While for the generals Montcalm and Wolfe, "Québéc Citadel" might have connoted heavy artillery, my own scaling of the QC cliffs this past December involved strictly the shorter spelling of "Canon".

I hate everything touristy, so when I find myself for a few days, a tourist with a camera, I feel the need to justify my presence on another’s turf by bringing something to the table: starting a local conversation; transcending the jolly street buskers; creating something witty. Pretentious? Yes, of course… But consider, for a moment, what I have spied (with my little eye).

Contemporary iron serves the interests of economic growth, through construction of attractive railings, along walkways that lead to shops where money will be spent. Yes, I did buy an apple-cinnamon beavertail. And while it’s indeed jolly, to be entertained by these fine institutions of gemshops and minor basilicas, these guns and excavators remind me that cold weather isn’t half as bad as getting your head blown off.

It is in that light, that I am inspired by Isaiah:

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. – Isaiah 2:4

My question, for the new year, then is this: What, exactly needs to be beaten into what, these days?

Whether or not I did my dishes well,
the microsopic remnants of yesterday’s fair
may well mingle with tonight’s risotto
adding to it such palimpsestuous character
as that which appears daily on my the house whiteboard,
whose time tested usage continually resists our efforts
to scrape (clean & use) again.

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When candle-light cavorts through wine’s red iridescence and frolics on the clean white whimsy of ironed purity, the question "shadow or reflection?" only has fresh luster when for this particular audience, the notion is novelty.

But tonight it is the carefree meandering of a an unsung moon – one but a few days post-harvest – that catches my weary eye.

Here are shadows and reflections worth getting out of bed to capture: armies of photons have arranged themselves pleasantly in compositions of nature and culture. They have invented themselves, and I have merely marveled.

Of intangible questioning there is enough. Your metaphysic must defer to light’s evasive duality. But I defer to a Trinity whose evasiveness lasts only as long as one’s doubt.

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When I discovered (several weeks after having constructed this mound of milkweed and earth at Wasaga Beach) that the milkweed plant springs forth from a rhizome…. well that changed everything.

The rhizome first intrigued me when Mark Cote assigned a few excerpts from A Thousand Plateaus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1987) for reading in our "Philosophy of Computing" class at McMaster. Of course I’m not really a critical scholar, and I don’t really care to read all 800 pages (of which one reviewer remarked "There’s enough postmodern nonsense in this book to start a cult. Which, sadly, has happed").

Mostly, I just liked the idea that you could make a model of culture, especially of postmodern culture. Actually, the model doesn’t require any making – rhizomes have been around a lot longer than D&G’s collective intellect – but I give them a lot of credit for noticing these similarities in natural and cultural structure.

I too, enjoy discovering such models, and am in the middle of a process at he end of which I hope to have such a model for the theme of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. Those are pretty cosmic terms, and so they demand a lot of meshing of ideas; I think my current mode of meshing owes a great deal to D&G. Like me, they were also interested in trees, as a kind of counterpoint to the rhizome. (e.g. trees are hierarchical, and rhizomes are a distributed mesh). Since having apprehended the power of these images, I have assumed a kind of structural tension between the rhizomatic and the arborescent in almost all of my artworks.

And now I’m going to paraquote something heavy from Wiki:
"As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the originary source of "things" and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those "things." "A rhizome, on the other hand, "ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles." Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis."

…so…

In this particular beach sculpture, there is an apparent (central) genesis, which implies that the spiral is only partial. But in principal, my sculpture does have (rhizomatic, free-flowing) spirality, as opposed to (arborescent, dualistic) linearity.

Suffice to say that milkweed and the spiral share some philosophical common ground.

–

At a later date, I’ll delve into the crazy beautiful paradoxes that this presents when meshed with my Christian faith. But for now this post has already sprouted enough branches.

Translated from the dutch, this phrase means "persevere, boy!"

For me it carried particular weight as a child, when dad was encouraging me either to clean up my room, or when school was a drag. It had a ring of urgency (the consequence of slacking off was a pain in the ass, if you know what I mean).

But the discipline was loving, and eventually, loved.

These days, self employed and flying solo, I have to invent other ways to stay motivated. Since masochism doesn’t cut it for me, I am trying to find ways to live mind-over matter, or more accurately soul-over-body.

Coffee is a good start, as is the meditative sound of Taize, directing the soul to a space of focus: on God but then consequently also on the task at hand.

May you all be encouraged by this bit of generational wisdom to persevere this September and beyond, each of your callings.

Shalom.

H

Stretch out your limbs to where the light is and you just might graze (in a subtler sense) Swiss grass as do the bell-bearing bovines below.

Said the Leman tree to the alps: "the peaks that millennia of tectonics and erosion have produced for you are akin to decades of flowing springs and summers evoking on my limbs these green extremities"

And the mountains replied, slowly, nervously, tentatively: "sister, will you teach me how to dance?"

On Sunday evening I attended a concert performance, put on by the Reformed String Camp, in which children from all over the country gathered together to showcase a week’s learning and practicing. I was impressed by their collective spirit, doubtless spurred on by the energy and enthusiasm of their conductors, Kent and Roxy. I came into the evening with dark brooding intellectual heaviness dragging on my heart, and left the evening refreshed, and with a rather expressive doodle on my hands. The piece releases some of my own pent-up energies (I haven’t completed a major piece in at least 4 months).

Speaking of Camps, there are always camps at war, and so my hope is that my present journey will yet conclude its meandering with something epic; something that aims to reconcile. Let’s just say Eden and Zion is evolving in my heart and mind, into something along the lines of new boundaries. But I’m afraid that if further clarity is desired, then for that we shall all have to wait a while longer.

I’m gearing up for a few days at Awenda Provincial Park, and then I’m off to Vienna, where I’ll be working with ICASO as Communications Support.

I will then be back in Canada, in time for a (final) week of camp with teenagers in Markdale.

It strikes me that Mandelbrot’s maxim might just as easily apply in a moral sense. When we maintain discipline (in any discipline), wonderous flowers emerge: such flowers as the mothers and fathers who give endlessly of themselves for 20 years in order to raise a child. Such flowers as the pianist who practices for 10,000 hours to attain concert-level mastery. The theme here is a constancy of service to others. And isn’t that a rather spiritual engagement? You might say that the Golden rule is the simple equation that sparks it all. Insofar as "Do unto others" is akin to Mandelbrot’s "zn+1 = zn2 + c", the intricacies sparked by goodwill maintain a mathematical majesty.

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Yesterday a man with a gas-powered steel-brushed broom
cleaned the slab of concrete that we call our parking lot.

The trees spent the evening weeping over the noise,
and now a fresh accumulation of blossoms
makes the raw power of machinery seem petty.

I, however, will aim to use my blender symbolically.

I have an itch to explore the tension
between metal and mush,
between blossom and brutality,
between garden and city.

Osterizer has answered the call.

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Confederation Park, Stoney Creek: the edge of earth and water, the place where (of late) creative juices flow, the site of a (closed-for-the-season) campground office, whose dusk-light glow is accented by the shadow of a gas meter, weeds, and an intriguing sticker.

So… about those Reformed doctrinal standards…

"God’s providence is His almighty and ever present power, whereby, as with His hand, He still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come to us not by chance but by His fatherly hand."
… Heidelberg Catechism, 1563

This being one of the many platitudes I had to memorize as a child, it has left an indelible mark on the way I interpret this sticker.

… And now for another exegesis, this one by the Hamilton Police Service:

Operation Provident assists businesses with advice about the protection of property and in identifying various objects in case of theft.

Using this system, a business will be allotted a unique sequential number. Simply contact your police for information on joining Operation Provident and a number will be assigned along with information on program implementation.

This national numbering system will assist any police officer in the country to quickly determine the ownership of recovered property through the police computer system.

A provident number is issued to the firm and a record of this along with the firm’s name is kept in the computer file for easy identification.

Metal items can be marked with etching equipment, which may be borrowed from the Community Policing Centres.