Blog # 88…December 2018

Christmas is coming with its usual cocktail of sentiments and behaviour: bittersweet memories of times and people long gone and sadness about the obvious gap between haves and haven’ts...over eating and drinking, forced conviviality and obligations. And yet, and yet, it’s also the season of office parties, family dinners, and other celebrations to brighten the darkness.  And it’s a reminder to communicate with people even if only an annual phone call or Christmas card.

I’ve been struck lately by how a number of features of our human condition are being explored in books, movies and on stages - addictions, depression, cancer, loneliness and alienation, all with their attendant difficulties in communication.  

Autism has had its fair share of attention with some sensitive looks at people who inhabit that world (usually on the end of the spectrum that used to be called Asbergers) hoping to promote some understanding of how they perceive and relate to the world and communicate with it and us.

Oliver Sacks introduced us to Temple Grandin in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat…if you haven’t ever read this book, rush out immediately and get it.  Temple is a scientist, famous for developing humane ways of handling livestock.  She manages her life in an unorthodox but very effective way and was played by Claire Danes in a prize winning biopic.

I haven’t seen The Rain Man, but I did read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon (then saw the play) and was highly amused by The Rosie Project by Australian writer Graeme Simsion. Both books successfully placed the reader in the position of a person with difficulties interpreting and responding to their surroundings and were executed with great humour, affection and respect.

People with autism may seem as if they’re not interested in connecting with others, but some of their apparently unsociable behavior may be when they’re trying hardest to engage. They may look as if they’re not paying attention because it’s difficult to concentrate on what someone’s saying while also making eye contact. 

Not expecting the usual social conventions and accepting behavior that may seem a bit bizarre and difficult to read can open us to the possibility that people may be trying in their own way to connect.  And that’s not only people on the autism spectrum…how about trying to meet people half way? Words I’m trying to live by in this season of good cheer.

A very happy holiday season  to you and yours dear readers, see you in 2019.

Blog # 87…November 2018

Our hands are fascinating... what they represent and what they can do.  The Current had a piece a while ago on the function of hands and how robotics are being developed to replace that function…hmmmm, not so fast.

Will they be able to fashion something with the grace of Rodin?
Will they be able to replicate a mother's touch on a child's brow?
Or know the right pressure to lift a feather or a bowling ball?

Our hands are our most personal interface with the world and with our bodies. We caress our children and our lovers, pat our animals, bathe and scratch ourselves. We sew, paint, cook, drive, hold a tennis racquet, a hand of bridge or raise a bottle of beer to our lips. Walking has always been a huge priority in rehabilitation after illness or injuries, but for me, getting hands to work is the big thing and an incredible work of art.

Think of how often we say hands…hands up, or down, hand held, give me a hand, hand it over, hand made, tip your hand, hand over hand , put your hands together,  hand to mouth, hands across the ocean - next time conversation flags at a dinner party, suggest finding expressions containing hands.

Poet Robert Priest devotes a 1998 collection called The Mad Hand to “plaster the propaganda together into mad tirades of affection…reactivate old hopes…sending out these bleeps with love…hoping for the best.”  Thirty years later, these words resonate on many levels. I remember meeting Robert playing the guitar with a bandaged hand from an industrial accident - there are two poems about this in the collection. Attacks on people in the press who use language to keep us informed, the confusing proliferation of language online and a general loss of interest in precise and beautiful language in the public sphere makes me hugely grateful to people like Robert, guardians of our tongues.

I also  have memories of my colleague therapists in the Hand Program at Toronto Western who performed miracles instilling function into reconstructed hands, and helped people accept the new hand that did the work but seemed a foreign part of their body. One of them told me patients often came in holding the reconstucted hand out in front as if it were an object on a platter. 

Modern medicine with all its technical wizardry poses some large questions about altering the human body…where’s the point in the process where we lose our essence of humanity?  Words help us explore and make sense of our world, let's not lose them either.

Blog # 86…October 2018

I just returned from Washington where I saw a t-shirt that read Make America Kind Again. I’m sure I'm not the only one finding the world a more turbulent and meaner place than usual.  The social stability in the US seems seriously damaged and, as well as sharing the continent, we suffer some overflow through the insistence of CNN.   So much to catch our attention and raise our anxiety level.

I was particularly attracted to a couple of recent newspaper headlines (I still prefer to digest material that way) Maybe Girls Will Save Us, and Two Cheers for Feminism.  I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about boys lately and intending to explore their world. Now it seems more interesting to look at both girls and boys and how the stories children read and hear give them hints, maybe even rules, about who they are and will be and how they’ll make their way in the world and change ours.

Although, up to a certain point, both boys and girls seem to express themselves pretty equally (allowing for personalities and situations) at some point most girls are encouraged to express their emotions - and focus on their appearance - by stories and what they see in the world around them. Rage Becomes Her, and Good and Mad have both appeared in the past few weeks, giving us a picture of women’s anger, how difficult it is to express, how it’s interpreted and the conflicted reception it receives. Girls (and women) face pressure to be popular, pretty and successful, in a system that still discriminates against their ambitions - lots to be angry about.

A couple of months ago, a piece by Rachel Giese in the Globe and Mail read Fears for Tears, referring to her book Boys: What it means to Become a Man.   The pressure for males not to show emotion in public is crushing and the roles they're assigned limiting.  As they grow up, boys get stories of action and the value of physical strength, not much about the consequence of their actions or encouragement to look at the future... I sometimes wonder if re-introducing some of the primitive rituals of entering manhood might be healthier than the drinking games that have taken their place with many teenagers.

Snakes and snails and puppy dogs tails … sugar and spice and everything nice - time we left those images behind; neither captures the complexity of kids’ identity or equips them for the world they’re entering. We’re all being confronted with shifting images of gender identity – our own and others. I’ve been in many discussions, you probably have too, about the relative influence of genetics and environment, as if either nature or nurture were more important...not that simple is it?  Roles are shifting too, women are working at all kinds of jobs, men are taking care of households and children.  But, in general, we’re still stuck in some old notions of what males and females should look, act and sound like. An uneasiness with change pervades us at the same time as we welcome it. Some people handle it better than others...in general we prefer predictability, uncertainty can make us mad as well as uncomfortable.

So, what’s my point here?  Stories are important. People are different. Listen to each other and be open to differences. Don't just think binary in any realm. Take a deep breath rather than leaning on the horn. Take a screen holiday.  Don’t be afraid of your anger if you’re a woman, or to be tender if you’re a man.  Keep calm and carry on.

I wish I’d bought that t-shirt

Blog # 85…September, 2018

“A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness”  Opening words of  Bonjour Tristesse, which I read first when Francoise Sagan and I were both 18.  They’ve lingered with me all these years and capture what I usually feel at the change of seasons - particularly summer to fall - a strange melancholy.  It often takes the form of missing people and looking for ways to keep them in my thoughts. 

Priscila Uppal, Canadian poet, novelist, teacher and brilliant spirit died a couple of weeks ago, on my birthday. Her first novel The Divine Economy of Salvation and Winter Sport, the collection of poems written during her time as poet –in-residence at the Vancouver Olympics are two of my most precious  volumes.  Priscila and I met a number of times, at book launches, hers and others, at several readings she did in my Canada Council series, and most delicious of all we used to meet in the locker room of the Athletic Centre where I swim and she took diving lessons. We had many of those spontaneous conversations that undressing seems to provoke…about art and exercise and sport and other things that struck us at the moment. I value that connection enormously and am grateful for the memories that her work evoke.

On August 25^th this year Leonard Bernstein would have turned 100 and although he died almost 20 years ago, his presence is still, well present.  An inspired composer and conductor, he could knock off a Broadway tune as well as a funeral mass for JFK;  conduct Brahms as well as Berlin.  I was lucky enough this summer to see a film featuring The Royal Ballet performing to three of his  very different compositions. The middle one The Age of Anxiety, based on WH Auden’s long poem, not only was a fore runner to West Side Story, but captured the angst of the day as well as of the composer.

The most difficult part of aging for me is the death of people I care about, whether they are public or private figures. In those internal conversations I have in the middle of the night, I remind myself of two things…to pay attention to present friends and relish their company, and to appreciate the creations of artists who have given us their work to enjoy.

See you next month

Blog # 84…August 2018

Museums connect us with the past: dinosaurs, native artifacts, Egyptian mummies - all fascinating glimpses of what the world was like before we arrived.   Increasingly, they also interpret our present with displays of fashion, media stars and social issues. Right now, a small gallery just inside the front door of the Royal Ontario Museum looks at the role of museums in the issue of artists and sexual harassment, called, predictably, #MeToo and The Arts.

Last Fall, at the Met Breuer in NYC a performance was staged by Jaishiri Abichandani at Raghubir Singh’s show Modernism on the Ganges. Abichandani alleged that Singh sexually abused her when she travelled with him as a young student of photography in the 90’s. Singh, who died in 1999, pioneered the form of colour street photography and a show of his work opened at the ROM on July 21.  Comments on his show and the demonstration at the Met Breuer form part of the content of #MeToo and The Arts at the ROM.

What should be done about the work of artists accused of sexual abuse reaches across all fields...should books be removed from libraries, films from festivals, canvasses taken down?  It resonates a bit with the issue of statues of Sir John A McDonald and other tarnished heroes who abused power. 

Should we remove the reminder of harmful acts from our past or use them as painful memories that make us consider present actions and shift thinking.  The Jews value Yad Vashem as a memorial to victims of the holocaust, honouring Jews who fought the oppression of the Nazis and the Gentiles who aided and protected them.

Our ability to forgive but not forget is complicated and individual, depending on how directly we've been affected. I'm always amazed by Izzeldin Abuelaish's ability to write I Shall Not Hate after the murder of his three children in the Israeli  invasion of Gaza.

There's also a continuum of offences...easier to forgive Al Franken than Harvey Weiinstein. 
I recently saw An Ideal Husband, apparently Oscar Wilde's favourite play.  It's about a wife forgiving a husband's secret... Wilde knew all about that.

Social media has gingered up feelings, getting the information out to us which is important, but often presenting it in a black and white, unconsidered form.  It's not that simple to line up villains and victims. Pointing fingers distracts us from focusing our energy in the right direction...and finding that direction isn't simple either.

News just broke of a noted feminist scholar being found guilty of sexual abuse of a male graduate student. Making the situation  slightly more complicated - the man is gay and married to a man, the woman is lesbian. It points out that there are challenges for all of us, feminists or not, male, female, gay straight or trans, old, young, whatever colour or income level, well you get my drift. We're all together in this struggle to make sense of life. 

I've just finished a wonderful book by Swedish physician and professor of international health Hans Rosling called Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. It's an interesting and important read, helped me on the road to looking at the world with more understanding and less anxiety and hopelessness. And that includes what I began with - art, artists and museums, Things are bad in many places, power differentials exist, but at least there is some movement towards looking. seeing and talking.

See you in September...

Blog # 83…July 2018

National Gallery

I’d never given much thought to Ottawa except as it appears in  some political context in the news…until I started going regularly about 10 years ago to visit a friend who relocated there. I was pleasantly surprised to find a transformation in the city. It now looks and feels like the capital of the country, representing us culturally as well as politically…not to mention in our national sport !

War Museum

Museum of History

 Three prominent galleries downtown, all cleverly placed on the river, are the works of Canadian architects: Moishe Safdie,  Richard Cardinal and Raymond Moriyama.  (Congratulations if you know which is which, if you don't, Google immediately.) All three have generous collections of indigenous art, proudly placed front and centre along with art from around the world.                   

There’s a new jewel in the city's crown with the recently opened Ottawa Art Gallery.  On the site of the former smaller gallery, it's a smooth blend of old and new, cultural and commercial.  The tower on the right features a small restaurant and display area connected to the gallery with a boutique hotel and condo development above. Next door, a marble staircase from the Firestone mansion in Rockcliffe takes visitors up to the second floor of the gallery (known affectionately as The Cube) where a home has been created for the family's collection of Canadian art. Space has been assigned for special exhibitions and for buying and selling art, workshops for kids and adults and for films, lectures, and classrooms for the University of Ottawa's theatre program. As with the other galleries, there are wonderful views of Ottawa to be had from several terraces and rooftops that serve as space for events or just a moment's rest to reflect.  On a wall beside of one of these views was an invitation to post responses to the question "If your life was a story, what would the title be?"  My favourite was "At least I tried."...words to live by.

Another recently opened and cleverly conceived space is the Wabano Meeting and Event Centre, available for rental and which can accommodate meetings and events from a dozen to several hundred people.  Rooms are simply decorated with aboriginal themes and equipped with the latest technology. The facility capitalizes subtly and effectively on the interest in approaching and understanding aboriginal culture and heritage that emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation committee. Since much of the Parliament Building space is undergoing a long term renovation,, creating space for meetings large and small is smart in practical terms as well.

Grand Gathering Space

So, next time you're in the market for a holiday and don't want to venture south of the border, think of our nation's capital, it's something to make us proud.

See you in August.

Blog # 82…June 2018

Yayoi Kusama’s blockbuster Infinity Mirrors at the AGO recently had everyone agog and lining up to scoot through the Infinity Mirrored Room. I didn’t get there, maybe you didn’t either, and too bad for us.  Luckily, we’ve got YouTube, where we can get a taste of her and her work from the comfort of our couches.  Not the same I know, but cheaper and more comfortable.

Known as the Princess of Polka dots, Yayio was born in 1928 in Matsumoto, Japan. She grew up in a repressive and controlling atmosphere, training in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga.  Art was her saviour, a world that she could control, and she turned her hallucinations into visual images. As with many artists whose work inspires the dismissive …”I (or my kid) could do that”...Yayio’s art is based on a strong foundation of skill in technique, colour, shape and form that comes from an early training and discipline.

Moving to New York in 1958, she quickly joined the group of avant-garde artists who were emerging and creating pop art in painting, music, film and fashion - hanging out with Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol. She was daringly experimental during the sixties, staging several memorable performances involving naked people painted with brightly coloured polka dots.  Her art is complex, both whimsical and dark. She uses the dots to explore the infinity of the universe and the  spherical objects that surround us...the earth, moon and stars, ovaries, baseballs, oranges  - maybe that explains my fondness for ellipses...

 

In the seventies, she returned to Japan, seriously ill and in 1977, checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she’s  chosen to live ever since.  She goes daily to her nearby studio and has produced a large body of work, including several novels and Japan’s contributions to the biennales in Venice in 1993 and Singapore in 2006   Her autobiography Infinity Net was published in 2003 and her life and art are viewable on a number of screens (back to YouTube) most recently (2008) Kusama: Infinity.   

I’ve just scratched the surface of this fascinating artist (who was completely unknown to me before the AGO show). But her work and her life bring up thoughts of the connection and interplay between art and mental illness.  Just like all people who smoke marijuana don’t go on to be heroin addicts - remember that? - all people with mental illness don’t have artistic talents (although it demands a huge amount of creativity to get through their daily lives…but we'll leave that for another time).  The expanded visions, looser boundaries and frenetic energy that often accompany mental illness, as well as being intolerably painful to experience, can lead to amazing results.


See you in July.

Blog # 81…May, 2018

Sports are always in the news one way or another. As well as providing inspiration and diversion for many of us and career opportunities for a few, sports are now being credited with promoting world peace.  Ping pong diplomacy thawed relations between the US and China in the 70’s. Rapprochement on the Korean peninsula began in PyeongChang earlier this year with the athletes from the North and the South marching together in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics under a united flag.

I’d never thought much about sports' connection to art until I read Priscila Uppal’s wonderful collection of poems Winter  Sport published in 2010 after she’d been poet –in-residence at the BC winter Olympics...featured in Blog # 7…March 2011. The two worlds seem to be radically different but both involve passion, precision and practice with a focus on reaching that personal best.

There’s a certain aesthetic in the form of a swimmer going through the water or the grace of a high jumper clearing the pole. The Globe and Mail’s new format includes on Saturday a double page of the week’s top sports photos, some of which are breathtaking.

And I've happened to read a couple of  novels recently that have sport as their focus and it got me thinking that art and sport really do inhabit the same realm in different ways. Sergio de la Pava’s Lost Empress gives us a backstage glimpse at big league teams and their obscene wealth, exploring the world they inhabit and the lives and systems they impact.  I’m not much of a fan of anything but baseball, but am always interested in a good story and in entering terra incognita.

In 2015, Lawrence Hill wrote The Illegal, about a refugee who literally runs from persecution in his native country. He goes on to become a successful but underground marathon winner in the country where he lands.  His internal life is a moving tale of someone who can never run fast enough or far enough to escape his past, another unknown world and a good story.

From Priscila's poem about the courage of Joannie Rochette who skated to a bronze medal just days after her mother died, all along the line to the scenes of the crass manipulations of professional team owners in Lost Empresse, sports run the gamut.  Don't get me started on performance enhancing substances!

See you in June, let's think about how to understand what's going on with young men these days.

Blog # 80…April 2018

I realized as I started number 80 that I’m a blogaholic.  As each month rolls along, my compulsion to post takes over… always something to explore in the art that surrounds us.

We’re constantly being challenged to broaden our notions of what’s usual, normal or acceptable in the human condition in general and gender in particular.  How we respond to the challenges depends on our situation - whether and how we’re exposed to people who are different from us.  Thirty years ago we began to see stories of homosexuals presented in books and films and our friends, brothers, daughters and even our mothers had the courage to come out.  Still not easy, as you’ll find out if you go to see Love, Simon, a touching film about a gay high school boy…but coming out is only the beginning, being out is where it gets really hard. Supportive communities are in place in large centres, but small towns are still tough going.

In turn, the world of people with other different expressions of gender is beginning to become more open and very gradually more understood and accepted.  Again, books and film help to open our eyes to the humanity and struggles of individuals and of the people who love them.

Annabel, Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel introduces us to an intersex child born in the 60’s in a remote community in Newfoundland.  We feel the challenges of growing up unique, with parents who had opposing views of which gender should be assigned.  It’s a masculine world with a stoic father who traps for a living, wants a son and calls the child Wayne.  She's Annabel to his fanciful mother when they’re alone, dressing up and dreaming of sequined bathing suits and synchronized swimming. Leaving for the broader world outside opens the search for ways to exist on her own terms.

In his latest film, Chilean director Sebastian Lelio introduces us to Marina, a transgender singer who has formed a loving relationship with an older man.  When the man dies, his family members scorn her and refuse to let her attend his funeral.  A Fantastic Woman is the film’s title as well as a perfect description of Marina.

Mchelle Alfano shares her story of welcoming a long awaited daughter in The Unfinished Dollhouse. Longing for a daughter and looking forward to building a dollhouse together, Michelle begins a troubled trip into motherhood with a premature birth and a vulnerable baby who survives and develops into a bright lively child. Until…a dark depression with confusion, anxiety and refusal to get out of bed culminates in Frankie’s revelation that she’s gay, a step on the road to realizing that she’s trans. Michelle’s compassionate and heartbreaking reaction to her daughter - now son’s – situation combines her emotional and intellectual responses with a candour and courage that will touch all parents, everyone for that matter.

Gender, parenting and relationships all offer us unique experiences with some common elements.  They are also ongoing and immensely complex and complicated.  Artists can help us enter stories that support our understanding of the world around us…it’s up to us to listen.

I’m also a swimaholic and on this International Day of Diversity, as I leave for the pool, here are some words to live by, from me and from Oscar Wilde…”Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

Blog # 79…March 2018

The world’s shifting population has ramped up in the past few years and it’s provided rich material for art forms to capture in fiction, film and theatre. 

And music…Safe Haven was a recent presentation by Tafelmusik, the baroque orchestra that performs at Trinity St Paul’s Centre in Toronto on instruments authentic to the period. Music has a way of conveying emotions that words on their own simply cannot. The concert offered some surprising revelations and changed our ways of hearing Bach, Vivaldi and Corelli amongst others.Threads of narrative were woven with music with a focus on the stories of refugee artists throughout history and the cross pollination that resulted.  

Here in Canada we've had the luxury of welcoming immigrants in a measured and somewhat controlled way.  Not so in some of the European countries, who've experienced sudden, overwhelming arrivals by water and on foot. Our eyes and hearts have been shocked by news photos of bodies lying on beaches and throngs of people hanging off the sides of small, unseaworthy looking objects.  A recent film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki – The Other Side of Hope takes us backstage in scenes where local Finns struggle with an influx of migrants, who look, speak and behave in alarmingly unfamiliar ways.  Despite Kaurismaki’s usual critical and unromantic look at his country and fellow citizens, he manages to represent the viewpoint and position of everyone in this film, - Finns, long term immigrants and recent migrants with clarity and humour.  At times they all warrant our attention, understanding, compassion and affection.

A number of novelists around the world have tackled migrants’ stories in their work, but the one that moved me and has stuck in my thoughts was a short story in The New Yorker many years ago.  An elderly woman had been brought from India to live with her son, his US born wife and their two children a few years after the death of her husband.  She had been happy enough in her village, but her son thought she must be lonely, so brought her to his large suburban house in California. Although she missed her friends and didn't speak English, she loved to clean, do the laundry and cook...only thing was, the neighbours objected when she hung the wash out in the garden, the family complained when she moved their things to clean...and they preferred pizza and burgers to her biryanis.

I often think of that woman, even if she was fictional, as we work to support our family from Iraq who arrived last July. Hiyam cooked us a wonderful middle eastern dinner last week for International Women's Day. We love her biryani, kubba and pomegranate salad ...and as we struggle to help her and her family adjust to life here, wonder if we're getting it right.

Blog# 78…February 2018

Figures of Sleep, on now at the U of T Art Gallery, caught my attention recently.  Hidden away just to the east of Hart House, the space is a little jewel -  always presenting something interesting, in a range of media.  Shows are small, vary in theme and span eras, sometimes featuring Canadian artists, but with an international focus. A coup about a year ago was to host the opening of  Shame and Prejudice, Kent Monkman’s show that was beginning a cross- Canada tour to celebrate our 150th birthday. 

I don’t know about you, but there’s not much I long for more than a good sleep.  It’s a frequent topic of endless books and pieces in newspapers, magazines and on TV and, since I’m a pretty regular insomniac, I was curious to see what artists would make of it. “Is sleep in crisis?” was the opening line of the show’s catalogue, setting the tone for the notion that sleep has evolved into less a peaceful repose than an evasive and erratic state.  

Contemporary art takes some work on the viewers’ part (something to fill those fitful nights) and I wasn’t disappointed. The artists have "adopted the motif of sleep as a cipher for...urgent cultural concerns." This show is as elusive as sleep itself, ragged and harsh rather than dreamy and soft .

Right in front of me as I walked in was a large image of a woman lying in a leaf-littered park. Titled Meet to Sleep, it represents women in India who met and slept in parks to protest the violence that made them unsafe in public. At the other end of the gallery, with a similar image and theme, Dream Catcher,  Rebecca Belmore’s unsettling tapestry shows an unconscious indigenous woman wrapped in a blanket stretched out on a sidewalk - a traditional medium startles us with a contemporary subject. 

Ron Muek, a German artist, has modeled a tiny and very realistic old woman curled up asleep in bed. It's from our National Gallery collection and she looks so cozy and relaxed, we can almost see her breathing and feel her comfort. She reminds us of  a baby....
or is she dead?




In Time Clock Piece, Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh took pictures of himself every hour for a year, starting with a  shaved head and finishing with a long bob.   The photos are speeded up to create the frenetic sleeplessness that he must have endured to create the work.                     


From the Vancouver Art Gallery,  Rodney Graham's Halcion Sleep is a compelling continuing video of a man stretched out across the back seat of a moving car. Asleep after a dose of halcion, he was moved to the car, then to his apartment where he slept for a further 8 hours. 

The show runs til March 4^th.   If you’re in the mood and the vicinity, you might want to see it, but don't expect it to give you sweet dreams.

Blog # 77 …January 2018

Welcome to 2018 and whatever ups and downs it brings us.   As I was wondering how to start the new year blog, I saw a production of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of no Importance and decided to weigh in on what‘s going on in that department…women and their importance. We’ve been inundated with hash tags the past few months... MeToo and now MeToo, NowWhat? TimesUp and from the guys - JustListen. Women all over the world walked last week-end to call attention to the crap deal they’ve been dealt - whether their personal issue was sexual harassment or racial justice, workplace fairness or pay equity, reproductive freedom, migrants’ rights or the whole mess together.

I first met Oscar Wilde in 1957 on the pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray and have re-visited him from time to time as I turn to books to find some sense in life.  “Mere words! Was there ever anything so real as words?” And, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” Still words to live by.

The themes in the play (written over a century ago) are still with us - how women are admired, feared, valued and despised, sometimes all at once. We’re still in a state of moral complexity and need to retreat from a black/white, good/bad stance and get comfortable with ambiguity; it seems to be here to stay. It’s some of the status quo that needs to change.

A few days later I heard a promo for a doc called Mummy Wildest, about females in the animal world - did you know that elephant societies value grandmothers most because they remember where the water holes are?  Another item reported that elder abuse in care homes had doubled in the past decade. Then I heard a centre for philanthropy announce a study that found qualities like empathy and generosity have declined markedly in the past dozen years.   In the UK, Theresa May announced a Ministry of Loneliness…see any connections here?

What to do…how to proceed in the never ending quest for justice and equality.  One specific thing,  in the interests of leveling the playing field, is supporting women running for public office.  I have immense sympathy for all women suffering workplace harassment, but women in politics have an extra dose, with death threats often thrown in and sometimes carried out. We need to keep our eyes open for that and stand with them. We can elect some wonderful women to decision making roles, some mediocre ones too, just like it is with the guys.

Although it was a bit predictable and got a laugh, I flinched at Wilde’s last line in the play “He is a man of no importance” Men are in a precarious state and we need to move to a more nuanced position, we’re all important - to ourselves and to each other.