Closing Time: farewell Blake, it’s time to go

Tomorrow I go to sign the papers that close the sale of Blake’s house in Toronto’s Cabbage Town. The lawyer’s office is near there on Parliament St., but I think I will not go back to the place itself. I am told that it smells like any closed up house, which is good news because I spent several thousand dollars getting it not to smell like dying dog and master and incontinent cats and hoarder/not housekeeper girl friend.

The only trouble is by signing those papers, I am killing him all over again. Prostate cancer took him out, long, slow and painful, but there have been steps along the way that made him deader. The day the house was finally emptied of all the detritus of twenty years of living and never throwing anything away or cleaning anything for that matter. The day we got the unconditional offer for the asking price. The day that I could no longer feel him there beyond the veil. He had walked away. Gone on to higher education. Oblivious to the weeks of juggling figures, filing late tax returns, paying utility bills, house insurance, all that day-to-day stuff that I still had to do.

For years, when I glimpsed the blue of Lake Ontario from my 14-floor window, I thought Blake’s lake, Sirocco is down there waiting him to climb on board, his house is down there. Now it is not Blake’s lake.

Blake was my great love. Explaining that is like explaining sex to a child, impossible.The only one who expressed it was Leonard Cohen in Hallelujujah.

Blake betrayed me. The only one who apologized was Leonard Cohen. I understood from him that Blake had tried in his way to be free.

Blake knew though what Cohen had said about “children waiting to be born.”, although he wouldn’t have put it in those words. Apparently, he and I had a contract to produce and nurture two children, He fulfilled it.  They are greater than we ever imagined

Why he forsook us for those who seemed to care less for him than we did, we can only surmise. It was his life.

He left me a dragon’s trail of slime. Little by little his son and his step-daughter and my sister and my niece have helped me clear the material dross, and I have wrestled the numbers into some semblance of order. Our daughter lent me courage from afar.

I know you’re busy, Blake, learning some advanced other worldly physics, but, just saying, I miss you, Love.



Dark: personal response #2

After I had watched Dark with English dubbed, I decided there was a better experience to be had and learned how to set the original German with English subtitles, as I said in my previous post. Then I went to the Internet and read several blog posts about the series. I printed 18 pages from Wikipedia, including a list of characters, who they are, and plot outlines of all 18 episodes.

I began watching again, stopping frequently to check these notes to figure out, for example, how the 1986 cop, Egan Tiedemann, fit in with the others: Claudia’s father, in uniform in 1953, FYI. That lasted until I got to episode 2 when I gave in and accepted confusion. In fact, on this second run-through even in a foreign language, I began to sort things out myself. But the best advice of all is just let it wash over you. Watch it twice if you want to but accept the fact that it’s like the ebb and flow of the ocean or the inevitable cycle of repeating events depicted in the story. Incomprehensible. But fun.

I feel a certain pride because I have observed my 24-year-old grandson watching Black Mirror and other such esoteria that way.

There are a few narrative problems with the series that you will have to accept as well.

When I was a child, there was a popular country/western son which proclaimed, “I’m my own grandpa”. It detailed the convoluted mating/marriage history of the singer’s hillbilly family, not so unlike present-day convolutions of divorced and recombined contemporary families. By carefully tracing his lineage, the singer comes to this conclusion. (I myself had a great grandmother who was also my great aunt.) This relates to Charlotte Doppler’s burning question. She finally meets her father as she searches through the artifacts in her adoptive grandfather’s clock shop. Who is her mother, she demands. He assures her that her mother loves her, implying that the mother is alive. She is and actually feels very close to Charlotte, but you get a prize if you figure out who this is before the big reveal.

Then there is Jonas Kahnwald’s discovery, which puts quits to his love affair with Martha Nielson, despite the fact that they are a ‘perfect fit for each other no matter what anyone says’. But the good news is that his discovery also explains the otherwise inexplicable suicide of his father Michael.

Then there is the puzzle of how Alexander got to be a Tiedemann, when we know that Claudia is the only Tiedemann offspring and her only child is a daughter.

Of course there is the burning question of where the disappearing children and adult go and sometimes return from radically changed or altogether dead.

This brings us to the whole question of time.

Okay, so let’s suspend our disbelief and accept time machines. But FOUR different time machines! Even in 1952, someone is trying to build a transporting chair, which has deleterious effects on its test subjects, even leaving out the bad taste wallpaper on the prison bunker. Then there’s the cave, which was always problematic, but became even more so after an incident at the nuclear power plant. If you find yourself in 1921, don’t even go there. The passage isn’t ready. Then there’s the brass thingee in a wooden box, which Charlotte’s grandfather built, before he first saw it. I know. Cold compresses help. Finally, there is the GOD PARTICLE, which looks more like a hairball your cat spat up if it were possessed.

And all of the people desperately trying to traverse time have the same goal to save the one they love by, incidentally, saving the world from the apocalypse. Some of these people describe others as the White Devil or evil incarnate, and the describee returns the favour.

And who the hell is Adam? We know his disfigured visage has resulted from time travel. But how did his soul get that way? What unforgettable event warped him? Did he actually cause it himself? And how does he relate to our innocent hero, Jonas? Jonas, who’s lost his father and his girl and who’s mother was never much of a prize.

And what of Ulrich, that rascally adulterer, who hasn’t turned out to be any better at finding lost boys than Egon? Gets a little impatient with his over-worked wife and look at the karmic pit he digs for himself.

As for Mikkel, his lost son – there’s a problem getting him back to 2019 and his over-worked mother. If he returns, others will never have been.

As my Aunt Mae taught me – first rule of seers and prestidigistators: don’t try to change events that you see are going to unfold. Such a change will have repercussions, you cannot foresee.

The only way the future can be changed is by changing the inner being.

Will season 3 wise up to this?


Dark: a personal response to the Netflix series

screenshot from Dark

It has taken great self-control not to watch both seasons and all 18 episodes of Dark for a third time. First, I watched the dubbed version. (Avoid that.) Then I watched the original German version with English subtitles. Altogether a much better experience. It took me over two weeks and given my advancing years, I held out against wasting time by perennially repeating this experience.

“Time is always with us. Time sees everything”

(Yes, you can. Go to options and opt for the original German as the language and English subtitles. Don’t have options, you’ll have something like it, the same place where you can opt for closed captions. Never did that? You have a whole new world of experience to discover. You will even be able to understand The Wire afterwards.)

Initially, I couldn’t understand Dark’s complexity. (Face it, kid, ultimately you couldn’t understand it either.) It starts with the disappearance of a child in 2019. Well, no, it starts with the suicide of a 43-year-old man in 2019.

Four different families find themselves in tumult: the Kahnwalds, the Nielsons, the Dopplers and the Tiedemans. But wait, another child disappeared 33 years before in 1986. From the same family – the Nielsons. Policeman Egon was so ineffectual at solving the mystery that Ulrich Nielson, brother of the disappeared boy, has become a policeman in order to do better. Now his son is missing.

The town of Windem is set in the midst of a great evergreen forest, but rising from its centre, far from the red tile roofs of the tidy houses, is one of Germany’s first nuclear generators. Snugged up to the guarded perimeter of the plant is a cave, which all the children are warned against, so, of course, it is a child magnet.

Windem, we are told repeatedly is a town of secrets. Initially, these secrets seem to be adulterous, but then again they could be ecological or incestuous.

Why is there a door in the cave that is welded shut? What does Sic mundi creatus est mean? And, whoops, why has another and another person vanished? Who is the man dressed like a priest, lurking near the cave and chatting with children? Why does the body of a boy dressed in 1980’s clothes and dead only 16 hours suddenly appear? What is this book that keeps surfacing – Eine Reise durch die Zeit – A Journey Through Time? Could there be such a thing as time travel? Could the question be not ‘Where is Mikkel?’ but ‘When is Mikel’?

Is Charlotte Doppler, Winden’s police chief, the key to these mysteries?

Then we find ourselves back in 1986, same town, same school, same nuclear plant, same people, just younger.

So you have home work. Get well into this series because I need to keep writing about it and there will be spoilers.