CALL AND RESPONSE

September 2003

by Barry Stagg

2003 Bourgeois Credo

This is bothering me on Labour Day 2003: In our peace time perennialism of the Baby Boomer middle ages, we are settling for managed order over accomplishment. The bourgeois credo of the North American tribe is to get your good government job and go forth and be a good neighbour. Rail against the grimness of modern life and its stifling conformity while you earn your mortgage money filling a high-paid government job. Elitist privilege and the selfish spoils of that power are the ideas and the supposed virtues that we live under. And under these tenets, we demand that the rest of our lesser fellows conduct themselves accordingly in this Shangri-la part of the planet.

Image: Beautiful women with brains. Thought: The women of my dreams fill important jobs in the stagnant and de-natured Stalinism of our times. Quiet efficiency of effort toward permanence of position is the chief and ultimately the only protocol of work. In plain terms, making work is the only work. Welcome to the end of the world, using the apocalyptic imagery of Archibald MacLeish, "nothing , nothing , nothing- nothing at all"

Let the economy of our rich top tier of the world become more and more institutional and statist as the educated and ambitious vie for government positions that pay well, have tenure and depend not at all on performance, profitability, quality of product or anything other than the basic eternity of demand for services paid for by others. Our elites use, to excess, the fundamental economic principle that there is infinite demand for a free product.

Danger: As professionals cede the fields of entrepreneurship to the unskilled and the very wealthy , they reduce the life essence of our society. They really do lower the collective quality of life toward a horrid common basement of existence. They are no longer there in the pits and trenches of everyday life duelling for success and, in so doing, creating a better place to live and love for us all. Instead, they, yes we too, fill government slots that give pensions, health benefits, the essence of unpressured and economically stressless life: doubtlessly a prime source of gradual mediocrity and decay.

That is the likely legacy of the post-45ers: They have no ambition to be self-made- no Bob Hopes here- instead they wish to be awarded the security of tenure which, in terms of supposed progress and obvious decadence, is no different from the profane ambitions of courtiers and courtesans in a royal court.

Since this is really an essay about beautiful women and underpinned by my attraction to them, let me say this and then share a bit of poetry I found under a coffee cup on Danforth Avenue in Toronto a few days ago.

First, my confession: I want a woman with whom I can read poetry. We can take a book of Yeats and explore it like the old limestone hills of Boswarlos and Aguathuna.

That is the simplicity of a wish that is terrible in its over-reaching hope. It, no I, expect a connection with earthiness married to intellect in harmony. Our humanity always defeats us while we simultaneously triumph over it and with it. Delmore Schwartz had it right with his imagery of "the heavy bear who goes with me". Humanness gives us the love of our ancestral home, the primal bonding to the earth from which we came. And yet, it includes an aching longing for the cerebral meshing of minds-active and reactive- and reaching out to each other. Life is good and also terrible , at the same time, in the same mind, on the same day.

Now the poetry:

New Age Freeway (discovered on August 5, 2003)

The Saab pulls up in front of the organic food store.
Another Saab parks, then a BMW and finally a Volvo.

Single drivers, female, get out and converge,
Each to buy a pesticide-free stick of celery,
And each to then drive away,
Prim, alone and highway bound, saving the world,
Celery stick by celery stick, catalytic converter by catalytic converter.

Formidable in their solitary sincerity,
Home to their husbands, significant others, if you must.
Stalin laughs or at least sneers, Lenin nods while Thoreau cringes.

Labour Day is fine this year as these things ascend into print and out into the cosmos of public confession.


Back to the 2003 Index
Back to The Boswarlos Review
Home Plate