Pebbles

Flipping the Pebbles of Memory

By John Taylor; 2007 Apr 12

Yesterday I was shopping for the ingredients of my gazpacho soup recipe in Hamilton Groceries when I ran into an old High School friend, Doug Dunford (or it may have been Doug Dumphries, memory fails me). Doug was a casual chess club member, often drafted onto the chess team when we did not have enough players to fill all five boards, as I recall. In later years Doug has become a high school principle. We talked of his sport, Aikido, and he suggested I look into it -- not as a sport but a philosophy -- since I am interested in Baha'i and the Baha'i principles of peace. I had met him once in after years and spoken of my life's work, the Baha'i principles. He told me that they teach Aikido to police officers on the riot squad because it trains them in dousing and non-violently redirecting the brute force of confrontation. Maybe I will do that.

When I got home my thoughts turned to the remembrance of things past, and I once more tried to look up my old Ancaster Chess Team buddy with the same first name as Doug Dunford, Doug Campbell. Although Doug Campbell is a programmer by profession, he keeps a very low profile on the Web. I had more success Googling his wife, Isabella Stefanescu. She has become a prominent artist with her current show featured, at least in part, on the Web at:

<http://www.translucence.ca/notebook/index.html>

This includes an interview with Isabella and an interactive display of her artist's journal. I remember her showing me the journal a few times and thinking it was a shame for it to stay private. Evidently I was not the only one to think that. On the website you turn the pages to her diary by moving pebbles from one scales to another. I furiously flipped the pages, ego surfing as it were, to see if she had drawn me, and if so whether my acne was featured prominently in the portrait or not.

Worst of all, was I mentioned in the text? Unfortunately the display is small and fuzzy enough on the web that you cannot make out much, beyond the fact that most seems to be in French. If I am mentioned, let us hope that it is in one of her two native languages, German or Romanian. That would afford a measure of privacy. Fortunately, the diary starts at a period in the early 1990's where, as I recall, we only visited them once, and subsequently lost contact completely. Silvie was about two or three years old, so the visit would have been around 1996. The only way for me to find out for sure that I am not in there somewhere would be to travel to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (or in whatever gallery it is located) and start flipping stones at the real-life display of her journal, which is projected on a large wall, it seems. Not to mention brushing up on my French, German and Rumanian.

Anyway, the remembrance of things past. Doug Dunford mentioned Kevin Johansik, and is still in contact with him; Kevin was the best player in the school but was a senior when Doug Campbell and I entered Grade Ten. After he graduated, first board on the team was up for grabs, and there were not many takers. Doug was a slightly better player than me but was scared to death to come up against Hamilton's best High School players, so for three years I played first board. If there is one thing I do better than most people, it is lose. Ever since I was a little kid I was good at losing. I was always at the bottom of my class all the way through Primary and High School. I barely scraped through to the next year. Now I know that I was suffering from headache-less migraines that would blow me away at random times. Until even a year or so ago, I had no way of knowing from one minute to the next whether I would be all there or not. The chess team was the one bright spot in my miserable life. I enjoyed hanging around the school "brains," and any time I won against a good player from a bigger school I counted that as gravy. If I lost, well, I was used to that. I enjoyed the eccentricities of my fellow team members, even though I was clearly not in their league intellectually.

Then Doug graduated and went on to study math at Waterloo University. Every week when he came home to Mount Hope for the weekend he would call me up and we would spend an enjoyable Saturday night playing chess, calling out our moves, while he described what he had learned that week. It was agonizing for me, for I longed for the life of learning. By this time I was a Baha'i, and that made it even worse. Education is a major principle. I still remember his explanation of Bertrand Russell's nemesis, the barber paradox. Also, he got a recording of Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff, to which I am listening right now (the first movement is extremely effective in getting the kids out of bed in the morning).

My talks with Doug about philosophy only made my situation more agonizing. How I yearned to know, to live the life of the mind. But I was probably the worst student ever to fail to graduate from Ancaster High and Vocational School.

Eventually I grit my teeth and took a correspondence course in Grade 13 Economics, which qualified me for university. Unlike ordinary classes, a correspondence course requires that you do all the work, every exercise, all the bull work that even better students than myself can safely skip over. But such was my desire that I did it all and when eventually I finished I did not have a bad mark. I remember Doug's comment when I was accepted to enter Guelph University, "You know, I always thought of you as a `brain.'" Yeah, some brain. This is your brain on migraine. I went on to become, after six years, the worst student ever to graduate from a two year degree program at Guelph University.

At one point early on Doug met and married a classmate in math class, the aforemented Isabella. My friendship with both of them basically kept me alive through the 1980's, reason being, Isabella encouraged me to write letters to them; they would read as much as I cared to write. But what to write about? I wrote about the only thing I knew well, my life and failures. I wrote them long letters every week or so, a big pile of which I still have in my filing cabinet drawer. Isabella also encouraged me to keep a writer's journal and diary. As her present artist's show demonstrates, she took her own advice. Writing daily, or almost daily, became a lifelong habit, as the size of this blog -- which only covers the past three years -- attests. My journals and letters prooved to me that though I may not be a brain, I was certainly some kind of artist. I have Isabella to thank for that.

By the end of the 1980's I had collected up a couple of other correspondents and the number of letters to Doug and Isabella began to diminish; but still it was getting clear that something was wrong. By then I knew for sure that my physical problem was migraines but that knowledge only allowed me to work around them, it was by no means anything like a cure. I continued writing furiously until at one point a non-literary friend, Vejay Dwarka, suggested that my letter writing had become a bad thing for me. I disagreed with Vejay firmly, but later I realized that he had a point. The bad effects of writing about everything in my life had long ago begun to outweigh the good.

So when I married in 1991, I intentionally let my diaries and epistolary art decline to nothing as I concentrated on researching the main pipe dream of my failed life, the Baha'i principles.

Around the turn of the millenium I gradually re-entered the fray with what became this, the Badi' blog. By then I had learned my lesson, largely. Today I keep away from personalities as much as I can, even at the price of artistic integrity. I do not gossip or backbite, insofar as that is possible for one of my temperament. I do not indulge in what I now realize was a kind of autophagy, eating one's own body, a habit that literary artists do as a matter of course but which for a Baha'i is worse than cannibalism, it is spiritual suicide. You cannot write about your own life without killing it first. At the same time, I firmly believe that art, including literary art, is not inherently alien to the Baha'i spirit. One can be an artist and a Baha'i at the same time.

But for me the question of the day is, how?

Last night, as I was flipping the pages of Isabella's diary I stopped worrying about whether I would turn up in there somehow. It is very unlikely that I do, as her interests by that time were clearly elsewhere. She was the muse that got me going as an artist, and now she has a muse of her own, and others are paying attention.

With each virtual stone that I passed over to the other side in order to get to the next page of her Web journal, I thought: What is my next step, artistically? Her journal is different from my letters and journals, but there is a fractured quality about them that reminds me of, well, me. She routinely spills ink onto her pages and it fits right in. You could do the same with my writing. I had terrible handwriting, as my wife now attests. Thank God for the invention of the computer. And like Isabella's vision, I had to break myself up in order to ingest myself.

Now that, thanks to the muses of chess, table tennis and gazpacho soup, I seem to have fairly stable health for the first time in my life, the parable of the talents surely applies. I have an incontrovertible duty to exploit the treasure that Baha'u'llah has -- for reasons of His own -- buried in me under a mountain of suffering and failure. God willing, the treasure has been growing and collecting interest; when the final hour comes I hope to be able to say, "Here, Lord, this is what I did with the ten talents you left in trust with me. I have made of -- well, more than ten talents."

But how? How?

It seems to me that other than my health, all I have grown underneath here is a massive tangle of fears. I am perfectly capable of taking this blog to the next level, making it into a webcast and vblog, going into other media, but something is keeping me back. But it is like my video making fiascos, all I do is end up fiddling with the technical aspects of the craft, anything but create.

Maybe it is not so much fear as, well, Adolph Nobody, an utter lack of confidence, total demoralization, enervation, retrogression, desiccation, expiation. For so many years and decades I would raise my head a little above the dirt, only to have it smacked down yet again by another migraine attack. I have been smacked so many times that even though I am fairly sure the ogre must be gone for good I still quake in terror at the thought of his return.

I think this is why at this point I have turned my heart to Martha, or perhaps she is turning hers to mine. What a pure soul she was! Maybe, in the next world, she will hear my supplication for talents: I have certainly heard her prayer. I keep going back to Youtube and with a trembling heart listening to her prayer, over and over again, at this site:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teej1FAew4>

An accompanying explanation reads:

"In May 1939 Martha Root's voice was recorded on a 78 rpm phonograph record by the Auckland Baha'is. This prayer, coincidentally, was read by Hand Hasan Balyuzi at the funeral service of Shoghi Effendi in 1957."

Here are some of the comments that people have left who heard the Hand of the Cause's prayer here. If I am not already in tears at hearing her voice, I just have to read these and I finally do break down:

"It is truly a wonderful treasure and bounty to hear the voice of Martha Root reading prayers!"
"Thank you! How wonderful it is to be able to share her voice with my young children."

Still, if this prayer was read at the Guardian's funeral, I hope it was in the original. As far as I can glean from Ocean, the only location for this prayer is in the middle of Baha'i Scriptures, and may not even, therefore, be the translation of the Guardian. Immediately following it, I notice, is an obsolete translation of the short daily obligatory prayer. Be that as it may, it is a beautiful, powerful prayer, portraying the epitome of the principle of One God teaches the world. Here is the full text:

 

264. Glory be unto Thee, O God, for Thy Manifestation of Love to mankind! O Thou, who art our Life and Light, guide Thy servants to Thy Way, and make them rich in Thee and free from all save Thee.
O God, teach them Thy Oneness, and give unto them a realization of Thy Unity; that they may see no one save Thee. Thou art the Merciful and the Giver of Bounty!
O God, create in the hearts of Thy beloved the fire of Thy Love, that it may burn away the thought of everything save Thee.
Reveal unto them, O God, Thy Exalted Eternity; that Thou hast ever been and will always be, and that there is no God save Thee. Verily, in Thee will they find comfort and strength! (Baha'i Scriptures, p. 184)