Of course there was balance. The decade began with a dynamic and romantic relationship between Judy and me that provided seven good years and a lot of songs. Our breakup was not of my choosing, but it would likely have been inevitable, given my walls and my travels. It was a gentle parting, though accompanied by some discomfort during the World of Wonders tour, when Judy was in the band. Though its dissolution hinged to a great extent on my absences, physical and spiritual, the relationship brought both of us greater understanding of the world and of ourselves. We remain close friends. During the eighties, my love for people grew and became more authentic. I learned to embrace my neighbour, which has been a gift all these years.
On the other hand, often feeling battered by the phenomenon of humans maligning and hurting each other and the planet, I struck back in song. Once the songs were in circulation, the media provided plenty of opportunities for speaking out—more than I wanted. My privacy meant a lot to me. There I was ranting in public but feeling burdened by the attention I got back. So by the end of the eighties, even with my heart opening more fully, I grew a thicker skin—perhaps reptilian, or maybe like a tree.
Big Circumstance begins with “If a Tree Falls,” a cry against clear-cutting that remains pertinent after twenty-five years, as the decimation of the world’s forests rages on unabated. A lot of people seemed to like it—the song reached number eight on the Canadian RPM chart, did very well on U.S. radio, and became a hit in Australia—but there was an opposite response as well. Shortly after the song came out, an organization of Alberta beef growers took out ads declaring that I, along with Canadian singer k.d. lang (an outspoken vegetarian), were anti-beef. Critics complained that the song was “too pedantic.” I was being too “literal,” was “stretching my metaphors too far.” As I said to an interviewer in 1989, “I have a two-word response for those people.” Who knew “parasitic greedhead scam” would offend so?
Rain forest
Mist and mystery
Teeming green
Green brain facing lobotomy
Climate-control centre for the world
Ancient cord of coexistence
Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam —
From Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills —
Cortege rhythm of falling timber.
What kind of currency grows in these new deserts,
These brand-new floodplains?
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
Anybody hear the forest fall?
Cut and move on
Cut and move on
Take out trees
Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day
Take out people who’ve lived with this for a hundred thousand years —
Inject a billion burgers worth of beef —
Grain eaters—methane dispensers.
Through thinning ozone,
Waves fall on wrinkled earth —
Gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars,
Speak of a drowning —
But this, this is something other.
Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
Where wild things have to go
To disappear
Forever
If a tree falls in the forest, etc.
“IF A TREE FALLS,” 1988
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/2.
The eighties for me were also a time of struggle over what it meant to be a Christian. I never found a church in Toronto at which I felt the collective spirit the way I had at St. George’s in Ottawa. In my travels I would attend Sunday services of any denomination wherever I could, but the experiences were mixed. Occasionally I experienced a real spark. Other times I’d be sadly aware of being viewed with suspicion as an interloper. Gradually I stopped going.
The Catholic writer Brennan Manning once said that embracing the true God of Christianity “has meant repudiating the god of fear and wrath handed on to me by preachers, teachers and church authorities in my youth, repudiating the strange god who sees all non-Christians as good-for-nothings, who consigns all heathens to hell.” If only leaders of the Christian right could be so converted. As Manning points out, theirs is not a true Christian path. A true Christian path would lead them into the untidy stables of the poor and oppressed, to shovel shit with the Messiah. Instead they remain spiritually shipwrecked, foundering on shoals of their own ambition and indifference, slick and ridiculous in their genuflections to greed. I got tired of answering for them, for there really isn’t much of an answer except an ancient one, something about human hubris. And when you get down to that, I have a sense that deep in my limbic brain, in my own fashion, I’m not so different. We remain in this wave-tossed ship together, and it’s for each of us to try to grasp where we are led, and by what.
The man who twirled with rose in teeth
Has his tongue tied up in thorns
His once-expanded sense of time and
Space all shot and torn
See him wander hat in hand —
“Look at me, I’m so forlorn —
Ask anyone who can recall
It’s horrible to be born!”
Big Circumstance comes looming
Like a darkly roaring train —
Rushes like a sucking wound
Across a winter plain
Recognizing neither polished shine
Nor spot nor stain —
And wherever you are on the compass rose
You’ll never be again
Left like a shadow on the step
Where the body was before —
Shipwrecked at the stable door
Big Circumstance has brought me here —
Wish it would send me home
Never was clear where home is
But it’s nothing you can own
It can’t be bought with cigarettes
Or nylons or perfume
And all the highest bidder gets
Is a voucher for a tomb
Blessed are the poor in spirit —
Blessed are the meek
For theirs shall be the kingdom
That the power mongers seek
Blessed are the dead for love
And those who cry for peace
And those who love the gift of earth —
May their gene pool increase
Left like a shadow on the step
Where the body was before —
Shipwrecked at the stable door
“SHIPWRECKED AT THE STABLE DOOR,” 1988
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/63.
By the time we wrapped up Big Circumstance, I had felt the psychic terra firma somewhat shift from under me. I would emerge from that decade not apolitical, but certainly less willing to dive right in. I became choosy about issues and the proffered opportunities to speak out about them, although at the same time, in the nineties, I began doing more actual speaking about issues, at colleges and other public fora.
One song on the album reflects the way in which politics finds you, whether or not you pay attention. We were scheduled to begin a German tour in early May 1986. I was to go over a few days early to do media interviews in advance of the first gig. On April 26, the world was treated to the spectacle of a nuclear meltdown in Ukraine. On April 29, I landed in Cologne.
The cities of what was then West Germany are barely a two-day drive from Chernobyl, a stone’s throw for airborne radioactive isotopes. I didn’t have to go. I could have cancelled the tour, or at least the PR exercise, but it struck me that all the cesium-laced crap that the nuclear plant was spewing into the atmosphere would be carried on the jet stream to Ontario in a matter of weeks anyway, so why not go? I’ve always hated the idea of cancelling things. I was raised on the premise that the show must go on. “What the hell, anything can happen anytime, might as well check it out,” I thought. “It’s a once
in a lifetime experience,” I believe was the hope.
The scenes in West Germany were sci-fi surreal: workers in hazmat suits hosing down transport trucks coming in from the east; people vying with each other in the corner stores to grab the oldest, pre-meltdown milk products; pedestrians ducking into doorways to escape intermittent rains; absurd government admonishments to avoid consuming milk and leafy greens, and to hold your breath to avoid the dust kicked up by passing cars. Here was horror and intrigue, even grotesque humour. I listened to an extended interview on a car radio with a man who claimed to have a radiation-proof hotel. The guy went on and on about how safe it was. He would not divulge its location. When the interviewer asked him how one would go about getting a room, he replied, “Oh, it is fully booked!”
Adding to the overall farcical sense of doom were the headlines—because in spite of a very vocal opposition, Europeans use lots and lots of nuclear power—proclaiming that the nukes in the West were safer than those in the East. (The same thing happened after the reactor failure at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011: “It can’t happen here.” Bullshit. Anyway, it doesn’t have to happen here. With nukes, everything is everywhere.)
The “safe nuke” argument is far more prevalent today than it was after Chernobyl. It’s doubly disturbing that the fantasy of “safe, new-generation” nuclear power plants, reminiscent of “unsinkable ships” and energy “too cheap to meter” (and we know how that went), is championed by many “green” leaders—Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand and Canadian ecologist Patrick Moore, to name a couple—as a path away from climate change. Even James Hansen, the otherwise heroic former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute—who was arrested, while still working at NASA, for protesting government inaction on climate change, particularly coal power generation—has publicly advocated building the whiter, brighter nukes. In 2010 Hansen told Newsweek, “I think that next-generation, safe nuclear power is an option which we need to develop” to cut carbon emissions. Incredibly, Hansen also said, “In fact there’s the possibility for the technology which would burn nuclear waste, which would solve the biggest problem with nuclear energy.”
Nuclear is the end. Maybe it will cut into dirty coal generation and provide a temporary respite from our mad dash toward a comprehensive undoing of earth’s life support systems, but are we really willing to settle for a temporary respite? I understand the emergency, and even how thinking gets muddled at high strategic levels. But pimping for nuclear is giving up the game. And it’s not just the fifty-thousand-year half-life that’s worrisome, nor Hansen’s fantasy of safely burning nuclear waste. Imagine what would have happened if warring nations had possessed nuclear power plants during World War II. The perfect target. No one would be reading this, that’s for sure.
They’re hosing down trucks at the border under a rainbow sign —
The raindrops falling on my head burn into my mind
On a hillside in the distance there’s a patch of green sunshine
Ain’t it a shame
Ain’t it a shame
About the radium rain
Every day in the paper you can watch the numbers rise
No such event can overtake us here, we’re much too wise
In the meantime don’t eat anything that grows and don’t breathe
when the cars go by
Ain’t it a shame
Ain’t it a shame
About the radium rain
Big motorcycle rumbles out of the rain like some creation of mist
There’s a man on a roof with a blindfold on and a
hand grenade in his fist
I walk stiff, with teeth clenched tight, filled with nostalgia
for a clean wind’s kiss
Ain’t it a shame
Ain’t it a shame
About the radium rain
A flock of birds writes something on the sky in a language
I can’t understand
God’s graffiti—but it don’t say why so much evil seems to land on man
When everyone I meet just wants to live and love,
and get along as best they can
Ain’t it a shame
Ain’t it a shame
About the radium rain
“RADIUM RAIN,” 1986
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/64.
(It was cesium in the Chernobyl rain, not radium, but “cesium” just didn’t roll off the tongue as well.)
Rounding out Big Circumstance were four songs that came out of a 1987 journey to Nepal: “Tibetan Side of Town,” “Understanding Nothing,” “Don’t Feel Your Touch,” and “Pangs of Love,” the latter two lamenting my breakup with Judy.
I went to Nepal at the invitation of USC Canada (founded as the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada), an organization I have supported since 1970. They asked if I would visit one of the various countries in which they were supporting development projects, to witness and help generate interest in their work among the public at home. I chose Nepal because it wasn’t a war zone. I wanted to visit a place where people weren’t hurting each other.
My brother Don had been in Nepal during his three-year trek around the world in the early seventies. He travelled by car, bicycle, riverboat, tramp steamer, and foot across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Nepal, he said, was the most beautiful place he’d seen in all his travels. I was there for five weeks, and from the first day it was clear that Don was right. Even though at the time I thought Kathmandu must be the most polluted city on earth, the glorious scale of the rugged landscape seeped into my soul through every breath and visual. Towns whose ancient architecture spoke of the mystery of time had their message echoed by hamlets carved into the mountainsides, overlooking terraces where the plows of spring were drawn by water buffalo. The colourfully attired residents were cautious, maybe a little shy, but gracious and hospitable despite privation. Humans have lived in Nepal for the past eleven thousand years. It’s the world’s most mountainous nation, and these are the most imposing mountains anywhere. Eight of the world’s ten highest peaks crown the wall of stone and ice that runs east–west to the north of the capital, Kathmandu.
Travelling in the company of Susie Walsh, USC’s project officer for the region, I was excited and grateful to step onto this planet of stupas and prayer flags and public cremation rituals, to be embraced by an atmosphere exotic yet accessible, where the plowing and life in general were carried on at a buffalo’s pace. I marveled yet again at grace blooming amid chaos.
We spent a few days in the capital before travelling out to the villages where we would find the USC-supported projects. We connected with an expat American photographer named Tom Kelly, a tall, rangy blond-haired Buddhist who had been living in Kathmandu for nine years with his partner, Carroll. They spoke Nepali. Tom had a portfolio of beautiful shots of landscapes and people, and a knack for putting potential subjects at ease. The USC had engaged his services to document our encounters with its Nepali associates. On our return to Canada his work was made into a slide show, which I narrated and USC used for fund-raising. In spite of the inherent stiffness of the medium, it came out well. Tom’s photos have appeared in National Geographic and other publications. He now leads treks into the Himalayas and spends a chunk of each year in Mongolia.
USC Nepal was headed by an impressive, highly educated, and dedicated woman named Nirmala Pokharel. Running the field operations was a shrewd young Nepali by the name of Sri Ram Shresta, who travelled with Susie, Tom, and me much of the time. Sri Ram had strong political views that he was extremely cautious about voicing. His favourite song of mine was “Call It Democracy.”
“Tibetan Side of Town” is a little grittier than the other three songs from that trip. In 1950 China invaded and took control of Tibet, rending the heart of a peaceful, spiritual population and sending thousands fleeing into neighbouring countries such as India and Nepal. A large community of refugees had put down roots in Kathmandu. Among other things, the Tibetans had brought tungba, a bevera
ge made by pouring boiling water over a baseball-sized wad of fermented millet and a bit of yeast. After a wait of only a few minutes, you had a large wooden mug of moderately strong, flat ale. It is drunk hot through a bamboo tube. The fermented mass is good for two or three fillings. After that you have to send out for a new batch of millet. It’s an acquired taste, but not that hard to acquire. The search for tungba came to occupy a fair amount of what leisure time I had in Kathmandu. Fortunately, I had a guide in this enterprise in the form of Tom, who had the largest motorcycle I saw in Nepal, an Indian-made Enfield.
In a way, the quest for tungba was a symbolic replacement for politics on this journey. I was seeking connection, culture, history, communion. Not that the politics of poverty went unnoticed. Nepali society was a revolution waiting to happen. Political parties were illegal. The reigning monarch, King Birendra, and his family controlled everything, raking in money from tourism and shadier things. A brother of the king was widely believed to be selling off the country’s antiquities and was suspected of being involved in the heroin trade. Meanwhile, the welfare of the citizenry was left entirely to the community of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The government had built health posts here and there, but had not gotten around to providing nurses or doctors or medicines. There were many things people would not say when they could be overheard, but you could feel the slow simmer.
On the surface Nepal evinced an air of mellow tranquillity. I thought the lid would take much longer to blow than it did. Only a couple of years later, public protests erupted and were met with violent repression. In February 1996 a Maoist insurgency exploded, quickly becoming a full-blown civil war characterized by extreme nastiness on both sides.
Through rutted winding streets of Kathmandu
Dodging crowded humans cows dogs rickshaws —
Storefronts constellated pools of blue-white
Bright against darkening walls
The butterfly sparkle in my lasered eye still seems
Rumours of Glory Page 31