Going for Gold!

So the Olympics are on, as they are known to do every other year, and I was entranced by the phrase “captured the imagination of the nation”. Firstly, my education has shown me how terrible the Olympics can be, and now, I find nothing captivating about them. Jaded and cynical, I know, but true none-the-less. But my English minor has shown me the problem with the phrase itself. Imaginations cannot be captured. In fact, that is probably the best thing about imaginations. They can be spurred or scorned maybe, but definitely not captured. Yet there is still something that happens when the Olympics roll around. Something does happen within the imagination, and it is valuable.

In some ways, Mirror Lake was born out of the imagination, but it also acts on the imagination as well, in a kind of Durkheimian way. There is some connection between the damning of Stony Creek, the person that clears the lake for skating every year, and the millions of dollars spent maintaining the lake itself. There is some connection between the people that live here, the people that lived here, and the people that will live here. Somehow, it all goes in and out of the imagination. It is my hope that while I will not be able to capture it, I may be able to express it. Or at least, hint at it. The early archival work we have done has at least shown me that there is a connection, and now the work to come will be to try and expose and express that connection in a way that is understandable, applicable, and genuine (also, hopefully hilarious, but we will see.)

I started this course intrigued. It has begun to blossom into excitement. So now I am going to strap some wings on this turd and see if it will fly.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

So documenting Mirror Lake over the weekend proved challenging,  because of an event that was going on. I unfortunately didn’t get a video of it, but I feel like this youtube clip really captures the emotion of the whole thing:

It was so cold that I didn’t want to leave my room, let alone my house (granted, that’s a heating issue best left for another day).

Further complicated in my quest by my own stupidity, I wanted to experience the lake late at night and in the early morning. I have never experienced the lake in winter when no one else is around. The dead silence of a heavy snow, or the vibrant pulse of air well below freezing, are some of the most magical moments I have ever lived. I took notice of none of those characteristics as I was brutally assaulted by a metric tonne of satanic frigidity.

Life is still lived in the body. That was what I experienced. Maybe it’s a product of my seemingly accelerating ageing process, but I seem to watch idealisms morph into realisms, and my mythic journey to discover myself on the shores of Lac Miroir became an almost comical struggle for survival as I dreamt of a hot shower.

It has been an interesting season for me as I come to understand what can sort of be described as perspectivism. Pulling from a Religion and Conflict class, Neitzchean Phenomenology, and some dead guys diary that talks about the London Fire, this idea of perspective keeps coming up. Seeing the world through the body. I experienced it at Mirror Lake… as the abominable snowman repeatedly punched me in the face. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t over-analyze, I just watched this guy clear the ice in a cute little snow plow. I sat on a bench, where six months early I had sat with three friends, drunk off our recent bocce-ball championship.

I thought about summer. I adore summer, even more so because I remember winter. That’s part of perspective. Living in the body doesn’t mean that I ignore the past, but rather I can use it to shape how I see the present. Partly because I think perspective really is the only thing that can change. I doubt winter will stop hurting my body. My only responses are to bundle up like a five-year-old child and learn how to skate. The hope is that I can have a different experience of winter, and therefore eventually craft a different perspective of winter.

Or move to Mexico

 

Natural, Artificial, Expensive

First, I do believe a good vent is in order. Number one, why can’t I add plug-ins to my WordPress Blog? Why did my Timeline photos all decide to be too small? They weren’t small before. Why are online guides always so out of date compared to the current versions? Mysteries I will never solve…

As for the process of using digital tools, I am skeptical but intrigued. I actually had a friend who was hired to do a major digital media project for the city of Camrose. It was entitled Boomtown Trails or something to that effect, and basically, the thinking was to use digital tools to make history more contemporary and accessible. I remembered thinking, “wow, that seems like a massive waste of time.”

I always felt like the people that care about the history of Camrose are people in their 70’s who wish to return to the days when you could still be blatantly racist on tv. And as for contemporaries, that demographic is comprised of roughnecks, University employees, and people who have a yearly yoga-pant budget of $10,000. Who is out there thinking, “man, I really wish Camrose would spend thousands on some digital project, that would sure disrupt the stranglehold the cult of hockey has on this city.”

I still carry many of those beliefs with me today. Who is this for? Who’s mind will be changed that isn’t already? My hope waxes and wanes, and in this season, it is waning. The scope of the problem drives my cynicism, my current circumstances poisons my paradigms. Yet, unexplainably, I feel… pretty good. And as I said in the onset, I am intrigued. I can’t even explain why, and that contributes to the excitement of the whole thing. And the last time I felt excited is when I woke up hung-over and remembered I had left-over Chinese food in the fridge. The process of building the timeline was even kind of fun, in a strange, infuriating way. Will my project have any meaningful impact? Doubtful. Will it even be worth the effort I put in? Questionable. Will I grow as a person through the effort? For sure that’s a maybe. But like I said, I am intrigued. And I do like being intrigued.

What Exactly Am I Doing?

My wife said, “camping is a tradition in my family.” It was a tradition in everyone’s family until we invented the house.
-Jim Gaffigan

Plainly put, I have never honestly felt a connection to a place. Sometimes this comes as a surprise to others, but it has ceased to be a surprise to me. My upbringing can best be described as transient, moving frequently, sometimes dramatically, to which the child me was reasonably apathetic to. Adult me is much more aware of the damages it produced, and also the bittersweet understanding of why it was caused. Perhaps I will return to the causes later, but for now, I will take a gentle left down a gravel road towards where my understanding is at now.

First, there was a childhood experience that should have left profound and positive impacts on my psyche. For three years we lived on the side of a mountain, in a secluded forest, with an enormous pond just fifty feet from our house. I was homeschooled there, and so I could spend most of my days freely exploring, swimming in crystal clear waters, and making forts to my heart’s content. And I did just that. I was living a boyhood dream, and in some ways, I was living my own boyhood dream. So what happened? Where did this emotional connection go? Why hasn’t it left a lasting impression on me? All valid questions. I believe that the problems I have in connecting to place are related to the experiences I have had in life. The positive childhood experiences were overwhelmed and smothered by the negative childhood experiences, and I am left with an emotional void. This void has made it challenging to generate genuine feelings of connectedness, and I have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to rectify this disconnect.

At first, I thought that my experience was just that, my experience, but I have recently returned from a trip to India, and I must say, for a traditional Western environmentalist, India is an enigma. Much of the dialogue I have experienced in the West just don’t seem to apply to India. Many of them are vegetarian, life is sacred, and Sannyasa (a type of Asceticism) and self-denial are still fairly apparent. Yet I witnessed a cow (which are revered in India) licking rotten fruit juice from a discarded bag on the side of a road. I watched a holy ritual performed on the banks of the sacred Ganges, which also happens to be the most polluted river in the world. Varanasi, the holiest city for Hindus, looks like a nuclear wasteland, with air pollution sitting like spring fog the entire time we were there. It was as stunning as it was perplexing, and I was left with a feeling that maybe the process I am going through can have a place in the universal discourse somewhere.

In some ways then, I think I am in a good position. I am not fighting to convince the world that the potentially apocalyptic behaviours need to change before it’s too late. I am not trying to convince the world they need to care about environmental issues. I am trying to convince myself. I am not struggling to figure out why there is a disconnect between nature and civilization, I am struggling to figure out why I want to care but don’t. And if this post is any indication, I plan on tackling these issues honestly, and maybe even openly, with the hope that if I do discover something, that something will be genuine.