THE BOOK OF MY SURROUNDINGS

i am sitting in the teak chair 
on the grass in front of my cabin 
a place i go often to read. 

but today no book accompanies me. 
it is january and as it has been most of the month 
it is springlike today. 

the nettles in the draw 
are big enough to eat. 
all the grass hills are green. 

i listen almost more than looking. 
i love my eyes 
what they can bring to me

but as much as that 
it is the sounds that reach me 
the tiny pressure changes. 

i think taken together it is a book 
always new always familiar 
the book of my surroundings.

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

there are nasty people in the world. i have no business with them. i have no interest in writing about them. they do not fascinate me. they teach me nothing, except to perhaps remind me of what i am not. 

david adams richards can have my share. he seems to favor them. 

me, they just bore me.

RIGHTS OF PROPERTY

we have rule of law in canada. this includes limits on the rights of property — all property. it is not a racial issue or an issue of injustice when the government expropriates land for the common good. it often involves rights of way, usually highway expansion or other infrastructure initiatives. the idea is to respect the right to be paid for value given/taken, and in the case of pipelines and hydro grid often the title of the land does not transfer to the government or private ownership and the government or company involved compensates for the agreed devaluation of the land by paying to attach a covenant while leaving title in the hands of the original owner. 

the first nations in BC have made claims to more than 100% of the land in the province. this does not reflect either the present reality of life in this province or even the history of land use here. 

there is a common good that most people can agree with. without that, governance would break down and rule of law would be threatened. large-scale projects will continue to be developed in this province for at least the near future and for a very small group of hereditary (read birthright) chiefs of first nations, nations who even in total represent only a very small cohort of the modern province in which we actually live, to block activity on narrow grounds and historical ambiguity is a flawed and ultimately doomed action. 

we all negotiate just about everything in our lives. absolutism, inflexibility and obstructionism are only successful in the long run when they protect something for which there is widespread agreement among the population as a whole. 

in the end, rule of law will be upheld in canada. for that, all of us on all sides of any issue should be grateful. the alternative, anarchy, which really just means the voluntary association of people, we are a (perhaps infinitely) long way from being ready for. we are selfish and not honest enough, kind enough or generous enough to make that a working reality.

WHAT THE MAN IS

an earth animal

a human

a male

an observor

a seeker of truth

of justice

a sometime loner in the midst of nature

in north america

in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

born middle-class

educated

white

against violence
against killing —

a survivor.

PATERSON

jim jarmusch has written a film which quietly puts the lie to just about every other film out there, that life is best portrayed as a series of large-scale extraordinary episodic events. his recent film Paterson depicts the mundane daily routine of an ordinary couple living modestly in paterson new jersey. it is repetitive in exactly the way life is, routinized and mostly unsurprising.

though it is unashamedly rigged and in some respects unlikely (as was de Sica's Bicycle Thief early in the neorealist movement), it manages to reveal an inner poetic and meaningful aspect of everyday life that anyone can relate to, because in one fashion or other, like all animals, we nearly all nearly all the time really live this kind of routinized life. and what that means is that we are none of us really ordinary, that life without embellishment is touching, rich and meaningful and, if you like, extraordinary.

to me that is still the most important use of film as a vibrant contemporary art form of singular importance in our time.

ASSUMPTIONS

out walking in a sunfilled late morning along a levee south of vancouver with a dear but departed friend (not expired, just gone from view) the topic of global warming and the future of humanity came up. she, who is degreed in biology, engineering and research ecology, decreed that humans are fucked. about this she was unequivocal. i had thoughts but initially said nothing, as the time and place were beautiful and i wanted to inhabit both a little longer. but i filed away my simple thoughts for perhaps another time and place.

it occurred to me that any talk of the future necessarily involves assumptions and i immediately noted two in her pronouncement: one, the notion that the technology needed to survive global warming will not continue to evolve along useful lines and: two, a corporate-dominated world economy and governance model is the last form of organization earth humans will ever employ.

the evidence for both these assumptions is just not there, in my view. on the contrary, i find ample evidence that: one, technology does continue to evolve along useful lines. but whether that will happen, and whether it will lead to solutions to the major existential threats to earth's biosphere — nuclear war and global warming — is not at all clear. and precisely because it is not clear, it is most useful to assume that something can and will be done about it. otherwise, why try? and two: there is a time for every organizing principle and i think a good case can be made for the time when competitive private enterprise and private capital is probably the most efficient way to exploit new conditions. but every time imposes on its people new sets of requirements that demand new solutions more suitable to the present and near future.

in our near future, global problems will need to be overseen by global institutions that ultimately have a controlling interest between and even within the corporations and nation-states of today. this is inevitable unless tragedy obviates the need for any governance of any kind. 

we don't need to learn these lessons from history, as any real thinker knows (with the possible exception of historians) but nevertheless the lessons are there for the concerned who need reassurance.