Canadian Journey - Into the Past

I'm not long back from a flying visit to Canada where I attended three reunions and a wake. As in that wonderful film Four Weddings and a Funeral, there were tears and laughter and many many magical moments. The 40 year reunion of my Canada World Youth/Jeunesse Canada Monde group - Malaysia Year One - was held in the Muskoka region of Ontario. Yes, that particular experience was the inspiration for My Blue Country. Hilarious to see all the photos from way back then and to acknowledge with some consternation that despite all the wear and tear of life we were not really that different! Here's a pic of me at 19 years of age with my first true love. Un beau jeune homme, n'est-ce pas? In fact, he was the inspiration for Jean in The Book of Dreams and it was after our 30 year reunion that he helped with the mythology of French Canada, sending me books about la chasse galerie (the flying canoe) and the loup-garou (French Canadian werewolf). My next post will tell of another reunion in Ottawa with my old navy gals.

Doris Lessing's Canopus Series

I'm reading four books at the moment (not bragging, I just need variety) and this is one of them. It's the fourth in the truly brilliant series Canopus in Argos Archives by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. She calls the series "inner space fiction" and it is breathtaking in its scope, beginning with the microcosm of humanity and ranging out into the vast reality of the universe and universes. (In the second one, she has dimensional 'zones' attached to Earth or Shikasta/Rohanda not unlike the Buddhist notions of bardo realities.) Each book is quite different in tone and subject matter though loosely joined together by the over-arching presence and observation of Canopus. I thought at first this last one was boring and 'small' in comparison to the others, but the more I read it the more hilarious I realise it is. A scathing attack on the folly of humankind, more particularly man-kind, and the machinations of politics and the absurdity of sentimentalism. Most of all I have learned, myself, a lesson in the dangers of rhetoric and how one can get carried away by one's own words. She presents rhetoric as a form of illness, of madness. One has only to think of the ridiculous nature of political conventions with their meaningless speeches and infantile flag-waving calculated to rouse the rabble.