Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  Music had a political voice then too. On May 4, 1970, when students protested Nixon’s plans to bomb Cambodia, National Guardsmen opened fire on the protesters and killed four of them. Neil Young’s song “Ohio”came out a week later, a song full of anger and pain that hit like a passionate editorial.

  But as Young reflected in a 2008 interview with Uncut magazine, “It’s a different world now than it was in the 1960s. I am not under any misconception that my next record is going to change the world.”The headline for this story was “Rock’s last great battle cry.”

  The great bonding experience for our parents’ generation was the Second World War and its jittery aftermath. For us, it was the new music. It mirrored us—and it excluded our parents. That was sort of the point.

  The role of the arts shifted, too, from a marginal, high-brow pursuit to something that felt more urgent, relevant, and personal. The Battle of Algiers, Revolver, Exile on Main Street, Astral Weeks, Blonde on Blonde, Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, Jean Luc Godard’s movies, The Living Theatre’s performances—these weren’t divertissements, they were works that challenged and changed the rules of their particular medium. Art also began to take on a more political role, charged with uncovering the truth in a buttoned-down era that was full of elisions, hypocrisies, and constrictions.

  The culture of the 1950s tried to construct a safe, controlled world, whose buried fears nevertheless found expression in the Cold War,with its bizarre domestic accessory, the fallout shelter. It was an era with little interest in sexual expression or social justice. The civil rights movement was still to come. The closet was not just for homosexuals; it was a crowded, dark place filled with female poets, secret Buddhist meditators and suburban teenage girls like me, who thought there must be more to life than mastering touch typing, wearing crinolines, and tolerating sweet but silent boyfriends.

  Since I wasn’t up to full-blown rebellion, art was the only acceptable way out of innocent, upholstered Burlington in the ’50s; that’s why I lay on the dining room rug listening to Charlie Mingus records, read the existentialists, and took a suitcase full of poetry to summer camp. That’s why I got on the bus to Toronto see the exhibit of mildly erotic paintings by Robert Markle and others at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery, before the police shut it down.

  Now, of course, there’s no need to get on a bus to find the edge of pop culture; you can’t open your email without being forced to wade through it. The New York Times and the tabloids have converged in the middle, both eager to report on the “news” of a drunken celebrity who drives up on someone’s lawn. The boundaries of visual art have become fluid and permeable; a work of art is just as likely to be a business deal (Damien Hirst’s paycheque) or a display in a department store window. Art is a shoe. Women’s shoes are self-help. (“I’m worth a $595 pair of platform booties.”)

  The days of one homogeneous culture that reflects the prevailing political winds are gone. Pop culture, protean and ever-changing, now scintillates in a million little pieces. The recording industry has collapsed, atomizing into self-marketing ventures and musicians who earn their living online or on tour. The combined worlds of TV,music, and social media have become a hall of mirrors, a Babylon of self-expression, a chorus of cooing, like pigeons in the grass. It’s fertile and febrile and maybe healthy in the end—I’m trying to avoid Codgerville here—but the scene is so mercurial. I can’t figure out how anyone makes money online, unless they sell their coffee tables on Craigslist.

  Meanwhile, our lives are simultaneously more connected and more isolated, as we tunnel from one suburb of the web to another. Potential artists have access to an audience of billions long before they can figure out if they have anything to say.

  Okay, that does sound codgerish. But the creativity of the new generation is difficult to evaluate because it’s so raw and evolving. Something more twitter than Twitter will have come along by the time you read this quaintly jet-lagged book. Art has become more about audience, less about artifact. Everybody’s first drafts are out there, topped and tailed with great-looking credits. We’re all thinking out loud, en masse.

  Pop culture now irradiates us from every side, like a vast tanning salon. But in the 1960s, especially in music, there was an outburst of energy, non-conformity, and self-expression that was idiotic in some aspects (I won’t quote Donovan although I have upon occasion) but it also helped define us.

  Our parents didn’t like it or want to be part of it. Rock ’n’ roll was “jungle music” (note the racism). So music was our crucible.

  Now whole families buy tickets to Springsteen concerts or share downloads of K’naan. Ads selling electronic equipment show silver-haired men playing air guitar. Is there a male left on the planet who does not play guitar? Casey listens to one or two genres of music that we don’t have the stamina or wardrobe for, but on the whole our two generations bathe in the same murky Ganges of pop culture.

  Our son’s musical palette is deeper and broader than ours was but it doesn’t necessarily define community for him. There are so many musical genres now that they’ve become a badge of personal identity: shoegazer bands vs. ambient-doom-metal. Indie is no longer short for “independent.” But in many cultural ways, our two generations have meshed. What is his and his alone? I’m not sure. It will be something he spots on the horizon that we can’t see. Something his parents can’t understand.

  That would be interesting for all of us.

  Our relationship to our parents was markedly different. We had a proprietary sense of seeing through the world of our “materialistic” parents. Protest music, rock ’n’ roll, the exploration of the psyche, the new science of consciousness—these were our ideas. India’s 10,000 years of spiritual practice or William Blake’s universe in a grain of sand? Our discovery. We were as engorged as ticks with a sense of being the first generation to see things as they really were.

  Our families lived,we thought, in benighted stupefaction while we were all waking up. Even as we drank our parents’ scotch, we made fun of their crystal decanters. I did, however, secretly admire my parents’ attention to tradition, their seasonal centrepieces and silver carving knives. I viewed their domesticity from an anthropological distance, and with a prescient nostalgia: I knew early on that I would not live like them. In many ways, I felt claustrophobic about family, but I was also hungry for more.

  The big divider between generations, though, was the so-called sexual revolution. The birth control pill made the ludicrous notion of “free love” possible at the same time that it cleared the path for more sexually transmitted diseases. For women, the choice to have sex or not no longer pivoted around wanting children or fearing pregnancy; it became a choice based on sexual pleasure or “exploring relationships.” We wanted to become not just equal to men in freedom of choice (jolly good) but similar to men in as many ways as possible (a bad idea and unattainable). Second-wave feminism— a surfer term, I believe—suffered from an implicit sexism of its own; it undervalued the traditionally feminine spheres of housekeeping, caregiving, and motherhood. It targeted the male paradigm of that era instead; let’s all become competitive, job-identified workaholics with no close friends!

  I think of it as “the sexual devolution.”

  I took the pill for a year or two but it made me depressed, so I went back to using the moronic but straightforward diaphragm. In London, the National Health supplied me with one, but I had to go through a bizarre “fitting” overseen by a nurse in a clinic. I had to demonstrate proper insertion of the little latex boat. I was afraid the thing would slip out of my grasp and fly off across the room,which they often did.

  The diaphragm is a fallible device—wellies for the cervix—but at least it doesn’t mess with your hormones, suppress ovulation, increase your risk of blood clots, or give you suicidal levels of PMS. I was leery of the pill from the start (and wrote a gloomy harbinger of its potential consequences that a women’s magazine declined to publish because it wasn’t sufficiently upbeat
).

  It was very nice not to worry about getting pregnant, a relief not to have to resort to abortion, but the sexual revolution came at a price: chlamydia, gonorrhea, pelvic inflammatory disease, urinary infections, all the afflictions that the unprotected female reproductive system, on the pill, became vulnerable to. Multiple partners without condoms was a new experiment and basically it failed. Thousands of women were left infertile from infections caused by an intrauterine device, the fiendish-looking Dalkon Shield— another freedom appliance we embraced too eagerly. (The women sued and won. Small consolation.)

  And what about the heart? Was “sleeping around” good for women? That was another failed experiment, if you ask me. When sex is severed from the possibility of pregnancy, it alters the whole geography of intimacy. The stakes are lowered; the mystery train pulls out of the station. “No regrets, Coyote. . . .” (Speak for yourself, Joni. Je regrette beaucoup.) Free love was a sweet deal for the men (give or take a case of non-specific urethritis) but it was disastrous for women’s sexual health and maybe their peace of mind too. How many of us lumbered through our twenties on Clydesdale-sized doses of Premarin? How many of us compromised our fertility in order to make ourselves available to the next guy in our life—old What’s-His-Name?

  The pill freed us to behave just like guys. So much for feminism.

  It’s my theory that the womb doesn’t like a lot of traffic. It raises the risk of cervical cancer, among other things. It’s men with their billions of sperm who biologically lean toward the scattershot approach. They’re the spendthrift gender that has an urge to spread the seed in order to ensure that one or two plucky sperm fall into the right, hospitable vaginas and find their way to bingo. There’s a lot of collateral damage when it comes to sperm—it takes a village, including the village idiots. But women are born with every egg already numbered and unique. When ovulation is thwarted (the logic of the pill), the orientation of the female body and mind is radically altered. The unique dialect of pheromones falls silent; some studies have shown that men are less attracted to women on the pill because the chemistry of ovulation is missing. Other studies reveal that lap dancers get more tips when they’re ovulating.

  A woman unafraid of getting pregnant with the wrong man has lost a portion of her good sense and connection to nature, her body, herself.

  This isn’t really an anti-contraception rant,much as it begins to sound like one. I don’t think biology is destiny. But biology is a sweet, integral part of our female identity, and the reproductive narrative, whether it’s expressed or latent, is part of our forward momentum in life. When we lose the biological signals, obscure them with chemical decoys, ignore the cycles of ovulation and receptivity, we may be losing the top notes and bass lines of our body’smusic.

  Women who feel armoured and invulnerable in their bodies are going to be less forgiving of their potential mates, less attuned to the men who somehow become irresistible to us, despite their flaws—when the stakes are high and the chemistry is right.

  Genes call to genes. Our bodies dance with one another in ways we don’t understand. Chemical contraception might suppress more than our fertility; it might also muffle the dialogue between the biological body and the social self.

  I don’t think this kind of wild-eyed, pro-ovulatory thinking will necessarily lead to an increase in 15-year-old mothers either. The more attuned to their bodies women can become, the more likely they are to take responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancies. Using chemical contraception is like putting on a hazmat suit; it creates a false sense of inviolability. It overrides the notion of consequence. And without consequence, sex becomes a monologue. Okay, let me pause for a moment to wipe the flecks of foam from the corners of my mouth.

  I could also put it this way: I might have had a second child if my fertility hadn’t been compromised as a result of “the sexual devolution.”

  In 1968, all these factors—the pill, the new music, and recreational drugs amplified the importance of choice, self-expression, and individual freedom. These values felt like progress after the post-war drive to hunker down, buy bigger refrigerators, and stabilize society. And for a time they were.

  Most of all, there were the numbers. In 1971, the average age of the population in North America was 26. There were so many of us that no matter how crazy we acted,we always had company.

  Incidentally, I still believe that we can see the universe in a grain of sand. Mr. Blake was right about that. It’s just harder to get to the beach these days.

  Long-Term Care

  MY MOTHER’S FACILITY sits at the end of a street called Corporate Drive, at the northern rim of Burlington. A suburb of a suburb of a suburb. As I drive toward it, the pink and grey building looks pale as a mirage, as if it’s slowly vanishing, like its residents.

  I park in front with my usual mixed emotions. I look forward each visit to seeing her 97-year-old face and to spending time with her. But it’s the new drifting mother, not my regular old one. She takes some getting used to.

  I press the code that opens the doors and keeps the forgetful ones from wandering. I’m relieved when the woman at the front desk doesn’t look up as I sign in. There’s enough forced merriment in here.

  The St. Patrick’s Day clover leaves have come down from the bulletin boards, and the bunny-and-daffodil Easter decorations have gone up. I suspect these are more a form of occupational therapy for the staff, because I’ve never seen any resident of my mother’s wing looking at them.

  For one thing, most are belted into wheelchairs, well below the level of the notice boards. For another, many are lost in their own little wildernesses. If they don’t arrive in one, they soon build their own. When I pass through the common room, one or two of them might chant, “Help me . . . help me.” Like the rabbit in that camp song (“In a cottage in a wood/a little deer at the window stood. . . .”). They don’t say it loudly or urgently because they know not to expect rescue. And the staff, most of whom are kind and patient, know to ignore their chant or else to lean in close to the new one, pat her knee, and clearly say,“Eleanor, you’re fine.”

  There is no actual emergency. It’s just that some unquenchable part of their brains continues to be alarmed at their predicament, of finding themselves old and powerless.

  It’s surprising how easily one acquires armour here. I breeze in through the sun-filled day room, where the residents gather each day in their cones of isolation. Today there is a newcomer sitting in a wheelchair by the windows, with down booties on her feet. She sits closest to the budgie in the cage. “Please,” she murmurs as I pass by, smiling. She’s not where she is used to being.

  “Hello!” I say, smiling at her. I use the same bright inflections as the staff now.

  I spy a familiar resident in a saucy striped sweater as she toe-creeps down the hall in her wheelchair.

  “Hello, Mabel!”Mabel likes to roam, using her slippered feet to slowly pedal her way up and down the corridors. She doesn’t speak but she has clear eyes and a steady, knowing gaze. That’s because she hasn’t been here long, she hasn’t gone inside herself yet. Mabel gives me a foxy smile as she passes by. I wish I knew what she was thinking. I zip into my mother’s room, where two of the staff are helping her do the transfer from bed to wheelchair via a complicated block-and-tackle device hooked to the ceiling. I retreat to the corridor to let them finish.

  Sometimes I like to visit in the evenings,when the residents are all in bed and my mother is lying in her nightie with her hair fanned on the pillow. Her face is soft and beautiful when she is lying down. Also, our roles are clear-cut: she is in bed, while I am the mobile, capable one, pulling up a chair. She also likes the cozy noise of the staff moving through the corridors,wheeling the snack trolley from room to room.

  One night I sailed in.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said rather gaily. “I was just trying to think of ways to commit suicide that wouldn’t reflect badly on the family.”

  This didn
’t faze me. It was like a Sudoku puzzle for her—a problem to put her mind to.

  “Yes,” she went on, “it’s not easy when I can’t get up, you know. I could take the drugs off the carts when they go by, but that would be hard for me to manage, and I wouldn’t want the staff to get in trouble either.”

  “Why are you thinking about this?”

  She flipped her hands, one of them covered in plum-coloured bruises. I think she bangs them against the bed rails in her sleep.

  “Oh, I’m so useless like this. I’m tired of being such a burden on everyone.”

  “You’re not a burden. I think you make life easier for the staff because at least you can kid around with them.”

  “Well, yes, that’s something. And they wouldn’t have jobs if we weren’t here.”

  “So you are being useful. You’re giving people jobs.”

  “That’s right. I do think of that sometimes. I was just having a gloomy moment tonight I guess. So you picked a good time to come.”

  Then she demonstrated how she could still reach over, ever so slowly, and find the switch on her lamp. She turned it on and off, twice. And that was a better moment.

  In the corridor, I hear the staff murmuring as they tend to my mother. The halls are lined with colourful prints. Most are pictures of flowers, in vases or fields, but another theme is crueller: empty chairs at tables for two, on the deserted patios of some vaguely French or Italian café. At the end of each corridor are sunny nooks with artificial flowers, plug-in fireplaces, and faux Victorian armchairs. It really is very pleasant here, I remind myself, except that the main activity is dwindling, and everything that precedes dying. Sometimes that too.

  Inside her room, the walls are ringed by photographs of her three children and three grandsons. My sister Jori hangs the pictures and keeps things homey. She is a hairdresser, among other things, and cuts my mother’s hair. After my father died, she and her family moved in with my mother, into our old family home,and lived with her for three years. It was hard on everyone. My mother couldn’t accommodate another household,one she wasn’t in charge of, swirling around her. The lawyer who drew up her estate when this plan was hatched gently warned us; families tend to fall apart under the strain of elder care, he said. Oh that won’t happen to us, we laughed,we all get along.