Bone Dream

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

After an encounter with the divine, even dreams must seem mundane and tiny, despite their distance from everyday reality. "After Cupid, Psyche begins to grind/the left-over mice bones of her dreams." These two lines, with which Moira MacDougall begins the first poem of Bone Dream, illustrate the central dilemma of the collection, which is also the origin of its power: that extraordinary experiences may also be ordinary.

In many of MacDougall's poems, this paradox appears most clearly in the final turn. The little girl who narrates "Hope" expresses in the last two lines the desire that her father would love her "as much as he loved his god." On one level, this is the ordinary wish of a young girl to be the center of her father's world. On another, it is an astounding aspiration: to be, in some respect, like a deity. "Sky" is more subtle. The tale of a family's typical summer outing ends with a camera "framing shadows." It is as though their bodies have disappeared, which is both wondrous and eerie.

MacDougall does not always wait until the conclusion of a poem to weave the unusual into the usual. In "Double Vision" the first stanza introduces the image of elbows-as-eyes. Because it is said in the voice of the little girl and a simile is used, this transformation of body parts comes across as merely the product of a clever child's imagination. The second stanza develops it more and drops the "as if" so that it comes to seem literal. The ordinary leads into the extraordinary.

Similarly, a sequence dealing with ballet makes the ethereal dance form a matter of bodies, especially bodies painfully disciplined. The first of these poems focuses on a dance teacher's gnarled feet. The last compares learning to wear pointe shoes and the other accoutrements of a ballerina with ritual embalming, thus adding spirituality while further emphasizing the body.

Despite the skill with which she brings together the ordinary and the extraordinary, MacDougall stumbles when writing about people unlike herself. She describes, briefly, the life and death of a dwarf in "Small Bones," but does so through the her own eyes and the eyes of others around him, as though this individual's subjectivity were less important than how others felt about him. He is treated not as a person, but as a symbol whose tiny skeleton echoes similar images in other poems.

Further along, in "Rituals of Healing," she writes, "A rabid, vegan idealist loses his right arm to the hijinks/of his adolescent daughter playing with a forbidden firearm/All that intellectual integrity shredded, then withered." She creates a stereotypical character in order to subject him to a supposedly ironic fate.

Still, Bone Dream remains a strong meditation on the connection between the usual and the strange, the embodied and the physical. Moira MacDougall has found a distinct way to explore a life in all its strangeness and familiarity.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Elizabeth Kate Switaj, October 8th 2009

Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920

admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

By Ian McKay

Between The Lines

Turn-of-the-century Canadian Leftists built the foundations for later thought and organizing, but their stories have largely gone untold. In his efforts to change that, Ian McKay writes not a great book, but a necessary and useful one in Reasoning Otherwise. Given that he describes his methods as reconnaissance, "several steps down the ladder of comprehensiveness from a polished final synthesis," he would likely see the compliment in that evaluation.

After an introduction in which McKay describes his method's theoretical grounding in such detail that most non-specialists will want to skim through it, the book proceeds through another eight chapters. Each forms a foray that begins with the retelling of an important incident in Canadian leftist history. McKay then uses a variety of discourses—historical, philosophical, sociological, and literary—to weave that anecdote into a consideration of broader issues and trends.

The first two incursions of Reasoning Otherwise should have been folded into one. "Socialism: The Revolutionary Science of Social Evolution" examines the use early Canadian socialists made of social evolution and the writings of Herbert Spencer. McKay's nuanced consideration creates the intellectual basis on which later chapters rely. "The Emergence of the First Formation in Canada, 1890-1902" provides a more practical base, beginning with a meeting in 1901 which "mark[ed] the first time in Canada that homegrown radical and socialist organizations got together to merge simple local clubs and units into a more complex interprovincial body." It then tells the stories of important Leftist figures who attended this meeting, followed by a consideration of the challenges attendees faced in and posed to the established liberal order. Divided from the first chapter's ideas, however, this part of the book lacks focus.

Each of the following four chapters revolves around a single issue. That "The Class Question" comes first reflects the notion (extant then and now) that socialism should center on socioeconomic issues. Here, McKay shrewdly uses conceptualizations of class as a golden thread to explore the complicated history of Leftist parties and organizations during the period.

"The Religion Question" focuses on Christianity though other spiritualities, such as Theosophy and Buddhism, make brief appearances. McKay considers divisions between Christian denominations and compares different versions of the social gospel. In so doing, he shows an appropriate level of respect for Christian socialists without ignoring criticisms made by their contemporaries.

The most problematic chapter, "The Woman Question," comes fifth. The title itself, while using the terminology of the day, marks it as different: woman is not equivalent to class or religion. It fails to describe the contents of the incursion accurately, as McKay includes both Leftist homophobia and the construction of socialist masculinity within the chapter. Discussing the former under the heading "The Woman Question" rather than "The Sex Question" inaccurately implies that socialist feminists bore the greatest responsibility for such discrimination.McKay more successfully addresses "The Race Question." He considers not only how white-dominated socialist movements made alliances with other racial groups, but also how fragile those alliances were. He does not ignore the role of racism and the construction of Whiteness within the Left.

After the questions, "War, Revolution, and General Strike" describes how Leftist takes on these issues, along with socialist parties and individuals, transformed during the era of World War I. A description of how The Great War led simultaneously to repression and a second flowering of the Canadian Left concludes with the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. This leads directly into the show trials which, in the final chapter, McKay uses to bring the book to a conclusion that does not pretend to be the last word on the subject. While not a perfect examination of Canada's turn-of-the-century Leftists, _Reasoning Otherwise _does achieve its author's end. McKay begins the process of filling a gap in the historical scholarship with careful thought and a style that is, for the most part, accessible to non-academic readers.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Elizabeth Kate Switaj, August 17th 2009