Oh Canada. Fraught with complexity, multiplicity, and all that can’t be wrestled into the bondage of fixed definitions. A determination to hear as many voices as possible. A distaste for tyrants and empires. Some call it wishy-washy. I call it inherently peace-seeking. I recently read John Raulston Saul’s “A Fair Country”. He suspects that this fondness for unresolved complexity is a uniquely Canadian trait, and can be attributed to the deep and pervasive influence of Aboriginal thinking on the Canadian consciousness. That made me smile. Yes! Why must what’s “true” be singular? An either/or phenomena? Isn’t that the domain of blustery curmudgeons who insist that there is only ONE way, and “long live the Queen”? Truth moves and changes like everything alive. I don’t know about you, but I like my truths alive. Dead truth, well that’s when life feels like a set of rigid rules to follow, y’ with me?

My last Cognitive Science paper was on this idea, and that it is at the heart of all scientific fallacy. What is it for a fact to be discrete, independent of all other things, true and incorruptible, separate from the rest of reality? When thinking long enough, you arrive at the wildly unsettling idea that nothing is. Not even the idea of “who I am”.

This reminds me of some images that visited me when I lived in an Almonte Ontario cabin for four months. In my dreams I saw myself taking eggs to a shoreline and burying them, taking dead birds to the river where they would float, ceremoniously away. Let go and let go, again and again, of the prayer for something static. Life is not this way. It never will be, so flow, sweet maiden, flow.

Speaking of this slippery topic, I have found an author who deals deftly with it, giving the world some crazy prophetic science fiction in the process. His name is Charles Fort, and he published in the early 1920s. Check out the new vitamins. He’s in there.

Thanks to all who came to the Harbourfront free show on July 1st. Looking out at the lake and giant island trees like rippling green lungs, I felt as if the music I was making had formed a great dish, and we were all sitting in it, sailing through time’s incessant tide. The colours were so lovely that I made a few piano mistakes. You heard them, did you? Apologies.

I am still working on the “Sea” scores. It is a massive undertaking, but I am learning much. Hmm, film scoring next? Or perhaps the Boy Wonder story and music will be a movie first, then a stage phenomena? AH! That delights me to think. I shall think that thought again and again and revel in its deliciousness until at last it arrives in the physical world. Yum.

That is all for now. I feel poems coming, little buds eager to burst. I hold you tightly and
we exchange wondrous powers.

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