Well, this is it. The last email before year’s end.We cannot recall the first email. Did email exist at the beginning of the year? Did the earth exist? So much TIME has passed. Like, REAL TIME. Aching, unpredictable time, sometimes passing like molasses, sometimes passing like desperate flies dive-bombing your head in autumn. Still, we remain, bound to witness these interesting times. Like us, perhaps you have dug a hole somewhere and buried loads of books in it for the long winter to come. In this hole we suggest including the beautiful albums of Julianna Barwick, albums one of our customers once described as “spa music,” but we describe as medicine.
Speaking of medicine, a Christmas memory came to Jason recently that was very helpful so we thought we’d share it with you. He was a young kid. He had just received a nasty operation on his blind eye (the right one). It was a success, although he remained, and remains, completely monocular. Now, growing up in Thorndale, small town pop. 500, meant that aesthetics weren’t the most PRESENT quality in his life, apart from the moody expense of farm fields and the decals on Fisher Price sets. So, that Christmas, at the young age of six, and just recently self-aware, when his Grandma took him to the Christmas Eve Carol sing at the United Church, something very important happened.
The Thorndale United Church is a simple country church, typically Protestant. Plain white plaster walls. Typical religious portraits on the wall (just one, actually). Oak pews. Beige carpet. A kind of “bleed all temptation from the physical world, those exciting colours must go” interior decorating style. But on Christmas Eve, all the colours are on display. Candles are lit. Lights are dimmed. A huge Christmas tree is struck. The choir wears special gold sashed gowns to sing carols. It is positively pagan compared to the usual Sunday fare. Jason, fresh from surgery, is brought into this sanctum, holding the hand of his grandmother, seeing the sublime for possibly the first time.
He has had eye problems all of his life. He was born blind, but fortunately, living in London, Ontario, and in CANADA, his family had access to the kind of medical care that saved one of his eyes. How things look, how what they LOOK like FEEL to him, understandably, makes a deep impression. And here is this place, perched on the corner of King Street and Maria, in dusty Thorndale, completely transformed into Another Place Altogether. Those persistent headaches, the stitching still felt behind the blind eye, the fear of hospitals, recede into the candles like the reflection of water on a wall.
Christmas becomes one of his favourite times of the year. CHRISTMAS, he finds out, is when people go NUTS with lights. His Dad plasters their house on Queen Street with strings of them, leaving them turned on all Christmas Eve night so his routinely brown brick and white trim house glows like the interior of a Christmas tree. He sneaks out of his bed and wanders around this alternative house, staring at everything, seeing how everything has changed, as if it had recently been drawn from the ether. The microwave? Drawn from the ether. The TV? Drawn from the ether. Even his hands and fingers, pre-digital, lo-fi as they are, seem lit and spectral.
And this is enough for him. While for some the aches and relief of the Soul are the meat and potatoes of Christmas, his is rooted in the body, the monocular, migraine-fueled body–a six year old body, fresh from the meat grinder of the hospital, discovering that a Dad’s ambitious Christmas light project, or the decorations of the United Church Women’s Auxiliary can produce sublimity. There are mysterious truths out there, he intuits. And he sits on the linoleum floor of his kitchen and soaks it in.
This whole year has most likely banged on the tuning fork of your heart a lot, for one reason or another. If you’re like Jason, that tuning fork was hit the moment life began and has been ringing ever since. But there are moments he found, like when he was six, where the sound it makes changes as the world goes dark and something beautiful appears. Our hope is that you find something like that these new few weeks.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
