inspo/revelation

I don’t remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. “Sang de satin.” From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin”? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish translating “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin,” I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can’t remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

The plan was to go back to school when I got better. The plan was to try to get into Oxford. The plan was derailed by the Conservatives in Ontario winning the provincial election in 1995. When I could finally walk and resume a life, the one I walked into looked nothing like the one I had been heading towards before my surgery. One of the first places I went on my own after months of convalescence was a meeting of the International Socialists. I’d seen a poster on a lamppost. As everything in the outside world had taken on a new shine after I’d been cooped up in our dark apartment for months, I now noticed things like posters on lampposts. This led me through quite a few meetings with various Marxist organizations before I ended up at the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and found a community of activists who took me in, embraced me, and educated me. So many of the conversations in my life now revolved around justice, labour, and fighting the exploitation of the vulnerable, and my own difficult experiences as a young child began to seem small and inconsequential compared with the suffering I was learning about and now saw first-hand. After a year or so, at a dinner at John Clarke’s house (John is the charismatic, brilliant founder of OCAP), someone asked me about being an actor as a child, and I reluctantly recounted some of the early experiences that had haunted me from the productions The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Road to Avonlea. Where I thought I would find eye-rolls in the face of my undeniable privilege, I found empathy, understanding, a weaving of important political context, and a generous holding of my more troubling experiences.

I dove into a life of activism, helping to organize protests against cuts to welfare and healthcare and the attacks on the poor that the Conservatives presided over. Seeing first-hand the decimation of the already impossible lives of the most vulnerable people I had ever encountered made the idea of going off to university to think when there was so much to be done seem frivolous at best, and at worst offensive and selfish. My life became a series of meetings, protests, and conferences, imbued with the camaraderie of people who had dedicated their lives to justice. I had a community I was proud to be a part of, a place in the real world, and a purpose after many months of not even being able to move. This was so much more than my fantasy of being mobile and strong enough to go to the hardware store to buy the imagined nail for the unnamed project. In those activist years, full of conviction and purpose, I lost Corey, I lost school, and I gained a wild and practical education in direct activism.