transforming culture

John Franklin

There is a freeing power in creative gestures like song and we are met in surprising ways. Song, poetry, image, drama, dance and a good story seem to have the power to move us while providing fresh vision, glimpses into what is possible and so be a catalyst for action.

The theme of transforming culture keeps showing up in books I read, conferences I attend and people with whom I have conversations. It is a buzz word both inside and outside the faith community. Linked with transformation is creativity. I think for example of the work of Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class – where he documents how the increasingly large numbers of creatives in the workforce have been forging a new world. The creative class spans a wide spectrum of work options, scientists, engineers, architects, designers, business, education health care and law to name a few. The artists are also on the list and it is their style of thinking, discerning and intuiting the world that has now been grasped by a much larger group. I noted a similar theme in another book I dabbled in recently, written by the well known Canadian culture critic Max Wyman. The Defiant Imagination: An Impassioned Plea to Keep Culture at the Heart of the Canadian Experiment. By culture Wyman means the arts and his book is an extended apologetic for a Canadian commitment to the arts as a resource for mapping what it means to be human and shaping a national identity. I confess I am not quite as optimistic as Wyman that the arts will deliver the values we need. On this matter there is evidence of both success and failure. One thing is clear art fuels the imagination and opens heart and mind to fresh possibilities.Art also can temper human passions at the flash points of our differences – and foster a sense of unity that is often hard to come by.Some of you may have seen the recent film The Singing Revolution not a blockbuster by any means. It is a gentle film that draws you into the life of the small European nation of Estonia. In the mid-twentieth century this nation experienced a profound intrusion with the coming of the Russian army to take control of its government and to reshape its identity. Large numbers of Russians moved into the country and large numbers of Estonians met their death. The Estonians have a repertoire of songs reaching deeply into their culture and tradition. There were a number of gatherings between 1987 and 1991 where the people would sing. In September 1988 about 300,000 gathered to sing. The underlying script was the cry for independence. Hope that independence would come was generated through andexpressed by the singing. Protests and acts of defiance were part of the effort to regain their country and the gathering to sing was in its own way an act of defiance. I have been wondering how one might make a virtue out of employing a “defiant imagination”.

Defiance doesn’t normally sit well in a list of virtues – but I find myself wanting to make it something of value. It resonates with what we find in the biblical narrative.The prophetic voice is often a defiant voice, taking on the prevailing values and actions of a nation, culture or people, compromised in belief and practice operating well outside the divine intention.

Michael Foster in a book titled Exiles writes about living missionally in post-Christian culture and make reference to “dangerous songs”. He laments about how so much of the singing Christians do is “often insipid, cloying and romantic”. I was surprised to find him referring to the importance of songs in many of the great revolutions, the French outside the Bastille, the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg, the American civil rights movement in Alabama and Washington DC, the anti- Marcos protesters in the streets of Manila, the banning of songs in South Africa under apartheid and the singing that has roused a new generation of Chinese into action. The examples could be multiplied. What I want to point out is the power of a simple art form to generate passion and hope in a way that mobilizes people to make a difference or simply serve as a vehicle to express a passion and hope already present. Another place I stumbled over a reference to singing was in a weighty volume titled Overcoming Ontotheology. That is overcoming an understanding of theology that is essentially philosophical. The author, a seasoned philosopher tells of attending an academic paper on biblical interpretation. In the middle of the argument the presenter stopped and said it was time to sing (and clap). Together they sang “Oh Mary don’t you weep don’t you morn, Oh Mary don’t you weep don’t you morn, Pharaoh’s army got drownded, Oh Mary don’t you weep. Those singing were taking an old spiritual and making the story of Miriam and Moses their story as well through which they were “seized by the message of hope and judgement”. Now here is the point – God understood in philosophical terms can only enter the scene in a way determined by that context. Those who were singing discovered that God entered the scene without the imposed determinations. There is a freeing power in creative gestures like song and we are met in surprising ways. Song, poetry, image, drama, dance and a good story seem to have the power to move us while providing fresh vision, glimpses into what is possible and so be a catalyst for action. It appears after all that art has a role to play in changing the way we live and changing the world we live in.

noir architecture

Hamish Robertson

The three poems and two images here presented are part of a much longer sequence which has recently been exhibited in the gallery of the Ryerson PolytechnicUniversity’s School of Image Arts under the title ‘noir architecture’. The impulse behind the project is a reflection of my peculiar gifting, as poet and photographer. I write poetic meditations upon photographs because it brings together two activities which have up until recently in my life been separate, thus groping toward some better sense of artistic integrity. The term I’ve coined for this brand new art form is ‘wordscape’. Now when people ask me how I justify myself in face of the great and (to me anyway) somewhat paralysing world of work I can say: ‘I make wordscapes’. Photos – even photos made deliberately as art – are today often still treated as factual matter. The joy of wordscaping is that it allows me to explore the imaginative underworld of some of my own photographs The ‘noir architecture’ sequence is about to be published in book form. http://hamishrobertson.coffeehouse.ca

you turn a corner (dead center of the night) shock of the real from the temporal, the fleeting (our handprint on the earth) to the now, the always the rapt eternal now

the old stones sidle outward to kiss the steps to kiss the shadowed wall while beyond by electric light outlined the tree trunks curve in staccato concert aspiring in the city air to leaf entangled difference

pure defiant soul, opposing to militant office windows-the chlorophyll riot to the victory of mathematics – organic necessity

baptising the art of entanglement

Paul Tucker

While searching through Winter Sun, The Dumfounding (Margaret Avison’s collected poems of 1940-1966), I discovered that someone had written a note in the margin of Margaret’s signed poem The Swimmer’s Moment. It read as follows: “Talked to Margaret – [She was] swimming in the Ottawa River toward an Oak. She realized the tree was going in the wrong direction and she was being carried away by the current.” If not for every one of us, an otherwise ordinary, though alarming, moment, yet suddenly transformed by an intuition and enduring images into a figure much greater than its individual features. That is poetry; the synergistic art of entanglement. Did Avison first see ‘pale-bland faces on the rim of suction’ or did she start with the hunch, ‘For Everyone // The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes, // But many at that moment will not say, “This is the whirlpool then?” Wherever the entanglement began, I sense there is a current of hope in the The Swimmer’s Moment that may not have been entirely owing to Avison’s own imagination. An excerpt of Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel Lecture, 1987: “There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem finds himself where no one has ever been before him, further perhaps than he himself would have wished for”. (From Noble Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frangsmyr, Singapore, 1993.) We recognize how potent language is when a poet who is admittedly not a Christian (not referring to Avison who admittedly was) can harvest the language to great, even prophetic effect, often beyond what she may have intended.

The Swimmer’s Moment

By Margaret Avison

For every one The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes, But many at that moment will not say “This is the whirlpool then.” By their refusal they are saved From the black pit, and also from contesting The deadly rapids, and emerging in The mysterious, and more ample waters. And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn Pale and forever on the rim of suction They will not recognize. Of those who dare the knowledge Many are whirled into the ominous centre That, gaping vertical, seals up For them an eternal boon of privacy, So that we turn away from their defeat With a despair, not from their deaths, but for Ourselves, who cannot penetrate their secret Nor even guess at the anonymous breadth Where one or two have won: (The Silver reaches of the estuary).

What then of the Christian who lives in the embrace of Christ? I do not mean to trivialize, but there is magic in the recipe. It is the sort of magic illustrated by C.S. Lewis in The Magician’s Nephew. A contemptuous Uncle Andrew throws an iron tie-bar that glances off Aslan’s head (a powerful lion whose song has created the land of Narnia), sticks in the ground, and grows into a lamppost. The pugnacious piece of iron had sunk into ground so fertile, so infused with Aslan’s own lifecreating breath and song that if it had not set down roots and sprouted, it would have begun to quiver and sing. A swim in the Ottawa River, iron bars, temper tantrums and even hunches are not in themselves extraordinary, but to the attentive poet, raw materials of the art, transformed first by power inherent in the language, then by baptism into him who said, “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed".

Notes...“A momentary stay against the confusion of the world,” is, you may think, a rather aggrandized way of describing the making of poems, especially since it was said by a poet, albeit a very good poet. Not withstanding Robert Frost describes of what a poem is capable. Why else does the tyrant first imprison the poet, remove a ‘stay’ in the path of the conquering machinery of despotic insanity? As possibly the first poem that I read and actually liked, T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock continues to deepen its allure. I might quote examples of its hypnotic cadences, its sagacious economy in lines like ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.’ or its foreboding in ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. // I do not think they will sing to me.’ as features of the poem that draw me back to further readings that have instilled in me an unquenchable compulsion to both write them and to understand what I can best describe as the art of entanglement. In Millennium Myth, N.T Wright encourages Christians confronted with ideologies and political forces that are “earthbound”, that is, bound in the ordinary, to a rediscovery “of truly apocalyptic language: language that will speak of earth and resonate with the music of heaven.” OK, sounds nice, but how?

Man In Bucket Hat
By Paul Tucker

He wears his bucket with the brim overshadowing his eyes like dependable eaves His closed left hand is nestled in a pensile pocket like an unweathered wing reserved His light blue jacket looks new or is it a telltale canvas, stretched round a waterproof, weather-top back? And his jeans, though thick are a little winded and bag out a bit at the sit and squat But he prefers his work boots with the tops worn through like the pipped and windowed shell of an egg that for a moment, let me see the confined struggle of the incessant hatchling