Manchester

Tags

England, Manchester, terrorism

 

Terrible. But here is one solution to the ubiquitous and most un-Islamic terrorist problem: offer rewards for information leading to the prevention of major incidents. These should be life-changing rewards – say five million dollars – accompanied by witness-protection deals. The suicide-bombers are probably too deranged or brain-washed to be of any use; but their brothers, cousins, sisters and other relatives probably aren’t. They’re usually relatively young – some, like Salman Abidi, ate just kids – and the prospect of a life of ease is bound to entice someone to rat on what must seem to any sane person a fruitless and pointless endeavor, and one that will bring grief to many not so concerned with the grievances. Oh, I know there are grievances – the drone killings of innocents here and there – but they are surely not so keenly felt by people brought up in the comfort and security of Manchester? It’s not a guaranteed solution, true, but it ought to be tried; and it does seem better than the streets of England under virtual marshal law, no? These are not probably the most upstanding citizens; and any result would be worth far more than five million dollars spent on police and intelligence activity.

Paul William Roberts

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David Altmejd

Tags

art, contemporary art, david altmejd, England, montreal, sculpture

When I saw the Van Gogh retrospective at London’s South Bank Gallery in 1969, with the works arranged chronologically – that last fearsome image of the path dividing three ways through a cornfield bothered by crows and stormy winds at the end – I walked out to sit on a bench overlooking the dreary grey Thames, and I cried for an hour. I had shared ten years’ of Vincent’s life, with its very tiny pleasures, its ineffable moments of divine awe, and, of course, its plunging periods of ever-deepening depression and despair, culminating with the suicide committed within hours of completing that last doom-laden painting. The retrospective had been an emotional roller-coaster ride through Vincent’s final ten years, and I felt I knew him better than anyone I knew. Thus, that final painting – like all great art – hit me in the heart like a bullet, and I experienced the same plummeting hopelessness as its painter must have been feeling. It took days to restore my centre of gravity; but I was only eighteen, and fully expected that a world of such powerful exhibitions lay ahead, much as I expected the next Beatles’ album would be yet another advance upon the previous one.

In the late sixties art – in every form – was exploding. In England, where we cared little for ‘New York faddism’ – Pollack, Rothko, Warhol, ‘flatness’: rubbish – but then we had the early David Hockney, Alan Davie, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Ben Nicolson, and so many others. With my meagre Saturday job wages, I subscribed to Studio International, so I knew – or thought I did – what was going on. I was even a member of the Tate Gallery, invited to openings etc. There was a big one too: Francis Bacon New Works, I think it was called. I’d only seen individual paintings before, besides magazine spreads, but it struck me even then that Bacon was a one-trick pony, essentially making the same painting over and over again. A few years later, when I was at Oxford, I met him on several occasions, and, besides finding him a drunken arsehole, realized his main interest was money – needed to pay off gargantuan gambling debts. It also struck me that his gallery had more of a say in what he painted than he did. Fame, 20^th century-style, appeared to have a very negative influence upon art and artists. It made me wonder how Vincent’s life and work might have changed had he become a star. Would that last painting have been postponed indefinitely? I think not.

Possibly due to reading classical literature at university, my interests in art drifted back in time. Possibly due to an interest in psychotropic drugs, I became increasingly drawn to artists attempting to portray dream-worlds, or hyper-realities, the preternatural. Oddly enough, this ended up in a fascination with ancient Egyptian art, where no individual artist is known by name, and the purpose is entirely symbolic – except during the reign of the so-called monotheistic pharaoh Akenaton. This latter work is often hard to see in the original. You have to bribe your way into the Theban tombs where some of the finest bas-reliefs exist. But bribing a warden in the Valley of the Kings is not the pecuniary apocalypse that bribing a suit on Capitol Hill might prove to be. You will, however, need to bring your own good, big flashlight. In its beam you will see the only depictions of everyday ancient Egyptian life in existence. Virtually everything I have seen of ancient Egypt has been a bullet to the heart – especially after reading Schwaller de Lubic’ monumental Temple of Man, the most indispensable book on Egypt – but the Akenaton works fire a special bullet of their own. Human love is shown with irreducible subtlety: a wife’s arm placed oh-so-delicately on her husband’s shoulders. The deep appreciation of life’s manifold pleasures is displayed in countless ways. A meal is displayed, revealing, in the graceful drooping of a dead goose’s neck, gratitude for the life that has given itself to sustain life. The joy in living, aware of its own brevity, is portrayed in a manner so moving that one is forced to paraphrase Wordsworth’s still, sad music of humanity.

The sheer potency of ancient Egyptian art and architecture enthralled, obsessed, and puzzled me, until I read Schwaller’s aforementioned book. It is much like wondering why walking down the aisle of Chartres Cathedral has such an uplifting effect on the heart or soul, and then discovering the precise Pythagorean mathematics involved in its design (the space between pillars makes them effectually a musical chord). Art and music are two things which elude scientific explanation. There is no reason why vibrations in the air reaching the tympanum, and thence ferried into the brain ought to create such vastly different effects: one, say, making you think of beer and pretzels; another creating thoughts too deep for words. Similarly, there is no explanation for why one painting or sculpture – regardless of technical skill – makes the heart glow, while others simply hang or stand there inert. Pythagoras actually has some of these answers – at least those relating to music and sculpture – but he deserves an essay to himself. However, what he knew and taught he learned in Egypt, as Schwaller – renowned mathematician and philosopher – noticed for himself during his 16-year study of one single Egyptian temple.

What, the reader rightly asks, does any of this have to do with David Altmejd? A lot, as it turns out – but patience is a virtue (not one of mine, I confess). After 50-odd years of seeing much great art, few great exhibitions, and being married to a painter so uncompromisingly attached to her vision that she’d rather sell nothing than change it, I had come to expect nothing from exhibitions by contemporary artists, less still that bullet-to-the-heart experience.

Bearing in mind that I am legally blind (about 7% vision in one eye), I do have to be dragged to most exhibitions these days, although I will happily stand before a single work for an hour, since the ‘good’ eye’s 7% seems to triple its abilities when confronted by a masterpiece. Thus it was with weary trepidation that I shuffled my way into Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art last week on my wife’s arm. She had already seen the David Altmejd exhibit once, insisting that I must see it myself. I usually trust her judgement, but I must admit that her description of it convinced me I would loathe it. My sole consolation was that the Museum closed in less than two hours – and time-limited torment, as Dante may have observed in Hell, is a blessing.

90 minutes later, my heart aglow, I was thinking they’d have to drag me out in chains if they expected me to leave this most exquisite of living dreams.

I have no intention of describing this exhibition, for any attempt to do so would fall miserably short by being forced to break up a whole into the parts it is greater than. No photograph can do it justice either. It is, quite simply, by far the greatest exhibition by a contemporary artist that I have ever seen in 50 years. It is overwhelming, a work of the highest genius, able to stand beside the ten supreme masterpieces of all time. I would urge anyone who cares about art, wherever you are, to drop whatever it is you’re doing and fly to Montreal before September 10^th, since it seems unlikely that the exhibition in its current magisterial form will ever be seen anywhere else again.

What I will say about some of the individual sculptures is that, whether through instinct or intent, they embody Egypto-Pythagorean dimensions, and not a few resonate with the same timeless potency of temple art. Indeed, the whole exhibit deserves a permanent temple of its own, for an aura of sanctity pervades the work, from its guarded angels to its muted rainbow threads. In a piece made entirely from thin gold chains, we even find the Pythagorean Egg. The pineal gland, identified by both ancient Egyptians and Vedic Indians as the physical seat of metaphysical enlightenment, appears in a number of isolated heads. But nothing in the initial rooms prepares you for the magnum opus which is to come. My poor eye was dazzled, and I shake even now, a week later, recalling a splendour of such beauty and complexity that the reactions of other people – not your usual art crowd of aesthetes by the sound of them – lent their own unique beauty to the awesome spectacle surrounding us. I thought of Proust, who could spend ten pages on Elstrir’s seemingly boring paintings, and wondered what he would make of this: it would either have killed him, or added another ten volumes to the memoir. I thought of Salvador Dali, who I once interviewed – childish, pompous, vain – whose reaction would have been envy expressed as scorn. I thought of Picasso, who I also met a few times, during the retrospective of his playful 3-dimensional works at the Tate Gallery: he would have loved this, and kissed Altmejd’s feet in respect. James Joyce – eyes as bad as mine —  would have loved it too: “Finnegans’ Wake in three dimensions,” one can almost hear him cry. By standing on the shoulders of giants, you see further than they can. David Altmejd has chosen his giants with care and discernment. He sees further than anyone else has yet managed to do. All one is left to wonder is who will be able to stand upon his mighty shoulders. Beyond all doubt, this is the greatest artist of the 21^st century. I wish I could pay for you all to see this indescribably moving, ineffably beautiful, supreme masterwork.

Deschooling Society

Tags

Canada, education, England, Quebec

Regarding the article by Catherine Solyom in The Montreal Gazette for August 16th, I was surprised to find no mention in Ms. Solyom’s intriguing article, Class Dismissed, of Ivan Ilyich’s seminal work on this very subject, Deschooling Society, in which he tackles all of the issues raised here, though with more archaic sagacity and insight. I attended an all-boys’ school in England afflicted by all the ills of which Ilyich complained: the division of time and the nature of study by bells; the emphasis on conformity in dress; the enforced deference to black-gowned teachers; the obedience to often arbitrary rules; the vital importance attached to marks, grades, and who was ‘top of the class’, etc. I read Ilyich’s book while at that school, agreeing with every word of it. However, after winning a scholarship to Oxford University, I found myself in an environment of academic and social freedom much like the one advocated in Deschooling Society; and I was extremely ill-equipped to deal with it. Suddenly, my time was my own, governed merely by two one-on-one tutorials a week, for each of which I was expected to produce a paper of some 20 to 30 pages in length. There was also a one hour group seminar for the eight or nine men reading the same subject – English Literature and Language – as I was in my college. There were lectures open to all university students, yet these were not obligatory. The management of my time was a matter solely of my own concern. My college in those days was all-male; its gates were closed at midnight, although there were ways of climbing in, providing one was not caught by ‘Bullers’ – bowler-hatted university police or enforcers, who roamed the streets after midnight in search of errant scholars. For there were a few women’s colleges; and when one’s life has been spent in an all-boys’ environment, the presence of young ladies was a confusing novelty, which interfered greatly with management of time.

Fifty years later, reading of the vagaries associated with ‘unschooling’, in Ms. Solyom’s piece, I find myself both grateful for and critical of my own pre-university schooling. Without it, I should never have had the advantages of studying Greek, Latin, and numerous other subjects holding no attraction for a child of eleven. I would never have had the opportunity to act in and direct plays; nor to learn carpentry and pottery. Yet, on the other hand, the school, with its encouragement of robotic conformity and its rigidity of structure, in no way prepared me for the boundless freedoms of Oxford. I felt there ought to have been at least a year’s transition period preparing us for a life that was more like Life. But Ilyich’s point had in fact been that such a school system did prepare its students for Life. Most of my friends did not go on to Oxford and a life of leisure in the Arts; they went into the offices and dark satanic mills of bureaucracy or commerce, where their robot-training was immediately continued in various ad hoc forms.

When my own children came of school age, I seriously considered home-schooling, partly because I had the time and qualifications for conducting it, and partly because I considered 80% of time spent at school wasted upon pointless activities and the seemingly impossible task of maintaining discipline without the means to do so. In my school, discipline was strict; pupils were quiet and well-mannered – because corporal punishment existed. There was always the threat of caning, whose effect lay far more in the threat, the possibility, than it did in the actual practice. Admittedly, there were a couple of sadists, who meted out their own forms of physical punishment – a couple, and incidents were rare. The threat created the discipline.

From my experience of my own children’s schools, discipline was an impossible dream, and it took merely one loud-mouthed kid – who had worked out that teacher had no power – to turn any classroom into mayhem. I disapproved of almost everything about the system, from the abolition of competition – everyone must get a prize – to the absurdity of lessons. Reading, writing, and arithmetic appeared to have been abandoned in favour of non-subjects, like ‘social studies’, and projects involving glue, macaroni, wooden skewers, and so forth. Parents complained if their child received poor grades; yet teachers never complained that parents ought to spend more time talking and reading to their kids, rather than letting them watch TV or play video games.

Home-schooling plays a major role in any kind of schooling, and always has done. But it involves time and discipline – and I don’t mean beating; I mean punishments and rewards that actually mean something to a child, and are not idle threats.

When I read in Ms. Solyom’s piece of the notion that children should be left to discover for themselves where their interests lie, I shuddered, recalling how my own childish interests had ranged from piracy, through train-driving, to geology and astronomy. Without forced exposure to history, literature, Latin, and so forth, I would never have arrived at the areas in which my interests truly do lie.

The subtext of this entire article seemed to me to be a severe dissatisfaction regarding what is taught in our schools, and how it is taught. Over the past few decades, teachers seem to have rearranged curricula to suit their own lazy concerns. As my own children ascended the educational ladder, the matter they were studying increasingly appalled me. Were I not so opposed to private education as the most obnoxious form of classism, one which no society ought to sanction, I would have packed my kids off there, along with half my income. For I once gave a talk to students at Upper Canada College – probably the best of Canada’s private schools – and was startled by the good behaviour, attentiveness, and intelligent questions emanating from the boys assembled in my classroom there. Leaving the pleasant buildings and grounds of the school, however, I was overcome by a sadness: why should such an educational environment only be available to the rich? The author John Le Carre recently said the same thing to the CBC’s Eleanor Wachtell; that, as long as Britain’s public schools (the English term for ‘private schools’) exist, the class system will survive to the detriment of all. A far superior education, conducted among one’s peers, inevitably leads to a two-tiered society, where the princes and peasants know their places, yet the middle-class are squeezed, by their own ambitions to climb the social rungs, out of existence. These, it may be recalled, were the very conditions that sparked the French Revolution.

To stem this capricious tide of anti-schooling, I would suggest a complete overhauling of curricula, more money spent on – and more excellence required of – teachers; the abolition of private schools, religious or otherwise; far smaller classrooms (20 children to one teacher at the very most); and a return to real teaching, not the reliance on video and computer aids, which only incite hypnotic disinterest in pupils. Subjects taught – after reading, writing, and math have been mastered – ought to include both official languages, though in an oral form, so that students can talk them first, then perhaps read them; an overview of world religions, to encourage multicultural mutual respect and understanding; a firm grasp of world history, rather than the Euro-centric version current; a course on Canadian political institutions and citizens’ rights; and then, after the age of sixteen or so, specialisation by choice in the sciences or humanities. All of this would be accompanied by real work, not risible projects, and students falling behind would be assigned special help in consultation with their parents, who must be made aware of their own vital role in their child’s progress. In special cases, where a parent is clearly incapable of providing more guidance, special provisions ought to be provided, even involving tuition during the long holidays that adequately-reimbursed teachers could hardly expect to continue enjoying. Yes, it will involve public money; but what better cause than the education of future generations can there possibly be?

The opting out of a system gone awry is, it would seem, a savage criticism of that system which is being truculently ignored by the system itself, one that has always chosen to place the blame for its own failures on other factors or persons. Ms. Solyom has written a fascinating and insightful article, one that ought to worry everyone who cares about education, both in Quebec and in Canada as a whole.

Sincerely,

Paul William Roberts

Canada Day

Tags

Canada, England, France, Immigration, politics, Quebec, taxation, welfare

What do we have to celebrate? A lot, I would say. I still believe that this is the best place to live on earth, in spite of those who would make it otherwise. What can we, as Canadians, do to protect what we have? Well, there are radical ideas, like the overthrow of a governmental system that is antiquated and dysfunctional; or there are less disruptive notions, like learning from the mistakes of other nations. Take Britain, where three trillion pounds annually of taxpayers’ money is spent on welfare projects, much of which is squandered on people perfectly able to work, yet finding the prospect irksome, this idleness encouraged by an administration more concerned with its own beaurocracy and red-tape than it is with executing the task at hand. For example, a woman with three children, from three different fathers, is given free housing, plus assistance for herself and her three children, until they are eighteen. No part of the system is given the task of finding a way in which she can work while her children are cared for. In other words, the system is designed to offer free money to those who fulfill certain, all too rudimentary, requirements. And these requirements are determined by a form, filled out with help from a ‘social services officer’, and not by any investigation of circumstances. The result is a country overwhelmed by debt and social chaos, one in which the rich get richer on the backs of the middle-class taxpayer. Another example: Paris is now a city of 60 million inhabitants, twice the population of Canada, the second-largest country in the world. This is a consequence of immigration policies resulting from the misguided, and ever burgeoning, Euro Zone, which differ slightly from the punishments of colonialism and empire (in which the conquered were, naturally, entitled to citizenship in the conquerors’ nations). An economic union between advanced industrialized countries, like Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian nations, made sense. To devise a common currency, among such countries, even made sense. But to include such places as Romania, Spain, and Greece – not to mention others on the list – was sheer idiocy. The consequences of this folly are now all too evident, and may well result in the dissolution of the whole union. The resultant waves of emigration to welfare havens, like France and the U.K., are causing severe social unrest. The erudite, and much misunderstood, British politician, Enoch Powell, predicted this back in the sixties, when immigrants from Pakistan, India, and the West Indies, began swelling the population of London, and other cities, like Birmingham. Powell stated that this would lead to racial warfare, and he was right. Unfortunately, Powell gained support from unsavory neo-fascist elements, like the National Front, and the Skinheads. Diana Macleoud, daughter of the great English politician, Ian Macleoud, once told me that her father, who was a great friend of Enoch Powell, told him that he was stirring up neo-fascist sentiments and racism with his views, and was regarded in some quarters as a new Sir Oswald Moseley (whose pro-Nazi Blackshirts had once terrorised the streets of London during the years leading up to World War II). Powell, Macleaoud had told his daughter, was appalled at this news, and had no intention of provoking such sentiments. He kept his views to himself thereafter. But his predictions were right. In a country where unemployment is high, there will always be resistance to an influx of immigrants seeking the same elusive jobs.

In Canada, we are faced with a similar, yet also utterly different, situation. While it behooves us to take in refugees from such nightmares as Syria, Somalia, and so on, we need to ensure that these refugees will not clog the major cities with self-enclosed communities increasingly hostile to the rest of the population. The current anti-Muslim feelings, promoted by some media, all but guarantee this. “I and all schoolchildren learn,” wrote W.H. Auden, “that those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Although our country is vast, and we desperately need more people to help pay the taxes, this influx of immigrants and refugees cannot be allowed to settle in the major cities. Where then should they go? The Harper Government’s obsession with eradicating the national deficit – a sum so paltry that most U.S. congressmen could pay it off, with a little help from their friends – ignores the more important concerns of infrastructure, especially within cities. To accommodate hordes of immigrants and refugees, besides providing work for those welfare vampires sucking our tax blood, there need to be enormous projects, not unlike the Pharaonic Pyramids, to occupy thousands profitably, and for many years. The opening-up of the North, thanks to Climate Change, also provides opportunity for an abundance of similar massive projects. It is, I suggest, the job of a government, not to balance books, but to dream big. To gaze into a distant future, rather than at the next election, or bottom-line.

I left Toronto four years ago, for personal reasons, yet also because the city I knew for thirty years was becoming just another overcrowded metropolis. It seemed to me that someone had decided the function of cities was to grow, and grow, and grow. Is there an example on earth of a city that has benefitted from excessive growth? Ottawa still strikes me as a reasonable place, an environment in which it is still pleasant to live. Montreal, however, from which I am 90 minutes away, is culturally vibrant, to be sure, yet also a chaotic hell for the driver, and, in addition, a place redolent of the kind of racism pervading some British cities. The unlamented ex-premier of Quebec even cited immigration as the cause of the terrorism afflicting Britain. She was not entirely wrong, though extravagantly unaware that her own anti-Islamic non-policies were the real causes behind such home-grown terrorism.

Quebec claims to be a non-multicultural society, within a multicultural Canada, yet such notions are as antiquated as the guillotine. The future of this country, which includes Quebec, and always will, relies upon some intelligent thinking by whomsoever is in control of it. Allow in as many immigrants as possible, by all means, but distribute these people across this enormous land, rather than allowing them to create mini-nations within every province – ones that will, someday, harbour the same separatist idiocies that continue to cripple Quebec’s future. You leave your country for ours, you leave your nationality behind. You swear allegiance to our Queen and Country, and that oath is binding. Anyone breaking it, I suggest, has lost their right to live here.

In the same way, anyone living on welfare, while being capable of working, is a tax-vampire. As someone who now lives on a monthly disability pension – ‘lives’ being a scarcely appropriate term – I can honestly say that I would take any employment of which I was capable, if offered, in order to pay my way. Why is there no organization to find work for those on welfare? We do not wish to find ourselves in the disastrous state which Britain now faces, do we? Unpopular as it may be – among those who don’t vote anyway – a plan of work-fare makes eminent sense, and ensures a future not over-burdened by idlers, encouraged in their idleness by a dysfunctional system. Philanthropy when it was a private endeavour, focussed on the needy, not the greedy. With our enforced system of philanthropy, via taxation, it is surely the right, and duty, of citizens to decide who deserves assistance, and who does not – just as it ought to be our right, by democratic vote, to decide if our taxes are well-spent on $40 billion-worth of warplanes for a military we cannot use effectively, nor can afford. I believe it is the right and duty of every Canadian citizen to report on suspected abusers of welfare, as it is to decide how and where their tax dollars are best invested. We cannot, and ought not try to compete with the U.S.A., which can no longer even uphold the role of Global Cop, to which it once believed itself elected, let alone cope with its domestic social and economic chaos.

I still remember when the Maple Leaf button assured one safe passage through the world’s disaster zones. Canada then meant equitable dealing, unbiased politics, and decent, humanitarian concerns. These qualities are worth all the biased, tough-guy posturing we hear today; and they are, and ought to remain, the essence of this wonderful land. We stand on guard for thee—and the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.