Photos of dancers, and other fragments

 I spend a lot of time thinking about getting older these days.

I don't mean I have anything profound to say about it. Nor do I exactly sit down and dedicate time to thinking about getting older. Rather, as I go about my day, I find scenes from my past flitting across my memory. Something - an artifact, a photo, a phrase, a seen or remembered place - suddenly conjures up a memory. The content of the memories is not necessarily compelling, rather something of the atmosphere in which the memory was made.

For example, this year, as Christmas approaches, I often find myself remembering leaving my university after classes to go Christmas shopping. I would walk to the nearest mall, then ride the bus back after making my purchases. I remember watching the sunset through the windows of the bus. It is the ordinariness of the memory that makes it unforgettable.

Currently I'm re-reading (after a period of quite a few years) Jennifer Homans' Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet. The first time I read this book, I was pleasantly startled by the nostalgia I felt. It's the same reading it now. I was never a professional ballet dancer, or anything resembling one. And yet there is something so familiar about the people, the values, and especially the "scene" Homans describes. It brings to mind a kind of shabby-elite aesthetic. Daydreams lived out in bargain-renovated studios. The secret glamour of tulle and sequins hiding in a garment bag. When I was growing up dress-up clothes were in short supply. My daughters have had piles of floofy dresses from the time they were toddlers, but I only glimpsed such things occasionally. I wasn't even allowed to wear the tutu my mother made me except on parent viewing days. I have always associated the arts with genteel poverty. Musty rooms, scratched hardwood, lumpy linoleum, dusty curtains, old photographs on the walls. And yet there is nothing at all sad or pitiable about such memories. Maybe a kind of glorious sadness.

Today, I admit I don't try very hard to save money on my daughters' dance clothes because I crave the magical feeling of going to the dance store. When I was child, we would buy ballet shoes and uniforms at Classique Dancewear. They closed permanently a few years ago, hence my melancholy pleasure at typing out the full name. I clearly remember walking down the stairs to the store in the basement. Beautiful high-heeled ballroom shoes sparkled in glass cases. Mannequins modeled pancake tutus, the kind I knew I would never wear, because my mother could not get the tulle to stick out like that on my homemade tutus, no matter how hard she tried. And sequins, sequins in all colours sparkling everywhere. I never got to indulge in such frou-frou, however. My mother bought the Royal Ballet standard leotard and tights, and of course, new ballet slippers. The ballet slippers came (as they still do) in a flat cardboard box, one of many stacked on the shelf. I thought of this when I read (and viewed) the scene in Harry Potter where Harry buys his wand. The store where I shop for my daughters is welcoming, brightly lit, and very pink. Classique Dancewear on the other hand was Diagon Alley-meets-Moulin Rouge.

I fell in love with ballet after seeing a performance of Swan Lake. My first ballet classes were not at all like Swan Lake, however. They were in a run down, industrial part of the downtown. Maybe it was an artsy-fartsy, bohemian neighbourhood, but I didn't know what that was at the time. I just knew it was a bit scary to go to ballet. My mother would park near the railway station and then we would run across half a dozen railway lines to get to the studio, sometimes in front of an approaching train. I think we'd get arrested now for doing that. Later, maybe to avoid that maneuver, she would drop me off near the studio and I'd have to walk a block or two by myself downtown. I was coached in this and I affected an determined, severe look and manner so no questionable people would think of molesting me. (It worked, apparently).

My first ballet teacher was also a bit scary. I never even knew her name as a child, because we didn't use her name, we called her "Madame." She was old at the time, and most of the active teaching was done by younger women under her direction. But I do remember her once leading us at the barre, with a cigarette dangling from her red lips. She always smelled of cigarette smoke. At the end of class, we had to queue up and give her a hug and a kiss. I dreaded this because I had to smell her, but I wouldn't have dreamed of refusing. I just learned to hold my breath very discreetly.  My father never learned to like or trust Madame. He detested her smoking habit as much as I did, and unlike me had no qualms about expressing said dislike. Most devastatingly, he forbade me from taking part in the school recital. I don't really know why, but it involved (of course) a lot of extra rehearsals and maybe he thought this offered Madame too many opportunities for instruction of a dubious nature. Madame was not happy, and on one occasion even tried to trick me into staying for rehearsal. To no avail. My stage debut would have to wait for more years and another teacher. But I was not entirely sad in the end, because I got to join a more advanced class and ended up ahead of all my same-age peers.

I was perusing Glenbow Museum's "Mavericks" exhibit some years ago, and to my amused surprise, immediately recognized "Madame" from one of the biographies. "Mavericks" may have itself been regulated to history, although there is still a website with a few working links. But thanks to the project I found out my ballet teacher's name: Regina Cheremeteff. And so I can search the internet for her part in history, and a little part of mine.

Her biography:

Regina Bickel, 1912-1992, was born in Berlin, Germany on March 25, 1912. She toured Europe as a child ballerina under the stage name Regina Royce. She also worked as the director of an Italian company. In 1930 she married Count Michael Cheremeteff, ca. 1900-1943, and worked in his equestrian troupe based in Berlin. They had three children, Christina (Olso), Alexandra (Madsen),1933-2002, and Dmitry. She settled in Calgary, Alberta in 1956 and established the Calgary Russian Ballet School, of which she was director, choreographer and teacher until its closing in 1989. She died in Calgary on March 5, 1992 at the age of 79. Alberta Record

YMCA Calgary backs up my memories:

Her students called her “Madame” over the 30-plus years that she trained young ballet dancers in Calgary from the 1950s to the late 80s. ...As a child ballerina Regina Cheremeteff toured Europe en pointe, surviving two world wars before immigrating to Canada and moving to Calgary in 1956, where she established the Calgary Russian Ballet School. Not above trading her tutu for a tool-belt, Regina remodeled her dance studio herself, knocking out walls and tearing up floors.

Allan Cozzubbo Academy of Dance notes:

In 1963 she opened her downtown location on 8th Ave. SW. The school closed in 1989. in 1930 she had married Count Michael Cheremeteff (1900=1943) and worked in his Equestrian Troupe in Berlin. Her three Children are Christine-Alexandra and Dmitry --he became a professional ballet dancer and was a guest at her recital.  

Some additional digging, however, turned up an 1980 Calgary Herald story on Madame. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to know more about her than my few childhood memories can provide. I have retyped it to the best of my ability here, as the scanned article I found is unedited and mixed in with a hilariously dull article on Canadian constitutional politics. Incidentally however, both articles illustrate how much higher quality journalism was 40 odd years ago.

Perhaps most unnervingly, there is a gallery of photos in The University of Calgary's digital archives.

This picture is from 1986, and I'm pretty certain it depicts part of the performance that I was not allowed to participate in. If I had taken part in that recital, I could have been in this photo or a similar one. That's just freaky. Since about 2000, I have gotten used to brilliant colour digital photos that never age. By contrast, this picture and the others in the gallery look absurdly old.

Maybe my favourite photo is this one, however:

It's not the dancers my eye is drawn to here. This photo is also from the 80s, but these young women are older than I was then, although not really that much older, either. But what I like to look at is the barre and walls of the studio beside the posing dancers, because they look exactly as I remember them, though in black and white. I can almost feel that barre in my hand. The top one was close to eye level when I was youngest. The photos on the walls are all of Madame at various ages, in various costumes. I remember yellowed newspaper articles too. I'm not sure why all the archive photos are black and white, since colour photography was definitely invented in the 80s! Perhaps it was supposed to give the photos a timeless, glamourous feel. If so I don't think it worked: there is a campy nostalgia to the photos: All the dancers look like amateurs trying really hard. I don't mean that as a bad thing: it makes them all the more relatable. There is a grounding grittiness behind the fantasy. In the end - for me at least - that was a more lasting impression of ballet than professional perfection.

I clipped this photo for the sake of the young woman kneeling right in front:

I'm pretty sure that she is Miss Mimi, who was one of the younger teachers whom I best remember. Up till this week, Miss Mimi’s identity was as lost in my incomplete memories as Madame’s. But thanks to my digging this week, I realized she is Mimi Haeseker, and she has been “Miss Mimi” to generations of dancers. How awesome is that. And I also remembered she was (is?) a talented artist who painted ballerina bunny rabbits. I could get addicted to this amateur archive hunting.

All this trip down memory lane, and the urge to somehow preserve it here, before the traces disappear further, was brought to mind my Jennifer Homans' description of the diaspora of Russian ballet dancers and teachers in the States in between the World Wars. Anna Pavlova toured the Vaudeville circuit as "'Pavlova the Incomparable": [appearing] alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European dancers." Madame would surely have been one of those who watched and learned. Homans continues:

"Pavlova was the most famous, but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballet Russes spin-off troups between the wars (some carried on into the 60s) introducing - and converting - several generations of audiences to classical dance. (page 450) ...... "When they were too old or tired to perform, many of those dancers opened schools: they fanned out and set down roots in cities and towns across the country. .... Performance by performance, class by class, over many years, these itinerant Russians passed on their tradition. Not only steps and techniques: they brought to their lessons the entire Imperial orthodoxy of Russian ballet, and it was in their sweaty encounters with students that the long process of transplanting ballet to American minds and bodies began. (451)

Although Madame was German (married to a Russian) she branded her school as "Russian Ballet," and I see her as the heir of those Russian teachers, albeit about a generation younger. And I particularly like the description of how ballet becomes absorbed into dancers' minds and bodies. There's something grounding for me in reading Homan's book, and reading about Madame's life. Even if my cultural inheritance is fragmentary, those fragments still come from somewhere. I am the inheritor of something; I don't just exist alone, attempting to make it all up.

The bad not-so-old days: A meditation

A few weeks ago, I read this question on a blog: “Regardless of your position on how governments handled [Covid-19]*, how has the experience of living through a pandemic altered you?" 

I’ve tackled versions of this question before. My answers have been and will be unfolding for a while. I don’t pretend to fully understand all the strange currents that swept me along, even the ones that I somewhat chose to swim in.

I have also recently been feeling a deep sense of disgust for the entire Covid era and its peculiar anti-culture, and a desire to distance myself from it. This includes many of my own coping mechanisms, behaviours and choices from 2020 to early 2022.

Putting that aside for a moment.

One way I’ve changed is that I’ve become much more focused on how I keep myself entertained and fulfilled instead of expecting people or institutions outside of me to do this. I recognize that I am the most significant agent in my life, and my skills and choices are what most affect how engaged I am with life. This isn’t maybe a radical change but an intensifying of a belief that was always there.

It affects choices I make for myself and my children. For example, I feel much better paying for music lessons rather than paying to take them to concerts. The piano will always be there in our house to play, assuming we don’t knock it to pieces. I can’t on the other hand assume that a band or an orchestra or a ballet company will always be there. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Institutions that I imagined were stable and based on values that I share proved not to be during the Covid era. 

In hindsight, that destabilization was probably the most unnerving part of 2020-2022. A totalizing structure was imposed from above, and it made all the other structures that constituted reality seem unreal. School, work, family, friendships: suddenly they all had to be arbitrarily restructured. There was some opportunity in this sudden restructuring: a chance to work collaboratively, do things differently, maybe even sometimes better. It was a fleeting moment though, because the proposed “solutions” quickly became more authoritarian and arbitrary (vaccine mandates and passports, laws intruding on private life and relationships.) I was left wondering, what is really real in the society I inhabit? I have had to rebuild my faith in society, from the ground up. And I have not gotten very far yet. 

Crowded places are more likely to give me anxiety and are more likely to be places I avoid. 

This doesn’t have much to do with fear of Covid directly, as I was never very afraid of catching Covid and not much affected by it when I finally did (in June of 2022).

It’s more a distrust for large groups of people that I did not choose and whose purpose I am not entirely sure of. After being deprived of more conventional opportunities for gathering together, it seems to me like something dark came loose in the psyche of a lot of people and coming together for more sinister purposes has become exciting and desirable. A crowd is a bit like a wildfire that might go rogue and consume whatever gets in its way.

I don’t want any of that scene, and I usually avoid any area of the city known for demonstrations or large gatherings. In my city that would be our downtown core and the bigger shopping malls.

I haven’t given up on the public square. But I’m in the process of re-imagining what it means to me and how I engage with it. Large abstract concepts like nation and democracy and social contract shattered around me like brittle, weathered concrete. I don’t know what “Canada” means anymore. Maybe I never did. If I was to vote based on emotion, I would probably vote for a separatist political party right now. (I try not to vote based on emotion.)

None of this is reason for pessimism or despair.

I’ve said this in different ways before, but the local has become much more important to me. The smaller groups I’m embedded in have more to do with my sense of who I am than larger abstract identities. This includes:

-School (mine and my daughters’)

-Dance communities (2)

-Work colleagues

-Friends (neighbourhood friends are closer relationships, but I’m trying to keep the further ones active too)

-Local places and business (small, not malls eek)

-Extended family

The catch word of Covid-19 was “social distancing”. I survived by doing the opposite: pulling people closer to me.

So was the pandemic and all the disturbing deconstruction of reality a time warp or void? Yeah maybe. It feels that way often, and it feels like the best thing to do is shove all those memories in the darkest corner I can find for them. But the better challenge is to shine a light onto that void and dare it to show what it can reveal.

*Of course, I can’t truly separate my experience of governments from my experience of the Covid-19 era. But I also factor in my experiences of individual people, some of which were also pretty disturbing. But, it’s easier to give individual people grace, which is another reason I keep my focus firmly on the local and personal. We’re all just trying to survive in our own ways: sometimes we aim rightly, sometimes not.

Habits

Starting during the Covid-19 era, I became a regular wine-drinker. It was never excessive, but I started having a glass of wine either with dinner or before bed, mostly every day. Previously I would only drink if going out for dinner or on holidays. The nightly glass of wine became a way to relax and mark the end of my work day, when things were weird and there was nowhere to go and nothing to celebrate. 

When life gradually went back to “normal,” or whatever you want to call it, I just kept up this habit. I came to expect that glass of wine, and I would make sure I always had some, and feel “cheated” if I ran out.  I did stop drinking for a while in the summer of 2021, but then I started again in the fall when my stress level went up.

In July of 2023 I decided I would give it up for the summer. School was out, life was good, I was doing fun things for myself like ballet and barre class, so I decided I just didn’t need this extra thing. And it was fine. And then September came and school started and it was still fine.

There is something else I think is a factor. I started listening to Fr. Stephen De Young’s podcast The Whole Counsel of God this past summer. In this podcast he goes through the Bible verse by verse and explains it.  Most nights I put on an episode or two when I crawl into bed. I look forward to it. And - this is important - there are so many episodes I don’t worry about running out. I feel like I will be listening for months and months. The Bible will just keep giving and giving; I an confident of this.

Ever since I started listening to podcasts, I have always needed them to be long. I won’t listen to anything that is less than an hour. I actually feel anxious when I see a short time. Not all of the WCofG podcasts are long, but I can play them back to back and they just keep going. It’s really like one giant podcast.

I realized something just this week. Not only am I okay without the nightly glass of wine, I don’t even want it anymore.  I don’t remember the desire going away. Just now it is. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me but it does, in a good way. It’s so hard to change habits even when you want to. I feel lucky that k was able to change this one. 

up the mountain, making a trail (two)

 I'm continuing to read Robert Orsi's History and Presence, alongside A Comparison of the Mennonite and Doukhabor emigrations from Russia to Canada, 1870-1920, by Robert Sawatsky. The purposes of each writer become clearer as I read, and my personal feelings and motivations can temporarily recede a bit, to come back later (one assumes) with greater clarity. I'm noting quotations from each as I go, and already have a significant amount of copied text and scribbled citations. I have a pleasant sensation of curiosity that is not fettered to any conclusion yet. I'm also having a flashback to my undergraduate days, when I seemed to have a knack or doom for finding the dustiest, obscurest, smelliest books in the library. Of course the dust on an online text is non-literal, but I think I can still see it out of the corner of my eye.

Anyway. Here is a passage from Orsi that resonated, on the topic of encountering a saint or deity. It references the story of Bernadette at Lourdes.

The testimonies visionaries give of their experiences are not exhaustive [...]. Both those who see and hear and their interlocutors sense that there are levels and dimensions of what is happening to and around them that are not completely within their grasp. To understand an experience, including an experience of real presence, involves relationality, conversation, doubt and ambiguity. It entails tracking back and forth between one life and other lives, as Bernadette and her family and neighbors did in their efforts to begin to understand events in the woods outside the village. But they did not succeed in containing the experience, which was probably not, in any case, their goal. "Life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it," and this includes accounts of our life and the life around us that we give to ourselves, as well as to others. No life is to thoroughly embedded in given structures of meaning, discourse, and power as to be fully accounted for by them, just as meaning, discourse and power are rarely hermetic, coherent, unidirectional, and stable. Narratives of encounters with the saints are simply not isomorphic with experience, just as the holy figure is not completely identified with any one social environment. These stories are incomplete, contingent, and intersubjective. They are shot through with "unknowningness," studded with "opacities." Talk about the Blessed Mother and the saints is contingent upon the unpredictable supernatural figure and the never fully knowable lives of the others with whom stories of what the Blessed Mother has done are shared. Such stories are always in three voices, at least. There is the Virgin Mary, the one speaking, and the one listening.  In these exchanges, aspects of one's life previously unknown or unacknowledged may be discovered. The imagination takes hold of the world as the world takes hold of the imagination. This all belongs to the experience itself and to its history. "Human culture, like consciousness itself," Jackson writes, "rests on a shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice, and this subliminal, habitual, repressed, unexpressed, and silent mass shapes and reshapes, stabilizes and destabilizes the visible surface forms." Bernadette was not an already, once and for all fully formed subjectivity when she entered the grotto where she saw aquero. Her experience of the supernatural other did not arise on securely and fully constituted discursive grounds, nor was it completely containable in the stories that first Bernadette and then others told about their experiences of her and of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The Blessed Mother lived in others' lives and they lived in hers. The apparitional figure standing in the grotto was at once known and unknown. She was an appearance. No story about what happened or happens at Lourdes is ever a secure medium of world making or meaning making, subject formation, or power because the narratives of this experience are never free of the interplay of the known and unknown, conscious and unconscious. There is always an excess of intersubjectivity in encounters with the Blessed Mother and the saints, and there is excess in the narratives that precede and follow from them, too. The experience arises on the shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice. (pages 62-61)

This is an admirable effort to say in precise language that some stories and experiences cannot be contained inside an interpretation even as they attract people to try and interpret them.

I am particularly intrigued by the sentence "there are always three voices, at least : the Virgin Mary [or other saint/presence, I would presume] the one speaking, and the one listening." This reminds me of the Caedmon story which turns on speaking and listening.

As I read Orsi's accounts of spiritual experiences and the interpretations of them by philosophers and theologians and heretics and all-sorts who wanted to the the ones with answers, I also become curious how and where the Doukhabours fit in. The obvious answer seems to be the Protestent side of things, but I wonder? They very much prioritized personal spiritual experience. But they did not, as far as I can tell, link it with specific locations or objects.

Other entries in this series:

(one)

Other people’s stories

I never read (or I don’t remember reading) anything by Heather Armstrong. Nevertheless, the fact I still write in a couple of blogs suggests she had some indirect influence. Something out there made blogging seem to me like a normal, even desirable, activity. Somebody found an audience of women which spun off into smaller audiences for people like me.

Heather Armstrong died by suicide this week, and the social media/news world discussed it enough that it came to my attention, first through an algorithm on a news page (which usually pushes articles about the royal family) and then through a couple of blogs I still sometimes read.

I didn’t know much about her so I chose to read 

this Vox article. I got about halfway through, then I’d had enough*. My conclusion? The internet probably killed Heather Armstrong. There was a lot of wealth and fame and drama and other stuff along the way, of course. But that’s my takeaway. We will never know, but it seems to me there is a decent chance she still would be alive if not for the internet. What about having your life struggles out there as entertainment for people is remotely healthy? I’m sure there’s room for debate but from my point of view, that is the conclusion to draw.

Now I’m still here blogging for my audience of dunno, five people, so isn’t that hypocrisy? All I can say that is if the five people suddenly became millions, or goodness, even hundreds it would change things a lot. I guess I blog in hope of a few good people reading, but more is not better. And none might be best of all. Having no audience is not ruining my life, anyway.

Having not been an audience, I don’t want to rush to judge Armstrong’s writing.  Based on some excerpts I read however, I’m not sure it presented a very helpful picture of motherhood. For sure it’s good to laugh at the trials and absurdity, but the struggles can be overemphasized, making parenthood sound like a constant horror show. It’s not. People need to be able to laugh at themselves and their problems, but we also need a sense of the sublime and a higher purpose in life. I think this can be lost with constant hot takes, over focus on detail and making a priority of being funny/ironic/sarcastic.  Some of us need to rediscover the art of being serious and dutiful and a bit boring.

Apparently Armstrong cursed a lot too, and this is presented as authentic/funny. I must disagree with that. I think cursing is extremely negative and people who do that a lot should be thinking about why and asking if they can be doing something else. 

But it’s hard to speak conclusively of cultural trends. Enough to say I seek support and guidance elsewhere than the confessional blogging/social media world that Armstrong inhabited and where I once had a presence on the margins. And I’m sorry this fellow woman’s story ended this way. 

*I did go back later and read the article to the end.

Up the mountain, making a trail (one)

So almost a year ago, I had a short online conversation with the Substacker Flat Caps and Fatalism, about his piece "Without Saints." I eventually responded with my own blog entry, called "The Saints," where I remembered my life-changing encounter with Caedmon and Hild, and tried re-framing it as an encounter with a saint.

But additionally, in part of our conversation, FCF made this comment:

"....I wonder how common this feeling that you have to make your 'interest' [in saints or some aspect of religion] respectable is. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there are often seminar rooms with several people all talking in 'respectable' language about something they relate to in a far more complex way.

Have you read Orsi's 'History and Presence'? Your story makes me think of it a lot." (Comments, July 28th 2022)

 I did in fact buy Robert Orsi's History and Presence after that exchange. But when the actual book arrived it look intimidating and I put off reading it. Finally today, a cool May day with rain, the kids at their grandparents', I started reading.

The first few chapters describe the theological disagreements of Catholics and Protestants and how these resulted in violence: rioting, torture, warfare, and (depending on one's affiliation) martyrdom. (Chapter 1, "The Obsolescence of the Gods). Now in the past three years, some aspects of Christianity seem clearer to me, and I even feel something like a call to participate. But, what Orsi describes is completely alienating. Obviously such carnage happened, it is documented, but there is no chime of understanding in me.

Or is there.

Maybe I have just not been listening for it. Maybe it's the last thing I want to hear.

I was born in Canada, with a immigrant Greek father and a Canadian mother of Russian descent. People who hear me say that usually make a few assumptions about my cultural background immediately. Most of them are wrong.

• I don't speak Greek or Russian, and this was deliberate on both parents' part. I never met my dad's parents and while I met my mom's parents and my dad's sister, there was a language barrier.
• I was raised with Christian stories. But not only do I have no background in the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches, I was raised to be actively hostile towards all churches.
• Growing up, I had almost no deliberate exposure to Russian or Greek culture or traditions, though there was some accidental exposure, for sure.
• As a child I celebrated no holidays, not birthdays, not Christmas or Easter or Halloween. Nothing.

Now, my childhood was not terrible; in fact it was extraordinarily rich in many ways. Family has always been my safe place, even when it was complicated, so I'm not trying to make my childhood family sound crazy or anything. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that they were always trying to do what they thought was right.

Still, when I think of my cultural background, it's hard for me to put into words just how fragmented and filled with loss it feels. If I include religious experiences and feelings in there, even more so. It's like an abyss that I only look at sideways, because looking right into it is overwhelming.

But maybe it's time to look at bit more closely at these pieces of cultural inheritance. I will start by learning about the Doukhabours, the Russian sect that my mother's family came from. They were both her cultural inheritance and a group she didn't want to be associated with at all, at least not when she was interacting with people outside her family. The Doukhabours were a sect that developed in Russia, and many eventually came to Canada because of religious persecution. My mother's grandparents were among those that immigrated.

There's some general information on websites, but I'm currently reading this thesis: MQ36523.pdf (doukhobor.org) It is a history and comparison of the Doukhabours and Mennonites. It will take me a while to go through it, so I'm optimistically titling this blog entry as "one" assuming there will be other entries. (But I'm kind of bad at long reading projects, so the likelihood of me making progress, or alternately, just continuing to be angsty and confused are equally likely.)

Observations/questions so far:

• I don't know if it's possible to reach a sympathetic understanding of the early Doukhabours (the ones who lived in Russia). So far I find it hard to relate (several levels of dislocation). It's natural to want to find points of sympathy with one's ancestors, but so far not.
• The history of the Doukhabours frequently involves isolation from the mainstream society as they tried to maintain their culture and religious practices.
• Many of the bloggers/stackers I read speculate about stepping away from an increasingly technological society and forming "parallel societies". There is logic to it, even a sort of cool "rebel" factor. But reading Doukhabour history should give one pause before promoting this idea. Corruption, scandal and misery are all just as likely in an isolated society, if not more so. It's rather depressing to read about, truthfully.

The metaphor in the title:

My maternal grandparents' property included a small forested mountain. On occasion, my brothers and I and sometimes my parents would hike up it. There were no trails and I remember these mountain excursions as challenging, exhilarating and spiced with a sense of risk and danger. In reality it couldn't have been more than a half-hour hike and I didn't have any trouble even as a small child. But there was a powerful sense of being off the map, away from the civilized world, into an unknown. So that is kind of how this research undertaking feels.

I will also try to continue reading History and Presence. It will be helpful background info I'm sure. Also I'm curious what exactly reminded FCF of my writing in the book, because it certainly is not obvious yet.

Other entries in this series:

(two)

Small scale history of ideas

This is random, but I was reading old entries on my other blog and realized it is six years exactly since I discovered (and took the time to listen to) Dr Jordan Peterson. I consider this my official entrance into the club (?) of people finding their way through the “meaning crisis.” I was primed for admittance long before that, but it’s different when you put something into words, or hear someone else put it into words.


Subterranean Messages

I became pregnant for the second time shortly after I discovered the lectures. Listening to Maps of Meaning helped me cope with my brutal nausea in the early months. Several months later, I remember listening to one of the Bible lectures while lying inverted on an ironing board while my husband did moxibustion on my toes. (We were trying to get my breech baby to flip. It didn’t work but she was born just fine anyway.)


Total honesty moment: the thinkers and intellectuals who have had the most impact on me in recent years are the ones that help me to sleep and/or deal with anxiety and physical discomfort. What can I say. I like to think and learn and I never want to stop learning. But life is a lot more complicated than what goes on in anyone’s brain. For an idea to have staying power in my life, it has to seep into the fabric of every day. It needs to say something to me in the moments when I have it together and the moments I don’t. And it has to motivate me to keep going.

I only occasionally listen to JBP’s content these days, but when I do it’s usually interesting.

My blog about the Birthgap documentary

Other posts from this blog

Becoming the sea

(Shared by a friend. I think you must adopt this perspective as you realize that nobody is immortal and time is limited. Every experience is temporary. To judge days as “good” or “bad” is to wish time away, and that means wishing life away. I don’t want to wish any of my life away.)

Flashback to 2016

I was scrolling through some unpublished posts on my other blog, and I came across this one from October 15, 2016.  I titled it: "The things I have to say that don't fit anywhere."

At the time, torthúil journey had a small but established and homogenous readership. Just how homogenous, I started to realize after the 2016 American election, when I saw my small community all express essentially identical political and cultural views. It wasn't long before this started to bother me, not so much the views themselves, but the fact there were no dissenting or different voices. Furthermore, I didn't even see difference or dissent valued in the abstract. Naturally, I didn't share these raw thoughts on that blog. They seemed almost scandalous then. This was before I discovered Jordan Peterson and the movement some call the "meaning crisis," before I started learning about Christianity, including Jonathan Pageau and Fr. Stephen Freeman and others, before Covid, before I (mostly) quit social media. Since I wrote these words I have accepted these observations about myself, have thought about them and addressed them, have in some ways moved past them. But I thought they would be interesting to record and share, especially in the context of the post about books. I think my thoughts here go some way toward explaining why I am reading and learning about the things that I am.

They also mark a moment in time, and one that I am no longer self-conscious or embarrassed about. These things I had to say do fit: they are an important part of my journey.

The things I have to say that don't fit anywhere (October 16th, 2016)

Surrounded by propaganda. People taking "sides." Most of those sides don't fit with my questions, my concerns, my beliefs. It all leaves me with a feeling of unreality.  What is most obvious to me is that I've lost interest in culture. This might sound like an esoteric problem. Reading novels and going to concerts and comedy clubs and plays is hardly essential to survival, right? I'm reasonably healthy; I have a job, a family, a house, some (rather neglected) friends. But my avoidance of culture is a huge break from how I lived most of my adult life. Concert halls were a home to me as much in a way as my physical home. I identified with certain artists and felt they spoke for me, gave my inner life voice and connected me to a larger community. No more. I feel like when I go to an event, the artist (and the audience) is going to start signalling, openly or covertly, about which side of the culture wars they are on. I respect people's freedom of opinion. But the constant signalling/side taking leaves me with the feeling that the event I'm going to is meaningless in and of itself. The artist and their work is irrelevant, or at least secondary, an (possibly) amusing distraction. What truly matters, what people truly care about, is which side the artist is on and which side their audience is on. That is where the solidarity comes from, not from the fact we have all come to this place because we value the cultural artifact on display. So I end up not going. For a couple of days I make up my mind to go to an event; I might even tell Mr. Turtle that we should make plans. A few weeks later, I realize I never bought tickets, the event is passed and I don't really care. It has happened again and again. It's not just that I have a toddler and an intense job and I'm busy. I know I won't find the belonging and catharsis I'm looking for, but I will find more pressure and more propaganda. There is no appeal.

And novels. Why is it I enjoy novels? I can take another person's perspective. I can choose to believe in the alternate reality they create. Really, reading novels is like allowing another human to rent space in my brain. They can live there for a while, interact with my feelings and ideas, and when it's time for them to leave, I have a sense of what I learned from the visit and if I want them back. I've always been very generous with renting out my mental space and I enjoy the "visits" a lot. There isn't a type of book I regularly read; if it has words on the page I'll read it. In university I didn't specialize in any kind of literature, though I developed an interest in medieval literature in the later years. I studied with professors who had a variety of critical and ideological perspectives, and I got along well with all of them.

Lately, I have no desire to read novels. At first I thought that this was just because I am more interested in current events and non fiction. That is true. But there is something else going on. I don't want to rent out my mental space anymore. I am less willing (unwilling) to let someone else come into my mind to play. Again, I think it has to do with being surrounded by propaganda. I fundamentally mistrust the stories and messages I get from the media, and from my peers, and from the supposed arbiters of culture in our society, because I see the dishonesty and manipulation. Logically, then, why would I assume that a writer is any different? Why would I assume their morals and motivations are superior to those I see every day? Because they are published? Because somebody wrote a good review? Because a friend told me they were good? Because they are popular? I trust none of those things. But I should still be able to give a book a try and make up my own mind, right? In theory yes. But in in practice, I feel it is not worth the time or effort. What are the odds I will learn something of value, versus the odds that I will be bombarded with more of the same? I don't recall consciously making this decision, but somewhere along the way I decided the odds were against novels being enjoyable or useful. What about escape? I don't want to escape. Or, I feel there is no escape. I might long for it, but I know that escape amounts to surrender and denial. I am surrounded by corruption on a fundamental level, and I have no time for anyone who is not actively engaging with and challenging it.

The book post

I have been reading more lately, but when I tried to think of what books I actually got through last year, I had difficulty remembering. So I thought it might help to list the books I have been or will be encountering in one place. Here goes:

Currently reading:

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien (simultaneously listening to related episodes on the Amun Sul podcast)

The Language of Creation by Jonathan and Matthieu Pageau

Want to buy and read:

Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond our Shame by Fr. Stephen Freeman (READ)

Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington (you can read about some of Mary’s ideas here.) (READ)

This is Your Brain on Birth Control

 by Sarah Hill

The Sagas of the Icelanders  by Jane Smiley et al

On Fairy Stories by JRR Tolkien 

New Think 1 by Gregg Hurwitz

Competing with this wish list to some degree are blogs and Substacks, some of which I’m considering getting a paid subscription to. Then there are books I already own but haven’t fully read or benefitted from, mostly because they are challenging for some reason or other. I’m also on my second course from The Great Courses. So far I’ve been only buying the courses on sale, but they still cost as much as a hardcover book, at least.

Books I started and should finish some day, but don’t hold your breath: 

The Bible (no link needed, lol) I think I got to about Exodus? Update: I am now listening to the podcast 

The Whole Counsel of God where Fr. Stephen DeYoung reads through the Bible verse by verse and discusses, offering interpretation and background based on the Orthodox tradition and his own historical education.  I am finding this more engaging and meaningful than trying to slog through the Bible on my own. Plus I can listen while doing crochet or other repetitive work.

The Gulag Archepelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I read a grand total of four chapters of this book in 2018, and blogged about it here: http://torthuilreads.blogspot.com/  Maybe one day I'll be back. But it's such an awful book to read and right now, I don't even want to try again.

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth. I was reading this one last summer, and while I did appreciate it, it just wasn’t the right book to get me through some of the difficult stuff that was going on then.

Books I already own and want to read, but haven’t started:

The Unfinished Tales by JRR Tolkien (which was a birthday present along with The Silmarillion)

The Parasitic Mind by Gaad Saad (READ)

Prayers on the Lake by St. Nicholi Velimirovich

History and Presence by Robert Orsi (READ)

The last two were recommendations to me, for reasons that may become clearer when I actually start reading them. I have dipped into Prayers on the Lake and enjoyed the bits I read.

Some books don’t really lend themselves to a “feet up by the fire” reading approach. Something I’m challenging myself to do with The Language of Creation, and maybe with others, is to respond in a way that specifically isn’t writing. I’ve been doing a sort of visual journal for The Language of Creation, basically drawing or attempting to draw the images that come into my mind as I read it, or the particular passages that stand out. So far it's been a rewarding approach.

There you go, I may be back to add to this list or to say that I've actually finished a book!

Calling up other worlds

The past few months I’ve been reading a group of bloggers who write about related themes and often comment on each other’s work. It’s like taking a footpath off the information highway into the woods and having a picnic with some thoughtful people who wonder about similar things as me.

(That metaphor took some thought. I started with “coffee house” or “salon” but images of lonely paths and trees kept coming to mind. I think these writers would prefer a picnic anyway.)

Paul Kingsnorth (a lot of content is subscriber only but there are still many interesting pieces available)

Luke Burgis

Pilgrims in the Machine

Jack Leahy

Flat caps and fatalism

Edited to add:

Mary Harrington

Ruth Gaskovski

The list could be longer I’m sure, but this group is what I’ve been reading on a fairly regular basis, and I like seeing how the writers often attempt to go deeper into each others’ ideas. But the voices still are unique and it doesn’t feel, at this point anyway, like people parroting each other or repeating slogans, though there is common vocabulary (such as references to “The Machine”.)

One essay that seems to have struck a chord with this group and many other people is Paul Kingsnorth’s A Wild Christianity (discussion here). Paul is an effective storyteller. His essays come across as an exploration into questions he himself is still seeking answers to, rather than as arguments about a certain dogma. I don’t know Paul personally, but I assume that this is a true impression and he really is the seeker he appears to be in his essays.  I appreciate his voice as he addresses the questions not just of our outer world (civilization and history and politics and so on) but also our inner world. No experience or understanding is complete without this inner exploration: I feel quite strongly that this is universally true. I certainly try to act as though it is. 

In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn is not that the external battle is never necessary; sometimes it very much is. But a battle that is uninformed by inner transformation will soon eat itself, and those around it. Kingsnorth, March 3rd 2023

I was moved by “A Wild Christianity” and I felt after reading it a call to do or be something, but I couldn't say what. My most basic impulse is to go out in nature and be there with the sights, sounds and sensations of the wild. That is never the wrong thing to do. And now it is March, and even inside my house in an urban area I can hear birds singing more often; I feel the effects of longer daylight hours; and even with snow on the ground any warm day with melt-off hints at flowing water, thaw and growth. I yearn to be part of that, to walk below tall trees and climb low hills, to wear florals and flowy fabrics, to match the patterns of spring.

Then maybe a week later, I read this response to Kingsnorth: A Fire that Purifies by Peco, at Pilgrims in the Machine.  Peco is also a storyteller and explorer.

We have a habit, say, toward fear or anger or pornography, or whatever haunts our conscience or unsettles our spirit. Prayer disrupts these tendencies and turns us away from them, so that when the anger or fear creeps up again, or we feel temptation coming on, we are more ready, more able, to deal with it, more ready and able to re-align the flow of our spirit.  

Prayer is disruptive, but so is the Machine. There is the outward disruption, in the form of devices and ChatGPTs and simulations, and—like prayer—an inward disruption.

The tools of the Machine invite us into their own rhythms and patterns: the incessant checking of messages, the compulsive need to know what is happening “out there” in the world or “over there” on that platform. But the real happening is “right here”, in and around our bodies.  

 The point of Peco's essay is not to give answers, but to pose a question:

What is your disruptive spiritual practice?

I have been thinking on that question for several days. It has, shall was say, activated my inner transformation, or at least presented a tangible way into it. By tangible, I mean something my distracted and often forgetful mind can hang on to. It is a sad truth that I can read beautiful words, true words, words with much thought and knowledge behind them, and forget them within the week. I keep a vague memory of something promising but nothing more. A question though: a question has a way of sticking in my mind.

What are my disruptive spiritual practices, or what might be the germination of them? What is it they are trying to disrupt?

In the quotation above, Peco gives some idea of what is being disrupted:  unthinking patterns of behaviour, especially those to some degree embedded in technology. I disrupted my social media use back in early 2021, and feel nothing but relief and gratitude. Two years on, I can say that getting off of the social media habit/addiction has been nothing but beneficial. Sometimes you cannot see things for what they are until you step back. For example, it took many months for my thoughts to stop automatically forming Facebook updates. For a long time after I ceased actually making any updates, I still thought in them. It was weird and disconcerting to realize this. It doesn't happen often anymore. (Not never though. 8 years of habit doesn't go away overnight.)

Still, that's a ways in the past now. What about today: what am I disrupting right now, and how?

• I think the first and most disruptive thing I do is recognize that disruption is necessary. I am busy and active, but I need to take time to not be busy and active. For me this looks like (auditory) silence and solitude. Writing this blog for example. I suppose it is not an entirely silent activity, as I'm still writing words, but I'm focused internally, not on verbal conversation. It is a kind of conversation, but different.
• Humility is disruptive. Openly and deliberately admitting I don't have the answers, that I'm always experimenting, that I frequently make mistakes. Aiming to be truthful, to speak about my experience honestly, not to censor myself, but not to try to persuade anyone either or come across as better than them.
• Deliberately choosing the stories I immerse myself in. We have on-again off-again discussions in our household about whether we should acquire things like Netflix or Disney Plus or Amazon or whatever. There are advantages to such things. We have little kids that like to be entertained. Why are we watching the same movie for the 50th time when there is a world of entertainment out there?
• Yet I always end up on the side of no, let's stick with our DVD collection and the documentaries on our current not-very-satisfying streaming service. Part of this is my age and history I guess: I grew up with (not having) cable and only one or two channels on the TV. To me not having what I want all the time is normal. But I also don't want our children, especially, to be too easily immersed in commercially-produced stories. I want them to have the temporal and mental space to hear and make their own stories: familial, personal, cultural. That is easier to do without a hundred different shows to get addicted to at any given time.
• Working with my hands. This could be our endless laundry, or tidying and organizing the house, or crocheting and knitting. Less frequently, creating art. I love to write, but creating something tangible has a weight to it that the abstract creation doesn't have. I need to do both, basically. Limiting the online activity has made me more likely to pick up my hooks and needles again. This week, for example, I made a cowl scarf as a gift for a friend. I plan to make one for myself, as well. In addition to the finished product I enjoyed the number patterns in this project: 7's, 3's, 9's, 24's, 60. And 13. Yes, maybe I'm a little weird. I enjoy number patterns. I also strongly suspect that the designer did not choose these numbers by chance and it feels like a private joke I share with her.

I can probably think of more, as the question sticks in my mind. In fact, I think "What is your disruptive spiritual practice" will by my theme for 2023. Back in January I started wondering what the theme of the year might be, and collecting thoughts (my own and other people's) that resonated. As I think on that collection, I believe this question encompasses much of it and also provides direction.

Peco talks a lot about prayer, as do many of the other writers in my list. I have tried to have a prayer practice now and again. I end up feeling at a loss though, like I don't know what I'm trying to embody. Ironically I had more success encouraging my eldest daughter to pray before bed, as a way to respond to her fear of darkness and nightmares. I think part of the problem/point is that religious practice would be the most disruptive spiritual practice I could undertake and that scares me. Into that space of confusion and fear come a lot of rather petty and resentful thoughts too. I envy lapsed Christians because they at least have the vocabulary and custom of a spiritual practice, even if they are not following it currently. They seem to be able to slide back into it (and out of it) with ease, whereas I feel like a fake and an imposter. For example, our family and extended family was at a Ukrainian cultural event a few weeks ago. Before dinner, grace was said. My husband crossed himself and repeated the appropriate words at the right place, a remnant of childhood practice, but a thing he never does in daily life. I stood there with folded hands thinking: how many hours of podcasts about Christianity have I listened to, and books have I read, but I don't know this practice and would feel like a total poser if I tried to fake it.

I don't know the way out of all these snarly avenues of thought, but maybe it's part of the journey. Something I have observed is that the closer I get to something coherent and whole, the more aware I am of my own fragmentation.  Being close makes me feel farther away. I will keep asking my questions, and hope that they can show me a way through the paradoxes.