Salem Alaton

Late one night at a racial-healing retreat in the woods of West Virginia, I found myself listening to an intense young man who unexpectedly declared, “I don’t know why everyone is running around to psychologists and psychiatrists when we all have the same problem.” By highlighting the commonality of our suffering, he conveyed what Gabor Maté calls “the compassion of recognition.” In The Myth of Normal: …

Caves are apertures for inward travel into realms we associate with the dream state. Half-seen revelations proliferate. We angle into surreal environs that summon our own nascence, now approached in reverse, from the detailed and edged world in the light without to the shrouded evocations within. This is the sticky, primal birthplace of the collective unconscious, where inchoate traces of shape and colour move in and out of the mind’s…

I once asked Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail film critic, a number of years before his passing from AIDS, if he was afraid of dying. “I’m afraid of not being alive,” he said, responding with his usual alacrity to loose ponderings in our tweedy arts ghetto at the newspaper. “There’s a difference.” While some Buddhists discern little difference in being or not being…

Curiously enough, aeronautical science chose Christmas Eve 1968 to register one of its most important milestones of the last century. That is when the three crew members of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission marked humanity’s first-ever voyage into lunar orbit by reading aloud passages from Genesis. The transmission to Earth of this unprecedented rite was then the most widely viewed television broadcast…

Walking around Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg during a rolling interview I was conducting with him some 20 years ago, we paused at a traffic light long enough for him to seize upon both the incarceration of his mother in a mental asylum and the point that as human beings we were all living in “these meat…