Speaking out against Ontario Works

My curriculum vitae, which I’ve written as a narrative rather than a list of dates and jobs, ends with the words: “I believe people are more important than institutions.” Not a sentence to warm the hearts of employers, but one that is true and belongs in my CV. Anyone wishing to employ my services should know what they’re getting: I don’t take kindly to institutional bullying. I have, or had, a history of standing up for fellow workers. The talented magazine artist named Linda, browbeaten into timid mediocrity; the single mother with a son named Carl required to work long nights and weekends. That sort of thing.

I’ve even compared salaries, especially with female co-workers. I realize that’s cause for being fired, even though freedom of expression is protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I don’t like lies, and I don’t like expedient silence. It goes against my nature. It goes against my conscience.

Did you know freedom of conscience is also protected under the Canadian Charter? Probably not. Most Canadians, like most Americans with their Constitution, have no idea what’s really in the Charter. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien wanted to have the article removed. So, no doubt, would have Mike Harris, former premier of Ontario and instigator of Ontario Works.

My recent yelling match with Claudette Gamache, the OW worker responsible for my file, has left me in a state of fear for the past few days. Anxiety has dogged my every waking hour. I’m uneasy all the time, unable to concentrate on the simplest of tasks. I’ve started doubting myself, even in areas where I know myself to be competent. I dread the ringing of the phone, the arrival of the mailman. I feel threatened, watched, under suspicion. I find myself defending myself to myself in order to shore up a demoralized sense of self-confidence. I feel attacked. I feel powerless.

All this because I dared be honest. Ms. Gamache chose to make my continued eligibility for OW benefits contingent on attending two interviews in widely-spaced locations, one of which meetings was clearly superfluous. So blatant was the duplication that I assumed an error and took steps to correct it. When it turned out to be deliberate, I smelled “jumping through hoops” and said so, adding that I would, of course, attend the interview on the other side of the city if that was what was required.

It wasn’t the right thing to say. I know. Neither is finishing my CV with a perfectly honest statement that, in a better world, would be self-evident.

I cannot help but notice that in this post and in my last, I’ve quite unconsciously repeated the phrase, “It wasn’t the right thing to say.” What would have been the right thing to say? Why, nothing, of course, just submissive, compliant silence. To speak up, to speak out—to speak at all—is to invite reprisals, and everyone receiving OW benefits knows it.

We all live under the fear that at any moment, we'll be called upon to justify our lives, our actions. A caseworker happens upon your file after a period of "inactivity" and calls you in. Sometimes the periods are a few months. Sometimes, they're a few years. The point is, you never know, but when the call comes, you know you're in for a rough ride. You will be interrogated, castigated, made to feel guilty, humiliated, and trivialized. You will know that the only way to ensure the arrival of your next cheque is to bow, scrape, kow-tow, agree to everything, and lie. Yes, lie. No one can live on the $7,000 a year provided by OW. The caseworkers know this, which makes the lying even worse because you're being made to do it as an exercise in power. It is nothing more than sanctioned, institutionalized oppression of a disadvantaged group.

It’s funny how long one can go feeling something without recognizing it for what it is. Depression, for example. Many people suffering depression know they’re feeling helpless, know that joy has vanished from their lives, know they’re not attending to the simplest life-affirming tasks, but never connect the dots. It’s the same thing with op-pression. You can go a very long time knuckling under to it without realizing it’s the reason why you’re fearful all the time, the reason you feel guilty when you've done nothing wrong, the reason you're defensive about things that need no defending. You’re scared because it feels as if at any moment someone’s going to pounce. You’re the Jew in Nazi Germany waiting for the knock on the door, the Alabama sharecropper fearing the arrival of the Night Riders.

For the record, and because I’ve spoken of honesty and conscience, I am not looking for “...whatever work I can find” (Ms. Gamache, verbatim). It is a lie I’ve been coerced to tell. The truth, which I’m afraid to speak lest I be punished, is this:

I have chosen to be on OW (“Welfare”) in order to be of service to others and to contribute, to the world, from my unusual combination of skills. It is an unconventional sacrifice, but not one made out of narcissism or mental illness. Conscience demands it.

I cook and clean and shop for a household of three. I spend long hours nearly every day teaching one of my roommmates to sing (if you read my blog, you know I have a degree in music), affording him an opportunity denied by his Children’s Aid Society group-home upbringing. He doesn’t know his father. His mother drank herself to sleep with a lit cigarette and burned to death. He suffers from ADHD. He was spat out by an insensitive, underfunded public education system. Music is healing him, in a very real way, but teaching the unteachable (no education, ADHD) requires an enormous investment of time. I make it willingly, without thought of remuneration, because I see his self-confidence growing, his anger softening, his ability to trust improving daily. And his voice developing in a “oh my god we've hit a motherlode” kind of way.

Cooking, cleaning, shopping, teaching... These aren’t the activities of a lazy man, which is how OW, in the guise of Ms. Gamache, characterizes me. But let’s add to the list of activities. I’m a writer, and not just of novels. I help friends without jobs, or a penny to spare, prepare their resumes. I write extensively-researched and well-respected tutorials for open-source software, most recently for a music-engraving program called MuseScore. (Open-source software is free, written by volunteer developers. Approximately 2/3 of Internet servers run on open-source software. Android, which powers smart phones and iPads, is also open-source.)

In 2002, I released my own software to the world, a text-processing tool that runs on another piece of open-source software derived from the Unix operating system (you know, the one used at universities and research facilities). It’s over 18,000 lines of commented code with well over a megabyte of documentation and took several years to write. Since then, I have been responsible for maintaining the program, providing support to users from all over the world, dealing with bug reports, and updating my work to reflect current technologies. Last summer alone, I spent over three months reworking the program into what is now one of the best PDF authoring tools available.

Lest you imagine writing open-source software is fun, or merely for the hobbyist, know that it frequently involves 18-hour days, and that non-availability to users is not an option. It is not paid, but it is necessary, demanding work in our networked age. I have the skills to do it, within my specialized field of expertise (typesetting and typography; I am neither a hacker nor a trained programmer), and conscience—a moral life— demands of me that I do it.

I’m also a musician, primarily a composer. With extensive training in classical music, the music I write will never be commercially viable, even when it approaches the popular song form. There are a number of examples of my work on YouTube, fully-realized symphonic scores and arrangements that took months to prepare, from composing the music to professionally engraving the scores to note-by-note rendering of the scores into computer-generated performances. I go to the trouble, again at a huge cost in time, not in the expectation of making money, not to trot out my creative efforts for the vanity of recognition, but because of my need to contribute to the unbroken tradition of classical music. It is one of mankind’s most magnificent accomplishments, but one which is seriously at risk of vanishing in the face of overwhelming commercial and corporate interests. My scores are online so that others can study and learn from them, as well, one hopes, to be moved by them.

So no, I am not “...out there, all day, every day, looking for whatever work I can find.” I’m at home, working hard at what I’m good at. Of course I’d like to get paid. But in the trade-off between giving to the world of one’s talents versus wasting one’s life in meaningless labour, I chose the former. That’s meant a life of poverty, but I’ve embraced it because I’m driven to be productive. I cannot otherwise hold my head up high.

Welfare exists to assist those who, for whatever reason, are in financial need. It is not OW’s place to judge. It is not OW’s place to frighten me into unsuitable labour. It is not their place to sit me down with a “specialist” who has no resources whatsoever to help me find work appropriate to my skills, but rather to acknowledge that paid work in my fields is exceptionally difficult to come by, especially now that I am fifty-six years old. It is not their place to demand an accounting of my “job search”, but rather to trust that, like any normal human being, I'll jump at any suitable opportunity that presents itself.

In terms of the social contract which used to be Canada’s pride, Ontario Works is a thuggish perversion that oppresses and demeans its clients, coercing them into a failing job market by means of threats and intimidation. Those responsible for setting it up and those responsible for its continuance have corrupted the war on poverty into a war on the poor. My case is unusual, I acknowledge, as are my life choices, but my treatment at the hands of OW is not. I am far from unique. As a province, Ontario to be ashamed of itself.

Speech after long silence - Ontario Works, again

Forgive the quote from Yeats in the title. I couldn't think of a better way to say I'm back from a long hiatus. I ceased blogging two years ago when I realized that almost no one was reading my posts. It seemed pointless to continue without an audience. I was also experiencing the chill of knowing that if I wrote the truth about living poor in Ontario, I was likely to be cut off Welfare. “Ontario Works”, as it is called, a double irony lost on no one.

Suspicion and Surveillance, a report from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work, spells out what OW is really all about.

“Rather than being guided by the principles of universality, needs-based eligibility, and rights and entitlements, the emphasis now is on compulsion, sanctions and obligations...the real intent is to deny access to social assistance and to remove those who are on as quickly as possible.”

Living on OW, whose monthly cheques add up to just a little over $7,000 a year, means living with the daily anxiety of being watched and judged. One is required not only to justify every penny in one's bank account, not only to disclose intimate details of one’s personal and social life, not only to participate in futile and irrelevant job seminars, one is also expected to be, in the words of my worker, to whom I just spoke, “...out there, every day, all day, looking for whatever work you can find.”

The chief means by which OW enforces its agenda is “non-compliance”. In order to receive even so much as a penny, one has to sign an agreement stating that one will, quite simply, do everything OW demands. Non-compliance with any directive from one’s case worker means no cheque. (It is difficult to know which allusion in “non-compliance” is more ominous: the echoes of Nazi Germany and 1984, or the pitiless totalinarianism of the Borg—“You will comply!”) Forced signing of an agreement is tantamount to a contract entered into under duress—void under the law, but when you’re handing welfare cheques to bums, who cares about the law?

I’ve just spoken with my worker, a woman named Claudette Gamache, and been threatened with non-compliance. Again. Roused from sleep when she called—the upstairs neighbours have been keeping me up late for months— I was unable to muster my usual composure and got angry with her. Here's the story.

Last February, after months and months of not hearing from her, Ms. Gamache called me in for an update of my file. Right off the bat, she made the delay into my fault. Why was I to blame? I asked her. I’d made no changes in my financial or living arrangements, and was keeping my eyes open for possible employment. She tippy-tapped at her computer, shook her head, and began muttering about “seeing no movement on this file.” More pecking at the computer, and she accused me of not complying with an order to see an employment specialist—2-1/2 years prior! I had, in fact, seen the said specialist and attended the prescribed seminar on online employment.

As we continued, further inconsistencies came to light, all pertaining to missing information I had in fact supplied. Throughout the interview, I was treated with suspicion and frequently chastised, the theme always the same: non-compliance and my “attitude”, which Ms. Gamache characterized as, “...if you’re like this in a job interview, it's no wonder you can’t get a job.” I responded that this was not a job interview, and that in a job interview, I would not be being reprimanded for the oversights of others.

Ms. Gamache then said she was going to set me up with an employment specialist and handed me some forms to sign, renewing my so-called agreement with OW.

A week or two later, I received notification in the mail that I had an interview with an employement specialist on Mar. 15, 2013. A day later, I received a second notification that I had a second interview with another employment specialist. The second interview was for Mar. 18—by coincidence, my birthday— at the office of another OW district entirely. At the same time, my mom, who’s 89, was experiencing unusual confusion and memory loss, necessistating an immediate trip to Elora, hundreds of kilometers away, to assess the situation. (She’s fine now.)

I called both employment specialists to advise them I’d have to cancel. As per OW norm, both were out of the office. I left clear and detailed messages, saying I’d call to reschedule as soon as I got back to Ottawa, and asking that the two specialists clear up between them which one I should see. I also left a message with Ms. Gamache (“out of the office for the next three days”) enquiring about the redundant interviews.

It turned out that the forms I signed included an agreement to meet with both an “employment specialist” and an “Ontario employment specialist”, a distinction that still escapes me. Since it was an absurd duplication to see both, I called the second, the one not in my district, and re-explained the situation. She agreed it was peculiar and said that, since I wasn’t even in her district, I just had to go see the one who was.

Upon my return to Ottawa, I rescheduled with employment specialist #1. Shortly thereafter, I received mail notification that I had failed to show up for the original appointment and was about to be held in non-compliance. I called Ms. Gamache and clarified that I had given proper notification of the cancellation and had re-booked.

A few days later, I received a second mail notification, this time from the offices of specialist #2, again threatening me with non-compliance for having not shown up at an interview.

Second letter in hand, I went to my interview with specialist #1. Let's call her Janine. Unlike Ms. Gamache, she deserves privacy in this matter. What transpired was both shocking and surreal.

When I showed up at the OW offices, Janine was in tears. A close relative had died, and OW was refusing to give her the day off. I offered what solace I could during the next hour while Janine soldiered on, so distressed she couldn’t even remember her computer password. I offered to write a letter to the editor about OW’s stunning lack of compassion, but she recoiled, fearful it would cost her job.

During that interview, Janine said that the whole OW system is broken. The case workers are unhappy, the clients needs aren’t being met, and the whole non-compliance thing is nothing more than bullying. Her job is mostly futile, since real employment is scarce in the present economy, and whatever assistance she could be offering job-seekers has been hacked off at the knees by cuts to employment programs. Not that the programs were all that effective, she went on, since they were largely for people with little education or for whom English is still very much a second language. Worse, the system requires everyone to lie: the clients, who cannot possibly live $7,000 a year alone, and the workers who have to pretend they don’t know. She said, and I quote: “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and wish for the End of Days.”

She was an intelligent and compassionate woman, and deserved honesty in return. I confided to her that my circumstances were unusual. I’m a classically-trained composer, a published novelist, a former typesetter, and a respected open-source programmer . In order to remain productive in these areas, and to pursue what my friend, Tom, calls a Christ vocation (devoting myself to the service of those in need, both in my community and in my immediate circle), I chose, many years ago, to live a life of poverty. “Living poor,” I call it. I have an overwhelming compulsion to be useful, and to give freely to the world what the world so freely gave to me: intelligence, education, talent, encouragement, and practical support. That none of my areas of training and expertise generate much income does not remove my spiritual obligation to continue practising them. Welfare is a choice for me, not to avoid work, but in order to work meaningfully at all. Of course I’d like to have reasonably-paid employment in one of my fields, but they’ rarified and Fate, more than anything else, decides whether I get wind of anything. In short, I’m a hard worker who relies on welfare because the work I do, while highly appreciated by those who benefit, is rarely paid commensurately with the labour involved.

Janine actually congratulated me on my difficult and unusual choices, and wished aloud that more of the people she sees sitting across her desk were like me. I don’t say that vainly, only with gratitude. We spent the remainder of our hour going through the online postings at several job-banks, the same ones I check at home.

To return to our actual story, at the end of our hour, I showed Janine the non-compliance letter from specialist #2. She agreed it would be absurd for me to repeat everything we’d just done. I asked if she could take care of the matter. She said she would, by speaking to Ms. Gamache and contacting specialist #2. To be on the safe side, I called Ms. Gamache (“This is Claudette Gamache, I'm out of the office...”) and left a message bringing her up to date on my interview with Janine, including what she’d said about the second non-compliance letter.

That, I thought, was the end of it. And for two months, so it seemed. Then, this morning, a call from Ms. Gamache claiming I’d refused to see specialist #2. Refused, as if I hadn’t called, hadn’t left messages, hadn’t kept her posted during the whole silly business. More significantly, I had “refused“ nothing, merely cleared up what seemed like a bureaucratic mix-up. I said as much.

The big stick came out quickly. "I don’t think you realize how serious this is. You’re in non-compliance.” Taken aback, I replied that, to the best of my knowledge, the matter of the superfluous interview had been cleared up months ago. Why was she was she calling now? Her response was to repeat: "You’re in non-compliance. You refused to attend an interview. I’m sending you a letter today.”

Over her continued insistence I was in non-compliance, I endeavoured to remind her of the steps I’d taken to deal with the matter, including my communications with specialist #2, my meeting with Janine, and the phone calls to Ms. Gamache herself. I got cross. Who doesn’t when people won’t acknowledge facts? As once before, she criticized my attitude, something which personally she may have had the right to do, but not when she was speaking for the Ontario Works system. Compliant I may have to be, but nowhere in my agreement is it written that I have to act submissively and keep my voice down, too.

I repeated that the duplicate interview had been taken care of months ago, and that it was a dead issue as far as I was concerned because I hadn’t heard about it since. Why was she raising it now? “There's been no movement on your file,” she replied, non-sequitur. “Look,” I said, “if this is a question of jumping through hoops, by all means, set up another interview. I'll be there. But don't threaten me with non-compliance, and stop using that phrase. It sounds like something out of freaking Orwell.”

Of course it wasn’t the right thing to say, but here’s the interesting fact: what I said was true. OW may coerce people into signing an agreement (they also coerce people into volunteering, in direct contradiction to the meaning of both words), but when they deny the right to speak honestly without fear of reprisal, then it’s clear that a darker agenda is at work than providing income assistance and employment counselling.

It goes without saying that Ms. Gamache’s parting shot, having not once acknowledged anything I’d said, was, “You’re in non-compliance. I'm preparing a letter today.”

Seville Orange Marmalade

February. Groundhog Day. Valentine’s Day. John says it’s the longest month of the year. Maybe that’s because the two days it’s known for don’t have holidays attached. If Easter isn’t early, you’re looking at the whole of March before the next real vacation. Plus it’s dead of winter. Months of it behind you, months of it ahead. It’s enough to make the shortest days drag on and on.

The one thing that redeems this godforsaken month is the arrival of the Seville oranges, which, as marmalade aficionados the world over know, are the only oranges to use in marmalade.

Sevilles don’t look like much. They’re generally small, with a thick skin, little pulp, and tons of seeds. But like crabapples, which reveal their magic only when you make them into jelly, Seville oranges are loaded with pectin and packed with flavour. So much so that a scant six oranges is enough to make a dozen jars of marmalade. Six oranges, plus six pounds of sugar and three quarts of water. Now that’s concentrated flavour.

My grandmother used to make marmalade (and the booziest Christmas cake in the world). My favourite Aunt made marmalade (and Damson plum jam, which my uncle, Alex, always called “some damn plum jam”). Until a few years ago, my mom made marmalade. These days, it’s me who keeps the fires of tradition stoked.

Marmalade’s a lot of work, but then, most jams and jellies are. There’s removing the pulp and extracting the juice, chopping the rind into slivers and soaking it, simmering everything until it jells, preparing jars and lids, packing the marmalade, and cleaning up afterwards. It’s more than worth it, though, not just for the resulting ambrosia, but for the savings. Living poor, as we do in our household, one gets into the habit of spending time and energy instead of cash. I could, if I had bucks to burn, go out and buy a single pot of Dundee marmalade. But for the same amount of money, I can purchase oranges and sugar for twelve jars. Which, unlike the single pot of Dundee, I can share—another habit living poor instills.

I suspect, though, that the real reason I get excited about the arrival of the Seville oranges is just that: their arrival. Ever since agribusiness started its headlong rush toward globalization and the perpetual availability of so-called fresh produce, the notion of eagerly anticipating the seasonal arrival of fruits and vegetables has largely vanished from the North American urban consciousness. Mourning the loss may strike some as incipient old-fartishness. It’s not. It’s about remembering and valuing a timeless concept: delight.

Delight is not to be found in things that are easily and constantly available. Neither is it to be found in a surfeit of the second rate. Delight in fresh foods, for me at any rate, goes hand in hand with waiting for them, savouring them while they’re in season, and remembering them once they’re gone.

Proust said: “Anticipation is the surest form of pleasure. Who wants to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?” While biting into that first ripe strawberry of the year hardly counts as a desolate attic, it is true that half the pleasure is in the wait.

My mom loves to cook, and I was lucky enough to grow up in southwestern Ontario, which is rich in agricultural land. The yearly rotation of seasons when I was young centred more on what fruits and vegetables were available than on the temperature. Even winter had its imported contribution to make: not just the Seville oranges, but the luscious Fuerte avocados as well, which make the year-round Hass variety look like overgrown warts.

It all started near the end of April, when the race began to see which would show up first: the fiddleheads or the asparagus. Even in stores, fiddleheads remain a seasonal item, and asparagus used to be the same. You waited for it impatiently as winter drew to a close, then pigged out while it lasted. Afterwards, no more tender, tasty spears until next spring. And as for fiddleheads, well, no one in their right mind bought them. They were “wild” food. Gathering the furled fern fronds was, for many people, a family tradition, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. The shortness of the season (fiddleheads can vanish almost overnight) made the celebration of them that much more delirious.

After the asparagus and fiddleheads, the next anticipated delight was strawberries. Strawberries don’t ever ripen off the vine, which means the ones available year round in stores are unripe, sour frauds. I can’t imagine why anyone would eat them. Neither can I imagine not gorging on the real thing during their naturally, if regrettably, short season.

In Ontario, strawberries last from the middle of June till the beginning of July, when the raspberries start. To my childhood self, summer gained momentum with the raspberries. Every week thereafter heralded the arrival of treats untasted since last year. The first unfrozen green peas, still in their pods and in need of shelling. The first wax beans. The first Bing cherries. The first blue plums. The first fat cantaloupes and watermelons.

August brought about anticipation of the first corn of the season, along with huge, misshapen Beefsteak tomatoes and Freestone peaches. Other fruits proliferated on the dessert table: Bartlett pears, apricots, nectarines, black grapes. And, of course, the jewel in the crown of August, the blueberries. Only wild blueberries taste like blueberries. The year-long wait preceding their arrival was foreplay to the orgy of gluttony that ensued.

With autumn came the first new apples, the first new “keepers” (beets, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas), the explosion of squashes in dozens of shapes, sizes, and colours. The year was winding down, but far from over. Brussels sprouts and hardy cabbages sometimes lasted even past December’s early snow.

And once winter had settled in, there were always the Seville oranges to look forward to—admittedly not native, but a reminder, just the same, of the delights of seasonal produce, and cause for the hope of spring.

* * *

It would be unfair of me to have mentioned marmalade without giving my mom’s recipe, so here it is. It comes from a cookbook put together by the Women’s Auxiliary of The Church of the Good Shepherd (Anglican) in San José, Costa Rica, which was my father’s parish back in the 1950s.

Seville Orange Marmalade

6-8 Seville oranges
6 lbs. sugar (approx. 14 cups)
12 cups water

Cut the oranges into quarters. Take out the pulp, with the seeds, and place in a bowl. Cover with 3 cups of the water.

Cut the quarter skins into halves lengthwise, then cut the skins into very thin strips the other direction. Cover with 6 cups of the water. Let stand overnight.

Next morning, boil the pulp and water gently for 10 minutes. Line a colander with cheesecloth, dump in the pulp, squeeze out all the juice, and set aside.

Again cover the pulp with 3 cups of water. Boil again, gently, for 10 minutes. Squeeze out juice as before.

Add the two lots of juice to the skins (and the water they’re in). Boil gently for one hour.

Lastly, add the sugar—gradually, a cup at a time, or the marmalade will be cloudy. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the temperature reaches 8 degrees Fahrenheit above boiling point (220 degrees Fahrenheit at or near sea level), or when the juice falls from a spoon in clear sheets.

Glenn Gould and the Voice of God

The flu hit our household hard just after the holiday season. All three of us—James, John, and I—were laid low for a couple of weeks. We’re only just now returning to full health.
The chief feature of the bug, other than fever and severe respiratory congestion, was the fatigue it inspired. For a while, we were sleeping up to eighteen hours a day.
I normally spend a lot of time at the computer, but with all the Zs I was catching, there wasn’t much I could do, so I set it to download, via BitTorrent, a number of recordings by Glenn Gould I've been wanting for a while. I knew they’d take a couple of days, since classical music tends to have fewer torrent seeders than Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga.
Mostly, I was interested in what I call Gould’s orphan recordings: performances that Gould pundits generally overlook, or would prefer didn't exist.
Gould has long occupied a hallowed place in my creative and intellectual life. As a young pianist, I was drawn to the dashing, Romantic figure crouched over the keyboard, coaxing such daringly unconventional, utterly right-sounding music from the strings. Whenever the CBC aired a Gould documentary or special, it was always an occasion for excitement. I'd sit glued to the TV or radio, captivated not only by the music, but by his unapologetically “for those in the know” discussions of it.
Gould, I have always felt, was first and foremost a great teacher, one who used the piano as a medium for communicating his ideas. His performances were often less interpretations than analyses, exquisitely presented theses that helped me grasp the genius of Bach, or Beethoven, or Berg. No other pianist I can think of, except perhaps Schnabel, has ever brought so much intelligence to bear on performances that are as satisfying to the mind as they are to the ears and heart.
I was fortunate while at university to study musical aesthetics with Geoffrey Payzant, author of the first in-depth study ever of Gould’s oeuvre. The book was in pre-publication at the time, and Professor Payzant used photocopies of the galley proofs as the textbook for his course’s second semester.
Significantly, the book was entitled Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. Written by a philosopher from the same university as Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan (the University of Toronto), it was determinedly not a biography; rather, an exploration of Gould’s aesthetics and his theories of media, communication and technology.
Gould was an intensely private man with a paradoxically intense need to communicate. He resolved the conflict by creating a media version of himself—performer, writer, lecturer, documentarian, occasional comedian. The man himself was almost never seen in public, nor did he need to be. The media creation wasn’t a facade. It was designed to shift the emphasis from “man” to “mind”, to force his audience to focus on what really mattered: his musical ideas as communicated through the medium of the piano.
In his lifetime, Gould succeeded in this strategy. However, in the decades following his death, there was a trend to poke around his dirty linen, so to speak. Not satisfied with genius, writers and filmmakers felt it incumbent upon themselves to delve into his personal life, thereby trivializing what he'd striven to accomplish.
Early evidence that Gould would be disrespected in death came in the form of the Toronto International Bach Competition held “in honour of his memory” in ’85, three years after his fatal stroke. Gould despised music competitions. Some of his most scathing and provocative comments are on that very subject. Yet there was Nicholas Goldschmidt, a friend of Gould’s no less, putting together precisely the kind of circus Gould detested. The only saving grace of that slap in the face was that it launched the career of Angela Hewitt.
No amount of biographical data will ever illuminate Gould’s genius better than the man himself, and attempts to understand him by pawing through his private life are nothing more than prurience.
Furthermore, Gould’s erstwhile biographers often end up looking like fools. I recall a CBC Life and Times biography in which a woman psychologist held forth on Gould’s mannerisms at the piano: his hunched posture, his hand gestures, his tendency to croon along with the music. According to her, they were symptomatic of some sort of psychopathology. Clearly, she wasn’t a pianist. Gould’s unusual posture was integral to his fleet, nearly superhuman technique. His hand gestures were those of someone conducting himself at the keyboard. And the crooning, along with the conducting, was Gould's response to a frustration known to every classically-trained pianist, namely that the piano is at heart a percussion instrument and cannot “sing”, for example, the way a violin does. We’re all taught to hum along while we practise. Gould’s doing so, even on recordings, was evidence of unselfconscious passion, not neurosis.
* * *
If Gould’s particular genius lay in the ability to enrich his interpretive art with a running analysis of the music he was playing, it was his extraordinary technique that gave the genius voice. Listening to Gould, one can’t help but form the impression that each of his fingers possessed a separate brain. Even in the five-voice C-sharp minor Fugue from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier (four is the usual upper limit for voices in a fugue), which has not one, but two, countersubjects (melodic fragments that, whenever the principle subject appears, are always heard along with it), every one of the five parts seems to proceed independently, each with its own articulations and expressive contours. The effect is rather like five people playing the fugue instead of one, each responsible for a separate voice.
This phenomenal ability meant that Gould could lavish attention on every note he played, precisely shaping the beginning, middle, and end, with the result that, listening to Gould, one can almost hear a composer’s thoughts between the writing of one note and the next.
For Gould, there were (or should be) no superfluous notes—none that merely coloured, or padded, or served a purely transitional function. Furthermore, the suppleness of his technique afforded him an almost unholy ability to spit out trills with devilish speed and utter precision, which in turn allowed him to use ornamentation as a structural, rather than decorative, element. Amongst the albums I downloaded during my bout with the flu was Gould’s recording of music for the virginal by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. His performances are incandescent. Glittering, myriad trills anchor the fine melodic threads like jewelled pins in a gossamer tapestry.
Given his unprecedented musical and intellectual gifts, it’s no surprise that when Gould turned his attention to a particular composer, the composer didn’t always fare well. It’s been said that his genius wasn’t suited to every composer. Frankly, I think it’s the other way around: not every composer was up to the level of Gould’s genius.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his recordings of Mozart’s piano sonatas. Gould had little use for Mozart, lip-service protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, and he seems to have used the recordings as an opportunity to reveal the paucity of musical substance beneath the grace and charm. He tears the music to shreds, exposing clichés, uncovering (and sometimes fixing) shoddy voice-leading, and hammering home the absence of harmonic inventiveness.
In an era where culturally pretentious urbanites (read “yuppies”) have elevated Mozart to godhood, Gould’s didactic analysis of the Viennese prodigy’s weaknesses comes as a bracing and welcome tonic.
Overall, Gould steered clear of nineteenth-century piano literature, in part because he was deeply uncomfortable using the legato pedal, but mostly because he found it musically unsatisfactory. I know, from my own experience, that learning the Romantic virtuoso repertoire is largely an exercise in mastering too many notes sketched over too little musical material.
Gould’s aversion to the likes of Chopin and Liszt led to a widely-held belief that he simply couldn’t play the Romantics convincingly, that his approach to music was too intellectual. Nothing could be further from the truth. His recording of Brahms' Intermezzi from various opuses is breathtaking in its emotional scope, from the bittersweet nostalgia of the B-flat minor (Op. 117, No. 2), to the otherworldly heroics of the E-flat minor (Op. 118, No. 6), to the achingly tender E-flat major (Op. 117, No. 1). The latter is one of those performances that truly deserves the adjective, transcendent.
Of the albums I downloaded, by far the most surprising was Gould’s Kunst der Fuge (The Art of the Fugue, by J.S. Bach). Unfinished at the time of Bach’s death, Kunst represents the culmination of the composer’s sublime mastery of counterpoint. As such, it is a work of suprahuman genius.
Gould’s recording was unique in his canon in that he forsook his beloved Steinway CD318 for the organ. Furthermore, it is unusual in that he insisted the microphones be placed close to the pipes (”close miking”), whereas it is a near-universal convention of organ recordings to place the mikes well out into the hall in order to capture the reverb that is so much a part of the organ’s magnificent sonority.
Gould’s Kunst also holds the honour of being his most universally reviled recording (with the exception, perhaps, of his legendarily perverse rendering of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major KV331, the one with the famous Rondo Alla Turca at the end). Even his most ardent fans were left scratching their heads.
Though I knew it by reputation, I was unfamiliar with Gould’s Kunst until I downloaded it. I remember seeing the black-and-white cover in the old A&A Records on Bloor Street in Toronto where I spent a goodly amount of my student allowance, but for some reason, I always flipped past it.
Scarcely had the twelve-note subject out of which Bach spins his eternal golden braid begun when I understood why even Gould fans viewed the recording with embarrassment. While well-schooled in organ technique, Gould had chosen to transpose his détaché piano style holus-bolus to an instrument that virtually demands a legato touch. His playing on the album could charitably be called un-idiomatic; more forthrightly, just plain ghastly.
But Gould never did anything without a reason. Not infrequently, what at first sounds like interpretive whimsy—a peculiar tempo, say, or a seemingly arbitrary articulation—proves to be a device for revealing hitherto inaudible or unsuspected connections in the musical fabric.
Taking it on faith Gould knew what he was doing, I kept listening to the strange, choppy, decidedly un-organ-like music. Listening intently. So intently that somewhere around Contrapunctus IV, I got hypnotized. As the work continued to unfold, I began to feel I was listening not to music, but a dialogue. And not the normal sort of dialogue associated with the subject-answer of voices in a fugue; rather, a colloquy between two masters, a conversation between Bach and Gould. At times, Gould would seem to hold forth: “Awesome, Herr Bach! I know you wouldn’t play it this way yourself, but if I articulate this entry thus, and phrase the corresponding countersubject like this, you can actually hear how the puzzle pieces fit together.” And Bach would reply: “Wow! I never even thought of it. But if you wouldn’t mind sliding over on the bench, let me have a go at the manuals for a while. I want you to check out this next bit. It’s totally cool.”
And so on, back and forth, two counterpoint geeks in private, passionate discussion about their favourite subject, revelling in their respective interpretive and compositional prowess.
Surely, I found myself thinking, the voice of God must sound something like this.
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The recordings I've referred to in this article are all available for peer-to-peer downloading via BitTorrent. Assuming you have a BitTorrent client on your system (Deluge and Ktorrent are good choices for Linux; for Windows, I don’t know since I don’t do windows—Vuze, maybe?), go to a site like kickasstorrents.com, type “Gould” in the search bar, and choose the ones you want from the results. Be aware, though, that some are in .ogg and .flac format. Make sure your media player can handle them.

Deathnote: Where manga meets Chris Hedges

It wasn't my intention to use this blog for discussing books, but things have settled down for now—at least until the next indignity of living in a credit-driven, corporatist state is visited upon yours truly. I have a home, a room to call my own, and stimulating roommates. Winter's coming on, and with it the urge to curl and up read until the greening of the buds next spring.

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I recently found myself reading two books concurrently—re-reading, actually—and, as occasionally happens when I have more than one book on the go, I discovered unexpected parallels.

On the surface of it, the books couldn’t be more dissimilar. One was Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press, New York, 2008). The other was Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s manga series, Deathnote (English tankōbon, 12 vols., VIZ Media, San Francisco, 2007). Atheists dissects the secular fundamentalism typified by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. Deathnote is a story about a high school student who stumbles on a supernatural notebook that grants him the ability to kill simply by writing a person’s name. Atheists is aimed at an educated, adult audience. Deathnote is primarily directed toward teenagers. And while Hedges is a best-selling author, it’s doubtful whether sales of all his books combined approaches even a fraction of the more than twenty-six million copies of Deathnote sold in Japan alone.

Near the end of Atheists, Hedges makes the following statement:

“Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable.”

While I’m predisposed to agree with Hedges on every point he makes against Dawkins and his ilk (including their staggering theological illiteracy and spurious application of Darwinian biology to culture), I respectfully disagree with his assertion that image-based culture cannot cope with ambiguity and nuance. As a novelist in the traditional mode, I’m well aware that we’re moving into a post-literary age. However, I do not hold his alarmist view. My position is cautiously optimistic. I believe what we are witnessing is analogous to the shift from an oral tradition to a written one. Much was lost by that shift, but much was gained.

I may be stretching a point, since manga is not purely images (it’s basically a Japanese comic), but what astounds me about the form is precisely its potential to convey ambiguity and complex human motivations. Not all manga realizes the potential; in fact, very little does. But when it is realized, the results are stupendous.

Deathnote is manga at its finest, and makes a particularly pertinent counter to Hedges’ doom-and-gloom view of image-based culture since it deals with exactly the same themes as Atheists, and does so in a manner that, contrary to his assertion, is complex, layered and nuanced.

Hedges’ main thesis is that the fundamentalist mindset, shared by religious types and science-worshipping secularists alike, always entails a Utopian future based on two related but demonstrably flawed assumptions: the possibility of collective salvation, ie. the idea that societies in their entirety can be improved (redeemed); and the myth of moral progress. Hedges rightly argues that as long as human beings are free-thinking organisms, any attempt at collective salvation necessarily devolves into totalitarianism and criminality. Furthermore, neither Religion, nor Reason, nor Science has ever occasioned any moral advancement in our race because, according to Hedges,

“Human evil is not a problem. It is a mystery. It cannot be solved...The forces of darkness are our own forces. If we fail to name or acknowledge these forces, they will destroy us. Acknowledgment means accepting that our encounter with evil is permanent and perpetual...The belief that we can achieve human perfection, that we can advance morally, is itself an evil.”

Light Yagami, the protagonist of Deathnote, is the embodiment of fundamentalist thinking. An A student of high moral principles, he is disgusted with the state of the world, which he characterizes as “a rotten mess.” When Fate hands him the means to kill at will in the form of a Shinigami’s notebook (Shinigami translates roughly as Death God), he mounts a campaign to purge the world of criminals and make it a place “...inhabited only by people I decide are good.”

The deathnote is “dropped” into the human world as a lark by Ryuk, a Shinigami seeking relief from the overwhelming boredom of his existence in the Shinigami realm—a sterile landscape inhabited by listless gods who no longer recall their purpose in Creation. The Beckett-like aridity of the Shinigami realm parallels the impoverished role of spirituality in contemporary Western culture, and it’s no surprise that it provides the seeds for Light’s Manichean Utopianism.

Light himself is an extraordinarily complex character. To start with, he’s impossible not to like. A model teenager, he’s charming, polite, well-spoken. His relationship with his parents is loving and respectful. He shows consideration toward his younger sister, even helping her with homework without griping. Girls find him hot, and guys think he’s cool. It’s as if the creators of Deathnote studied the Patricia Highsmith manual on how to get readers to side with psychopaths and monsters.

Because monster he is. Along side the very qualities that make him so likable is a monomaniacal appetite for power. Light will stop at nothing to become “...the god of a new world.” I say along side, not underneath, because his dark side and his light side, so to speak, coexist. One does not mask or eclipse the other. The synthesis of the two creates a character who’s at once both appealing and utterly blind to his own evil.

He’s also disarmingly frank. Ryuk, the Shinigami, is largely ignorant of human behaviour, a device that allows Light to explain how people think. It’s nearly impossible not to nod in agreement when Light elucidates the reason behind an explosion of Internet sites supporting his purge:

Light: “This is what human beings are like, Ryuk. Say in school, we have a discussion in class...there’s no way the subject would be, ‘Is it all right to kill someone evil?’ but let’s say that was the subject. Everyone would act all virtuous and say, ‘No, it’s wrong to kill anybody.’ And of course, that would be the proper response. People need to maintain that kind of facade in public. But this [Light points to his monitor] is what people really think. Cowards. Nobody will acknowledge my existence openly, but out on the anonymous Internet, ‘Kira’ rules.”

Kira, derived from the Japanese mispronunciation of “killer,” is the name by which Light’s criminal-killing spree is known. It’s not an alter ego; Light is not “sometimes-Light” and “sometimes-Kira.” It’s the label for a phenomenon that appeals to people’s desire for simple solutions to complex problems:

Light: “Media reports still refer only to ‘the series of mysterious deaths among violent criminals,’ but people all over the world already feel it—that someone is passing righteous judgment on them [criminals].”

Light dislikes the term, but intuitively grasps that ‘Kira’ encompasses more than just himself. It’s a doctrine, one that promises its followers paradise on Earth. In manga, as in real life, paradisaical futures, religion-based or secular, demand belief in dogma.

Light is gifted with a high IQ, and, in truth, much of the entertainment value of Deathnote comes from the battle of wits between him and his equally gifted nemesis, the enigmatic L. Reading the series is a bit like watching two grand masters trying to outwit each other in a marathon game of chess. But Light’s intelligence is paired with a grotesquely childish concept of justice. His plan to make the world a better place by killing criminals is utterly jejune. Like any radical Utopian scheme, it reduces evil to a single target and proposes that removal of the target will lead to an era of prosperity and harmony. His plan is as doomed to fail as gassing Jews or bombing Muslims. Or, as secular fundamentalists propound, excising spirituality from human experience.

Not surprisingly, Light’s target list expands when he encounters opposition. At one point, L accuses Kira of being evil, and Light, speaking to Ryuk, has this to say:

Light: “Me...evil...? I’m the hero who’s liberating people from fear. I’m the saviour who’s going to be like the god of this perfect new world! Those who try to fight me...they’re the evil ones!!”

In order to advance his Utopian scheme, he must now purge anyone who opposes Kira or seeks to unmask him. It’s an infantile reaction, one that leads irrevocably to the fanaticism that George Santayana so astutely defined as “redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

Light’s opponents are, in many ways, as childish and fanatical as Light himself. Their protestations that Kira is nothing more than a murderer come across as rote expressions of schoolbook morality. Like Light, they’re blind to their own evil. Abduction, torture and forcible confinement are part and parcel of the battle to bring Light/Kira down. L and his successor, Near, are perfectly content to stand by while lives are sacrificed. Their fanaticism overwhelms any initial sense of justice. In the end, all that matters is winning.

In Atheists, Hedges maintains that failure to acknowledge the innate flaws in human kind, that denying the full, irrational complexity of human beings, and that imagining evil is “out there” invite the catastrophic violence of fundamentalism.

“...once evil is seen as being only external, once some human beings are proclaimed more moral than others, repression and murder becomes a regrettable necessity to improve the world.”

Only one character in Deathnote is natively responsive to the emotional complexity and warring moral impulses that make him human, a police detective named Matsuda. Significantly, he’s the buffoon of the series. While the supposed good guys are reviling Kira for his wickedness, it falls to luckless Matsuda to point out that Kira’s killing of known criminals has indeed resulted in a significant drop in crime. He offers the observation tentatively, in the spirit of wondering, and for his courage in saying what no one else will receives embarrassed, foot-in-the-mouth silence from his fellow police officers. While everyone else is being deadly earnest, only he is capable of spontaneity. He laughs at what is funny, is moved by what is touching, gets excited when there’s cause for optimism. For this he’s treated like a fool. He sincerely wants to bring an end to Kira—for him, “killing anybody is wrong” is not a public facade—and constantly asks: “What can I do to help?” In one telling panel, L brushes him off with: “Well...you could make me a cup of coffee.”

Matsuda’s just not smart enough, not grimly righteous enough, to play with the big boys. He’s marginalized, much as in the real world those who place humanity above big schemes and sweeping reforms are trivialized and dismissed.

However Matsuda, in his role as fool, makes everyone else look bad. From the start, L suspects that Light is Kira. Proving that he is forms the heart of Deathnote’s plot. But Matsuda likes and respects Light, and rejects L’s notion that Light is guilty until proven innocent. He defends Light at every opportunity, rejoicing whenever the evidence overwhelmingly supports his innocence, which frequently, and quite reasonably, it does—if you subtract the supernatural element of the story. That Matsuda’s wrong is not an indication of intellectual deficiency; it’s evidence of loyalty, decency, and humanity.

It’s no accident on the part of the creators of Deathnote that when Light is finally unmasked, in a stunning progression of images that incorporates one of the most expressive panels in the entire series—Light naked and howling like a beast—it’s Matsuda, the avatar of Everyman betrayed, who fires the shot that brings him down.

I’ve only touched on some of the ways Hedges’ arguments in I Don’t Believe in Atheists are vividly depicted in the pages of Deathnote. Light and L’s relationship alone deserves a book, so finely layered and mytho-psychologically nuanced is the friendship/enmity. Hedges is correct in his blistering criticism of the Utopian ideals that fuel both religious and secular fundamentalism, however he is wrong to imagine that image-based culture—here exemplified by manga—is a priori incapable of coping with the layers of ambiguity, nuance, and doubt that ultimately define who we are as a race.