It's a lazy Sunday here in Toronto.
Normally, on a day like today, I'll spend hours looking out the window as I write. The floor-to-ceiling windows in my solarium offer a grand view of Lake Ontario, which I've always considered to be the friendliest of the Great Lakes. Don't ask me why.
A few months ago, a warehouse condo conversion marred the view somewhat. The old
Tip Top Tailors building south of me was converted, and the puckish designers thought it would be cute to keep the old sign, but skew it at an angle on top of the building. Now it looks like a crooked painting you can never straighten. It pollutes the view, and irrevocably draws the eye. There are mornings when that distressed sign makes me wish for a shoulder-mounted missile. I feel dark and awful at this moment of aesthetic rage, and what it may mean.
Today, there's no such temptation. A heavy snow swirls outside the window. The lake is obscured. I take it on faith that it's still there. The Tip Top Lofts are also obscured from view, their rogue sign mercifully erased. The harsh weather offers cover to be lazy, sip coffee, read
The New York Times, and reflect on other matters.
I'm an American living in Canada. That's not precisely true -- I'm a dual citizen now, and have been for nearly fifteen years. There's so much I love about this country, Canada, this starkly beautiful and modern and underrated place I came to as a child. But truthfully, when people ask, especially when people ask abroad, "Where are you from?" I will usually answer "I'm American."
Every year I spend in Canada makes me feel like more of an American. Part of that is a recognition that my temperament and my upbringing make it so. Part of it is the fact that there are quintessentially American characteristics, values, even -- that clash ever-so-subtly with comparable Canadian values, and I feel myself pulled more to the former over the latter.
It's something I don't talk about very much any more. My Canadian friends don't really understand it. And how could they?
To be Canadian is to spend a lot of your time thinking about the United States. A lot of time being frustrated by the United States. Canadians think they understand the United States, but what they understand they see mostly from the vantage point, and through the safe distortions of television.
I understand this distortion well, and forgive it. Sometimes I wonder if my stubborn love for the country of my birth springs from the same fount -- like my Irish brethren who'd keen for the land they left, do I keen for a land that never really was? Is the America I miss merely a set of ideals in my head, and not the messy reality on the ground? The last few years have made me think maybe that's so.
As in most countries today, there's a steady stream of anti-Americanism that flows just under the surface of Canadian life. It burbles up from friends and associates at odd times, and it surprises me, always, even after all these years. But the Canadian version of anti-Americanism is lazy. It's couched mostly in a brook of smugness that also runs under the surface of Canadian society. The truth is that Canada, more than most countries, benefits the most from some of the very qualities that they pillory in the USA. As the largest trading partner, closest neighbor, and most similar society, the protests of Canadian anti-Americanism have always struck me as something rarely to be taken seriously. More often than not, it springs from wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.
But in a growing number of countries around the globe, the Anti-American feeling has deeper roots, and roots far more justified.
I think it's the duty of every American to live abroad -- even if only for a while. It opens your eyes and makes you understand things from an international perspective, and in the century we've just entered, that's an absolutely essential skill.
And sometimes, you have to be prepared to hear the bad stuff.
This morning, I read the full text of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Pinter is one of my writing heroes, a brilliant, irascible playwright with a surgeon's touch in language and a steamroller's feel for the dramatic. In his speech, he talked about his work, and there was some great stuff in there about writing:
"Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time."
A delicious insight. But of course, if you keep reading, or if you've read any of the news reports, you know that that was not the sum of the remarks Pinter made. There are few bully pulpits as rarefied or respected as that of the Nobel Prize. Pinter did not shirk from using the pulpit.
I love the America in my head. I love what it stands for. I believe in the City on the Hill. I have climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial four times, and I have always left with eyes wet and soul stirred. I've stood in front of a marble statue of Jefferson and said a silent prayer. It's this, more than anything, that haunts me still, that forever defines me as American, no matter how long I'm away, and no matter how much I disagree with the policies of my government. I hate that in their zeal, they have taken my flag from me. I hate that, though our ideas are better, we are losing because the men who rule now are not up to the ideals laid down over two hundred years ago when a nation was young and not quite so arrogant.
Mostly, though, I think it's time -- past time -- for every American to stop the bleating and echo-chamber bloviating, and take a good hard listen to Harold Pinter's speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize.
Contained within are two poems. One is Neruda describing the horrors of Republican Spain. To read this poem and, maybe, to view
Guernica, is to know in a new light just what is being done in your name.
The second poem is Pinter's own. It will haunt me as I go about my day today. There are no body counts. There are no causalty counts. Every death we inflict is a sin against humanity, and if there is a God, we will surely answer for it.
Death
by Harold Pinter
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
The full text of Pinter's address is available
here.
