No Worst, There Is None. Eve McBride
reorganize food on platters. Often, when she is doing this, she thinks of the teenage mothers whose children she minds at the settlement house. They do not have the food or the resources or the wherewithal to think or even care about the aesthetics and ritual of eating. She wonders if she should somehow be cooking for the young girls or at least teaching them how to shop and cook economically. They are hungry for food and direction in their lives. The readers of RARITY have surfeits of both.
Finally the crew is ready for Thompson and he whoops with relief and exhilaration. Though he appreciates Meredith’s work and knows what he does depends on her artful compositions, he hates the waiting. All he wants is to partner with his camera. He loves his camera, a Swedish 500 ELX Hasselblad. He loves that it is an extension of his creative eye.
Photography is about capturing reality as opposed to reproducing it. He sees every photograph, however inanimate, as a kind of portrait. The food is his focus, as expression is to a face. That the food is arranged on beautiful objects is really only about what face says. And what he has to consider is how an initial glance from a viewer will perceive the whole. In this instance, it must be captivating enough to draw that viewer’s eye into the detail, to “drool over” the display of food and search out the recipes.
The camera is his voice and it is as eloquent as it is loquacious.
He keeps the mood light in the studio. He doesn’t feel his art or his craft are compromised by what he ultimately thinks is mundane work. True, it doesn’t have the grit of his previous work, the derelict areas of the waterfront. But he likes what he does enough to keep doing it: the careful, magical transposing of food into print. He loves how the contrast of light and dark makes shapes mysterious, creates depth, and how angles manipulate the eye. He controls all that and it always excites him. Even the simplest, most mundane of dishes.
And he especially likes the lack of financial pressure they feel. But he senses a restless and critical mood in Meredith. He knows she thinks that what they do is superficial and indulgent in the realm of world problems. He disagrees. He feels that life would be bleak without the aesthetics of nourishment and he’s glad to be an interpreter of that.
Shortly before 4:00 p.m., Lizbett calls the studio from the payphone at the museum, just to let her mother know she is still going to the library. Meredith tries to talk her out of it.
Sometime after 4:00 p.m. Meredith walks over to the kitchen windows and sees the black, turbulent sky. The lake looks angry. Directly below, torrential rain is flooding the brick walkways. She hears the thunder; starts at the immediate flare of lightning. And her heart sinks. Why did she ever consent to allow Lizbett to go to the library in such weather? Why hadn’t she made herself available to pick her up and drive her home?
The shoot finally ends a little after 6:00 p.m. Meredith phones home and Brygida tells her Lizbett hasn’t appeared yet, which is odd, since she usually calls if she’s going to be delayed or has changed her plans, although allowing for browsing time and travel time, she’s not really late.
“She’s probably gone to a friend’s house or has taken a bit longer at the library,” says Meredith. She suggests Brygida look in their address book for the numbers of her best friends — there’s a list — and give them a call.
After they have cleaned up, the art director asks, “Who wants to go out for a bite to eat?” Meredith and Thompson both do.
4
A Monday Afternoon in July 1986
Lizbett and Melvyn
Lizbett loves the rotunda of the Courtice Museum with its gold-and-turquoise mosaic floor and its soaring dome with the beautiful stained glass. She has been coming to this museum since she was in a stroller pushed by Meredith or Thompson, a Sunday afternoon ritual.
She is just returning from the Chinese garden where she has eaten her lunch with a couple of her campmates. She and her friends had thought they might get rained on, but they were lucky. They have come in early, in any case, to make a quick visit to the mask exhibits, something Lizbett does almost every day. She is in awe of the masks, of their tremendous variety and meaning in every culture. She likes what Melvyn has been telling her about masks: that a mask is something that hides a person, but is also an extension of that person. A mask has one face, but is two people: the one in it and the one it represents.
Lizbett gravitates to the very wild, primitive masks and also the Noh masks of the Japanese theatre. There is a maiden’s mask from Mali where the entire face is covered in white cowrie shells and draped over those is a heavy veil of hundreds of thin braids. On top of the head, the hair is formed into a tiara bordered in bright yellow and red beads. And beneath there is a collar of turquoise beads. The Noh mask that most attracts her is also that of a young girl. Playing a young girl was the highest challenge for a Noh actor and the masks only succeeded if the performer’s movements were natural and convincing. Lizbett imagines a man making this white doll-like face with the thin red lips and laughing eyes into someone the watchers believe is a happy, innocent girl.
It distresses Lizbett that in almost every culture, only the men wore masks. Even if women took part in a ritual or drama, their faces remained uncovered.
This morning Melvyn had gone over again what mask camp is about. It’s not just about making masks, he always says. “What else is it about?”
Lizbett’s hand shoots up.
“Lizbett?”
“It’s about what masks say. Like they can say who we aren’t as much as they can say who we are.”
“And how do they say who we aren’t?”
Again, Lizbett’s hand.
“Jesse?”
“Um,” Jesse says, “Sometimes they can be a fantasy of what we want to be, a self in our imagination. Like who we want to be. Like a king mask, or something. Or they can turn us into someone else who is real. Like a mask of someone famous. Or else they can show us to be scary when we’re really timid. Or happy when we’re really sad.”
“Or they can be a spirit or a god or something. Or maybe even an animal,” Laurie, in the back, pipes up.
“That’s right,” says Melvyn. “They can be representations, not of ourselves, but of what we believe. That also is a kind of indication of who we are. We’ve talked about the two-fold aspect of masks. Masks allow us both to deceive and believe at the same time. The person wearing the mask is the deceiver, but he is getting you to believe what the mask says. Masks can be us, but not us, as creations of our ancestors, our bloodline, or how we imagine them. Masks can be instruments of healing. Warrior masks protect against evil. A mask is a facade that gives us certain powers, the ability to act in ways we couldn’t act without it. But do people really believe the one wearing the mask actually becomes the spirit he’s portraying? Does that figure then become a way for someone to communicate with the spirit? Next week, our last week, we’ll examine spirit masks, masks that are stand-ins, masks that portray something unknown, something we don’t really understand. Something spiritual. A god or goddess. Something that might be worshipped or perhaps be a communicator between us and a higher force. And then we’ll create our own spirit masks from moulds of what we’re going to do today. So far, we’ve done two kinds of masks. The first week, we carved a mask out of clay to show a self from our imagination. An ideal self, a fantasy self. Last week, we went into our deepest selves to make a mask of an inner feeling, one that we could only express through an art form. We called that an outer creation of an inner core. Many people create invisible masks to hide feelings or their real identity. We created visible ones, ones that actually advertised an emotion.”
Lizbett thinks about the masks she has made. She has not found this course easy. She had thought masks were about disguises, like for Hallowe’en. But Melvyn has talked about each mask being a map and that making them is a journey of discovery. The first was a journey outside yourself, so you could see yourself as a fantasy. The second was a journey inside yourself to find a hidden or secret feeling. The first one was the real challenge.
“I really don’t