Grave Thoughts on the Levity of Life

From where I sit on a bench the seaside graveyard climbs a gentle hill. The graves, headstones, crosses, bouquets of flowers fresh or wilted, have a calming quality. The silence of underground folk makes them seem wiser than they were in life. They have acquired gravitas, of course. All of them, however wise or foolish they once were, took some sort of knowledge to the grave, took life experience. If you could gather all the knowledge and memory lying silent and hidden here – cryptic in the crypts – how bulky would your treasure trove be? How would we measure the weight of it? 

The birds are hushed and even the trees stand motionless for a windless moment. Wisdom gathers just out of reach, below ground, an existential state away. I chat with the dead.

I knew some of the people buried here, before they arrived at this final place. As a Memoirs Coach I helped them write their life stories. I did unofficial surveys of their beliefs (as I still do of their survivors' beliefs). What is the secret of your longevity, I would ask clients in their 90s? How do you stay young and active?

“Don't drive. I walk everywhere.”

“Exercise kills. Never run or do aerobics. I drive (or better yet, get driven) everywhere – I relax, I smell the roses.”

“Play bridge, it keeps the mind alive.”

“Never play bridge, it's an old folks game.”

Maybe it's a matter of diet, I wonder aloud when I'm chatting with these wise elders.

“It is indeed: eat protein. Lots of meat.”

“It is indeed: never eat meat! I'm a vegetarian.”

“Oils. Olive, sesame, coconut, grape-seed ... I'd be dead without oil.”

You'd be dead without food, I point out. It doesn't seem to matter which kind we eat.

“That's because we don't live by bread alone. (By the way, don't eat bread, carbohydrates kill.) Try prayer.”

“Meditation.”

“Friends and family.”

“Solitude.”

“Knowledge.”

“Innocence.”

“Duty.”

“Wealth.”

“Freedom from possessions.”

“Doing what's right.”

“Doing what you want.”

“Laughter.”

Yes, I reply, you're right.

Afterwards, my memoir clients drift off to their own lives and purposes, to solitude or family, bread or no-bread, walking, driving, roses, bridge ... leaving me none the wiser. Now I sit in the cemetery where the wise lie silent. So many purposes they too had, back then in Life.

Purpose itself keeps us getting up in the morning. I noticed that memoirists who had proclaimed purposes that made them unhappy were tense and tight. Those who were pleased with choices freely made seemed fortified, balanced, calm. Whoever is pleased is healthy. People with a sense of humour live on after death: I hear them chuckling down there below ground. There's levity inside those heavy coffins. Why not? Who said the afterlife would be rational?

I am pleased to sit in the sun in a park-like cemetery, viewing the natural world, living off-line. For this, my "platform" is my bench, from which I survey the beach and a bit of ocean to my left, and the grassy expanse of the graveyard to my right. Video sites (“I see” in Latin) in fact provide no vista. Cyber-life has no physicality, no flesh, no touch or scent. Virtual isn't real. 

The underground folk are real, and I hear their murmurs. Their city-state is stable, their country will last forever. They have time to be wise, now.

I turn to the seaside view on my left. A reviving breeze is coming off the ocean, its salty tang just noticeable up here on my bluff. The sea heaves gently. The life below the surface is as mysterious as that in the soil around the graves beside me. There are worms and micro-organisms in sea as in soil. The ocean floor crawls with them. Crustaceans hunt them. Fish slip through underwater forests of weed, nosing the swaying curtains apart in a silent search for food. Above, kelp forests bloom. A few otters and seals break the surface, calmly pursuing their otter-pleasures, seal-purposes, oblivious to us, our graves, lost loved ones, fears, plagues and sudden prohibitions. 

If You're Not Confused You're Not Paying Attention

In the middle of town the Cacophonous Zone is set up, a discordant place, there being so many behind the creation of it. Leadership they didn't like, for it sounded elitist, colonial and privileged. Yet the founders knew the wrong followers when they saw them, and evicted them.  

Anti-capitalists jostled for space with libertarians, while indigenous interests denounced both as Euro-centric. 
Communists notwithstanding, a gaggle of entrepreneurs appeared, creating a pop-up market in one section when the Cacophonous Zone took over a square hectare of the city. Business opportunities abounded here. Marchers need equipment and protestors need stimulation.

Stimulants were offered under a big old urban survivor-tree in a corner. Someone set up "aSIGNations" in the marketplace, which offered instant signs for those who forgot to bring a placard or who (if they were politicians perhaps) suddenly changed their allegiance, and needed a new placard. These knew when to abandon a sinking allyship (as CTV News called allegiance, when they stopped having any for Jessica Mulroney who sunk from TV because she said … what was it again? Does anyone remember an outrage of an hour ago?)

Not remembering an hour ago, few here remembered anything at all about distant history, if they'd ever learned it. They only knew it was Bad. They joined with gusto in the new sport of statuecide, which was (as far as most could tell) a response to genocide, which was all that ever happened in history. "Take that, War Hero!" shouted the crowd, as one granite figure after another was pulled from its plinth.

One entrepreneur did good business selling Statue Lassoos, so that anyone could join in the pulling. Someone else started an instant translation service which would translate your placard slogans into rap. It could also purge your messages of any lingering grammar (grammar being elitist). The instant printer produced Certificates of Gender Identity, in case anyone in the LGBTrans corner suddenly needed to transfer theirs that very day.

There was a herbal products table which sold drops that turned tear gas into tears-of-laughter gas. This could be aimed at the riot police, making them die laughing.

There was a used clothing outlet that sold … used clothing. The product came from the homelessness tent city where it had arrived after being liberated from a different used clothing retailer. Originating thus in the trendiest district of town the used clothing fetched top dollar, and was displayed on a table labelled Riotware. (That entrepreneur was getting a free government start-up COVID grant to trademark the name.)

Someone spray-painted "Cacophonous Zone" on a wall at its entrance, but someone else covered that with Robotonous Zone, which was at length recognized as a criticism, and erased. Those deemed the perpetrators of Wrong Labelling -- a bunch of Golf Hooligans whose skin was as white as white marble -- were captured and knocked down (we thought they were statues, their assailants told police).

Some English as a Second Language teachers turned up with a peace sign plus a message saying "Clear Language Matters". The crowd ripped up their banner accusing them of disrespecting ethnic groups and calling them cultural appropriators, not to mention demo-jackers. The teachers texted their union from the Zone for help, but the union merely responded (via media) by saying that "Canada has systemic racism". 

One man's placard read "Non-Cause in Search of a March". He wandered about aimlessly, anonymous behind a pandemic mask that looked so scary the other marchers left him alone -- except for one old lady who called out "Hi George" while walking through the square because she always walked her dog through the square. 

"Stay safe", he called back.

.

Let's de-fund the language police, and remember that Private Lives Matter

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-cbc-host-wendy-mesley-apologizes-for-using-a-certain-word-in-2/

De-fund the Language Police

   Some months ago, retailers downtown demanded more police presence due to an epidemic of shop-lifting. City Council refused to increase police funding, so retailers hired private security. Then residents and businesses called for more policing in other neighbourhoods as well, when homeless camps arrived and drug-dealing, break-and-entering and fights became frequent.

   Now that demand for “police visibility” has fallen right off the table. When news broke of ugly police assaults on Blacks in the U.S., the pieces on the civic board game were moved. Now we hear “de-fund the police” in Canada too, some claiming that we are “just as racist” as the U.S. Calls for increasing police presence were no longer popular even though shop-lifting had been increasing. During 2020 – the COVID period – business break-ins increased by 567%.

   "Ethnic minorities” are not uniquely targeted by the overzealous security industry which replaces police and plainly stalks and spies on all shoppers. Plenty of incidents of police harassing white people are listed in Canadian Police Complaint files, although discussion has been shaped around the “black lives matter” theme.

   Whatever the reality of police behaviour, the censorship of discussion is real. Anti-white, anti-government graffiti on walls are permitted, while their opposite would not be. Print and broadcast media are running with the censorship ball, fearing to become targets themselves of popular rage if they don't play the right game. These media should be platforms for discussion, not shapers of discussion. Case in point: the CBC has dropped Stockwell Day, a participant in its discussion panels, for expressing the view that Canada is not, in terms of policy and institutions, “systemically” racist.

   Freedom of opinion is not wanted on Canada's taxpayer-funded broadcaster. Yet what, we might ask, is the point of an “open” panel discussion if the moderator tells the participants ahead of time what they must say? Are media outlets platforms for free speech, or for authoritarian dictatorship? If a publicly-funded organ of communication is going to fall on the anti-free-speech side, it's not doing its job. Should we de-fund it then? A few days after the Day fuss, the CBC suspended veteran broadcaster Wendy Mesley -- for using “a word”. Coyly, they refused to identify the word, but never mind, the language police are happy to throw Mesley to the wolves without specifying the crime. Guilt is assumed -- like that of a hooded black man when seen on a city street on a dark night.

   To point out that the CBC is behaving dictatorially (dictating which diction is permitted) in the Stockwell Day example, is not to be a champion of Stockwell Day, who not surprisingly has detractors (isn't he the guy who gets his knowledge of science from the Book of Genesis?) The point is that whatever the public policy of a government may be, everyone has the right to think independently.

   Canada's Constitution, government and public institutions protect equality among ethnic groups: in terms of “system” Canada is not racist. That doesn't mean private thoughts aren't racist, but these cannot be forbidden, for they are private. Personal. Free opinion is by definition idiosyncratic rather than ideological, free-range rather than herded. Denunciation can't make race-based private thought less race-based, only more private. Public policy rests on the views of the majority – the "demos" of democracy – but a healthy democracy also protects dissenting views. We hear a lot about “diversity”, but government and media fear diverse opinion. 

   Few Canadians defend aggressive, let alone violent, behaviour toward others and few support non-equality under the law, considering that both repugnant and irrational. One can respect others' rights without liking them however. One person might have good reason to despise another. It's a personal feeling. Do we really want to criminalize feeling? Do we want to live in a nation where citizens have no right to private thoughts? Private Lives Matter.

   We are entitled to weigh evidence, make observations, develop hypotheses. In schools they teach “critical thinking” but they also impart the message that you can only be critical of white people, politicians, or those you perceive as “privileged”. It's censorship, then, that's systemic.

   The root meaning of the word privilege is “having access to privacy”. Let's strive to make everyone privileged then, by protecting everyone's right to private opinion. It shouldn't be banned by thought-control ideologues. The latter shout loudest, while many of humanity's best ideas have been passed down the ages in whispers. Someone, somewhere, had disagreed with them, and tried to silence them.

   Our world is riddled with thought-police. A TV News channel asks a 21-year old black man who organizes a rally whether he believes racism exists, knowing how he will reply (he having organized a rally to oppose it). He speaks of being profiled by police in a case of mistaken identity. Some of us have white friends who have been detained by police in cases of mistaken identity and who, when taking the police to court, were brushed off by the courts. If a black person sues police in the present climate, they won't be brushed off, for officials would fear being called racist.

   Maybe, however, some black people don't want to be poster-figures for a movement. Maybe they too want a private life. They have their own work to do (as scientists, scholars, explorers, novelists or whatever) which may have nothing to do with politics. You, Reader, might have a problem with the idea that “Private Lives Matter” because you presume I express it as a white person. But am I a white person? You don't know, and being not “racialized” means you don't need to know, because it doesn't matter.

   What matters is to let thought itself be free. Police do need to be restrained in their treatment of citizens. The language police also need to be restrained. Every dictatorship begins with censorship, but you cannot legislate feelings. 
A.J.