Leonard Cohen. And me, I suppose.

So long Marianne; it’s time that we began, to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.


Tonight we think of Leonard Cohen.

I still have the songbook I purchased in the music store in West Point Grey where I took my first guitar lessons all those years ago: The Songs of Leonard Cohen.  With a picture of Cohen’s Greek visa - if that’s what it was - on the back cover. I wanted to learn how to play Suzanne, because everyone else could.  (It sounded so simple, though it wasn't.) Instead, I learned Bird on a Wire and So Long, Marianne. But really hardly ever played them. There was something impenetrably, ineffably unreachable in his unique juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.  And I could never shake this feeling that they weren’t really songs; they were more like poetry barely set to music.  He was, I think, simply too adult for my 14 or 15 year old self.  It was far easier to set sail on the more approachable, or at least tuneful seas - flying machines and broken heartships - of Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor and Neil Young.

Oddly enough, I returned to Leonard Cohen a few years later through a side door: Jennifer Warnes’ completely perfect record, Famous Blue Raincoat.  That punching drumbeat in First We Take Manhattan cracks across your mind like some kind of weapon.  Her duet with the man himself on Joan of Arc is a wild tour into the unknowable, unresolvable mystery of mysteries. Song of Bernadette, which I played so often the grooves wore out on the vinyl and still today can bring me close to tears: ‘so many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine, torn by what we’ve done and can’t undo’ - well, isn’t that life in a dozen words?  And anyway, I was just old enough by then to be entranced by the idea of a Jewish poet from Montreal who couldn’t leave all these Christian icons alone. Jennifer Warnes helped me see the music that completed the poetry.

And then again, a long interruption, until the album The Future, and its Closing Time, which I played and played and played again, not just because it really is hell to pay when the fiddler stops, but by then I guess I was maybe old enough to start thinking about closing time.  But young enough still to think that the answer was simply to party on, and hope the fiddler would never stop.

If you will forgive me a moment of excess, I think I can say that the first twenty thousand times I heard Hallelujah - including as k d laing sang it at the 2010 Olympics opening ceremony (we were there for rehearsal night) it meant something to me, but eventually all good things - even really, really good songs, wear out their welcome. Not Cohen’s fault, I know, but there it is. It’s a curious song.  I’ve always thought it’s a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA: there’s something superficially compelling about it that allows you to disregard the true darkness that lies within it.  Sometimes I hear people sing it and I say to myself, are you actually listening to what he’s saying?

Pico Iyer’s writings about Leonard Cohen’s life with Buddhists brought the man into focus in ways that could only cause you to rethink your own way of living, or at least it did that for me, and I give them both credit for doing that.

Leonard Cohen is a special treasure to Canadians, of course.  A Montrealer who made it big in the larger world and never completely let go of his roots.  Someone whose muse also never quite let go, and drove him to create, to mystify and enlighten and even entertain us into his 80’s; well, that’s a powerful inspiration in his own right.  He’s thought of as an icon of the 60’s, one of the greats of a long ago era who managed to reinvent himself into relevance again and again for six decades.  I think his work will last.  Context always matters; the time and place in which creation happens is always at least relevant.  But the art that truly endures can stand outside its time and place.  That is a right reserved to very few creators.  Leonard Cohen is surely one of them, an immortal.  Few people prepare so publicly for their own demise, but I always thought that he was preparing us for his departure as much as he was preparing himself. He’s gone now, but the words and the songs will live on.

The morning after the morning after, and it's not getting better

A day later, and the future still seems pretty dark to me.

Yesterday morning, Hillary Clinton conceded defeat with grace and dignity, and a resolute commitment to the inevitability of social progress, confirming our belief that these have always been her qualities.  President Obama began the process of transition. He invited the President-elect to the White House as soon as today.  And in a quite remarkable attempt to re-contextualize 18 months of bitter, impassioned and angry campaign rhetoric, he quaintly described US presidential elections as "intramural scrimmages".

Well, we're all getting along now, I guess.  At least no one it seems, is any longer describing the US voting system as rigged.

Commentators are well into the post-mortem analysis.  For many, of course, that will have to include an examination of the question: what went wrong with their confident prediction that Americans would reject Trump?  (Of course, in one sense, they did: Clinton won the popular vote.)

There will be lots of explanations.  Here’s one that needs considering.  I won’t remember the numbers perfectly, but they went something like this: compared with 2012, the Republican vote decreased by a bit less than a million (in round numbers, 61 million to 60 million); but the Democratic vote declined by as much as 6 million (66 to 60).  Overall, a lower turnout.  But perhaps what really happened is simply that Republicans voted Republican, while millions of Democrats abandoned their party and candidate.  (These would probably be the blue collar workers who once formed the backbone of the New Deal Democratic coalition and who are now the bedrock of Republican support in the Rust Belt states where the election was won and lost.)

The other narrative that has returned to the media discourse as an explanation of Tuesday’s outcome is the argument that what really happened is that voters decided, as they do from time to time, to vote for change rather than continuity.  In crudely simple terms, it’s like this: “we’ve given those bastards a pretty good run at it; now it’s time to elect a different set of bastards.”  (The argument is pursued by Gail Collins in her op-ed in today’s New York Times.)

This idea was once very elegantly explained by the American philosopher Robert Nozick in his book, The Examined Life.  He called it the "zigzag" of politics.  He wrote,

“The electorate I see as being in the following situation: Goals and programs have been pursued for some time by the party in power, and the electorate comes to think that’s far enough, perhaps even too far.  It’s now time to right the balance, to include other goals that have been, recently at least, neglected or given too low a priority, and it’s time to cut back on some of the newly instituted programs, to reform or curtail them.”

It’s a philosopher’s argument (I don’t think he even names a political party throughout the whole of his discussion).  It implies, plausibly, that voters are rarely as entrenched in their adherence to the positions and views of parties and candidates as are the parties (and their ideologues).  It argues for a balance over time that ensures that different interests, priorities, and aspirations eventually all have their chance.  It underestimates the role that personality - as opposed to policy - plays in election outcomes.  But it is not a bad way of explaining one of the best features of healthy democracies, which is that long term one-party rule is the exception, rather than the norm.

So maybe what happened is that Americans - or at least some of them - were simply voting this week for change.

Fine. I can comprehend that analysis.  I might even agree with it.  But it doesn’t help.
Americans may have voted for change. But what they got was Donald Trump.  And that’s where the fear starts to rise again in the pit of my stomach.

A Sunday summer day in Howe Sound

Sunday afternoon, the first weekend in June.  It’s a glorious day, more like summer than spring. We are paddling kayaks in Howe Sound, surrounded by ocean, mountains and islands, and counting seals and eagles.

We are not alone.  In the waters around us others are enjoying the beautiful blue sky day.  There are motor boats filled with families fishing, picnicking and water-skiing.  Off in the distance other boaters are travelling to and from their cottages.  Water scooters zoom noisily back and forth. From the mainland across from us, we hear the roar of traffic on the Sea to Sky highway – folks coming home from a weekend of hiking or mountain biking at Whistler, and motorcycle riders making the long day’s circle trip up the Duffy Lake Road.  High overhead, seaplanes filled with sightseers circle around the scenery.

It’s a busy day in Howe Sound.  Everyone’s finding their soul space, doing the things that give them pleasure, and enrich their lives.  It’s at the heart of why we love this province, and why we live here in coastal BC.  And it is all completely and utterly dependent upon fossil fuels.  

Without carbon products, the only sounds in Howe Sound would be waves lapping on rocky shores and the beat of seagull wings.

Strung out along the mountainside just across from where we are paddling is the community of Lions Bay.  It was once home to a few waterfront cottages.  Now it’s a community of over 1300 people.  Made possible by, and utterly dependent upon, our car culture.  As a place to live, it fails every walkability score ever devised.  Yes, there’s a community school, but it stops at grade 3.  There’s a village hall.  There’s a small general store that serves great cinnamon buns, and a real estate office, and a marina, but that’s about it.  Everyone who lives in Lions Bay does their shopping somewhere else, a bus ride or, far more likely, a car drive away.  They would all be helpless without carbon fuels.

The same is true for all of us who live or play in Howe Sound and its islands.  There’s Bowen Island, increasingly populated by folks who commute daily by ferry and water taxi to Vancouver.  There’s Gambier and Keats and Anvil Islands, with cottages and boat docks lining their shores.  It’s motor cars and motor boats that make it all possible.  And the chain saws that clear our views, and the generators that operate our water pumps, and the ferries and the water taxis that deliver us to our destinations.  And yes, of course, even the plastic kayaks in which we are paddling.

There’s a breath-taking gap between the promise we have made to reduce our carbon output and the reality of our lives.  

I feel this all the more acutely because I know that some of those boating or driving around on this lovely Sunday afternoon will spend their Sunday evening writing letters to the editor insisting that we keep the LNG vessels and oil tankers away from our precious waters.  LIke them, I believe that Howe Sound is a special place, and I am glad it is cleaner today than it was a generation or two ago.  I certainly don’t want to turn back that clock.  But I also don’t want to live in denial - to pretend - or even simply just ignore - the reality that without carbon none of us could live or play in these waters. 

But what about the orcas?  Yes, there are the orcas that, for the first time in my life, are swimming in Howe Sound.  Those orcas.  They are beautiful, majestic creatures.  I always know when there’s a sighting. That's because I can see the train of motor boats following behind and surrounding them. 

The problem, I think, is not that we aren’t superficially sincere in wanting a better, cleaner, sustainable environment.  It’s that we assume that all that heavy lifting is going to be done by someone else, somewhere else, some other day, while we continue to live and enjoy our carbon-dependent lives to their fullest.  As if, somehow, we will have done our part for the environment if we insist that the pipelines and tankers go somewhere else.  But please make sure I can still afford the gas I need for my boat or car!

Canada has signed on for ambitious carbon reduction targets.  As the Canada West Foundation recently pointed out, the amount of the reduction required by the year 2030 is equivalent to the elimination of all GHG emissions from Ontario, Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and the Territories. Completely shutting down the oil sands would only get us partway there.  The reductions in carbon activity required to achieve this target are nothing short of transformational.  Are we actually ready for that change?  As I look around at the busy waters of Howe Sound on this lovely day I don’t think we have even begun to turn our minds to the magnitude of the task.

Other Americas

I began my Sunday morning as a good citizen of the world, by deciding to catch up on the week in US presidential election.  Pretty soon, I was back in the slough of despond.  The thing is, there is an America that is not the grotesque caricature that is dominating its politics just now.  At times like this I just need to make a special effort to remind myself of it.  

So I jammed the earbuds in and went for a walk on the windy beach.  Richard Shindell began singing Wisteria: “The vine of my memory is blooming along those eaves.”  Soon enough, I felt a bit better.

***

It is a cold October night and my friend Sam Morse and I are camped on Tumbledown Mountain in Maine, which is not so much a mountain as a long ridge of ancient granite that looms over the miles of forests and farms of northern New England.  We have a campfire going, and we are working our way with some deliberateness through a bottle of Jack Daniels, solving the last few remaining puzzles in the mystery that is the universe.  It’s a dark starlit night. Just when I am starting to think it is time to crawl into the sleeping bag, a car pulls up, filled with teenage boys.  They ask if they are on the right road to Mexico.  I start to laugh.  Sam, who knows the backroads of Maine, asks, “Where are you boys from?”  They reply, “Paris”. I laugh again. Sam looks at me as though I am the completest idiot ever to set foot on earth.  He turns back to the boys in the car and says, “I’m afraid you’ve overshot Mexico.”  And then he proceeds to tell them how to get back to the right road.  It turns out there’s more than one way to get to Mexico from Paris, in Maine.  In that other America.

***

It is a summer afternoon in the early 1990s, and we are sitting in Fenway Park, in Boston, in a row of seats halfway up the stands behind home plate.  The Blue Jays are playing the Red Sox.  It’s a sunny, muggy day. We catch bags of peanuts from the vendor and make a mess of shells at our feet.  We watch as pitchers and batters duel, fielders make spectacular catches, and there is a collective intake of breath with every long ball that arcs towards the Green Monster.  We feel like we are sitting in the nave of a cathedral built to honour the soul of a nation. On the row beside us sit two men who have probably been watching Red Sox games at Fenway Park for over half a century.  They see an opportunity for education.  And so for the whole of that long, deliciously slow August afternoon, they generously regale us with stories of their team, its players and managers, its successes and heartbreaks.  They fill our heads with statistics of unsurpassing obscurity, which they disagree about vigorously. They tell us what to watch for with every batter, and call every pitch before it is thrown. All is said with what can only be described as wise-cracking reverence, as though there could be nothing more important in this world than to know every fact about the life and career of Carl Yastrzemski, the greatest Red Sox player of them all.

***

There’s a room in Washington D.C. in an art gallery called the Phillips Collection which holds four paintings by Mark Rothko.  We were there last December. Its mid-20th century construction marked the first time an entire room had been created specifically for Rothko’s work.  It’s not a large room; and it is dominated by the paintings, abstract expressionist works that are fields and bands of colour.  When you enter the room, you are literally immersed in Rothko’s vision.  It’s deceptively simple: colours and shapes on four canvases; purely abstract.  But if you take a slow breath, and let it wash over you, you start to realize that the paintings are somehow humming; as though they are alive. And then you realize that you are not just looking at something, you are feeling it. You’re buzzing, elevated by an emotion that’s almost impossible to explain.  It’s glorious to be in the presence of such achievement. 

***

There is a book by the American photographer Robert Adams called Prayers in an American Church.  It’s a small book, a collection of a dozen or so photographs, accompanied by meditative words from diverse sources.  The church in the title is not a building; it’s the natural world, whose beauty is honoured in the photographs.  Not the grandeur of mountains and canyons, but the simpler beauty of sun-dappled tree branches and leaves, and the peace of quiet places.  Robert Adams’ images are austere.  He captures the intersection of humans and the landscape of western America. It might be a treeless suburban housing tract on the outskirts of Denver.  Or a scarred clearcut hillside in Oregon. Or a woman pushing a shopping cart in a grocery store.  Or the line of the prairie horizon broken by a single tree.  Or a lonely road. He is determined to find beauty in all these places, and, against the odds, he does. 

***

When I want to think of that other America, I think of Dar Williams, whose early songs were, for a time, the soundtrack of our life as a family.  When I Was a Boy was a kind of anthem for our belief as parents that our children could grow up on their own terms, unconstrained by the limiting stereotypes of mass consumer culture.  The Christians and the Pagans is a generous and funny hymn to the possibility that we can get along, despite our differences, as long as we can find a way to eat together.  The Babysitter’s Here is a short story about love, growing up, and everything else, sung in about four perfect minutes.  She still makes amazing music. 

*** 

One summer a decade ago, we rented a car in Las Vegas and began a road trip by heading towards southern Utah and its breathtakingly beautiful red sandstone natural monuments. On our first night we stopped in a town called Springdale, which is on the doorstep of the majesty of Zion National Park.  We try to be respectful travellers.  We had read that Mormon traditions were strong in southern Utah.  We were prepared, then, for a few days of righteous, stoic, alcohol-free travel. But on our first night, we sat down at the table of our restaurant and read a menu that suggested we might like a glass of Polygamy Porter.  Why?  Because, as they said, “you can’t have just one.” It’s hard not to love a country that can make fun of itself.  And while I am at it, I think, too, of Las Vegas, all of it, because, as I said, it’s hard not to love a country that can make fun of itself.

***

When I think of America, I think of Aaron Copland, and that moment early in the first movement of Appalachian Spring when the orchestra comes alive and I always jump from my seat. And Bob Dylan, because, well, because everything.  Even if “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” And Edward Hopper’s paintings.  And Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.”

And I think of lightbulbs, Linus Pauling, the Hardy Boys, Huckleberry Finn, Rosa Parks, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, Walter Cronkite, e e cummings, Rebecca Solnit, and that moment when, after screaming in terror all the way down the Matterhorn at Disneyland, our daughter turned to us and breathlessly said, “Can we do that again?” 

And my favourite sentence in the English language. “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.”

Happy Earth Day, British Columbia

The Globe and Mail published this piece online tonight.  I've read some of the comments, which, really, no one should do, who wants to maintain any faith in humanity.  But the hilarious thing is that no one (so far) seems to have read what I've actually written. They've read the headline and that's about it.  Maybe I shouldn't be surprised?  Anyway, here we go.  



Happy Earth Day. Earth Day can be a day to honour the precious gift that is our planet. Often, however, it is also an occasion to lament, or at least feel guilty about, the way we use it.

There’s reason enough to lament. But I would suggest there is another perspective, that there is also, sometimes, a reason to celebrate. In British Columbia today, we actually have an enviable environmental record to celebrate on Earth Day.

A recent report by Corporate Knights confirmed that no jurisdiction in Canada protects more land than British Columbia. There are 1,029 protected areas managed provincially. As of last June, over 15 per cent of British Columbia’s land base, or nearly 14.3 million hectares, was dedicated to protected area status. That’s 2.2 hectares per resident. It’s a remarkable achievement.

And the story gets better. Earlier this year, after years of conflict and negotiation, the Great Bear Rainforest on the central coast was fully and properly protected.

The agreement now in place permanently protects 85 per cent of the old-growth forested area in this enormous and remote part of British Columbia from industrial logging, while allowing restricted logging on the balance. That’s over 5.4 million hectares of additional protection, an area nearly the size of Nova Scotia.

For once, I don’t have to go out on a limb to agree with the Greenpeace spokesman who stated: “From conflict to collaboration, we now celebrate the protection of areas of cultural and ecological importance while ensuring economic opportunities for the communities exist long into the future.”

This achievement is especially important because our forestry, energy and mining resources will continue to drive the growth and stability of our economy.

The reality for our province – and for Canada – is that our prosperity is founded on resource development. That’s not to say we should not diversify our economy; we have done so and should continue to do so. But it’s resource development that built our province, and responsible, sustainable resource development will be a cornerstone of our economy for generations to come.

That makes it all the more important to find the right balance between land development and land protection.

That’s why for the past couple of years, I’ve been involved with a group in Vancouver that is sparking an informed conversation about these issues. Resource Works, a non-profit society with representation from all sectors and corners of the province, works to raise awareness of the importance of our resource economy to our standard of living in British Columbia.

Too often in this province, we hear a discourse that presumes we can somehow maintain our quality of life by leaping immediately to some postresource economy. It won’t happen. And it shouldn’t happen. For as long as we continue to drive cars, take buses or ride bicycles; use smartphones, tablets or computers; expect our streets to be safely lit at night; boil water for coffee or tea; expect our homes to be warm in winter; build and live in houses; catch fish; eat fruits and vegetables in winter – in short, for as long as we continue to do everything that is indispensable to our quality of life, we will make demands on the planet. It’s simply not credible to pretend or suggest otherwise.

Somehow, we need to hold two thoughts in our minds at the same time: the need for access to sufficient resources to sustain our quality of life and ensuring that we respect the planet. Neither side holds a monopoly on truth in this debate. There is no point or purpose in trying to out-shriek each other. The task, again, is to find the balance.

But I’m not suggesting it’s easy. I am suggesting it is fundamentally important that we embrace both sides of the question, and find a path forward that can both recall our duty to protect the planet and yet also find a way to continue to sustain ourselves from its amazing bounty.

Count all of the protected areas, wrap your mind around the millions of hectares of British Columbia that have been put outside the reach of resource development – the forests, mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, estuaries and marshlands that have been been protected. It’s been the labour of a generation to reach a point where our record of land protection is second to none. It’s Earth Day. Let’s celebrate that achievement.

And then ask the question: Is that enough?

We are travelling in Laos.  Admiring the glorious Buddhist temples of its capital city Vientiane.  In the back of my mind is this nagging question of how Canada should respond to the events in the Middle East, Syria and ISIS in particular.  There’s a call for greater bellicosity.  Commentators and opposition politicians say we need to increase our military engagement.  It’s not quite wanting to make the desert glow, but lots of “why can’t the Prime Minister sound at least a little angry?”

Well, anger may be a great way of letting off steam, but it’s not always the best emotion for rational analysis.  There’s a recurring moment in the movie Bridge of Spies, when the Tom Hanks character asks his Soviet spy client (played brilliantly by Mark Rylance) a question intended to provoke a strong emotion, and the spy always replies, “would it do any good?”  That’s a great question, a question which we should especially ask about whether Canada needs to get more engaged - I was going to say ensnared - in the literal and metaphorical minefield that is the Middle East.  Would it do any good?

All wars come about because older men and women decide to kill younger men and women. Their own citizens. Some of those killed are soldiers, and others are innocent civilians. The Leader says to his people, “Please give me your sons and daughters so I may slaughter them on battlefields, and break your hearts when they never return from the faraway place I need to send them.”  The question arises, “Why, O Leader?”  The answer is often an appeal to a higher ideal.  In many countries of course, the answer is sometimes “because our borders are threatened.”  Not so in Canada, not for the past two hundred years.

Sometimes the answer is, “We need to do this to make the world safe from something bad.”  Perhaps it is justifiable to put Canadians in harm’s way if the result of the loss of lives is that some greater evil has been avoided.  As I get older, however, experience teaches me to be increasingly skeptical of that argument.  The world was told Iraq needed to be invaded to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction.  Except there weren’t any such weapons.  And the result of the invasion of Iraq is that the world is actually less safe. Much less safe. The world was told that Afghanistan needed to be invaded to make the world safe from the harm being caused by its leaders. Well, the world is always being told that about Afghanistan, and whether it is ever true, the fact is that the lost of precious Canadian lives in Afghanistan has had no enduring positive impact on domestic safety and security in that country, and Afghanistan continues to be a source of international instability.  And we are told we need to increase our military engagement in Syria.  We are told this, mostly, by people who are much better at starting wars than finishing them.  Forgive me if, this time more than ever, I am skeptical of the war-mongers. I have grandchildren.

Why am I ranting on like this?  Yesterday we visited the National Museum of Laos.  The plaster is cracked, there's dust in the corners, and some of the exhibits are a bit timeworn, but the story of the country's passage is compelling nonetheless.  It's a story told from the singular perspective of the Democratic People's Republic, with the special tone that one-party states tend to adopt when praising their accomplishments.  I took a (bad) photograph of this map.  Every dot is a bomb drop.

Between 1964 and 1973, as part of a secret operation conducted during the Vietnam War, the US military dropped dropped 260 million cluster bombs – about 2.5 million tons of munitions – on Laos over the course of 580,000 bombing missions.

As our tour guide said a couple of days ago, “Well there were about three million people in Laos then, so you could say the US dropped about a ton of bombs for every man, woman and child of Laos.”

Did it do any good? Did all those bombs make Laos a free country, with liberal democratic institutions, respect for private property rights and the rule of law?

No. About a year after the bombing stopped, Laos became a communist state.

Some historians argue that the final triumph of the communists in Lao was a direct result of the US bombing campaign.  That is, not only did this massive, relentless campaign of utter destruction singularly fail to achieve its stated purpose, it actually produced the opposite effect.  Laos was bombed (in part) to protect the US war effort in Vietnam.  Well, so how did that turn out?  The US left Vietnam in failure and disgrace, and soon thereafter, North and South Vietnam became one undivided communist state, the very thing that the US intervened to prevent a generation earlier.

All conflicts have their own histories.  But before we put our children in harm’s way, isn’t it right to ask the question whether it will do any good?  The answer is so rarely yes.  It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  But we do not have to.  It is also said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.  I have heard no one begin to offer a coherent explanation of the kind of multi-generational commitment that would be needed to build a measure of security and stability in the Middle East, and frankly, the region’s leaders are themselves quite conflicted on the question whether they would ever want such a thing, given that a certain amount and kind of conflict and instability seems to suit their interests.

For a generation, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Canada tried to make a reputation for itself as a peace maker, not a war maker.  Many look back on that era as a high point of our contribution to world affairs.  Others think we should just buy more fighter planes.  I say, just this once, let's reach for something higher.