BLURT 12: Professional basketballer Ron Artest has changed his name to Metta World Peace. Shall we rejoice? The end of war on earth is a punchline, not a pipe-dream!
Subtle, he wasn’t! This is the title of a poem by the American Vachel Lindsay, one of my daily electronic gifts from the Academy of American Poets. Sometimes, the day’s package of words overwhelms me – again? More tangled texts to unravel? – or just irritates me. Poetry at its best is wonderfully irritating, like the grit in a clam shell. I was glad to greet Mr. Lindsay. (And sometimes it just ticks me off, especially some contemporary stuff, so aggressively obscure that it’s no surprise most people have given up on “serious” poetry. But the words don’t give up on us, and they keep returning: in popular song, in gangsta rap, in comics and graffiti, like twitch grass sprouting between the patio bricks.)
Vachel Lindsay killed himself in 1931, victim of another era’s financial meltdown
BLURT 11: We all remember on big anniversaries. ‘Never forget’ does ring less hollow when the horror is but a decade old. But few see 9-11 as the toxic symbol it is: the toxicity of privilege and resentment, the disease of disunity, the pathology of meaningful futures sought without meaningful changes in outlook or decadent practices.
Yesterday after class, I went to my favourite noodle joint. I call it “the Muslim place” because one of my friends identified it that way, and a nodding salaam alaikum is received with appreciation, and because I can’t read the blue and white sign in either Hanzi or Arabic. A wall poster for the city of Lanzhou, capital of China’s central-western Gansu province and an ancestral home of noodliciousness, makes me think that the owning family must come from there. It’s fairly clean (but don’t use the washroom), there is a posted No Smoking request (but don’t ask them to enforce it), the noodles are hand-made, old-fashioned, in-house (free and easy to watch, from the back tables, the one-eyed maker throw the dough),
BLURT 10: It’s always good to try new things. Openness. Discovery. Antidotes to fear and complacency and sloth. But. What but? Lay’s Chinese potato chip flavour “Lobster Cheese”. Now trembling about “Refreshing Cucumber” and “Green Tea” as well.
BLURT 9: Reveille plays from the sports field next door: it’s megaphones, and marching, and martial music, and hundreds of young college students in uniform by 6:00 am. Yi! Er! San! Se! It’s frosh week in China.
BLURT 8: Returns and returns: this modest collection retrieved from electronic limbo, this Canadian family walking the now-familiar paths of a Chinese life.
BLURT 7: Days and nights hiking Banff, Lake Louise, and on into British Columbia is a jaw-slackening reminder: this here Canada, it’s big and beyond beautiful. And almost nobody lives here, according to my China Eye. Happy day(s).
Intellectually, I believe in moderation, and I have proved for myself that “moderation in all things” — at least for many of the things life has brought to me — is among the most valuable of principles and a guide to right living. But I enjoy blizzards and heat waves, and some tunes just have to be played loud. And my goodness, I love and wish to echo the passion for justice in Garrison’s defiant eloquence. Listen:
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; – but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”
William Lloyd Garrison (December 13, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American journalist, and social reformer. He edited the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and in the first edition — published in 1831, when Garrison was only 26! — he wrote the above challenge/threat/promise/vow. He was one of America’s greatest voices for justice, not only a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society but also a campaigner for women’s suffrage.