Category Archives: journal archive

Just because it’s 20/20 doesn’t mean you’ll like what you see

Like all new years, 2020 started with a bang and joy and a sense of wellbeing as we collectively looked towards the future. Most years tend to disappoint somewhat, tend not to live up to our unrealistic expectations, but 2020 has gone well beyond the normal range of let down. I hesitate to reuse the overused word “unprecedented,” because it’s simply not true. Humanity has lived through similar periods of plague and come out the other side—albeit with greatly reduced population. Even before we clearly understood disease transmission or public health or had vaccines, we still muddled through, and I have no doubt that we’ll muddle through again this time.

Every day we’re saturated with numbers: the number of new transmissions, the number of cases in hospital; the number of deaths. But the numbers don’t accurately reflect the human cost to those who’ve succumbed to the disease or their families or their healthcare workers. (Check out Kathryn’s November 22 “How it started; How it’s going” pics to see the toll on nurses.) The power of this disease is that it’s underscored the seriousness of social issues that were already there, bubbling just below the surface of our communities.

For-profit long-term care homes have been exposed for what they are: profit-centres that prey on some of society’s most vulnerable, optimizing stock values by minimizing supplies and staff. And that staff is only part of the frontline we consistently undervalue and underpay. Grocery store and other food chain workers, janitors and garbage collectors, postal workers and couriers, and a plethora of others we consistently take for granted—the invisible workforce that keeps us all going. These are jobs often taken by those in our society who are already disenfranchised by lack of education or racial discrimination or grinding generational poverty. These are often labourers with the least financial resilience and highest vulnerability in the face of sudden catastrophic change, those most likely to find themselves on the street this winter. We’re all feeling it, but the load is not equitably shared.

Even for those of us fortunate enough to have adequate housing and food, the stress of the pandemic and lockdown are apparent. Lack of social interaction has a price; hopping on a Zoom call just isn’t the same as having a physical encounter. Not much wonder mental health concerns have skyrocketed and substance use/abuse is way up. The physical and mental threats are ever-present wolves at the door.

As a teacher, I’ve witnessed students struggling with illness or anxiety about diagnosis or family illness and loss. Although I’m working safely from home, I’m still aware of the psycho-emotional toll this situation brings. I look forward to the day we can meet in person—but I’m not in any hurry. I look forward to the new year, to 2021, and the hope a new year always brings, but I won’t be the first out the door.     

Stay well. Stay safe. Looking forward to a bright new future—one that propels us forward through treacherous waters and out the other side with renewed relationships and advanced hope and a clearer sense of what’s important in our lives. Sending love and light to all.

© Catherine Jenkins 2020 all rights reserved

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Florence (the city, not my aunt)

While there’s no doubt that Florence is a heavily touristed destination (Ciao. Selfie stick?), it’s still an exceptional city. I had my first taste last fall, and this is the first chance I’ve had to write about it.

Florence’s most recognizable attraction is the Duomo di Firenze, also known as the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Saint Mary of the Flower). Although I’d seen dozens of photographs, I wasn’t prepared for the shear magnitude of this building, nor its architectural intricacy. It seems to have its own gravitational pull; no matter where you are or where you’re walking, somehow one always ends up on a path around this monumental structure.

I tend to do a lot of walking when I’m travelling, and so I tend to focus on architecture; however, on this trip I also spent time in galleries I’ve been wanting to see my whole life: the Uffizi and the Bargello. The Uffizi contains paintings that are familiar to most, even if one has never travelled to Florence; the Bargello contains statues I remember from my high school art history text. It’s a good idea to get tickets in advance, as these galleries attract crowds, especially during tourist season.

In the Piazza della Signoria, near the Uffizi entrance, is the Loggia della Signoria, containing numerous amazing statues. It’s best to go early to allow entrance into this free outdoor exhibit. This is also the square where Girolamo Savonarola held his bonfires of the vanities, burning books and other apparently sinful objects. It’s also where he himself was thoroughly executed in 1498.

Michelangelo’s David is synonymous with Florence. A copy of the original stands on top of the hill in the Piazzale Michelangelo, affording views of Florence from the less touristy side of the Arno. Another copy is situated outside the Palazzo Vecchio in the statue’s original position, near the Uffuzi. The original in the dell’Accademia is worth the effort to see (although beyond the Michelangelo gallery, I found little else of interest). The level of detail is exquisite and compelling.

I loved Florence, in spite of the tourists. I went in the fall, off peak season, so I can’t imagine what it would be like in the summer.

©Catherine Jenkins 2018 all rights reserved

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My Less-tech Experiment

I’ve been doing this (very informal) social experiment for the last six months. My cell phone died—again—except this time I couldn’t find a replacement battery. So I decided to go without for a while, just to see what that was like. Overall, it’s been very liberating. I feel lighter. I still have a landline (old school, I know), as well as e-mail and limited social media, so it’s not like I’ve vapourized completely. It’s just that for some periods each day, I’m less readily available. Given that I’m teaching some part of most days, I can’t have my cell phone on anyway.

I hate the sound of it ringing, and I hate vibrate mode even more, so most of the time I’ve carried a phone, it’s been completely muted. I check it when I think of it, and that’s been a much better way for me to relate to a cell phone. In the last six months, there’ve only been three times when having a cell phone would’ve been convenient. I’ve also noticed, however, that some of my friends, especially some of my younger friends, are less inclined to get in touch now that they can’t text me. Texting has clearly superseded phone conversation, although verbal communication is often more efficient. I find tech services in Canada outrageously priced for the use I get out of them, so I’ve also enjoyed the savings.

This less-tech experiment also caused me to ponder my relationship with cell phones, as well as when and why that relationship started. After about three months without, I remembered that I got my first cell phone when my Dad was dying. I was freelancing and often out of reach of my home phone, but I knew that at some point I’d get a call and that I’d need to get somewhere. A cell phone made a lot of sense for the kind of urgency I was experiencing. I kept it through my Mum’s similar fate. And then I had it, so I kept it. But now I’ve realized that because my introduction to cell phones was surrounded by anxiety and hypervigilance, these emotions have impacted my relationship with this technology.

I think it’s good to have taken a break, and to have figured out why I have tended to relate cell phones with anxiety. I have some travel coming up, and it’s now assumed that everybody travels with a phone, in part so airlines can inform you of delays, you can change or make last-minute bookings, and so you can show e-Tickets. (I once saw a woman arrive late at her boarding gate suddenly discover that she didn’t have her e-Ticket because she’d left her phone at security. I wouldn’t have pegged her as someone who could run that fast, but she made it, thanks to a short flight delay.) So I’m beginning to move in the direction of reinstating my cell phone, but with a shifted awareness that will hopefully make my new experience a little less stressful.

©Catherine Jenkins 2017 all rights reserved

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Reading

Reading is a mythic symbolic act in which squiggles are assigned to letters to create words and sentences and paragraphs and meaning. It really is a form of magic. And like many things in this life, it’s possible to overdo it.

Although I could read fine, I didn’t become an engaged reader until my teens, mostly because I was bored with the books I was offered. In grade 8, I discovered S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and never looked back. I devoured books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Ursula LeGuin, Lloyd Alexander, Johnathan Wydham, and H.G. Wells, before moving onto Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins. By university, I was engaging with Philip K. Dick, Mary Shelley, Douglas Adams, Samuel R. Delaney, Delacorta, Italo Calvino, and The Tao Te Ching.

My MA focussed on hard boiled American fiction, mostly from the late 1920s to the 1950s. I was quietly in love with Raymond Chandler, while appreciating Dashiel Hammett’s edge, discovering David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Leo Malet, and others along the way. I read, re-read, and analyzed thousands of pages of fiction and criticism and philosophy over a six-year period. (Is that a record for a Master’s thesis?) Once the dust had cleared, I made the unsettling discovery that I couldn’t read any more. When I picked up even a magazine article, an anxious nausea welled up making me stop. This lasted about a year-and-a half. And then I got into Umberto Eco, James Joyce, H. Rider Haggard, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson, Michael Cunningham, and Bruce Wagner.

When I started my PhD, I was unsure and concerned about what the renewed academic work would do to my reading (or writing). Because the research wasn’t literary, I wasn’t required to read fiction, and I think that helped. I did, of course, read reams of academic work, realizing that now I actually read this type of writing much faster than when entering a fictional world I want to savour.

Once the PhD was done, I started reading things with lots of pictures; National Geographic, Eyewitness Travel Guides, and comics (which have opened up a new research area for me). I started catching up on about ten years of missed TV and movies, thanks to the Toronto Public Library’s vast collection of DVDs (old school, but free!). One of the (many) series I discovered was Wire in the Blood, in which a forensic psychologist and a DI unravel and track down serial killers (you may be noticing a recurrent theme by now). Intrigued by the complex plotting, I discovered that the series was based on books by Val McDermid, so now I’m working through them. So thanks to picture books and DVDs, I’m reading books without pictures again, and looking forward to future discoveries.

©Catherine Jenkins 2017 all rights reserved

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“Time, time, time…

See what’s become of me” (Simon & Garfunkel 1966). The things one remembers, the things one forgets, in the quick-quick-slow foxtrot of life. Wondering at 30, when the brain feels too full already, how memory can still be possible at 50, but somehow at 50 managing it with ease. And wondering at the selectivity of memories that pop up over and over, when others are forgotten—like the last time I felt truly affronted at being treated like a child. In the hallway of a Spanish hotel, my Dad quickly responding to my choking on a hardboiled sweet going down the wrong way by bodily upending me. The indignity! I was, after all, eight years old, and well past the stage of being picked up by a parent, this stance perhaps embellished by my being surrounded by adults; my parents and older siblings, then about 13 and 15, so adults to an eight-years-old’s mind. This fall, I’ve been reflecting on time quite a bit, and thinking about other writers’ reflections on time too.

I came to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics only in the last few years, although they were published in Italian in 1964-65, and English in 1968. Each of this series of twelve stories begins with a scientific fact, or at least something understood to be scientific fact in the mid-1960s. Narrated by Qfwfq, a reincarnated Being who morphs from shape to shape, retaining memories from the inception, the stories follow the development of the Universe from the beginning of Time. Although each conscious form is true to its own nature, the stories offer very human reflections on love, complicated relationships, evolution, extinction, the search for signs, writing, and the urge for immortality.

I read physicist Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams when it was published in 1992. Told as a dream diary of the young Albert Einstein as he works out the theory of relativity, each of the thirty brief chapters explores a unique conception of time, and its impact on day-to-day life and being. Similarly to Calvino’s work, Lightman brings scientific concepts into his imagined time conceptions, although some may be pushed beyond their known limits. If time stood still, for instance, parents would forever hold fast to their children; if time were circular, we would be fated to return to our successes and failures ad infinitum.

Most recently, I enjoyed psychiatrist Francois Lelord’s Hector and the Search for Lost Time (2012, translated from the French, Hector et le temp, 2006). I stumbled onto the Hector series after watching Simon Pegg as Hector in the 2014 film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, based on Lelord’s Le voyage d’Hector ou la recherché du bonheur (2002). Hector’s examination of time takes him on an adventurous trek across continents, as did his previous searches for Happiness and Love. While Calvino and Lightman based their imaginative explorations, however loosely, on scientific constructs, Lelord focusses on lived and cultural perceptions of time. Lelord counters our current cultural anxieties about pressured time, our sensed lack of time, with alternative cultural constructs of time that encourage an expansion of our perceptions of time, allowing us to take a breath.

At this time of year, when Father Christmas “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe” (or some such, with apologies to Lewis Carroll, 1872), as we ring in the New Year (at least on the Gregorian calendar, 1582), and “settle our brains for a long winter’s nap” (thank you Clement Clarke Moore, 1822), this is a time of reflection, when memories stir. Tonight, I hope you’ll join me in reflecting on the past, as we move into a bright new future. 2017. Bring it on!

Nearly Midnight

©Catherine Jenkins this last day of 2016 all rights reserved

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