Mary Jo lives a few houses over. She has done a lot of work in her life improving the world of refugees to Canada. She’s in her late 70s or maybe early 80s. She is a recipient of the Order of Canada. I think she had a hip replacement this year. I see here in her little blue Toyota scooting around and we say hello. One day this winter while we talked squirrels and electricians, for some reason Hanna Arendt came up too. Turns out we both admire her. Mine from Eichmann in Jerusalem, hers from the PhD she did decades earlier. After that exchange, each time I saw her she says we should have coffee and discuss H.A. further, but often I am in a hurry and we did not make a date. Unsurprisingly in June there was a book in my mailbox titled Thinking Without a Bannister by Hanna Arendt. Now, almost September, I start it. Her writing displays a mind that processed many angles of history and the human condition. The first two chapters are about Karl Marx. I studied Das Kapital at York University in 2017, that professor even gave me an A, but unfortunately I have no idea what Das Kapital is about or how to talk about Marx, at least compared to things Hannah Arendt says in these first two chapters. Her perception interests me much more. She says Marx had no interest in authoritarianism or violence in the name of his ideas. That he did not foresee any of what has happened in his name. I wish the guy who taught the course I took started like that and then explored everything surrounding it. All I remember is the term commodity fetishism.

She writes about the state of the world in early twentieth century, ripe for the Stalins and Hitlers to hijack the car and drive super fast towards the cliff. She says it was against a background of the dramatic breakdown of traditional authorities. I like her analysis which resonates with how I see me art reacting to similar breakdowns. There is no end to that dynamic. People being under the control of someone or groping to be distanced from anyone controlling you and then exploring what you can do with freedom. in a way you can see the same story everywhere even from the Beatles adhering to ordinary song design up to Revolution #9, even fighting later about whether to allow Revolution 39 on the white Album.