Persistent rose
How do things persist? Rituals, roses, oranges. Each bring joy, and so we fight to preserve them.
May-June 2022
At the end of May I got a writing opportunity (whose fruit I hope to share in a future newsletter), which distracted me from my newsletter duties, so here is another double-issue. As often happens, something of a theme has emerged from disparate elements: persistence – of rituals, of fruit preserves, of flowers, and of the joy they each bring. We live in increasingly dire times, and it’s good to be reminded of examples of keeping the things we value going despite the forces that seek to undermine them.
The Sneak Peek
This spring, I copyedited an interesting collection of academic articles, Conversion Machines, that explores various mechanisms – literal and metaphorical – for changing people’s minds in the early modern period, from novels to poetry, from art to architecture.
One of the most intriguing articles, by Anthony Meyer, was about the use of “patio crosses” by Spanish friars seeking to convert Nahua peoples in newly conquered Mexico to Christianity in the sixteenth century. These were crosses erected in the patio – the courtyard – in a church complex. They were often created by Nahua artists, who were skilled stone-carvers, and they as a result incorporated multiple symbols that related to Nahua mythology and practice – which made them more effective as devotional symbols, but, the Spanish began to fear, less effective as vehicles for full conversion.
But what I found particularly intriguing was the records of the constant sweeping of the patios around the crosses by the Nahua. Sweeping temples and homes had been an important Nahua devotional practice for women, a way of cleansing impurities. “Its ritual significance was at first undetected by European friars,” writes the author, and they took it as an act of devotion, but after a while they became uneasy and began to realize the act might have deeper, less Christian meanings. But how do you forbid sweeping? It’s a fascinating story of how colonized people sought to take ownership over a forced conversion.
The Tidbit
Marmalade is efficient. Made from imported Spanish oranges that fruit during the winter, it was a way for English farm-based jam-makers to continue with their production lines over the winter, after the English fruit was finished for the year. I learned this reading my friend Sarah Hood’s marvellous Jam, Jelly and Marmalade: A Global History.
That wasn’t the first or only source of marmalade, though. Apparently it was the Scots who first started making it in bulk as a commercial enterprise – although legend has it that it was kicked off by a desire to save a shipwrecked cargo of oranges from spoiling, so again inspired by efficiency. Why the Scots? I can imagine a bit of tart bright orange preserved fruit from a hot, sunny clime could be especially attractive on a cold, damp, grey Scottish winter morning.
What’s Up
One of the joys of being part of Spacing magazine is that it gives me rein to indulge in some of my geekiest fascinations, including the details of how we are governed – and to discover that some people share those fascinations.
Back when I was co-chair of the official Toronto Pedestrian Committee, I noticed our decisions and recommendations weren’t really tracked – they’d appear in the minutes, but then you never knew what happened to them unless you pursued the question yourself. Recently I discovered that the City of Toronto clerk’s office keeps a semi-official spreadsheet of reports city council has requested of its often overburdened staff – and that spreadsheet lists 62 pages of reports that are overdue. I wrote a post about this, with a suggestion for how to put some discipline into the system for both councillors and staff – and this seemingly dry subject became one of my most popular posts in a long time!
I’ve been fascinated by election results ever since I was a kid, when I would pore over the results published in the paper, back in pre-internet days, to see how the different parties and candidates had performed. Nowadays, there is a ton of information about elections, but a lot of the analysis tends to focus on the polling before an election. Once the election is done, people seem to want to move on – but not me, I’m fascinated by the details of what happened. So I did a deep dive into how the most recent Ontario election played out in Toronto specifically. What was happening beneath the basic seat count results?
Quotable
“Uselessness is itself a kind of resistance, or rather what is deemed useless serves subtler purposes.”
“A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.”
- Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
It’s rose season – the front yards of my neighbourhood are filled with roses in bloom, of many shapes, sizes, and colours. We stop to smell them as we pass by, but most don’t have much scent. I learned, from Rebecca Solnit’s book Orwell’s Roses, that they have been bred for visual impact and repeating blooms, and the scents roses were long famed for have fallen away. I feel their absence.
Solnit’s book highlights George Orwell’s love of gardening and nature – something omnipresent in his writing, she shows, but often overlooked. To her, this aspect – symbolized by rose bushes he planted in his country garden as his writing career took off – encapsulates a vital part of his outlook: any effort to create a better society needs joy as well as purpose. Without joy, it will inevitably become as oppressive as what it tries to replace. And joy is, in itself, a political act, an assertion of individuality and pleasure in systems that seek to deny them.
In our garden, we inherited a rose bush. The first year, it bloomed spectacularly. But then it caught the piratically-named black spot, which gradually killed it off despite my efforts, leaving fewer blooms each year. I felt like a failure as a gardener. This spring, the last of the bush was dead, and I cut it back to the root. But the rose is resilient and determined, and it has put out a new shoot from the root, which I am doing my best to protect. Joy will not be suppressed.
I feel like there is a metaphor for writing in there somewhere.
Pic Pick
Molly and I have long been fascinated by the village of Warkworth, in Northhumberland County east of Toronto, and meant to visit its “Lilac Festival.” This year, we finally visited the lilac trail in season – which was not quite as spectacular as we’d imagined. We did see wonderful birds, however, including a bluebird, and I was particularly taken by this modernist birdhouse. Indeed, why should a birdhouse have to follow traditional architectural styles?
The Shout-Out
Molly published her second short story – she won the third prize in the Humber Literary Review short story contest! It’s a visit to expat life in Russia in the late 1990s. You can read it online in the Issuu format (which I’m not especially fond of, but it’s workable if you go full screen). The story starts on page 25. You can also buy a paper copy of the magazine in good bookstores.