Pop 89: Only Listen
By Madonna Hamel
I’m watching planes take off from the Vancouver airport tarmac as I wonder how I pulled myself away from my brother’s cottage on 15 acres of old-growth trees and wild ferns? How did I manage to leave behind a man who has suffered a stroke with all its attendant post-stroke difficulties - seizures, whirlies, dizziness and TIAs? When did we go from children - throwing snowballs, sliding down slopes on inner tubes and slippery snowsuits to teens swimming in lakes to young adults taking foolish risks on mountaintops and in fast cars, exploring the urban and rural wilds of this extremely large country - to here and now. We have become two people in their 60s, forced to accept the sobering reality that we have more years behind us than ahead of us. But it’s better than the alternative, we say.
May I dare suggest that we are just beginning? That here is a new life - far richer and keener and replete with lessons too valuable to be dismissed. Watch now, I tell you, dear readers, watch intently and ferociously, as your friends and relations, having suffered sobering hits of mortality, are teaching you something. Import their important bits of wisdom, essential to the sane navigation of these remaining years of life.
Do not turn away. Do not busy yourself with incoming texts. Put down your phone. Put down your pressing engagements. If you cannot bear witness to the unbearable truth, then what was the point of you even being born? Shut up; listen.
On one side of me is a nine-year-old playing a game on her mother’s phone, while mom wanders off to find something to eat in a place where an egg sandwich goes for 15.99$. The fact that the eggs come from “cage-free” chickens does not soften the fact of the ridiculous fee. On the other side of me, a young man, maybe in his late 30s, from India sits down and introduces himself.
I am happy to chat. I live in a village of ranchers and farmers on the edge of Grasslands National Park. I don’t get many chances to speak to people from other parts of the world. (Things are changing, however. As the gateway to a national park, we are beginning to attract people from everywhere, hungry for vast, open and empty spaces of wilderness. The irony of Europeans hungering for the dark sky and the deep silence they colonized a century and a half earlier does not escape some of us. We built a park to honour a colonized space, pretending we left it open and pristine and untouched by the “progress” 19th-century industrialization once revered as the only true way forward.)
The young man from India points at a chocolate shop across from us selling “sustainable” chocolate. The chocolates come individually wrapped and placed in a kind of bento box, then wrapped in another impressive decorated box for deluxe gift-giving. Exactly what part of all this rigamarole is “sustainable”? he asks me. “It’s humour like yours that is sustaining,” I laugh.
Part of me just can’t get too upset about the whole “woke” hypocrisy of “sustainable chocolates.” I am exhausted. It has been a long three and a half weeks of watching over my beloved brother, of trying to bear witness to whatever comes up for him. And lots have.
Every morning, I rose early to stoke his wood stove. I learned the art of chopping kindling. Of building a proper fire. I made us morning coffee and listened to him as he faced a new day with a seven-month old reality- the visual “swirling” has not stopped ever since his occipital lobe was compromised.
The best gift we can offer anyone going through the shock of a new overnight reality is to shut up and listen. When that new reality becomes chronic, it is even more imperative that we hear them in their plight. They are forging ahead of us in an unknown territory that is both terrifying and identity-pulverizing. Having a stroke, I realize, is not an ideological or dialectical challenge to “identify.” It is an immediate and harsh physical fact. “I am learning from you,” I tell my brother as he attempts to describe what it’s like to view the world as a whirling cubist painting presented on 26 planes and seen through a fishbowl. Who among us can maintain any sense of connection in a world so disrupted, so fraught with overwhelm and confusion?
Peering at my email, I see a call for submissions from an art gallery. The gallery “welcomes transgressive works of art that disrupt conventional modes of perception.” I want to rant at these people, to howl at their “rebel” delusional posturing. They have no idea what it is like to have the rug of life truly ripped from beneath their feet. To have their literal perceptive powers utterly compromised. Their stance is just more empty conceptual, intellectual posturing, as far as I am concerned. And when the present trend shifts, they will shift too. Meanwhile, their latte liberalism will blind them to the true plight of “the people” they claim to represent but cannot see.
My brother continues to write poetry. He muses lucidly on his latest challenges. I am rocked by the rock-bottom beauty of his words. But he is a white male. A construction worker. A lover of the classics. So, he will have to sit out the latest counter-prejudice against men like him.
And he will. “The world is poorer for its reverse discrimination against anyone who doesn’t fit the MO of a broken “woke” world. I tell my new friend, and he gets it. Not every nonwhite voice is better just because it’s not white, he says. He believes it will pass. He tells me why. Truth will prevail, he says, explaining how. I am thankful for the young man from India who reminds me the future is bright. If only I listen.