The North West Passage

I was walking in the forest this afternoon, and went by the Wampum Cave. It’s not well known, but some time in the 1700s a small team of Hurons hid a wampum belt in a cave in the Elora Gorge. Around two hundred years later, after Elora was founded, some kids discovered it and brought it to their schoolmaster who was also an archaeologist. I turned around and headed to the Elora Public Library, to see if there was a book with a photograph of the belt. Wampum was used, among other things, to seal trade agreements, to record council decisions, and the like. I suddenly thought that in the course of my research travel, I might meet someone who would read and interpret the wampum that was found there.

I found lots of pictures of the cave, and of the schoolmaster who took credit for discovering it. (Must remember to go back again, and take note of his name.) But no picture of the belt itself. Maybe in the county archives, which is not far from here, I’ll find one. But I won’t have enough time to go looking for it before the Ottawa trip.

While spending time in the village library, which I hadn’t done in perhaps twenty years, I found a few books on local history. It was most illuminating to flip through them, looking at grainy old b&w photos of places that are very familiar to me. When I put the books away, even the library itself looked different to me. The building is one of Elora’s original buildings. With its high ceilings and windows, creaking wooden stairs and decor, the portraits and stone busts of the prominent men of the pioneer times, it’s easy to see the continuity over time, from then to now.

We Canadians don’t celebrate our history enough. And why is that? We don’t see that there’s much to celebrate. But it doesn’t take much digging to find an interesting story, one that ought to be re-told.

It seems that the founding fathers of Elora were envisioning a kind of model Protestant town, a complete world into itself, self-sufficient, independant, comfortable, prosperous, and virtuous in both the Christian and the Heroic senses of the term. They wanted a community that would value qualities like temperance and prudence. Yet they also wanted to encourage strength, ruggedness, self-sufficiency, and pride. It seems to have been the rocky cliffs of the Gorge which inspired it: the idea was that anyone who could live around such trecherous places, walk the precarious “Indian Bridge” in any weather, and so on, would have to be an admirable and excellent human being.

Elora even had its own “intellectual awakening”. The aformentioned schoolmaster used to encourage his students to learn woodcraft and wilderness survival skills by day. Then by night he would hold public meetings for the whole townsfolk, to explain Darwin’s newly emerging Theory of Evolution. Apparently there were town meetings to debate the theory: schoolmen like himself on one side, various (mostly Protestant) priests on the other.

As soon as I stepped out the library I got a facefull of car exhaust from a passing SUV. Back in the 20th century, I was. Almost a disappointment!

Nicked from wire_mother and from the Washington Post. You must read this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=topnews

In a comment to my post yesterday, conspiracy_girl asked me if there is anything so bad about ‘dumbing down’ one’s work. In her words:

Bren’s answer

My oldest friend in the world is T.W., whom I have known from my early teens. He came by my house yesterday, saying that he heard our old high school was being torn down and he wanted to have a look. So we went out together, driving along the back road to Fergus. (We saw a wolf, half way there, running across the road, but that’s another story.)

When we got to the site of the old school, we saw that all but the original stone building was completely torn down. What remains is the original three-story limestone block which is perhaps 150 years old or so; the rest of the site is now a great flat mess of rocks, bricks, and holes. Tom and I were a little aghast. So many of the places where important things from our teenage years happened–were now totally erased from the face of the earth. Even the place where I discovered Paganism – the hall where I had a locker once, and where a friend told me she knew a Druid and would introduce me to him – is now a hole in the ground.

It got me thinking. Canadian society is a highly mobile society. We’re born of European immigration, after all. Today we think little of driving an hour or more to go to work every day. We think little of moving hundreds of kilometers to start a new job. We are the first country in the world, perhaps still the only one, to have mobility rights enshrined in our constitution and our charter of rights and freedoms. These are wonderful things: but it also has the consequence that people do not put down roots the way people in other countries do. I’m thinking of my experiences meeting people in Ireland and Germany, where the culture is thousands of years old, and there are continuities of land occupation, architecture, customs, folklore, mythology, etc. stretching back at least equally as far.

Here in Canada, which has been settled by Europeans for 500 years, we think very differently about heritage and homeland. The loss of a building, like a high school, that was once important to a whole community, isn’t lamented. The loss of a pristine untouched forest or landscape isn’t lamented. The transformation of farmer’s fields and little woodlots and things, into big-boxer shopping districts, friendly to cars but not to pedestrians, isn’t lamented. Why is that? Last night Tom and I were thinking it might be because Canadians don’t have the same attitude toward heritage, the past, to belonging to a landscape or a community, or to a home. We think of homes, communities, and places as almost infinitly interchangeable: never putting roots down deep, it is not hard to pick them up and plant them again elsewhere.

Among Aboriginal people in this country, as also obtained among the Heroic Pagan cultures of Europe’s ancient history, the highest forms of punishment were exile, banishment, and shunning. A person’s whole psychological sense of himself was closely bound to his belonging to a homeland and a community, and so to be banished from that homeland and community was worse than to die. Today, banishment as a punishment wouldn’t have the same force: we simply don’t tie ourselves to our landscapes or to each other anymore.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (who, by the way, recently recieved a $1.5 million award for contribution to religious thought) talks abot this too. He says that our values are characterised by a kind of narcissistic individualism. And that this individualism is ultimately unsatisfying, precisely because it is logically unable to recognise sources of value and meaning that transcend the self.

Well, the destruction of most of my old high school seemed to me like a perfect case in point. The values of landscapes, heritage, homelands, communities, and so on, are precisely values that transcend the self, which modern-day narcissistic individualism is structurally unable to recognise.

Here’s a photo of the old part of the building, which is still standing. I nicked this off the web years ago, so it shows a part down to the lower-left which is now gone.

I’m told that the remaining building, which is being gutted and renovated, will be turned into municipal government offices. How banal!

I was sitting here reading a few newspapers on-line as I do most days of the week. Looking through my window, I saw the most amazing thing: a young grey squirrel trotted along an overhead wire, stopped half-way, then flipped himself up-side down on the wire. Holding on to the wire with his hind legs, he reached out toward the top branches of a small nearby tree. Then, he let go, and was in free-fall for just a second, then caught the branch. And then he trotted down to the ground as if that was the most ordinary thing in the world to do.

Can’t say I know too many human beings who would do that! Isn’t nature wonderful?

http://www.new7wonders.com

Here’s an initiative (started by a Canadian!) to designate seven new wonders of the world. Over the last few years or so they had a long list of great monuments, and with a series of runoff-elections they’ve narrowed it down to 21. The last runoff vote is in progress. You can vote online, right now, for free. I voted for:

The Acropolis, Athens, Greece,
The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.
Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
The Colliseum, Rome, Italy
The Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
Stonehenge, England.

Pass this web site on to all the pagans you know: let’s make sure that the Pagan monuments on the list, like Stonehenge, are named to the final list of Seven Wonders!

I love architecture: I almost entered an architecture program at university (but chose drama instead, because I decided I didn’t want to do the math). Even so, I still have a few books on architectural design and aesthetics on my philosophy shelf. my favourite is the Ethical Function of Architecture, by Karsten Harries. I sure wish I had written it! (Oh, and I met the author, once, when he was on a philosophical lecture tour.)

One of my long-term, life goals, is to some day build some kind of monument: an obelisk or tower, or a grand temple / theatre / concert hall, or something like it. Also to design the landscaping and gardens surrounding it. Also to be buried in it, but that’s another story.

This new Wonders of the World initiative got me thinking. If pagans today had enough labour power and money, and could build a monument of our own on the scale of grandeur and magnificence implied by “a wonder of the world”, what would it look like? What kind of building would it be? Would it be a magnificent temple, a palace, an observatory, a collosal statue, or a complex of various buildings, or something else? Would it be a functional building, or would it be wholly aesthetic? What kind of social order would we have to have, in order to decide what to build, and to marshal the labour and resources to build it?

Myt ever-luvin, long-sufferin’ sister Nuala sent me this list of ‘let’s get to know each other’ questions by email. It came with the following instruction:

“Okay, here’s what you’re supposed to do, and try not
to be lame and spoil the fun! Just copy (do not
forward) this entire e-mail and paste into a new
E-mail that you can send. Change all the answers so
that they apply to you. Then send this to a whole
bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person that
sent to you. Some of you may get this several times
that means you have lots of Friends.”

So here are my answers.

The Cuckoo’s Nest Folk Club (London, Ontario) 2006 / 2007 Season
http://www.CuckoosNest.folk.on.ca
presents
Andy Webster

of the award-winning Scottish supergroup Brolum

plus special guest Kelly Hood (pipes, whistles) of LOKA

Bren’s Editorial:
Andy Webster is my brother in law. So I feel almost honour-bound to promote his gigs. But beside that: he is a wonderful musician. I mean, some of my friends say that about me, but there’s no comparison. Andy’s musicianship is absolutely world-class.

More info here

Yesterday, I bought a cup of tea for myself and my TA, from an on-campus snack spot. Little did I know that among the coins returned to me in change, at that time, was a penny from 1940! I found it at bedtime, just as I emptied my pockets and got into my pj’s. I noticed it when I saw on the back there was a profile of King George 6th, instead of the Queen. Amazing, that this penny is still in circulation, eh?

and now, I must get back to marking essays…

Another example of someone out of touch with reality:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,1998805,00.html

…although I’m not sure that pagans are all that much better sometimes. We go to aromatherapists and reiki practicioners more often than we go to regular doctors. I used to know some pagans who also refused real medical help, and preferred ritual and spellcraft–even to heal a broken leg!