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| date | 2001-001-02:16:40 |
| Play |
Spent some time on Saturday evening skating up the Rideau Canal in Ottawa from Pretoria Bridge to Parliament hill. The skate up was a bit tough, into the teeth of a cold north wind and flying snow, and something was wrong with my right skate--it was like the inner boot was rucked up around my toes, and I couldn't seem to flatten it out, at least not without getting the skate right off. I'd heard that there was an open-house at the Parliament buildings and it seemed like something interesting to do after the kids were in bed. My host lived only a few blocks from the canal and so it was only a short walk to the ice, which opened only a few days ago. For Canadians not living near enough to the capital to take advantage of thier tax dollars at work this way: Thanks. Your money, although it rightfully belongs to you and not the bozos who spend it on frivolities, gave me a lot of pleasure, though I'm sure not as much pleasure as it would have given you had it been left in your hands. Carolyn got me into roller-blading last year, and I've bladed into work on occassion, which is about three miles. I'm not a very good skater, having grown up in the one bit of Canada where it almost never gets cold enough for anything to freeze. Blading has helped a bit, but I'm still no wonder on ice. I only fell down a couple of times on the way up, and twice more on the way back, both times when one skate got caught on a defect in the ice and tripped me up. A better skater would've stayed up, though. I got to the end of the canal and swapped my skates for boots, and pulled the boot out of my right skate to see what the problem was. A vertiable cascade of sunflower seed shell fragments fell out onto the ice. A bit more shaking and it disgorged the fluffy matrix of a mouse-nest, sans mouse. The little critter was a pretty good tenant, I've got to admit--the soft rubber boot itself wasnt' chewed at all. I just hope the wee beastie has found an equally warm home elsewhere. The skate back was much easier, partly because the wind was at my back, partly because my legs were a bit more limber, but partly because I didn't have my toes cramped up. The visitor's entrance to the Parliament buildings makes you feel postively criminal--you go up toward the main entrance and signs direct you off down below-stairs, into a broiling hot lobby (this despite Parliament being in recess for the holidays) where there's a security check to go through. I can understand the logistics of this, but it still causes my chronic case of Westerner's Chip On The Shoulder Disease to flare up a bit. After starting to strip off my light jacket, two thin sweaters, felt touque, gloves and snow pants, I realized that I didn't want to see the insides of the seat of Canadian government that badly--I really wanted to wander around out in the cold beautiful night. So I cut out of the line--which seemed mostly inhabited by people who'd just wandered in a random--and circumnavigated the grounds. There are all sorts of statues--Lester Pearson looking smug and self-satisfied, Elizabeth II astride a horse, and a frumpy looking woman I originally took to be Mackenzie King's mother, but who turned out to be Queen Victoria. A lion that looks like the personification of something more likely found trying to pick up women in a sleezy bar is leaning against one side of the statue's plinthe, and on the other is a bronze rendering of an axe. With a bundle of sticks strapped to it. No truce with fascists. Further on there are a number of small hills that children were sliding down on plastic carpets, ignoring the "closed" signs on the stairways. The top of the stairs gave a nice vantage over the river, and I reflected that this is how Canadians rebel--not with the explicit declarations of our southern friends, but with an implicit "that silly rule does not apply to me." More explication wouldn't be a bad thing, although except for the Left it does save us from the worst excesses of jingoism. There's a colony of feral cats on the back of the Hill, maintained by private donations to which I contributed my own. They're vacinated and neutered, and have a little space of their own. You have to love something about a country that takes care of it's stray cats in the shadow of Parliament. The skate back was effortless--I almost flew right past the stairs I needed to get off at. Sometime this winter I'd like to go all the way from Parliament Hill to Dow's Lake, the full length of that part of the canal, which is probably a couple of kilometers. It's a small ambition, but as Caro has taught me, it's important to pursue our small ambitions, to keep our habits in shape for the pursuit of our large ones, as well as for the pleasure of realizing the small ones themselves. |
| Reading |
I still have a few things to say about the Iliad. How old are these people? Assume they were late Myceneans. We know quite a bit about the life and death of classical Greeks--Robert Garland has two books called The Greek Way of Life and the The Greek Way of Death that deal with just that. But I don't know of anything comparable regarding Mycenean culture, in part because we don't have any literary sources to speak of, and so the data are restricted to intpretation of grave goods and the like. And I'm ignorant even of that, which leaves me free to speculate. Suppose that at the beginning of the Trojan War, Aggamemnon et al were in their mid teens. This isn't by any means implausible: in many cultures boys are considered "men" at an age that would appall anyone who has seen traffic accident statistics. This hypothesis of extreme youth would explain a lot about the childish stupidity of much of the action of the poem. Here are these kids who go off to make war and basically party for the first nine years. Only around the magic age of twenty-five, where the rate of traffic accidents for males falls suddenly from it's stratospheric height, do they get their act together and actually form a plan for attacking the damned city. The Iliad in this view is a kind of coming-of-age story, in which the Argives realize how stupid the whole enterprise is, as a prelude to putting a short end to it. Odysseus, in this view, comes home at the ripe old age of 35 or thereabouts. This isn't anything I've seen discussed, although my impression is that it's simply impossible to say anything about Homer that hasn't been said before. All I'll say is that if there isn't a literature on how old Homer's characters are, their ought to be. As someone feeling the first tendrils of middle-age approaching (although I've decided to start counting my age in hexadecimal when I turn 40, that is to say, 28 :-) I'm aware of how young Homer's characters seem in much of their behavior, which I didn't notice so much when I was younger. Another curious aspect about the poem is the weird notion of time and space that seems to apply--I can't recall if I've written about this before or not. The Argives throw up their wall in a matter of days, but then it seems to be heavily built, with stone facings and gates and so on. It's never clear how large an area it takes in, sometimes seeming huge at others barely enough to contain the prows of the ships. The distance between the landing place and the walls of Troy seems equally elastic. And strangest of all, the scenes of the gods on Ida an Olympus seem much more realistic in this regard, with more consistent depiction of spatial and temporal relations. It's almost as if the tale was being told from the viewpoint of the gods... Hmm.... |