Israel.
When the war in Lebanon was raging in 2006, communication was often reduced to e-mails calling on me to "defend Israel" from rising anti-Semitism. My position by then was: Israel needs no help in destroying its image as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. Shelling civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza have pretty much accomplished that goal.
Some e-mails even suggested the bombing of Lebanon was really a "feminist" campaign against a medieval culture that mistreats women. Rather than inspiring me to join the clash of civilizations and defend western culture against radical Islam, these mass maiings were making me sick to my stomach, triggering unpleasant flashbacks as well as doubts about the moral IQ of the people sending them -- people I thought I had much in common with. Now I began to wonder.
Even back then, dialogue was almost extinct. When I replied to one woman, a kind and generous person (in the past), she was shocked and sent me an URL about the oppressed Jews of Iran. Nobody was bombing and shelling them at the time, none of their women and children were being buried under rubble. I had a friend who happened to be an Iraqi Jew. He also was no Zionist and told me the Iranian Jews e-mail was a propaganda hoax, discredited some months earlier. I asked my friend why she found that community's history worth sharing at a time when Israeli rockets were pounding civilian villages in the south of Lebanon?
She explained that all these dead children were nothing more than "human shields," and switched to an interrogative tack. "Do you or do you not think Israel has the right to exist?"
It was like talking to someone who is using a handbook. Were we in kindergarten? I spelled out my answer: The right to exist is not the right to wage war on innocent people. When did existence become synonymous with mass murder?
This woman was not Jewish. She was a Scottish Canadian, a former nurse and one of her great qualities is empathy. Put this woman in a Gaza hospital, and she would be racing around saving Palestinian lives. But her friends in Montreal were telling her Israel was being attacked, and that the horrific images on TV were manufactured in some Hezbollah PR office at the UN.
The discussion ended when she struck me from her "support Israel" e-mail list. The next time I saw her, she was as friendly as ever. We talked about everything but Israel. By then of course the Wall had been built. It has served a symbolic purpose in hiding unpleasant realities that don't jive with a self-image, built up since WW2, of the Jews as a suffering people with a deep sense of ethics.
This may still be true of many Jews, but it is definitely not true of the Israeli government. This disconnect between historical suffering and present-day criminal policies, really needs to be addressed for the sake of our sanity. But no one seems to know how to initiate an inquiry into how whole nations end up sleepwalking toward mass murder.
I have many Jewish friends and for the most part they are moral people, or they could not be my friends for very long. Lately, though, some of these friends have dropped me. Others have suggested I should be less vocal, mainly by quietly un-friending me on Facebook. Israel's human rights violations, which some are calling war crimes, are not a polite topic on the street where I live.
In a way, Jews are collateral victims of every new Israeli offensive, with its echoes of Second World War atrocities in European cities and villages. "Collective punishment" is something I take personally, especially when friends try to justify it by pretending it isn't happening.
It's as if they're saying: "Love thine enemy. OK, we tried that, and it doesn't work!"
Collective punishment on the other hand, works. I guess that makes it a desirable weapon when you are wishing for a world of peace. It silences resistance by destroying everyone in an area where one's enemies are thought to be operating. It makes no distinctions of gender, age or political affiliation. Anyone can become a human shield without volunteering, and be made to pay equally for the actions of a few, whose bodies need never even be identified.
A few years ago, my former neighbour told me that universal collective punishment for the holocaust is justified, even inevitable. He predicted a time was coming when all of humanity would end up paying for the crimes the Nazis committed against the Jews. It was, he said, part of a divine plan revealing the ultimate purpose of human history. God was angry about the continued suffering of his chosen people, and how world opinion was turning against Israel. So, when the time was right, He would commence revenge killings and destroy all life on the planet. In those days, there would be a great trouble, followed by victory for the chosen.
He seemed to be presenting me with a choice: you are with us or against us. Speechless, I went home to think this over. It could not be a joke, because it had the quality of religious conviction rooted in poisoned emotions. Later these kinds of statements were made by some evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives leaders. And certain Israeli politicians. And of course, extremists.
You don't debate such statements, and there is no answer for them. They come from a fenced-off zone of total negation, roamed by uniformed children with automatic weapons. They have the ring of fanatical racism, and lead to methods which have been shown to work when you are terrorizing a population and preparing the ground for mass murder.
To hear such a statement coming from a former friend is the kiss of death. If not retracted, it erodes all trust, and defeats every possibility of dialogue. Maybe some families can function without dialogue. But a friendship, no. Friendships are based on choice, unless they're friendships of convenience.
"Kill or be killed" is not a human choice but it's an increasingly popular worldview shared by the criminally insane. Like secret abuse, it punishes the innocent, turns supporters into hostages and collaborators. So almost overnight, I lost a friend. And I left town.
A criminal gang have made it clear they believe in collective punishment as the key to their own survival. No exodus is possible in this closed-in world. Inside this walled enclosure, genocide is simply a fact of life because humans by their nature are genocidal. Faced with encircling evil, what choice does a "democracy" like Israel have?
Kill or be killed.
The indiscriminate killing of Palestinians is not only inevitable, it's also insufficient. It evokes international rage and condemnation -- which only reinforces the lonely path of "self-defence" that Israel is following. And once on that path, there is no going back. You don't embark half-heartedly on war crimes. Just ask Hitler. Once unleashed, Blitzkrieg imposes the necessity of carrying on to a conclusion. So in the end, Germany was reduced to smoking rubble, along with the neighbourhood. Logically, inevitably.
The same thing could happen to Israel. If it does, it will be the working out of the same "collective punishment" doctrine that decrees we all must die for the crimes of a few.
I actually used to defend Israel, back in the 1980s before the politics of that country hardened into present-day policies that now seem to include genocide of Palestinians. While Israel was drifting towards extremism, my friends were drifting into the psychological equivalent of gated communities. Many now live behind their own version of the Wall that separates Israel from Palestine. For some, children of holocaust survivors, it's a well-earned state of peace.
Psychologically, it also can be a no man's land where if you squint, you can see barbed wire and heavy artillery. An arid landscape that does not lead to flourishing friendships. So these days few people I know ever bring up the subject of Israel.
When the war in Lebanon was raging in 2006, communication was often reduced to e-mails calling on me to "defend Israel" from rising anti-Semitism. My position by then was: Israel needs no help in destroying its image as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. Shelling civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza have pretty much accomplished that goal.
Some e-mails even suggested the bombing of Lebanon was really a "feminist" campaign against a medieval culture that mistreats women. Rather than inspiring me to join the clash of civilizations and defend western culture against radical Islam, these mass maiings were making me sick to my stomach, triggering unpleasant flashbacks as well as doubts about the moral IQ of the people sending them -- people I thought I had much in common with. Now I began to wonder.
Even back then, dialogue was almost extinct. When I replied to one woman, a kind and generous person (in the past), she was shocked and sent me an URL about the oppressed Jews of Iran. Nobody was bombing and shelling them at the time, none of their women and children were being buried under rubble. I had a friend who happened to be an Iraqi Jew. He also was no Zionist and told me the Iranian Jews e-mail was a propaganda hoax, discredited some months earlier. I asked my friend why she found that community's history worth sharing at a time when Israeli rockets were pounding civilian villages in the south of Lebanon?
She explained that all these dead children were nothing more than "human shields," and switched to an interrogative tack. "Do you or do you not think Israel has the right to exist?"
It was like talking to someone who is using a handbook. Were we in kindergarten? I spelled out my answer: The right to exist is not the right to wage war on innocent people. When did existence become synonymous with mass murder?
This woman was not Jewish. She was a Scottish Canadian, a former nurse and one of her great qualities is empathy. Put this woman in a Gaza hospital, and she would be racing around saving Palestinian lives. But her friends in Montreal were telling her Israel was being attacked, and that the horrific images on TV were manufactured in some Hezbollah PR office at the UN.
The discussion ended when she struck me from her "support Israel" e-mail list. The next time I saw her, she was as friendly as ever. We talked about everything but Israel. By then of course the Wall had been built. It has served a symbolic purpose in hiding unpleasant realities that don't jive with a self-image, built up since WW2, of the Jews as a suffering people with a deep sense of ethics.
This may still be true of many Jews, but it is definitely not true of the Israeli government. This disconnect between historical suffering and present-day criminal policies, really needs to be addressed for the sake of our sanity. But no one seems to know how to initiate an inquiry into how whole nations end up sleepwalking toward mass murder.
I have many Jewish friends and for the most part they are moral people, or they could not be my friends for very long. Lately, though, some of these friends have dropped me. Others have suggested I should be less vocal, mainly by quietly un-friending me on Facebook. Israel's human rights violations, which some are calling war crimes, are not a polite topic on the street where I live.
In a way, Jews are collateral victims of every new Israeli offensive, with its echoes of Second World War atrocities in European cities and villages. "Collective punishment" is something I take personally, especially when friends try to justify it by pretending it isn't happening.
It's as if they're saying: "Love thine enemy. OK, we tried that, and it doesn't work!"
Collective punishment on the other hand, works. I guess that makes it a desirable weapon when you are wishing for a world of peace. It silences resistance by destroying everyone in an area where one's enemies are thought to be operating. It makes no distinctions of gender, age or political affiliation. Anyone can become a human shield without volunteering, and be made to pay equally for the actions of a few, whose bodies need never even be identified.
A few years ago, my former neighbour told me that universal collective punishment for the holocaust is justified, even inevitable. He predicted a time was coming when all of humanity would end up paying for the crimes the Nazis committed against the Jews. It was, he said, part of a divine plan revealing the ultimate purpose of human history. God was angry about the continued suffering of his chosen people, and how world opinion was turning against Israel. So, when the time was right, He would commence revenge killings and destroy all life on the planet. In those days, there would be a great trouble, followed by victory for the chosen.
He seemed to be presenting me with a choice: you are with us or against us. Speechless, I went home to think this over. It could not be a joke, because it had the quality of religious conviction rooted in poisoned emotions. Later these kinds of statements were made by some evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives leaders. And certain Israeli politicians. And of course, extremists.
You don't debate such statements, and there is no answer for them. They come from a fenced-off zone of total negation, roamed by uniformed children with automatic weapons. They have the ring of fanatical racism, and lead to methods which have been shown to work when you are terrorizing a population and preparing the ground for mass murder.
To hear such a statement coming from a former friend is the kiss of death. If not retracted, it erodes all trust, and defeats every possibility of dialogue. Maybe some families can function without dialogue. But a friendship, no. Friendships are based on choice, unless they're friendships of convenience.
"Kill or be killed" is not a human choice but it's an increasingly popular worldview shared by the criminally insane. Like secret abuse, it punishes the innocent, turns supporters into hostages and collaborators. So almost overnight, I lost a friend. And I left town.
A criminal gang have made it clear they believe in collective punishment as the key to their own survival. No exodus is possible in this closed-in world. Inside this walled enclosure, genocide is simply a fact of life because humans by their nature are genocidal. Faced with encircling evil, what choice does a "democracy" like Israel have?
Kill or be killed.
The indiscriminate killing of Palestinians is not only inevitable, it's also insufficient. It evokes international rage and condemnation -- which only reinforces the lonely path of "self-defence" that Israel is following. And once on that path, there is no going back. You don't embark half-heartedly on war crimes. Just ask Hitler. Once unleashed, Blitzkrieg imposes the necessity of carrying on to a conclusion. So in the end, Germany was reduced to smoking rubble, along with the neighbourhood. Logically, inevitably.
The same thing could happen to Israel. If it does, it will be the working out of the same "collective punishment" doctrine that decrees we all must die for the crimes of a few.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Letter from an Israeli friend (verbatim)
I received this letter about a week ago, i.e. mid-January, at the height of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. I am putting it here, verbatim, while I think it over. What can one say? I did reply, as quietly and reasonably as possible, but my response came nowhere near dealing with the core of M's message. Clearly, she believes Israel is defending itself from terrorists, and that no one in the outside world can possibly understand what her people are experiencing. She also seems to believe that Israel's "humanitarian aid" to Gaza has gone ignored due to "human nature." Clearly, she feels herself to be living in an island of sanity in the midst of an ocean of evil.
I am reminded of how the people of Nazi Germany were conditioned to think of themselves as totally isolated, surrounded and under attack by evil enemies -- when in fact their leaders were using mass media and deception to build support for acts of extreme aggression against their neighbours.
I just don't know where to begin in trying to make sense of this, so I'm starting here.
Ann
****************************************************************
Dear Ann
I deeply appreciate your reply and thank you for mentioning my emotional approach.
The numbers are so horrifying because the Hamas use the people and the children as a source of shelter. They shoot the rockets from homes, hospitals and know that Israeli attitude (even as hard to believe it now) is NOT to hurt civilians in any case.
I am so so so sorry for all the loss of people on both sides, but the Hamas have been sending rockets for years!!! The South of this tinny country lives in constant terror, The farmers say for years that they feel like in a "Russian rulet" every day while working in he fields, people died lost houses, what about all the walking bombs we fear constantly - is that OK?The world seems at peace with that, WHY?? is it OK to kill Israeli people? Is it Ann?!,,,and many more stories and reasons for the strong action that you and the world are seen. You know that they have the headquarters under a Hospital - How sick can people be??? Apparently very (and you know that).
I get very upset when I see that people as you only see one side of the picture.
Do you really think I feel safer or good knowing that so many people/children lost their lives? Well I don't but we can not live with so much daily fear of s bloody deadly rocket falling on you in the country (they reach most of Israel between the Hezbollah in the North and the Hamas in the South), enough the danger along the borders.
I just think that you see one side and take a side with out really understanding that it is about human nature and not Hamas/Israel/Hezbollah /Iran/Bosnia/Tibet/..... and so many other countries.
How come this was makes you so active and not other wars?
what about horrifying situations in so many other parts of the world?
Why Israel vs Palestine?
Is it sexy to take part here?
Have you heard of the idea that Gaza is entirely bomb trapped: homes (with family's inside, schools even the animal cages in the zoo!!!!!I mean come on...and you know why? well that Hamas may be a big bunch of bully's but they know that the Israelis have a human heart within, no matter what and they starved the people and animals - knowing wed fall into the trap, while giving supplies and aiding.
Of course you never hear of the help; the ceasefire so they can get water and food supplies(including the Hamas), no rape, no beating up or cruelty towards the people face to face.
Give one example of a nation who does not hurt the civilian's? rape, kill, rob.....while in face to face contact? You know that the Israeli soldiers give them food and water? the hospitals treat whom ever shows up , even at a time of war because we understand that they are lead by a bunch of Hamas bullies/
So I may send you some stuff may not- as I am so tiered of explaining ...but that may be a small part that I need to do, since I am not fighting nor sitting in a protected room, as thank God the rockets have not reached the area I live in.
So think before taking such strong sides for or against -- and of course do what ever you want to. My approach is the human weakness, how cruel humans are towards each other....
Tell me Ann: How can an armed man take a child as use him as cover?
I hope it will soon end - the war, but the Hamas and the Hezbollah are still arming and look around the world...see what is happening.
You want to help - no shortage of places and people.....why spread hatred towards any side? Do you really think that will improve any thing?
Any how
Do what ever you think is right for you.
As always
Take care and be safe and happy,
in peace
Marcelle
Thursday, December 11, 2008
HOW STEPHEN HARPER STOLE POETRY
Everybody left the room an hour ago
Only you have failed to have your fortune read
It's time to pack it in, put out your Marlboro
Everything that gathered here is dead
Forget that tune you're plucking on your mandolin
Forget that song you sing inside your head
The piano doesn't need your variations anymore
It's time to put your fingertips to bed
Put out, put out your cigarette
The stores are closed, the streets are wet
There's nothing that can stop us from destroying you
The jackets are all hanging from their happy little hooks
There's a party in El Salvador
The screams are coming through the floor
It's not your turn, so close the door
The Kommandant is calling you to bed
You thought by hanging round you might learn something more
Or by sticking out your hat you might get fed
Or by rifling your bureau drawer
You might turn up some metaphor
That no one's ever thought about or read
Forget it. Everybody's gone to bed
And everything that mattered here has fled.
Put out, put out your cigarette
Pick up your gun, the streets are wet
There’s nothing that can stop us from deploying you
There’s a coup d’etat in Ecuador
The boys are marching 4 x 4
They used to be alive but now they’re dead
This is where you come down hard
In boots you bought on credit cards
This is where we sever
The affair you thought would last forever
Darling, you're not one of us
You should have boarded that last bus
When everyone got wind that we were here
You should have scattered with the rest
You hung around, you failed the test
You're just a bitter aftertaste
A steaming chunk of human waste
You feasted on our charity
It's time you saw our Face
You're coming to the end of our embrace
(Ann Diamond)
Only you have failed to have your fortune read
It's time to pack it in, put out your Marlboro
Everything that gathered here is dead
Forget that tune you're plucking on your mandolin
Forget that song you sing inside your head
The piano doesn't need your variations anymore
It's time to put your fingertips to bed
Put out, put out your cigarette
The stores are closed, the streets are wet
There's nothing that can stop us from destroying you
The jackets are all hanging from their happy little hooks
There's a party in El Salvador
The screams are coming through the floor
It's not your turn, so close the door
The Kommandant is calling you to bed
You thought by hanging round you might learn something more
Or by sticking out your hat you might get fed
Or by rifling your bureau drawer
You might turn up some metaphor
That no one's ever thought about or read
Forget it. Everybody's gone to bed
And everything that mattered here has fled.
Put out, put out your cigarette
Pick up your gun, the streets are wet
There’s nothing that can stop us from deploying you
There’s a coup d’etat in Ecuador
The boys are marching 4 x 4
They used to be alive but now they’re dead
This is where you come down hard
In boots you bought on credit cards
This is where we sever
The affair you thought would last forever
Darling, you're not one of us
You should have boarded that last bus
When everyone got wind that we were here
You should have scattered with the rest
You hung around, you failed the test
You're just a bitter aftertaste
A steaming chunk of human waste
You feasted on our charity
It's time you saw our Face
You're coming to the end of our embrace
(Ann Diamond)
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Every time I think of someone, they... get shot in a Mumbai hotel
I was thinking of Montreal actor Michael Rudder just last week. I hadn't seen him in several years, but on Monday he just popped into my mind and I asked one or two people where he was. Has he been in any new plays lately, I wondered? No one knew. In fact, I barely know him, but in the old days we used to bump into each other on a street corner and chat.
The answer came a few days later from an unexpected source: the television news. Michael made headlines last week, having survived the November 26 attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, by playing dead.
I hope Michael comes home soon. He's one of my favourite Montreal actors.
I am one of those who think the events in Mumbai were carried out by "non-state actors" -- aka mercenaries -- working for corporations, intelligence agencies, and governments who have a lucrative stake in promoting conflict in South Asia and the Middle East. Sorry -- nothing short of definite proof will make me think any different.
These mercenaries in designer jeans, barely out of adolescence, are a new kind of soldier being deployed around the world at this time. I suspect many of them have been subjected to various kinds of mind control training, designed to turn them into deadly killing machines, who commit mass murder with a smile. The role they are playing on the world stage is to spread fear, confusion, chaos -- and give our rulers another excuse to expand their wars and tighten their deadlock on our minds.
It takes courage to stay sane, grounded and humble in times when psychopathic kids with guns are running amok, their hatred fuelled and funded by well-organized global gangsters who own both the weapons of mass destruction, and the media of mass deception.
Actors like Michael Rudder, on the other hand, practice theatre for reasons that have nothing to do with greed for power. Michael's humanity and self-deprecating sense of humour were on display while he was being interviewed from his hospital bed, with tubes up his nose. He's never been one to scream or over-act.
If only our leaders would enrol in that kind of acting class...
The answer came a few days later from an unexpected source: the television news. Michael made headlines last week, having survived the November 26 attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, by playing dead.
I hope Michael comes home soon. He's one of my favourite Montreal actors.
I am one of those who think the events in Mumbai were carried out by "non-state actors" -- aka mercenaries -- working for corporations, intelligence agencies, and governments who have a lucrative stake in promoting conflict in South Asia and the Middle East. Sorry -- nothing short of definite proof will make me think any different.
These mercenaries in designer jeans, barely out of adolescence, are a new kind of soldier being deployed around the world at this time. I suspect many of them have been subjected to various kinds of mind control training, designed to turn them into deadly killing machines, who commit mass murder with a smile. The role they are playing on the world stage is to spread fear, confusion, chaos -- and give our rulers another excuse to expand their wars and tighten their deadlock on our minds.
It takes courage to stay sane, grounded and humble in times when psychopathic kids with guns are running amok, their hatred fuelled and funded by well-organized global gangsters who own both the weapons of mass destruction, and the media of mass deception.
Actors like Michael Rudder, on the other hand, practice theatre for reasons that have nothing to do with greed for power. Michael's humanity and self-deprecating sense of humour were on display while he was being interviewed from his hospital bed, with tubes up his nose. He's never been one to scream or over-act.
If only our leaders would enrol in that kind of acting class...
Friday, November 21, 2008
Is it just me, or is it getting English-er out there?
GLEAMS THEATRE presents The Bald Soprano at Geordie Space
THE BALD SOPRANO is about the peculiarity of English life, English fires, English food, English chairs, English socks, English men, English women and everything English.Yes, all this is shocking, especially the first time you encounter it. After the war, Eugene Ionesco, who lived in France, began studying English, and wrote a play about the experience. Presumably he had also noticed how autistic, even catatonic, phrasebook-English speakers appear. Perhaps he felt lost without his native Roumanian and French - continental languages that entwine around reality, while English boxes it. Or perhaps he feared the world was growing Englisher day by day.This is where the Bald Soprano began: a reaction to culture shock. But Gleams Theatre's director Constantin Sokolov takes it a few steps farther. There's an introductory sequence that includes a fascinating monologue from another Ionesco play, THE CHAIRS, followed by a sequence in which the actors announce there will not be a play because the theatre is empty. Actor-ushers order the audience to get up and move to the other side of the theatre. Without a word, everyone cooperates, exchanging glances. Do these people know what they're doing? Is this a play? or something else? Should we leave now to avoid further embarrassment?The cattle are reseated. The play begins. A scene in London. A couple, seated in chairs. The husband is doing a crossword puzzle. The wife is darning socks. We know they are English by their accents, although their cellphones keep ringing, forcing them to switch to their real-life personas, before becoming British again. These improvised interruptions help emphasize the awkwardness and absurdity of the play.Inevitably the wooden English characters and their absurd dialogues become nearly comprehensible, and by Act Two we're almost interested in their 'story' -- which goes to show it's practically impossible to write something meaningless. Despite our best efforts to eliminate it, meaning creeps into everything. Time and habit create the illusion of familiarity and repetition builds suspense, even as Big Ben chimes 17 times whenever it pleases. Characters move like mechanical toys, changing chairs with no rhyme or reason; nevertheless, before long, they seem almost alive and the audience begins to care what will happen next. Somewhere between tension and total boredom, we await the grand finale of nonsensical lines shouted into space by maniacal robots on amphetamines.Despite a few gimmicks too many, this play was strangely satisfying. Could it be because, since 2001, we've been living in wartime? Or a simulation of wartime? In the beginning, wasn't Theatre of the Absurd a response to war and the psychosis it unleashes in every little corner of our lives? Didn't absurdity come into vogue between the wars? Aren't plays like this a way to relax and let go and indulge in a little controlled insanity after you've been trapped for too long inside the real, out-of-control kind?I'm all for more surrealism and absurdity in theatre. Nothing in the world is as solid or structured as an English play or English "life". No solid threat is real unless we allow it to entrap us in the fear of it. Down with television and newspapers. Down with the prison called English. The best response to the English Terror is a sense of irony and the absurd -- usually acquired after real immersion in a foreign language.
THE BALD SOPRANO is about the peculiarity of English life, English fires, English food, English chairs, English socks, English men, English women and everything English.Yes, all this is shocking, especially the first time you encounter it. After the war, Eugene Ionesco, who lived in France, began studying English, and wrote a play about the experience. Presumably he had also noticed how autistic, even catatonic, phrasebook-English speakers appear. Perhaps he felt lost without his native Roumanian and French - continental languages that entwine around reality, while English boxes it. Or perhaps he feared the world was growing Englisher day by day.This is where the Bald Soprano began: a reaction to culture shock. But Gleams Theatre's director Constantin Sokolov takes it a few steps farther. There's an introductory sequence that includes a fascinating monologue from another Ionesco play, THE CHAIRS, followed by a sequence in which the actors announce there will not be a play because the theatre is empty. Actor-ushers order the audience to get up and move to the other side of the theatre. Without a word, everyone cooperates, exchanging glances. Do these people know what they're doing? Is this a play? or something else? Should we leave now to avoid further embarrassment?The cattle are reseated. The play begins. A scene in London. A couple, seated in chairs. The husband is doing a crossword puzzle. The wife is darning socks. We know they are English by their accents, although their cellphones keep ringing, forcing them to switch to their real-life personas, before becoming British again. These improvised interruptions help emphasize the awkwardness and absurdity of the play.Inevitably the wooden English characters and their absurd dialogues become nearly comprehensible, and by Act Two we're almost interested in their 'story' -- which goes to show it's practically impossible to write something meaningless. Despite our best efforts to eliminate it, meaning creeps into everything. Time and habit create the illusion of familiarity and repetition builds suspense, even as Big Ben chimes 17 times whenever it pleases. Characters move like mechanical toys, changing chairs with no rhyme or reason; nevertheless, before long, they seem almost alive and the audience begins to care what will happen next. Somewhere between tension and total boredom, we await the grand finale of nonsensical lines shouted into space by maniacal robots on amphetamines.Despite a few gimmicks too many, this play was strangely satisfying. Could it be because, since 2001, we've been living in wartime? Or a simulation of wartime? In the beginning, wasn't Theatre of the Absurd a response to war and the psychosis it unleashes in every little corner of our lives? Didn't absurdity come into vogue between the wars? Aren't plays like this a way to relax and let go and indulge in a little controlled insanity after you've been trapped for too long inside the real, out-of-control kind?I'm all for more surrealism and absurdity in theatre. Nothing in the world is as solid or structured as an English play or English "life". No solid threat is real unless we allow it to entrap us in the fear of it. Down with television and newspapers. Down with the prison called English. The best response to the English Terror is a sense of irony and the absurd -- usually acquired after real immersion in a foreign language.
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