Pop 89: Lost Blooms
By Madonna Hamel
My mother always told us we were late bloomers. And it’s true we took our time growing up, gathering tools and stories and information, failing and finding and losing our ways, stalling in the magical hinterland of childhood. We were born before life online. We were free from today’s obsession with computer technology. We were also born a generation after the Second World War, so our foray into adulthood was delayed past our twenties and late into our thirties. ( I speak of those of us who did not marry and have children. I know that nothing shoves oneself into the sobering reality of livelihood like the responsibility of being good providers for a brood.) I am thankful that we had a chance to try different pursuits, work at different jobs, test our metal, be late bloomers.
And yet, I also recall when I was in my 30s and 40s, working as a writer-broadcaster at CBC, that many of the young journalists just out of J-school expected to bypass the lowly position of researcher and immediately be offered broadcasting positions at the radio station where I worked. They were hard-working and driven up-and-comers. But often, what was driving them was a kind of dread of poverty. Perhaps, being an artist, a writer, a waitress and nomad for so long, I was the oddball - but I’d never seen people so young be so determined to own that house, buy those cars and earn that pension, and now! I am not saying they were not also driven to become the next great newscaster or ground-breaking reporter, but the message of economic security as a marker of success was pounded into them at an early age.
Unlike me in my twenties, there would be no “gap year,” no “seeking,” no summer as a cashier or waitress for these upwardly mobile young professionals. One young thing in her early 20s announced to me that she would be gunning for my job because there was no way she was going to be “folding sweaters in The Gap all summer.” I had the gall to reply that perhaps folding sweaters in the Gap would be the best thing for her. It would make her a more empathetic, insightful reporter. It helps to understand the people to whom you are broadcasting.
I also observed how sexually active they were. How easily people fell into bed with each other. Love seemed to have little to do with it. Or so it appeared. Young women adapted a kind of bravado and cavalier posture, which succeeded in convincing each other that they could be as casual about sex as they could about brunch. I never really believed them. And I mourned their vulnerability - how easily they entrusted their bodies with each other, how both young men and women seemed incapable of waiting to see if the other was trustworthy. Sex seemed to be nothing more than a pleasant activity. Afterwards, you just got up and went back to the work at hand - building a brilliant career.
I write all this as one who is not exempt from many of the behaviours I mention. And, as is obvious, I have some very definite opinions, opinions bordering on judgements. But perhaps, at 65, I get to have some very definite opinions. Most of which are based on a collection of pretty spectacular failures, I sometimes see as pruning of a rose bush that finally began to bloom when I moved to the prairie.
Once in Val Marie, I began taking long walks in Grasslands National Park, where I uncovered some pretty uncomfortable truths about myself. And in so doing, began to see who really lay beneath all my strivings and yearnings. I learned it takes very little to be happy and content. And none of my happiness comes from the incessant urban noises and hammerings of ads, billboards, LED signs, decked-out mannequins and products in shop windows. None of it can ever come from the artificial world, whether that’s artificial actions, relations, connections or intelligence. (Surely the word “artificial, when it comes to AI, should ring some bells!)
When I got a job at Vancouver Public Library in 1992, they assigned me my first email. I could’t see the point of it - it was just a collection of bulletins and administrative directives from head office. I was given time every day to read these emails, but I learned everything I needed to hear at coffee break in the lunch room.
That was the year I graduated from art school, where I had the soul-saving good fortune to work with my hands - I got dirty. In performance, I worked with mud. In painting and collage, I worked with glue, paint, scissors and found objects. I welded in the metals department and have the burn marks in my coveralls to show for it. One day, marvelling at a friend’s pristine and fashionable outfit, I asked: “How is it you can dress like that and not get covered in stuff?” Her response: “I do it all on computer.” She showed me how, with her computer “tools” she could bring up an image and then “cut” and “paste” it without the need for scissors or glue. “Oh yeah,” I replied,” well, I have a tool too. It’s called a hand!”
Computers and technology bedevil us, though our technology can take no pleasure, provide neither rhyme nor reason for the things it “creates”. It can’t reflect on its content, nor grow emotionally, psychologically or spiritually from the process of making things. It can’t take a pause, go for a walk, wash the dishes, scrub the floor when a pause is needed. It can’t reflect or search or inspire. It can’t bloom like a rose. Or a soul. Or a living being. To hand “discovery,” “talent” and “skill” over to technology is to make of it a god. And what happens to us? We wither. Or we explode.