Art As Therapy: Georges Seurat, The Bathers, (1883-4)

The light in this painting is pearly. This pearly light glows on the skin of the subjects and flickers on the surface. It diffuses a pleasant glow on everything as if the world radiated rather than reflected light.

There are smokestacks in the background. One of them (center) is diffusing smoke high into the air. Its darker blue seems to diffuse innocuously into the general mist of the foreground.

The river has many bathers on its modest, grassy banks and beaches. This is urbanized nature, thanks in part to the not-so-distant smokestacks. The bathers have come to the river for a temporary break. The swimmers wear their underwear, or their swimsuits under their clothes, to save time. Others sit or lie on the bank in their summer suits.

This does not seem to be a day at the beach but more likely a break in the work day. Ordinary life taps the bathers in their shoulders. They respond to this tapping in various ways.

The three young bathers in the foreground may have come here together. They are associated by their proximity in the composition and the bold reds and golds of their hair and bathing clothes. The boy sitting on the bank with his feet in the water seems to be the eldest. He slouches and looks out at the water from beneath shaggy ginger bangs. His flat hair suggests that he wore his hat to the beach, then removed it. If he notices the younger boy making farting noises with his hands and mouth directly in front of him, he doesn't let on. The eldest boy is stealing time from encroaching pressures and responsibilities, which might include looking after his younger companions. He no longer feels young enough to make impish farting noises or stare down wonderingly into the water (as the third, possibly youngest bather does). His visit to the river is desultory. He doesn't want to remember being that carefree or consider that loss.
But this teenaged bather is not the only one sitting in solitude on this busy beach at mid-day. The children are immersed in their own separate worlds of play, and the adults are in various states of solitary repose. One exception is the man whose proximity with his dog suggests intimacy. In this painting, human socializing is a spectator sport enacted by others across the water. Figures on skiffs or sailboats might be interacting, but the figures closest to us are not. Several of our sunbathers are doing similar things by lying or sitting and looking at the water; but even that focus is not unanimous among the bathers. One of them, in the background, lies on his stomach facing away from the river.

In a crowded place, peaceful solitude is an art. These are Parisians, people who know how to live and make the most of a meagre mid-day break. The adult figures in the painting (stacked vertically along our left) have learned that art. They have cultivated this repose over generations.

The casual triangle formed by the figures from top left to bottom right gives the scene remarkable stability and stillness. It is always the quiet stillness of midsummer noon in this painting. Modernity is looming, but humans can cultivate themselves in Nature's generosity, perhaps enough to figure out what to do about those smokestacks.

Tim Hudak Wants Your Job

Hey, why do I keep seeing you in this aisle of the store? Do you work here or something? Sorry. We used to joke like that before Tim Hudak wanted your job.
     But what will he do with it? Turn it into something that gets extruded from a machine? Something nasty and cheap, like the mush that becomes Chicken McNuggets and weaves its curiously addictive odour among the off-gassing of better Wal-marts?
     After all, your job can get a lot nastier and cheaper than it is. Really, Hudak is just taking a pre-existing austerity plan to its absurd, dystopian conclusion. Already discrepancies are growing between you and your colleagues  because of a rebate on sick days for some people. You haven't used your quota of sick days; therefore, you're elegible for a rebate on one of your unpaid days. Meanwhile, a colleague, who, through no personal wrongdoing, has been ill this year -- not one of those "imaginary" psychiatric disorders that we so-called "liberals" complain about; rather, the kind of physical ailment whose symptoms include blood-filled cysts that cause nebulae of agony when they explode inside the abdominal cavity -- will earn a day's less pay than you. Arguably a sick person might need that day's pay more than you do to cover incidental, non-refundable expenses that arise from illness: non-prescription meds and supplies as well as services to keep lives running smoothly when we can't cook or clean or get around as effectively as we would when we are well. But not to worry; under Hudak's system, that person, who happens to be an athlete, can make it up with "merit pay" and get ahead of you in this free-market world of education.
     Anyway, Hudak isn't even in power yet; but thanks to low voter turn-out, that will be easy. Once he makes your job an essential service and outlaws your union (following the Wisconsin model, which he has been researching), he intends to hire you back for half your pay. In no time,  public education will become like a smooth-running chain of Wal-mart stores, the most relevant experience which he brings to the field. Like most Wal-mart employees, you've probably already finished paying for your spacious house and reliable car, unless you've been slacking off; after all, we reap what we sow. And in order to sow, you will need special skills that have only an arbitrary relationship to good pedagogy.
     Unless you play sports or a musical instrument or teach acting, you'll have a tough time qualifying for merit pay. And since we'll all be striving for that minimum 90 percent on standardized tests, it's probably best to teach from manuals and websites that extrude unit plans like bags of interesting-shaped pasta. After all, teaching isn't an art, right?
     So with half your pay, merit pay would sure come in handy if you could get it in your spare time. (By the way, those long hours that you work will only get longer because classes will get bigger once many of us are fired.) As for those of us with heavy marking loads, well, there's no merit in that work. Better take that barista course while you can still afford it. Maybe you can get much-needed free coffees during your shifts; after all, every little resource counts.
     Speaking of resources, let's talk about energy: yours.  Since you will be working longer (not counting your part-time job) and getting crankier from marking those bigger classes, you might have to budget for a cheap divorce or settle for more of a solitary life than you'd envisioned. Your early hours have never suited most other adults, but your longer work will make relationships even more difficult to start or sustain.  Oh, and if your productivity flags from the stress of personal loss or solitude, you'll probably get fired. After all, no one is irreplaceable.
      So Hudak gets your job back for a worthier person to do it. Society loses you but gains the next "enthusiastic, quality teacher", at least until that  one wears out and joins you in the line of unemployed to the crack of doom.
     However, losing your job shouldn't matter to you: you're middle class, right? And middle class means that you own a vineyard or something and go to work just to beef up your investments. If you actually had to work to pay your bills, you'd be working class, but that can't be true. You've been told all your adult life that you're  a middle class professional. I'm sure you'll be fine.
     What, are you still standing there? Don't you have shelves to stock or something? No, wait. That's next year. Better study up!

Important reading

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution

Proust Questionnaire #2

Seeing gender as a continuum rather than polarities all my life, I hesitated to address the second topic in the Proust Questionnaire: "my favourite qualities in a man." But Proust's own playful response - "womanly charms" - gave me courage to proceed. My favourite qualities in a man are confidence, fairness, and sincerity, in order of increasing importance.
     We seek out qualities that we lack. I have trouble accomplishing some things without another's courage; and since courageous women disdain one another's cowardice, I seek out the help of courageous men when I need it.  Therefore, I value courage in a man because I lack it.
     I suspect, mostly from clips of movies starring John Wayne (a notorious real-life coward), that courageous men disdain cowards of their own gender as much as brave women abhor cowardice within ours. Therefore, a wise man might be more capable of fairness in the concerns of women than the affairs of men, as a wise woman (like Shakespeare's Portia) may be superior at settling scores among men but overly-involved in or indifferent to her own. At this specific moment in history, a classically cultivated Western gentleman considers others' conflicts thoughtfully and humanely, tempering "strict justice" with the tacit empathy of noblesse oblige (there I go again). In this, his final, brief incarnation, the modern gentleman's "quality of mercy is not strained", at least not in his treatment of women, as a nod to our otherness if nothing else. And since ever fewer men and women entertain the dream of becoming "gentle" in the traditional sense of land ownership, inherited wealth, and leisurely time to cultivate oneself, the concept of a gentleman must adapt or die. But regardless of economic fluctuations, as long as men and women eschew the competition that comes most naturally of similarity but instead grow in our mutual otherness, we will deal each other justly.
     Finally, and most importantly, I value sincerity in a man. I recoil from the word honesty, having experienced this excellent quality in the service of cruelty on numerous occasions. I appreciate genuine intentions. Similarly, I like to know that a person's expectation of reward does not outweigh his desire to give of himself. Since such exchanges are inherent in human relations, I prefer tacit acknowledgement of mutual debt to blatant accounting. When I give to a friend, I expect no compensation, certainly not in kind. Only in the spirit of giving - that is, a generosity of spirit - do I crave mutual rather than complementary values. And generosity happens to be the topic that I chose in response to Proust's previous question: What is your favourite virtue? But alas, that entry is so specific and vitriolic that it will remain in the private realm until I figure out what to do with it.

Id+Ego=Jihad

So Premier Dalton McGuinty created a crisis, then  prorogued legislature and resigned. It's hard not to frame this triple-hit as avoidance fueled by cynical confidence in public forgetfulness. Under these conditions, rightists have only to iterate jobs-taxpayers-jobs-union fatcats-jobs into the void. And when Ontario's right wing -- friend to Canada's masters of proroguerie -- cries foul and calls for an election, the left wing will face the charge of political cynicism for standing by the current minority government or running with the rightist opposition. Thus, what would be a source of power for other political parties -- the leverage to support or bring down a minority government -- becomes a political liability for Ontario's left-centrist party.
     How is it that other parties, despite traditions of greed and corruption, don't suffer such derision? Because just as a healthy person needs a balance of id, ego, and superego, so a three-party liberal democracy cannot function without a strong left wing. Regardless of political bent, everyone intuits that the left embodies his or her conscience. No matter how often we choose to ignore it, everyone needs assurance of that "eternal jewel", ready, ultimately, to be cashed in.
     Even the most avaricious and narcissistic need assurance of their own neglected humanity. So the act of reviling the faintest whiff of practicality in any leftist party's decision is an act of fear: fear, regardless of political stripe, for our very soul; our innate call, beyond sectarianism, to enlightenment, epiphany, jihad.
     Late in 2001, a student described in her journal the true nature of jihad (a word tainted from that time, some say indefinitely, by right-extremists) as the daily struggle of the soul to seek and express itself, a deeply private revolution that drives every decision that everyone makes every second of life: to have or forgo the cookie, exacerbate or relieve gridlock, vote or not vote. There is even a jihad of reading inherent in Northrop Frye's description of any literary work as an "apocalypse", reading as "the last judgement of mankind." In other words, every moment is an opportunity to evolve. And the left, the political arm of that impulse, is the voice of civilization. By railing against the left every time it does (or might do) something pragmatic, all people, regardless of belief or opinion, acknowledge that inner voice.

Like vs As

"like, as, as if, as though Like is a preposition and introduces a prepositional phrase. As, as if, and as though usually function as subordinating conjunctions and introduce dependent clauses. In college and business writing, do not use like as a subordinating conjunction. The sky looks as if [not like] the end of the world is near."
Edward A. Dornan and Charles Dawe, The Brief English Handbook Third Edition (USA: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), 459.