The Crystal Men

            On Friday morning I started working out the chords for “Le complainte du progrès" by Boris Vian. It sounds like the set of chords in C7 are the right ones so far.

            I worked out the chords for “Pamela Popo” by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through the song in French and English.

            I spent a lot of the day working on my Indigenous Studies essay although I got more research than writing done. I have about a page and a half plus about the same amount of notes.

            I didn’t do my usual afternoon exercises.

            Today was the deadline for submitting writing to the Jack McLelland Writer in Residence workshop and so I sent an old science fiction story I wrote called “The Crystal Men”:

The last Man before me has burned. I want nothing more than to burn, but if I fall there will be no one left to shepherd the flock to God's slaughterhouse where the Crystal Men will single out our prime cuts & Jesus will feast on us all.

Swingle the dingle-ball, ooweeoo, the Crystal Men are comin in two by two. They don’t cast no shadow. They don’t cast no fuckin shadow. Have ya noticed that they don’t cast no shadow & that they shit see-through rocks? Fire & war & war & fire & cold, cold money that ain't worth nothin no more burnin a pocket in your hole. & there’s that bastard out there sellin Crystal Men piss for dope. Here, I'll piss on you ya friggin asshole! Come and get the real thing! Take yer puppets and shove em brainless and dancin up the Crystal Men’s asses.

            It’s fuckin hot! Oh yeah, of course! Down the street one of them Crystal bastards are meltin somebody. He’s screamin now, No! Help! Help! No! but it ain’t gonna do him no fuckin good.

            Funny thing... them guys never bother me or my buddies... Only once... When Sammy tried to clean his self up and get sober. He was on his way to church and one of them glass bastards fried him like a friggin fish stick.

            I got a theory. It’s the booze. I know it sounds crazy but I don’t think them things can fry anybody that’s drunk. I walked right by one of them once and he didn’t even pay no attention. I think it’s the booze, so as long as I stay sauced I’m safe. I'd rather burn out than get burned. The drunks shall inherit the earth an the next fuckin Prime Minister of Canada will be smokin rollies from gutter butts, drinkin bitters, singin drunk in the alley with his premiers an readin his blanket when he wakes up in the afternoon in the park or wherever, cuz there ain’t gonna be no Sussex Drive no more.

            You'd think the Crystal Men woulda brought everybody together against a common enemy, but that ain’t the way people really are. Everybody feels even more alone than before, cept fer us drunks. If what I’m thinkin is right we can go anyplace we want and take anything we want. The drunks shall inherit the Earth but then they’re gonna trade it in fer a bottle of wine an then stagger off into the sunset cuz it ain’t worth keepin, an then it's all gonna start up all over again anyway, but they ain’t never gonna get it right, cause whatever they build is gonna burn.

            But that ain’t nothin ta cry about. Its somethin ta drink about, cause drinkin kills alla the germs in the head. Pour it on yer wounds an then go get some Chinese take-out & an ole Playboy magazine out of a dumpster... Man, that’s Heaven!

            Hey! I don’t care, cuz they don’t bother me anyways, but Ill bet I know how ta kill them Crystal bastards! I bet if I threw this bottle a wine I’m holdin right now at one of them glass fuckheads he’d melt like a son of a bitch!

            Ahh, fuckit! Think Ill go check out the dumpster behind the Pizza Pizza.

            There’s one of them creeps now! Hey Buddy! Here's a present fer ya!

            (The careless aim sends the nearly empty bottle flying, bottom first from the wino's weathered hand. The drunk doesn’t even stop to look at whether it strikes its target until he hears a loud cracking noise like a heavy frost biting into a tree limb, then he turns to see the Crystal Man collapse on the street, a gnawing rift ascending from its red wine stained ankle, up its leg & into its upper body until it lies like a broken Christmas ornament on the concrete.

            The homeless alcoholic suddenly changes his mind about the dumpster & heads for the liquor store instead.

            I found one I found one! shouts the tourist on her knees in the alley.

            Her husband leans begrudgingly forward & scolds, Willya give it up, Martha? The last shard was picked up years ago! That’s a piece of a broken wine bottle or somethin, not a Crystal Man!

               Martha’s face lights up. Do ya think it was a piece of the one thrown by Joe? she asks.

            How the hell should I know? he barks. Look, everything that bum owned or touched is down at the Joe Schmecky Museum, Martha! Come on! Lets go home! There’s this great recipe book I bought at the gift shop. Its called Cookin With Thunderbird. I wanna try out the barbecue sauce!

            She puts the broken glass in a baggy & slips it into her purse.

            Oh, all right Fred. she says, &  they hobble away from the alley.

                Whadaya suppose ever happened to the guy? she asks as they lock arms & continue down the street.

            I had a potato, three pork ribs and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            This story begins with Bernardo doing magic tricks in the market for the children. Then Don Diego intervenes in an argument between a Romani woman named Maria. She paid for some groceries with two shiny nuggets that look like gold. The shopkeeper does not think they have value because at this point in history everyone knows that there is no gold in California. Spanish California lasted until 1821 and the gold rush was a generation away. Diego pays for Maria’s groceries and the shopkeeper gives him the nuggets. A prospector who happened to overhear examines the rocks and says they are fools gold. Later Diego’s father confirms they are gold and dreads what would happen to California if gold fever were to hit. Maria had gotten the nuggets from her grandmother, who is a witch living in the hills outside of town. Diego goes to ask the old lady not to tell anyone about the nuggets but he learns that Maria has gone off with two men that claimed they needed help with a sick child. When the old lady describes one of the men Diego realizes that he is the prospector that he had met in Los Angeles and that Maria has been kidnapped and forced to lead them to the gold. The old lady had gotten the nuggets from an Indigenous woman from the mountains. Diego and Bernardo follow the bad guys into the mountains as they force Maria to show them where the Natives live. Diego changes to Zorro but with no cape and with a knife instead of a sword. The bad guys find a mine rich with gold. Maria runs and one of the guys tries to shoot her but Zorro stops him. Zorro has a knife fight with the prospector during which he is unmasked again. The Natives show up and kill one of the bad guys. They’ve also captured Bernardo, who dazzles them with magic until he throws some flash powder into the fire and they escape. The prospector tries to escape with a big bag of gold but the Natives start an avalanche and he is crushed.

Indian Act versus Treaties: Canada said two different things at the same time

            

            On Thursday morning I copied the rest of the last set of chords I’d found for “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian. Next I have to find which chords work for me.

            I finished memorizing “Pamela Popo” by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords online but as I suspected, no one has posted them. It’s a simple blues melody so it shouldn't too hard to work them out.

            I worked on typing my lecture notes.

            A few weeks ago I bought two small containers of Tetley Earl Grey tea. The first one was fine but the second one tasted like gasoline and so I bought a much more expensive box of the same brand at Loblaws. I discovered afterwards though that only the first two bags of the other pack tasted vile and the rest were okay.

            I can smell the Christmas trees in my apartment from the corner store across the street.

            I went to Freshco in the late morning and bought four bags of black grapes, two half pints of raspberries, a 500 gram bag of frozen shrimp for $5, spoon size shredded wheat, a bag of McCain wedges, orange juice, hot salsa, dish detergent and paper towels.

            For lunch I heated a burger that I’d cooked a few days before.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. The story begins with Sapphire complaining to her husband Kingfish that the reason he is a no good dirty bum is that he hangs out with Andy Brown. Next we hear that Andy has just received a telegram from his uncle in Brazil offering him $200 a week to help manage his rubber plantation. Kingfish decides to cash in by opening a travel agency to arrange for Andy’s trip. Andy says he hears he has to go through customs and he asks Kingfish what that is. Kingfish tells him that Customs is a bunch of islands owned by Spain off the coast of Gibraltar and it’s a wonderful trip going through them. Kingfish goes to a travel agent to arrange Andy’s trip but the agent doesn’t know where Brazil is. He says, “Tell your friend to be reasonable! If we can’t find it he can’t go there!” Finally, wanting the $200 a week for himself, Kingfish steals Andy’s ticket and ships out. When Andy tells Sapphire she says that she sent the telegram pretending to be Andy’s uncle because she’d wanted Andy to leave town.

            I got caught up on my journal and returned to working on my essay but it was too late in the day for me to apply a lot of brainpower to it. I wrote about the Indian Act being illegal under international law. It’s also ironic that the Canadian would enact a law to govern all Indians while at the same time negotiating several treaties with groups that it recognized as being sovereign nations by the very act of negotiating treaties with them. Canada was effectively speaking out of both sides of its mouth. I have a little over three days before the deadline.

            I grilled some pork ribs and had a few for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching Zorro.

            In this story the fake commandant sees Rosarita with Don Diego in the Los Angeles market and recognizes her from the boat that he took to get there. He hides when he sees her because she met the real commandant on board before he killed him and she could expose him as an impostor. Bernardo overhears the fake Ortega plotting to kill Rosarita and he runs to warn Don Diego. Dressed in civilian clothes and introducing himself as Sancho Fernandez he comes to Rosarita’s uncle’s house at night while her uncle is away and the servants are asleep. He is just starting to attack her when Zorro arrives. They have a swordfight for a while until Fernandez escapes. Knowing that he will soon be exposed and that his mission has failed he goes to the magistrate’s office and robs him. He is just leaving when Zorro gets there. They fight on the roof and at one point he has the upper hand and unmasks Zorro. Zorro recovers but as they are fighting again Fernandez falls from the roof and dies. Zorro’s identity is safe.

 

Yeats Infection

            On Wednesday morning I found the last set of chords for “Le complaint de progres” by Boris Vian. I always stop searching after four.

            I memorized two more verses of “Pamela Popo” by Serge Gainsbourg and there is only one more to go.

            A few weeks ago the rubber ring that had been directly moulded onto the stopper in my toilet tank broke off. I rigged some wiring around the hinge so I could still pull and flush but yesterday the wiring broke off. This morning I rigged it again with a new and longer wire. The water back there is cold on the hands!

I worked a bit on my Indigenous Studies essay but mostly on changing the wording of the first paragraph.

            I had time to take a shower before leaving for Aesthetic and Decadent Movements class.

            I delayed leaving for fifteen minutes because it had been raining. Fortunately it stopped just before I headed out.

            A little after Dovercourt on College there was a short construction area in the right lane and so I moved to the centre. After clearing the construction I went back to the right lane but the cyclist behind me stayed in the centre to pass me. He then wanted to pass the rider ahead of me and so he continued in the centre lane. The cyclist ahead was going pretty fast and when the guy in the centre lane got to Ossington he perhaps was too focused on speeding up to pass the other cyclist and not paying attention to the turning streetcar tracks and so he wiped out. It looked like it only hurt his pride though because he was getting up by the time he passed.

            There were two students in the classroom when I got there.

            I plugged in my laptop and fiddled some more with the first paragraph of my essay.

            Professor Li said that colours figured prominently in the Decadent Movement and peacocks.

            William Butler Yeats was a bridge between Decadence and Modernism. When he was with the Rhymers Club he was a Decadent and when he wrote Easter 1916 he was a Modernist.

            The Decadents wrote about the rose a lot. George Meredith talked of the rose and so did Rossetti in “Body's Beauty”.

            Swinburne: Shall I strew on thee rose?

            Dowson: Flung roses. Roses riotously with the throng.

            The Decadents were about subtleties of feelings.

            She mentioned Terry Eagleton and a book called, “Hope Without Optimism”. Optimism is more external than hope.

            We looked at Yeats's “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time”.

            “Rood” is the cross.

            Eternal is out of time.

            Yeats was a member of The Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucians. The Golden Dawn seems to have been a spin-off of the Rosicrucians.

            I mentioned that Henry Miller had a series of novels called The Rosy Crucifixion.

            Renna gave us our first seminar starter of three on this poem.

            The first line “Rose of all my days” is personal.

            “Cuchulain” is a mythical Irish warrior.

            In the poem he is talking to the rose.

            Sadness is the spirit of Decadence.

            There is indulgence but a surprising anchorage in reality.

            Yeats regretted not learning to speak Gaelic.

            He tells the rose to keep approaching him but not too close. It's like Xeno's Paradox.

            We looked at “The Rose of the World”.

            This poem has a more universal take on the rose.

            Jacob gave us our second seminar starter and pointed out Yeats’s complex use of time, circular time and eternity in the poem.

            Is Yeats talking about outside time or outside our sense of time.

            The professor reminded us that it’s always helpful to read a lot so we know what we are talking about when we analyze a poem.

            The speaker eternalizes the rose, which represents beauty.

            Yeats is more mystical than the other Decadents.

            During a break I mentioned to the professor that when I was a kid the Rosicrucians used to advertise in comic books and that Leonard Cohen mentions them in “The Dress Rehearsal Rag: “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians? They will give you back your hope. You can find your love in diagrams on a plain brown envelope.”

            We looked at “Easter 1916”, which is later Yeats when he was a different guy. It’s raw history.

            The poem is about the unsuccessful and fatal Easter Rising by some members of the Irish Nationalist Movement against British rule. It addresses idealism versus reality.

One of those martyrs of the cause mentioned in the poem is John McBride. Yeats had hated McBride while he was alive because he married Maude Gonne, whom he loved. She turned down four marriage proposals from Yeats before marrying McBride.

Yeats is searching here for a sufficiently chaotic form.

Professor Li suggested that we write a poem and become more sensitive to prosody.

“Terrible beauty” is a loaded term. The Irish Nationalist Movement was beautiful in its ideals but terrible in its actions.

In the first stanza he shows that the people that died were familiar to him but distant. He knew them well enough to stop and chat meaninglessly but he would not have written about them if they hadn’t died.

He refers to a “shrill” woman as if she was one of the ones killed. This was the Countess Constance Markievicz. She was sentenced to death but spared because of her sex.

“This man … rode our winged horse”. Pegasus is associated with poetic inspiration.

            The rebels knew they would fail and so their martyrdom is like a stone.

            In Yeats’s poetry there are always two sides linked together and worked through in a tangibly tortured manner.

            Next week for our last class we would be watching a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Earnestness is mocked. He is challenging the moral seriousness of the Victorian middle class. Ernest becomes an ironically empty name. The characters emphasize principles of Aestheticism.

            I like chatting with Professor Li but I had to leave right away because I had to work that night and I wanted to get home as soon as possible so I could eat a late lunch first.

            I had an hour and ten minutes at home. I ate a salami and cheese sandwich for lunch. I went out and bought a six-pack of Creemore. I started feeling tired and so I sat on the couch with my feet up and dozed for ten minutes before leaving for work.

            I worked for Brendan Flaherty in the Fine Arts department of OCADU. He told me he remembered drawing me when he was a student there. I think this was a Continuing Studies course as the three students looked like they were between their late twenties and late thirties. This was the first time they’d drawn from the figure.

            I did ten thirty-second poses and three fives for my first set. I just did twenty-minute sets after that. During the breaks I typed my lecture notes.

            When I got home I made a quick dinner of a mini-pizza with a slice of bread, salsa for sauce, three slices of salami and some melted cheese. I had it with a beer while watching Zorro.

            This story begins with the soldiers of Los Angeles having captured Zorro, but we see it’s not really Zorro because the real Zorro in his secret identity of Don Diego is watching in the crowd. The fake Zorro turns out to be one of Commandant Ortega’s men and it is a trap because he knows that some of the peasants will try to rescue Zorro. The real Zorro arrives to warn them but he is almost captured. He escapes on the commandant’s horse but Zorro’s horse Tornado is captured. An auction is held for the horse and Don Diego gives Sergeant Garcia money to buy it. Ortega had hoped Zorro would try to rescue Tornado. One of the soldiers begins whipping Tornado in the corral but inadvertently sets it on fire. He is trampled just before Zorro arrives to ride Tornado away.

            

Smoke on the Water

            On Tuesday morning I found another set of chords for “Le complaint de progres” by Boris Vian. One more set and I'll just choose between them or work out my own.

            I memorized two verses of “Pamela Popo” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I typed some more of my Monday lecture notes.

            I took an early siesta because I had to work in the early afternoon.

            I had a piece of chicken and some yogourt before leaving.

            I worked for Nick Aoki on the third floor of the Village by the Grange campus.

            The walls of the little changing room for the models in studio 316 have all been filled with dynamic artwork in black and white. I was also pleasantly surprised to see an electrical outlet that had been put in the change room. I had brought my laptop and was setting it up to sit in the change room during my breaks when I realized that the electrical outlet was just painted with the artwork on the wall. I found somewhere outside the change room to plug in.

            I did the standard sets of gradually lengthening poses from ones to threes to fives to tens and finished with a twenty-minute pose. I had longer breaks than usual because Nick lectured for about ten minutes a couple of times. Near the end he gave his students an analogy relating to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. I asked the class if anyone had actually gotten the reference but none of them had. Nick said it’s too bad because there aren’t any three-chord guitar riffs now that are iconic enough to reference.

            When class was over I commented to Nick that “Smoke On The Water” was way before his time but he said it was only ten years before. He went to high school in the 80s. I guessed correctly that his era was Grunge. He said that “Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out when he was in Grade Seven and Nirvana was enormous. They used to have air guitar competitions and guys would lose it. But there’s actually nineteen years between “Smoke On the Water” and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". I guess Nick is about twenty years younger than me. He looks like a kid.

            I had a potato and the rest of the whole chicken I’d cooked on Sunday with some gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            In this story the new commandant Don Juan Ortega arrives at Los Angeles. He turns out however to be another agent of the Eagle feather and not even the real Ortega, whom he killed. Ortega and the magistrate discuss their leader whom neither has seen but whom they agree pays well. In his efforts to find new revenue the magistrate learns that Franco Barbarosa, one of the wealthiest ranchers in Los Angeles, does not own his property, which belongs to the king. Living on the king’s land and improving it is a legitimate way to eventually own it but the magistrate said that has changed and arrests Franco for trespassing, sentencing him to hard labour turning a millstone while being whipped. Meanwhile Don Diego becomes reacquainted with his childhood friend Rosarita. When she learns of Franco’s arrest she asks Diego to intervene. He speaks with the magistrate but to no avail. Rosarita is angry that Diego only uses words. Later as Zorro he returns to rescue Franco and has his first swordfight with Ortega. He defeats him and makes him promise to never treat a man like a mule again.

            Rosarita was played by Sandy Livingston, about whom there is very little information online.

Residential Schools

            On Monday morning while listening to Shouty McWheelchair hacking down on the street in front of my building, I thought about how when the Coffeetime closes a month from now there will be no more danger of him coughing up a lung and tossing it through my window.

            I copied the chords for the C7 version of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

I finished posting "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and listened to “Pamela Popo”, the next Gainsbourg song I'll be learning. This one is about a stripper with a unique act and every line ends in a word that rhymes with “oh”. I haven't included the word “Negro” in my translation because I don't think it's necessary. 

My right index fingernail still hurt but it was manageable. However my index finger is having some bad luck lately as when I closed my living room window that morning I did it too fast and my index fingernail got jammed. Now in addition to there being a little cut near the top it's blue and purple near the base. On the positive side the tip of my finger under my fingernail hurts less now that my finger under the base hurts more.

I worked some more on my Indigenous Studies essay, mostly reading and taking notes from parts of The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel that relates to treaties.

I went to bed for an hour so I’d be fresh for Indigenous Studies class and the tutorial that follows.

While waiting for class I read about the Métis, but the book still doesn’t explain why some tribes like the Haudenosaunee have full members that are mixed whereas the Métis are not just Cree.

Our lecture was about residential schools. The United States generally used the name “Boarding School” for the same thing but residential schools were also in Buffalo.

Residential schools were a thing unto themselves.

They were not cross cultural but about total indoctrination leading to assimilation. It was easier with children because they could be made to believe anything.

They go all the way back to the beginning of treaty language.

There were also day schools in the states going back to colonial period. They wanted to change the culture through education. The plan was they would compensate indigenous people for having lost territory by educating them. The day schools lasted from 100 to 175 years. They changed to boarding schools that were at first nearby and so the children got to come home for the weekend.

Churches divided communities in competition for which ones got control of the minds of natives.

Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt founded the influential Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He is associated with the first use of the word “racism” to criticize racial segregation. He also coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian and save the man”. Carlisle started out as an industrial school designed for boys from three to seventeen. They learned farming, manufacturing skills and marching. It sounded like the professor said they wore “SS military uniforms” but when I asked him he seemed pissed off and said, I wouldn’t have said that!”

How could I possibly know what he “would" have said? My question was about what he did say. Maybe he said, “Yes, yes … military uniforms” but if he did why didn’t he just tell me what he’d said? Maybe he said it and didn’t remember.

Carlisle became the model for 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools and hundreds of private religious boarding schools.

The professor said that his great grandfather went to Carlisle and that the discipline was passed down to him so that he could bounce a quarter off a made bed now.

It was decided that the only way to remove children was far away because that would make it more difficult for the parents to visit. Natives needed special approval to leave the reservation. It was an act of war to leave without a permit.

General Philip Sheridan is attributed with saying, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” which over time became popularized as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”.

Ironically the idea of killing Indian culture in the young happened at the same time as ethnographers began desperately gathering Indigenous knowledge from elders.

Canada’s apology was very public while that of the US was buried in paperwork and it was not legally binding.

The Canadian government is pushing back on compensation for the sixties scoop. To be fair, it seems the government is not against the recommended compensation package but rather just wants to study the right way to deliver it to survivors.

There are generations of recent victims.

The United States shut down its boarding schools in the 1920s and 1930s while it took Canada until the 1960s.

There was criminal child abuse that might even be considered war crimes.

Professor White addressed the fact that we are frustrated with his United Statescentric and apologized. He excused himself by claiming that for Indigenous people the border does not exist.

One would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the United States or Canada an Indigenous community that has not been touched by residential schools.

Some former students say they were not bad while others say they were very bad.

There is generational trauma. Those that were abused as children are more likely to abuse their own and the cycle continues.  Canadian residential schools lasted until the 1990s and so there is more trauma in Canada.

The acquisition of titles and lands is a problem but treaties are ongoing in Canada.

Parents could have been jailed in Canada for not submitting their children to education.

The professor said that he learned after his father died that he spoke fluent Mohawk but never admitted it to anyone.

We watched several videos about residential schools but there was a ten-minute or so delay because the professor couldn’t get the audio working.

The first three videos were parts one to three of Unseen Tears and the third was a preview of Canadian Residential Schools.

Unseen Tears is about the Thomas Indian School and Mohawk Institute or the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, also known as the Mush Hole in Erie County, New York.

The movie begins with several students of the school singing “Ten Little Indians”. A person interviewed said it’s a song about dead Indians. To be fair, some die and others just leave for various reasons like to get married.

When the kids arrived they had their heads shaved. When they went home the other kids called them “Mush Hole Baldies”.

A man tells how the day he was brought there he never saw his mother again for ten years.

Their mouths were washed with soap and they were given cold showers if they were caught speaking their language. One woman said if she couldn’t speak her language she wouldn’t speak English and so she didn’t speak for two years.

They were given numbers.

The administrator came from working in a prison. They were trained in a military style.

Children were molested.

One man said that his brother got away after five years and they never found him.

A woman talks about having been raped as a girl there but when she reported it she was beaten for accusing someone that they didn’t believe would do such a thing.

Everyone had their tonsils removed and they were kept in bottles. All of the boys were circumcised.

Older girls received regular virginity checks.

A woman tells the story of how they put on a play of Little Black Sambo and the darkest skinned Native child would always play Sambo.

Families lost bonding and after they grew up they passed on the regimentation to their own children.

One man asked what the good would be of receiving a hollow apology.

Another short video was about a residential school at Portage La Prairie. It was run by a Presbyterian women’s organization. There was deprivation of food, beatings and rape. In 1925 the United Church of Canada took over. The staff had the best food.

A woman tells how another girl that threw up her dinner was forced to eat her vomit.

The greatest pain is loneliness.

Although US federal schools closed down in the 1930s, some states continued running boarding schools.

The US military had spent $1 million trying to catch Geronimo and so brainwashing was cheaper.

The before and after photos of Native children were a very effective tool for fundraising.

Four generations were in the boarding schools.

There is no human society that does not educate its children to teach them to survive and to pass on cultural knowledge.

Not all high school diplomas are equal.

A student said that it’s more lucrative to be a schoolteacher in Canada. That seems to be generally true.

The schools only trained Indians for servitude roles.

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, called for the extermination of Indians in two articles he wrote in 1890. His mother in law was a white woman adopted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons.

The professor claimed that the racism of the United States is more out there whereas Canada hides its racism.

Someone said that Native communities in the way of the CPR route were starved into moving.

The United States resists the genocide compact.

Trudeau owned it and apologized but said it costs too much. He didn’t say that. He didn’t argue against the amount but that more former students should be compensated than the court ruling indicates.

Records only show part of the picture. For example he said that there are only two records that indicate his religion. One is his baptismal record and the other is from the declaration he was expected to quickly make when he joined the military.

Student records will be destroyed if they don’t come forward to say they don’t want them destroyed.

In tutorial Safia said that in Atlanta, Georgia people will call you “N****r” straight up. I think that’s called racism.

She added that two hours from Toronto there’ll be racism in your face as well.

She wrote some questions on the board:

What were the assumptions behind the Indian Act?

What were the goals of the residential schools?

What can the goals of residential schools say about the European view of Indigenous cultures?

What consequence do those view have on Indigenous people?

She mentioned the five stages of colonization and decolonisation by Poka Laenui: Rediscovery and recovery; mourning; dreaming; commitment and action.

Some students were talking about First Nations House. I asked where it was and when someone said it’s on Spadina I thought at first that the Native Centre had changed its name. They are different places.

Robin and another Native woman said Native people are lactose intolerant. I hadn’t known that. I said it would be genetic and cited the fact that I’m Scandinavian and we are the most lactose tolerant people on the planet. The woman said, “Good to know!” but I don't know if she was being sarcastic.

Safia gave us a tip that this course always has questions on the Indian Act and on Residential Schools.

Safia said there couldn’t be competing oppressions, as in “I suffered too!”

She quoted Steven Biko that the most potent weapon of the oppressed is the mind.

I was surprised to hear that from 1920 to 1951 every school age Indigenous child was in a residential school. My research shows that’s not true or even possible. The most residential schools operating in Canada all at once numbered eighty in 1931, with an enrolment of 1700 students. I can't see how it would be possible that in 1931 there would have been only 1700 school age Status Indian school age children in Canada. There were probably at least a quarter of a million status Indians here at the time. Also there were no residential schools in New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island. It's very difficult to find any information on Native children attending non-residential schools because any searches are dominated by Residential school results.

There were 150,000 residential school students over 150 years.

50,000 students died and some of those died while trying to escape into the remote areas that surrounded the schools.

St Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario on James Bay had a homemade electric chair for shocking students as punishment.

40% of staff had no professional training.

The residential school syndrome results in self-abuse, identity crises and inter-generational trauma.

There have been incidents of forced sterilization of Native women after giving birth in Manitoba.

On my way home I stopped at Loblaws where I bought grapes and Earl Grey tea. The cashier was physically very slow. A woman ahead of me was buying the same kind of grapes as me and she disputed the price. She thought that they were $2.79 and that was the same price that I'd read. The cashier told her they were $3.99 and so she finally decided not to take them. I disputed the price too and finally a staff member asked me to show her where I'd seen the price. I went there and discovered that the $2.79 had been for the mangoes and the grapes were displayed in another section. I bought some lower quality red grapes instead. Really, I think I would have just paid for the more expensive grapes if the woman ahead of me hadn't argued about them.

I had a piece of chicken and some yogourt for a late lunch.

I typed some of my lecture notes.

That night I made some more chicken gravy.

I had a potato, some chicken and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

In this story a gambler arrives in Los Angeles with an eagle feather in his head, suggesting that he is part of the criminal organization the Brotherhood of the Eagle. He cheats a wealthy landowner out of his livestock, land and money and then opens up a leather tannery that pollutes a shared spring. Zorro comes to force the gambler to play a fair game so the landowner can win his assets back. The soldiers try to capture Zorro but he gets away.

Law of Nations

            On Sunday morning I forgot that I have a new faucet in the kitchen and I ran my three glasses of cold drinking water in the bathroom.

            I copied the chords for the Am version of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and started on the ones in C7.

I finished working out the chords for "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg and began posting the song on my Christian’s Translations blog.

It’s nice to be back in control of the hot and cold water in the kitchen.

I finished my second reading of Treaty 6. If one eliminated every repeated phrase the 19-page document would be a paragraph.

I did my laundry and the Laundromat was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. There were no free double-sized vertical loaders but the two cheap ones at the back looked like they were finishing. I put my jeans and sweatpants in a top loader and got my change. The top loaders take ten minutes longer and so I started the cold wash and by that time the back washers were done. I had to ask the attendant to try to find the customer but he couldn’t locate him. The guy whose clothes they were only came from the other side just as the attendant had taken his clothes out. I always leave and go home but I’m still back in time to take my clothes out. It’s hard to imagine me being late to do so if I was already waiting in the laundry.

I was finished by 13:10.

            While I was unlacing my boots I was trying loosen the laces by pulling them in the middle without unlacing them so as to loosen the boots and I wound up bending back my index fingernail and cracking it and it was bleeding underneath a bit. It smarted for the rest of the day.

I had ramen noodles with a piece of chicken for lunch. The noodles were a bit stale.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish and Sapphire are invited to a high-class function but Sapphire doesn't have a new evening dress. She tells Kingfish she wants to rustle when she walks into a room. Kingfish suggests that she tie some paper bags under her old dress. Kingfish convinces Andy to let him buy Sapphire a dress on his charge account on the condition that they return it the next day. But when Kingfish is trying to impress Sapphire by using a pen to change the price from $39.50 to $89.50 he spills blue ink on the pink dress. Kingfish and Andy try to cut the bottom part of the dress but it keeps coming out uneven and so they have to keep cutting it several times at the front and back. Finally when they try to return it to the store they refuse to refund it but a woman sees the dress and likes it. She buys it from Kingfish but the next day tries to bring it back. They refuse to give her a refund and so she leaves it with the clerk and goes to talk to the manager. He refuses to refund it too. When she goes back to get the dress it's already been sold because Sapphire bought it.

I wrote a page and a half of notes towards my final Indigenous Studies essay comparing The Indian Act to Treaty 6.  I typed those notes into a document and began expanding on them.

I grilled two burgers and had one for dinner with ketchup, mustard, relish, hot sauce and a beer while watching Zorro.

The story begins with a crowd of citizens gathering under the balcony of the magistrate’s office to ask him to return their illegally taken tax money. An appointed spokesman named Paco makes a humble plea. The governor has already ordered that the money be redistributed to the people but the magistrate has delayed this, claiming there is a legal process involved. Suddenly a member of the crowd throws a rock and breaks the magistrate’s window. The magistrate orders that the man be shot but Sergeant Garcia diverts the rifle to the sky so that when it fires the crowd disperses. Later we see that the man that threw the rock was hired by the magistrate to do so. The magistrate pays the man again to rob a wealthy landowner and his wife and to mention while doing so that he represents the people. Diego’s father Don Alejandro witnesses this attack and it convinces him to join the other landowners against these revolutionaries. Paco is arrested on the charge that he threw the rock, even though Garcia insists that he did not. Paco is sentenced to die by firing squad but Diego’s father assures him that they do not intend to shoot Paco and that it is merely a trap for Zorro. But the magistrate really does intend to shoot Paco. But Zorro has anticipated this and replaced all of the firing squad rifle bullets with blanks. Zorro has Bernardo dressed as Zorro distract the soldiers by riding in circles around the fountain while the real Zorro has a brief swordfight with his own father before rescuing Paco.

How Victoria Won Over the Indians

            On Saturday morning I started copying a version of the chords to “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and worked out the chords for "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg.

            The keys on this Dell keyboard are so high compared to the old one I saw a little mountain goat leaping from the G to the F.

            I started re-reading The Indian Act. That Superintendent General sure has a lot of power.

            I went to No Frills where I bought three bags of grapes, a half pint of strawberries, a small pack of pork chops, coffee, Irish Spring, mouthwash, some cheap cheese for cooking, some petroleum jelly and a few containers of Greek yogourt. I'd thought for sure that I'd picked five containers of yogourt but I was charged for six. I was going to point the cashier's mistake out to her when I thought I’d double check. It turned out that I had bought six after all.

            When I got home my landlord was in the hall with a new kitchen faucet for me, this time with two dials, so hopefully it’ll last longer.

            I read some more of the Indian Act out loud. It is so repetitious and in legalese and so dry that it’s like I’m inhaling blackflies through my eyes.

            Raja told me that he’s pretty sure that Popeye’s will be renting the space downstairs after Coffeetime moves out. They probably wouldn’t open until March or April though since they would have to renovate. That probably means that I’ll have to depend on the espresso place across the street for wifi and it’ll be weaker.

            The new faucet seems better because even if the actual tap were to get loose I’d still have control over the hot and cold water.

            I had a cheese and hot Genoa salami sandwich for lunch.

            I finished most of my second reading of the Indian Act. There's a provision where in the case of arresting an Indian without a name the official is allowed to name them by description.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. The audio was really bad on this one but the basic story is that Kingfish and Sapphire decide to rent a room in their house to make extras money to renovate. After several odd interviews they finally rent to a young woman. But this woman has an overbearing older sister that comes over and uses the place as well. They want to try to get rid of their tenant and so Kingfish gets Andy to pose as a health inspector. He tells the woman that she’s taking up all the oxygen in the house. She says she opens the window but Andy tells her that lets all the oxygen out. It turns out that her sister is dating the chief health inspector for Harlem. Kingfish tries to force her out by doubling her rent but that just causes her sister and her boyfriend to move in.

            I finished re-reading the Indian Act. The shittiest part is that Native women of any age are considered to have fewer rights in their family than any male of fourteen years of age or older. But to be fair, at the time of the Indian Act no women in Canada were considered to be persons in terms of rights and privileges.

            I read Treaty 6, which was first signed at the same time that the Indian Act was passed. In this treaty a large amount of land consisting of what is now a quarter each of Saskatchewan and Alberta (Including the future site of Edmonton) was ceded by several mostly Cree western tribes in exchange for reservation land and various amounts of money and supplies. There are additional tribes that add their names to the treaty for the next almost 100 years. The main difference between Treaty 6 and The Indian Act is that no chiefs negotiated, signed or agreed to the Indian Act. But this treaty continues to be disputed because it was written in English and poorly translated so that the chiefs agreed to things that were not in the treaty. They had not realized they were selling the land but had thought instead that it had been a treaty for sharing it such as they might have made with another tribe. They also assumed that since their ruler, Victoria, was a woman that she would want to share.

            I read half of treaty six again out loud.

            I had oven fries with salsa and melted cheese for dinner, forgetting that I’d bought ground beef on Thursday. I watched two episodes of Zorro.

            In this story some highwaymen intercept a tax collector on his way to Los Angeles and force him to give them his papers. One of them then poses as a tax collector and raises the taxes to such a degree that several men are placed in jail for not being able to pay. Don Diego offers to pay their taxes but the magistrate says it is too late as the men have been sold to be indentured servants in the mines. Zorro rescues them in the desert with the help of Bernardo posing as another Zorro. This was another plot by the eagle feather organization. With the slaves freed, the slave trader takes the eagle feather thugs that had sold the men to the mines instead.

            In the second story a man is murdered at the fort and Don Diego finds an eagle feather beside him. Later Diego’s father tries to match him with a childhood friend named Magdalene who has grown up to be a beautiful woman. A party is held in her honour by Diego’s father but the evil magistrate is also there and Diego observes that she passes him an eagle feather. Diego picks the magistrate’s pocket and doctors the feather, thinking that it will signal for the magistrate’s death when he hands it to the assassin but it turns out to signal Magdalena’s death. As Zorro he rides to save her as the assassin pursues her wagon. He catches up just as the assassin does. While he is struggling on the back of the wagon with the assassin, Magdalena stabs the killer. Zorro advises Magdalena to go back to Mexico City.

            Magdalena was played by Julie Van Zandt who held the Guinness World record for the biggest needlefish ever caught and was also a painter. Her and her husband founded the Malibu Art Festival. 

The Indian Act

            On Friday morning I finally finished memorizing “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and also "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg. I found that there are chords posted online for the Vian song but not for "Titicaca".

            I worked on my journal.

            I had a chicken wing for lunch and was trying to pour some orange juice from a full bottle but when I started picking it up I squeezed it and spilled some of the juice. Later while eating I reached for the glass and spilled some on my keyboard. I turned it upside down and tried to dry it but later I discovered that the space key on the keyboard that my daughter bought me a few years ago no longer worked. Fortunately I have other keyboards. I found a Dell on the upper shelf in my bedroom and plugged it in. The computer said it was ready to use but it wouldn’t work and so I restarted and it worked. It will take some getting used to because it doesn't fit my desk drawer like the old one and the keys are more elevated but at least now the "E" works every time I use it. It was getting sticky on the old one.

            I did my exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish and Andy go into the parking lot business. In letting their customers know that they are not responsible for what happens to the cars they write on the tickets that they are irresponsible. After Andy goes to lunch Kingfish decides to go to get a bite too and so he puts his brother in law in charge for a few minutes. When he returns he finds that his brother in law has sold one of the cars for $600, thinking that it was a used car lot. Kingfish decides the only thing he can do is to sign over his half of the lot to Andy and to give him the $600 without telling him about the mistake, so that he’ll be liable for the car. When Andy asks why he’s selling his half Kingfish explains that he found out he’s allergic to carbon peroxide. He says the doctor gave him an allergy test and scratched him with an exhaust pipe. Andy takes the deal but when he finds out about the car he threatens Kingfish. Kingfish says he’ll help him solve the problem. Andy has spent $100 of the money and so they need to get $100 so they can give the buyer back his $600 and give the customer back his car. They go to a loan company where Kingfish says he wants to borrow $100. The loan agent says he needs $100 for security and Andy gives him $100. The agent gives Kingfish the $100 and thanks them for their business. Eventually Andy makes $100 on his own and they get the car back. Kingfish then wants to get the lot back and so Andy signs it all over to him. Kingfish asks by the way where he got the $100. Andy says Kingfish’s brother sold a Lincoln for $100.

            And speaking of lots, I spent the next two hours reading The Indian Act. It sure does talk a lot for a while about timber, lumber and brush on Indian land and who gets to sell it. The most bizarre thing though is the idea of “enfranchisement". If a Native became educated, a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a soldier, if they travelled for an extended time they would lose their status and stop being considered as Indians. This really seems counterproductive. What a way to discourage Indigenous people from trying to achieve the very things that Canadians value.

            I had a potato, a slice of chicken breast and the rest of my gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            In this story Sergeant Garcia has a rock thrown through his window while he is sleeping and attached is a message that is signed “Zorro”. It reads that Zorro would surrender to him if he comes alone to a certain remote area outside the fort. He goes and unseen to Garcia the man named Gomez from the previous episode shouts out instructions from behind a rock. He tells him to drop his sword and then ride ahead another kilometre to await further instructions. But no instructions come. Next we see the king’s messenger who is supposed to carry the soldiers’ pay arrive at the fort. He says he was robbed by a soldier and when Garcia returns he says it was him. The messenger has in his possession Garcia’s broken sword, which he claims he broke across his back. Garcia is arrested and tried by Magistrate Galindo for robbing the king and sentenced to death at dawn. Don Diego wants to question the messenger the messenger but learns that he has left for Monterrey, despite the fact that he is supposed to be injured. Zorro catches up to the messenger and jumps him on his horse. Zorro is almost knocked off but manages to pull both of them off. But as they tumble down a hill Zorro is knocked out when he hits his head on a rock. The messenger is about to finish Zorro off when he is attacked by Zorro’s horse Tornado. Zorro recovers and captures the messenger. Meanwhile it is time for Garcia’s execution by firing squad. He is asked if he wants a blindfold but says, “I would rather see them not kill me than not see them kill me”. Just as they are about to fire Zorro arrives with the messenger who admits that he had been part of a plot. He has the soldiers’ pay and so they all lose interest in executing Garcia since they haven’t been paid for four months. After finding another eagle feather Don Diego is beginning to suspect the magistrate as being part of a criminal organization. He also notices that the barbs of each feather are cut with a unique pattern, which he thinks must be some kind of code.

            Afterwards I tried to write in my journal but the new keyboard wouldn’t work. I had to restart my computer to get it to function again. Another problem is that the Dell is three times thicker than the old keyboard and so it’s higher and hurting my back when I type because I have to use a different posture. I raised my chair as high as it would go so hopefully that would fix the problem.

Myrna Fahey

            On Thursday morning it was a relief to be able to play guitar and sing instead of spending hours and hours on an essay. But my guitar kept going out of tune and my playing sucked.

            I’ve almost finished memorizing "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg and “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

            In the late morning I was about to leave for the supermarket when I discovered that I had a flat tire. Fortunately Bike Pirates would be opening in fifteen minutes and so I went to wait outside. While standing there I read a few paragraphs of Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian. He was talking about the various Indigenous activist organizations in the history of Canada and the United States.

            Den opened up and I started changing my tire. I discovered that the puncture was on the rim side of the tube but we couldn’t find anything in the rim that would have caused the flat. I asked Den if my tire was still okay. One of the older volunteers who was chatting with Den at the time chastised me for asking because I should be able to tell. He reminds me of Igor Kenk who had the ironic attitude that if you don’t know how to fix your own bike you shouldn’t take it to other people to help you fix it. I told him that I didn’t trust my eye. He said that his and Den’s eyes are old and shouldn’t be trusted. Said I wasn’t talking about my physical eyes but rather my ability to discern. I bought a new tube and installed it but when I was putting tire back on I noticed that the derailleur hanger kept moving and didn’t line up. I asked Den if it was supposed to be tight. He said that the kind I have doesn’t need to be because the nut of the wheel will hold it in place.

            While I was there I took the opportunity to oil up my chain,

            I was finished in an hour. It’s amazing how little I know after coming to Bike Pirates for five years but then again five years ago I couldn’t change a back tire by myself, so there has been progress.

            The tube was $6 and I kind of cheaped out with my donation, as I only gave $4. Then again I have given them generous donations in the past.

I asked Den if Bike Pirates is still moving. He said it's not certain yet and they got an extension on their lease until February. He said the landlord likes them as they pay the rent on time and take care of the building but he still wants to raise the rent by $300 a year and they can’t afford it. H said landlords are screwing themselves because eventually they won’t be able to get anyone to rent their places if they keep raising the rents. He compared it to climate change and said people just do what they are used to doing and don’t think about the future. He said that in Miami they are losing their beach so quickly that they have to bring in new sand from other places at night but they are running out of places to get it. I asked if it could be manufactured but he said it would require too much heat. They do manufacture sand for the making of concrete but I guess beach sand is more complicated because it’s partly made of organic material. I suspect though that eventually they’ll work out a way to create man-made sand.

            He said, "I'll be dead but I worry for my grandchildren!" I hadn't known that he had grandchildren. He has three granddaughters in Philadelphia from his previous marriage. Both he and dawn are from the States. He said they are both from across the border from Sarnia and so I guess that would be Port Huron, Michigan. He and Dawn were high school sweethearts and he proposed to her back then but she turned him down. Twenty-five years later she said, “Yes”. I commented that he and Dawn make a cute couple. He admitted that they fight but they’ve been married for 28 years now and they would be delivering a harpsichord to Georgetown together that night with dawn lifting the other end.

            He said he and Dawn are taking care of an invalid at their house right now and it takes a lot of time. They tried to bring in professionals but the woman just screams at them because she’ll only permit Dawn to help her.

            Den said that two of his harpsichords are part of the Rubens exhibit at the AGO but he doesn’t get why the musicians are playing modern music on them at an exhibit for a 17^th Century artist.

            I rode to Freshco where they’ve started selling Christmas trees and other bits of evergreen for decoration and so the outside has a nice coniferous fragrance. I bought one bag of grapes, a half pint of raspberries, Bavarian sandwich bread, Old Dutch potato chips, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a pack of lean ground beef, frozen pork ribs, half a brown sugar ham, a pack of sliced hot salami, and a block of old cheddar cheese.

            The guy ahead of me had bought a scented wreath that had shed needles over the conveyer belt. I pointed it out to the nice cashier who seems to be in charge of all the other cashiers and who is friendly with everybody in both English and Portuguese. She got a hand broom and swept it up and then she leaned into the dustpan and declared, “It smells so good!”

            I had a chicken wing for lunch that I’d torn off the whole chicken I’d roasted on Tuesday.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises and finished watching the Naked City episode “A Turn of Events” for which the audio had not downloaded. I couldn't figure out without the sound who the murderer turned out to be.

            I worked on my journal.

            That night for dinner I had a potato, a chicken leg and some gravy while watching Zorro.

            This is the beginning of a new, more intriguing story arc. The new commandant arrives and while he is giving his speech, Don Diego is impressed enough to conclude that Zorro will no longer be needed in Los Angeles. But suddenly the new commandant is assassinated. The killer, Esteban Rojas, puts the rifle into the hand of a mentally challenged beggar named Josafat and Josafat is arrested. But when Rojas notices that Maria the barmaid saw him come down the stairs he hypnotizes her and convinces her that he is Zorro and that he killed the commandant because he was a bad man. Later we learn that Rojas is part of a larger organization as he is chastised Magistrate Galindo for not killing Maria. Rojas has Gomez his coachman kidnap Maria and drive away with hr tied up in the coach. Zorro pursues them. Gomez jumps from the coach as the horses still charge onward through treacherous territory. Zorro reaches the back of the coach but he can’t reach the reins and so he frees Maria and jumps with her just before the coach breaks free of the horses and goes over a cliff. When Zorro returns to Los Angeles he finds Rojas has been killed and an eagle feather has been left behind by his assassin.

            Josafat was played by Charles Stevens who was publicized as being the grandson of Geronimo but he was not even Native. He perhaps got the idea from the fact that his father’s first wife was Apache. He had the same birth date as me, but 63 years earlier.

            Maria was played by Myrna Fahey. For a while she dated Joe DiMaggio and received death threats from a mentally ill person who only wanted Joltin Joe to be with Marilyn Monroe. She starred in the 60s TV series Father of the Bride. She played Blaze, a member of False Face’s gang, in two episodes of Batman.

            

Artists Must Be Outlaws

                            When freedom is outlawed only outlaws will be free – Tom Robbins

            The Artist is an Outlaw. Creativity is criminality. For art to break new ground it is necessary for artists to break the law. Old forms of art must be robbed of their valuables and murdered. Convention must be tortured and mutilated beyond recognition. It is in the nature of artists to revolt but that is never their conscious intention. It is not in trying to be disgusted with glorified mediocrity that poets find fresh forms. It is not out of sympathy with any political doctrine that artists terrorize the sleepily familiar structures, as “the poet is of no faction” (Baudelaire 20). It is because it is immoral, “to accept the standard of one’s age” (Wilde 88). Revolution in art results from artists tuning in to their rebellious natures and creating accordingly.
            Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are outlaws whose work inadvertently serves to shock their audience out of complacency. They do this by expanding into the realm of Decadence the accepted understanding of beauty and the locations in which aesthetically pleasing things can be found. Further, they challenge the belief that beauty in art is secondary to representations of morality. They offer alternative realities that cut directly against the grain of those in which society takes comfort. They rebel, each in their own way, against class distinctions that limit artistic expression. They oppose the oppression by religious law of human sensuality. They put forward the doctrine of honesty of vision. They accept mortality as a crucial aspect of beauty.
            Baudelaire portrays the grotesque as beautiful, not with the intention of jarring the reader but to jolt himself into expanding his own understanding of beauty.  He illustrates this in his poem “Une Charogne” in which he describes the “superb carcass” of a maggot clustered dog “as a flower coming into bloom” (Baudelaire 94). The allure he seeks is not inner, spiritual charm but rather an improved perception of the superficial. He searches for elegance in ugly places where “enchantment blossoms from fear of harm”. There he finds “bent and weary monsters” and urges the reader to “come love them!” (Baudelaire 341).  Wilde too harvests flowers from the grotesque, as his Dorian Gray discovers the beautiful Sibyl Vane in “a wretched hole" of a theatre "in a labyrinth of grimy streets" (Wilde 54-56). Indeed, if beauty arises from tragedy it is rendered more perfect (Wilde 40).

            Appearances are important to both Wilde and Baudelaire and each shows affinity with Théophile Gautier in this respect in being “one for whom the visible world exists” (Wilde 146) (Baudelaire 1). Because beauty is not only better than goodness (Wilde 83), it must replace it (Wilde 147) and if she is “Satan or God, who cares? Angel or Siren who cares” as long as she makes “the moments less grave and the world less repellent?” (Baudelaire 73).

            Wilde’s main method of outlawry is to play with opposites by taking conventional beliefs and arguing that the antithesis is true. He may not believe these reversals but in making them he toys with conventional wisdom to show that must not be blindly accepted. We must “test reality we must see it on the tightrope” and then “when the verities become acrobats we can judge them” (Wilde 44). Truths that cannot keep their balance prove themselves false and therefore must be deposed. When an honest person believes a lie it does not render that falsehood true (Wilde 10), and besides “the things one feels absolutely certain about are never true” (Wilde 245).  There is freedom in not knowing and it is also more conducive to learning.

            Wilde often uses characters as fifth columnists in high society that serve to tear down the temple of privileged mediocrity from within. These acts of sabotage frequently take place at dinner parties and assume the form of witty conversation between guests that lampoon the absurdity of classism without directly opposing it (Wilde 43-49).

Unlike Wilde’s Victorian Britain, post revolutionary France of the same era has no ridiculously elevated aristocracy to burlesque and so Baudelaire’s target is the far less remote bourgeoisie. As this is not so rarefied a class as English nobility they are not impenetrably barricaded and can be attacked head on. Additionally, Baudelaire’s assaults are more full and frontal because poems tend to use solitary voices that are not camouflaged by verbal intercourse and so he can address ennui personified and say, “You know him dear reader, that delicate monster / Hypocrite reader – my fellow man – my sibling" and be assured that he is reaching the bourgeoisie (Dear Reader).

            In societies where belief can influence the law, outlaw artists challenge the religious establishment and its cherished icons. Sometimes these acts of rebellion will elevate the traditional enemy of these figures to the status of worship. This is not done to establish an alternative faith but rather for the purpose of breaking down oppressive convictions. In response to the oppression of the Christian church, both Wilde and Baudelaire enthrone as heroic the figure of Satan, the ultimate outlaw of Judeo-Christian thinking because “when that high spirit, that morning star of evil fell from heaven it was as a rebel” (Wilde 215-216) In blatant mockery of the Roman Catholic mass Baudelaire composed “Les Litanies de Satan” in which he praises him as “You who know all, great king of underground things / Celebrated healer of human anguish” (Baudelaire 475).

            The Satanic figure in The Picture of Dorian Gray is Lord Henry, who is dubbed by Dorian as "Prince Paradox" (Wilde 220). Lord Henry represents the outlaw artist in the novel, as he is the voice of decadence and rebellion. Lord Henry’s satanic credentials are established at the beginning as he sits in the Eden-like setting of the artist’s studio of his friend Basil Hallward, who is symbolic of the god-creator (Wilde 1). The opening scene is a metaphor depicting the larger metaphor of Satan and God as good friends sitting in the Garden of Eden and discussing “god's” greatest creation, which is Adam in the form of his painting of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2). When we are introduced to the portrait’s model, it can be seen from the beginning that, like Adam, Dorian Gray is clay, in that he is a tabula rasa. Two works of art then come into being in the studio, as Basil effectively creates an externalized immortal soul for Dorian Gray (Wilde 243-244) while Lord Henry sculpts the mind of Dorian Gray by feeding him in the form of paradoxical statements such as “cure the soul by means of the senses and the senses by means of the soul” the fruit of good and evil. This fruit also takes the form of a book that Henry later gives to Dorian (Wilde 141-142), the description of which is uncannily similar to Joris-Karl Huysman’s À rebours, “Against the grain” (Wilde 261). This is an appropriate gift from the Satanic Lord Henry, as it becomes for Dorian his Bible of Decadence.

            Made jealous by Lord Henry of the eternal youth of Basil the creator’s painting of him, Dorian wishes for the eternal youth of his body and for his externalized soul to age instead. But not only does the painting accumulate Dorian’s years, but also his sins, as the painting becomes Dorian’s conscience (Wilde 253). The artwork becomes a reflection of Dorian’s inner darkness and so Dorian becomes a metaphor not only of the father of mankind but also of humankind itself.

            Dorian Gray is not an artist but rather a living artistic masterpiece. He has no free will to create beauty but merely becomes the slave of an appetite for it (Wilde 215). His criminality is not expressive like that of the outlaw creator but rather a form of destructive vulgarity (Wilde 242) He forgets Lord Henry’s lesson that “one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner” (Wilde 242). Those that break the law in secret are merely criminals like the murderous failed poet Pierre François Lacenaire whose dead but still-violent hand haunts him as it is described by Gautier, “With depraved curiosity / I touch it despite my disgust / that it is still stained with cruelty / this cold flesh with its down of rust // Mummified and yellow / like the hand of a pharaoh / Stretching faunlike fingers / as if temptation lingers" (Wilde 185) (Gautier 22) (Christian).

            As a living art form Dorian lasts too long. He is a style that becomes taken to the saturation point. His flaw becomes his obsession with beauty and he not only turns internally ugly to maintain it but also begins to confuse that ugliness with beauty (Wilde 165). His desire to be forever beautiful runs counter to the code of the artistic outlaw. His concentration on surface aesthetics without time limits and without change makes him the embodiment of a failed artistic genre. Dorian becomes the very thing that outlaw artists like Baudelaire and Wilde need to kill.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Translated by William Aggeler, Roy Campbell,

Geoffrey Wagner, Kenneth O. Hanson, David Paul. Creative Commons, 2008, pp. 1-341.

Christian, Christian. Translation of “Au lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire,

            University of Toronto. 2019, lines 39-40. Unpublished manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Hymne à la Beauté”. by

Charles Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 25-28. Unpublished

manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Les Litanies de Satan”. by

Charles Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 7-8. Unpublished

manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Une Charogne”. by Charles

Baudelaire, University of Toronto. 2019, lines 13-20. Unpublished manuscript.

Christian, Christian. Partial translation of “Lacenaire” by Théophile Gautier

University of Toronto. 2019, lines 5-12. Unpublished manuscript.

Gautier Théophile. Selected Lyrics. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro, Margellos World

republic of Letters, 2011, pp. 23-25. pdf.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Notes by David Wayne Thomas, Modern

Library, 2004, pp 1-261.

Une Charogne

And the sky regarded that superb carcass

as a flower coming into bloom

The stench was so strong that there on the grass

You believed that you might swoon

Flies swarmed and buzzed on its putrid belly

From which emerged dark grey brigades

Of maggots that were flowing like thin jelly

Along the threads of living rags

Les Litanies de Satan

You who know all, great king of underground things

Celebrated healer of human anguish

Hymne à la Beauté

If you’re Satan or God, who cares? Angel or Siren

Who cares, if you make, Fay with eyes of velvet,

Rhythm, perfume, glimmer, my royal sovereign!

The moments less grave and the world less repellent?

Lacenaire

With depraved curiosity / I touch it despite my disgust / that it is still stained with cruelty / this cold flesh with its down of rust // Mummified and yellow / like the hand of a pharaoh / Stretching faunlike fingers / as if temptation lingers