under the veil

The MacLaren Art Centre, a gallery in Barrie, is hosting a fantastic exhibit that J. and I saw today.

Called Enduring Women: Veils of Secrecy it came to being when southwestern Ontario artists Gerald Pedros and Sylvia Curtis-Norcross “challenged one another to examine and respond to the issue of violence against women – not in general theoretical or historical terms, but rather in the way we allow ourselves to see and to hear,” as the gallery explains. 

The result is a multimedia show that turns us, as viewers, into participants. We touch and feel and comprehend in a way far beyond simply taking in an image or abstraction on a wall.

At first glance, the room in the gallery seems to be full of filmy white squares and rectangles, some painted and vigorously scrawled on, others blank in sections. 

Stepping closer, I press my fingers on the pale surface and push against the details below. I’m allowed to do this. Large signs say “please touch.”

Called mylar, the top material obscures collages of sketched images and written words, bits of newspaper articles that report stories of sexual abuse and murder. When pushed against the bottom layer, the mylar comes clear and details emerge through the pearly fog.   

In one piece, the image of a sword is drawn over the Venus de Milo. In another, the story of what happens when a woman becomes embroiled in a violent relationship is carefully written out.  

Red thread thickly zig-zags across the top, strands falling loose, tangling with my fingers as I push the paper together, a few lines at a time. As details come clear, others fade away. It’s easy to miss things. Like the psychological confusion that accompanies violence - who is wrong, who is right – that the artist describes in the piece.       

But most powerful to me are several large works that use life-size sketches of naked women. As I touch the smooth skin-like surface to discover their shapes and their stories, I feel as if I’m touching them. Eyes look at me at eye-level. It is an experience that elicits such strange intimacy that I move my fingers on the outskirts of their bodies, avoiding the pencil-sketches of breasts and privates.      

‘Privates’ is an accurate word. These women are hidden within their own privacy, secreted inside situations that are all too common and that gain power from being quieted away - while 1993 statistics report that over half of Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence, only 6% of sexual assaults are reported to the police (according to Statistics Canada, 1993). 

The power of this show is that the viewer is given the task of breaking through the barriers, of pushing through the white hush. In the interactive process, interest and compassion are called forth.

As I am seduced into the show, soon engaged in discovering and listening and looking, I am drawn into the conversation, into an intimacy with the enduring women who stand behind the veils.   

The show runs until April 14, 2007. On March 31st, there will be a talk with Sylvia Curtis-Norcross and a guest speaker.

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signs of peace

Saturday was an inspiring day for people who oppose war.  

Among the many, many rallies and demonstrations protesting the war, activists in the Humanist Movement hosted living peace signs around the world to denounce the continuing occupation in Iraq, the ongoing battles in Afghanistan and, simply, the idea that war and violence ever really answers any human need.

Here in Orillia, we had about 40 people attend our event in the gymnasium of a local church, including a reporter from the local paper. In Kitchener-Waterloo, they had about 300 (although the newspaper only tallied 150). In Toronto, 1000. In Rome, 10,000! In El Salvador, 200.  Fifty people gathered in a Belgium village. 3350 in four locations across Budapest, Hungary. 400 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Burkina Faso, 250 people. 100 in Los Angeles.  200 in New York. And more, more, more (click on the ‘mores’ for images from around the world).  

As Roberto Verdecchia, a longtime member of the Humanist Movement in Toronto  said: “By coming together, we take that little flame nestled inside each of our hearts and we join them together and we make fire!”

And here’s what we said, in Orillia:

It is the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Today we are standing in the symbol of peace with thousands of other people around the world.

Today people are forming human peace symbols in France, Hungary, El Salvador, Toronto, a refugee camp in Ghana and many other places.

This is a quote by Danny Zuckerbrot, a longtime member of the Humanist Movement:

“My heart is pierced by every bullet that rips apart that one who, like me, simply finds themselves thrown into a game they didn’t choose. I am torn apart with every single person who cowers in fear or shakes their fist in helplessness. Even if I would, the tears I shed for that child cruelly slaughtered by a bomb don’t know how to distinguish between Jew and Muslim, between white or black, or Hindu or Sikh.

This war is a disaster. All war is a disaster. All violence impossible.”

Many thousands of people have lost their lives in the past four years in Iraq, and many more have had their lives shattered and been traumatised due to this war. Many more in Afghanistan, Darfur and in other places in the world that are, right now, gripped in violence and death.

This can seem like an overwhelming and impossible situation. Yet here we are, standing for peace and nonviolence. Like thousands of others around the world who are standing for peace and non-violence, we have hope. We have hope, faith in ourselves and others to be able to build peace and non-violence. Otherwise we would not be here. What would be the point?

We have hope and faith in ourselves that our commitment to non-violence can create the change we want to see in the world.

This is a quote by Silo, the founder of the Humanist Movement, from a talk he did in Bombay, India:

“Without inner faith, without faith in oneself, there is fear, fear produces suffering, suffering produces violence, violence produces destruction. Therefore faith overcomes destruction.”

In that same talk Silo said – “Treat others as you want them to treat you. There is no human act superior to this. When human beings understand this and carry it out in practice every day, and in every hour of every day, they progress and help others to progress with them.”

Treat others like you would want them to treat you. Almost every spiritual tradition, culture, and religion has upheld this golden rule as the most important practice for realizing a truly human society.

As we stand here for peace on the anniversary of the war in Iraq, let us renew our commitment to non-violence by deciding to make a daily practice of treating others the way we would want them to treat us.

Through this intentional practice of treating others as we would want to be treated we will nurture the hope and faith we have in ourselves and others that we have brought with us here today. We will build the peace that we all need, we will create non-violence in our lives and the lives of others.

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momentary lapse

Due to the fact that I quit caffeine a couple days ago and can now only sleep and pop aspirin in my spare time, this week’s post will be slightly delayed. Please do return on Tuesday for thoughts on the human peace signs that echoed around the globe yesterday.

In the meantime, check out these breastfeeding images that Liz Schamehorn sent me, wondering whether or not the censors might want these banned as well…

Posted in Writing Life | 3 Comments »

MySpace and the Case of the Breastfeeding Boobs

Boobs are bad, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, not totally bad. This is okay. And this.

It seems that they are allowed exposure in polite society when they are presented for gentlemanly pleasure or clasped in tight T-shirts a la Hooters. But exhibit them in their natural position – clutched in the tiny mouth of a nursing infant – and that’s just not good.

This is the message that MySpace is giving. Recently, they started removing pictures of breastfeeding women. The images go against the terms of the user agreement, they claim.

This agreement states that any content that is offensive or illegal or that violates the rights or harms or threatens the safety of any person may be deleted.

Offensive content?  

What are they? Crazy?  

Seeing as it is 1952, I guess not. 

Ah, it’s all so tiring. A discussion about how-can-we-even-consider-linking-the-word-offensive-with-breastfeeding-in-the-era-of-Girls-Gone-Wild-and-the-”I-am-a-slut-ha-ha-ha”-antics-of-Paris-Hilton? seems like such a no-brainer, a sorry excuse for an intelligent rant.

And I can’t believe it’s not.

It’s shocking to me that in this day and age it still all needs to be said, over and over and over again.

Here we are, at the apparent drop-off point of feminism, when ten-year-old girls are giving boys blow jobs for a dollar a pop and young female college students pick email user names like eyecandy95 and hot_lips69.

More so than ever before the world around us is smeared with the idea of woman-as-object and the people that rule the modern arenas of social exchange let it all be. They allow the teenagers and 20-something-year-old young women to sell their stuff - oh, wait, most of them are just giving it away – all over the Internet.

This, to them, is not offensive.

Breastfeeding is.

That’s the enemy that has inspired them to censor.

What is it? The wholesome use of the boob, the empowering position, the woman as ruler of her very own roost?

Whatever the unfathomable reason, lots of women have risen their voices in a grand 1970′s styled roar over this ridiculous ruling. An online petition  is filling up fast. 

Please sign it. Please tell your friends. 

If things don’t change soon, I’m afraid it will get much, much worse for women than 1952 ever was. If we’re not already there.     

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the sword of damocles

Around the corner from our house is an old red-brick Victorian that’s seen better days.

With three stories and a wrap-around porch, it must have been nice once.  

But last winter the roof of that wrap-around porch was leaking.

By January, a giant icicle hung over the front door like the sword of Damocles hovering above anyone who came in or went out. Even when we walked by we tiptoed, afraid we’d cause a tremor and knock it loose.

I’ve been thinking a lot about icicles lately.

On neighbourhood walks with the dog, I’ve been examining them: some are skinny spears, others as fat as boa constrictors, hanging from the eaves.

It seems that every second house in this town has some remarkable construction of ice waterfalling from its roof.

Back in January the Federal Government announced some EcoPlan which promises a bunch of money to support alternative energies. It goes something like this: people who develop energy-efficient technologies will get money. So will homeowners who use geothermal, radiant heating, solar or wind to heat their houses.

As you can tell, I’m not totally up on the details but that’s because I’ve been too busy examining the icicles. I find myself shaking my head at how plentiful they are and thinking simple things, thoughts that would likely get me laughed clear out of Kyoto.

Why not start with everybody’s heat-leaking roof?

That’s what icicles mean, my husband explained to me shortly before I began venturing out daily on the Icicles of Orillia tour. It’s really quite simple: heat rises, heat seeps out the attic, heat melts the snow which runs and then freezes again.

So all these upside down geyser-like formations are actually energy, that stuff we’re supposed to be conserving. There it goes: bleeding away into the open winter air, doing nobody any good at all.

“Why doesn’t somebody just go around giving notices?,” I said to my husband one day.

“You know: your house is leaking, fix it.”

He laughed at me – like lots of people would – but to me it seems obvious. Why not start in our own backyard?

The difficulty, of course, is that a lot of these houses are rentals.

The sagging Victorian on the corner is practically a slum, its large parking lot scattered with garbage, a blanket hanging out of a broken window. There are kids living there. Cold ones, it would appear.  

It’s easy for people with money to take advantage of the government’s eco-options. It’s not so easy for people on low incomes.

And with the wage gap widening between the rich and the poor, exactly how much of the population can actually afford to put energy conservation first?

They’re pretty busy with those shiny swords hovering over their heads.     

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