For I am involved . . .

 "Full fathom five thy father lies . . ."

 EMC Cemetery on Highway 312

A host of good friends came over a few days ago to celebrate—or mourn—my passage of the three-score-and-ten millstone . . . er, milestone. It was a great party with enough gag gifts and cards and just as many of the warm, well-wishing kind to melt anyone’s heart, even that of a 70-year old curmudgeon (which, I suspect, doesn’t truthfully describe me). A friend reminded me that it wasn’t a significant date at all; that I’d actually begun my 70^th year a year ago. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s a distinction without a difference. A card I received said “Age is just a number . . .” and inside “. . . and yours happens to be a pretty big one!”

               My Blackberry Playbook told me the very next morning that Christopher Hitchens, renowned journalist, polemicist and irritating anti-religionist, had died of esophageal cancer at age 62. (It might be fair to say that he smoked himself to death—his consumption of cigarettes was said to peak at 130 per day.) You may know Hitchens from his best-selling diatribe against all religion: God is not Great, published in 2007.

               One day later, an acquaintance and sister of a near neighbour died peacefully at 104. Her very last thought—her sister told me—was about the imminent reunion with her mother.

               It’s been a week of passages and numbers and conversations about passages and numbers.

               I’m currently reading the diary of Jacob Klaassen, early minister in the Eigenheim Mennonite Church, and I’m learning from him what thoughts were raised by passages experienced in the 1920s. In my last reading, his good friend and brother-in-law, David Toews, survives a house fire in which his four year-old daughter dies; a teenage boy dies on the operating table in Rosthern from an overdose of chloroform and a man in Neuanlage is killed in a threshing accident. Jacob Klaassen mourns these deaths with understated poignancy, and usually adds something like a quotation from Psalm 39:4: “Show me, LORD, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is.”

               There are echoes in Klaassen’s diary of John Donne’s “Meditation 17” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, later published as the poem, “No Man is an Island.”

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

               Then there’s that other view of death from the pen of William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths / The valiant never taste of death but once." Julius Caesar (II, ii, 32-37). In other words; why should the fear and anticipation of old age and death characterize us? Death will come when it will come. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s characters leaned toward predestination, both in the inevitability and the timing of significant events.

               I believe more in the significance of influences around us and their effects on critical constructions in our minds: more simply put, if my experiences and thoughts circle increasingly around aging and death, I can easily come to see the world as characterized by aging and death. The reverse, of course, is also true: if I remain fixed as much as possible on deliberate, ongoing participation in the events of the world, that will be the world view for which I will be known and by which I will continue to know myself. But as a TV ad says: “Good luck with that.”

Don’t retire; retool. The universe exists in your head.  

Next week, I hope we can all joyfully get on with it, whatever “it” is, as another ad says.

                

              

              

the play's the thing

 "Never trust a man who hates dogs" (Gustav, in Heroes)

“The plays the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king . . .” (Shakespeare’s Hamlet)

Of course Shakespeare, the iconic bard, would see in a stage play the power to move even a king to question his conscience; his vocation revolved around those peculiar events where actors assume the personality of a character in a story and strut and bellow their hour on the stage, acting out parables for the enlightenment and/or entertainment of a crowd who, for the most part, just don’t get it. So he wrote comic relief into his plays, humorous—often bawdy—bits to appease the groundlings, the uneducated poor who could stand on the ground below the boxes for the admission of one penny.  

               Heroes, too, has its humorous and bawdy bits. Tom Stoppard collaborated with French playwright, Gerald Sibleyras, to produce this English version of the latter’s popular play about a few days on the terrace of a retirement home in France. Three surviving veterans of WW I are facing old age—as are all of us—and the terrace has become their private nation, and when it’s threatened, they comically revert to military strategies to defend it. Cantankerous and quarrelsome throughout, they are nevertheless bound by the strictures of a past when they were heroes in an heroic cause.

               More people stayed away from Heroes than attended it, obviously. Of those that did attend, some said they didn’t get it, some felt it was fraught with so much subtle, nuanced meaning that they had to see it twice. A few said they didn’t get the gestures at the end, and one or two implied that it was a bit too corny to be enjoyed by them. For the bottom-liner in us at the Station Arts Centre, the fact that we were sold out, turning people away for the last half of the run, spoke loudly about the play’s impact.

               It’s a rare drama indeed that plays to audiences who come away unanimous. Neither can you base your entire outlook on one parable (Jesus told many).

               Reverting to the bard, I recall Hamlet’s instructions to the actors about to present the conscience-catching play before the royal household:

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure (Ham: III, ii, 17ff).

I’m not sure how many patrons saw their virtues and scorns reflected in Heroes, nor whether it mirrored the age and body of the times for them as it ought. As for me, I loved it from the first time I read it to the last time I watched Philippe, Henri and Gustav united in their longing for the freedom of the geese, heading south to their mating ground.

Oh to be young again!