Bob Wiseman

A woman from England wrote me with questions about my book. This in itself was suspicious. From the internet most either want money, validation, or directions to the bathroom. She seemed genuinely interested in my writing. I answered her questions. She replied with more. We went back and forth and I enjoyed the exchange. There is always danger in this. The business world is full of people who understand artists are lonely mammals and curiosity often is just a free sample. Eventually she revealed she worked as an editor. This caught my attention. I happen to need an editor for the new book. The universe appeared to be offering popcorn for my movie. But when I asked about hiring her, she redirected me toward a friend. He was, she explained, more professional than her. This sounded noble. Also suspicious. I wrote him anyway. He turned out to be real. I Googled him. He had a significant job. The internet trained me to assume everyone is a Russian bot. He replied warmly, said flattering things about my writing. Artists should never trust compliments. We are descendants of dogs. Throw us a bone and we follow you into traffic.

Then came the referral. He recommended another person precisely because he liked my work. She is specialized in developing authors for their publishing house. I wrote her. She responded promptly with her fees, somewhere between six hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars. Suddenly the entire experience acquired the faint smell of a casino. Not an evil casino. A tasteful literary casino that apparently nurtured creative voices. Still, the sound of coins dropping into machinery seemed unmistakable. At this point I could no longer determine whether I was witnessing the ordinary mechanics of publishing or being herded, albeit slowly, through a beautifully mannered extraction process.

Everyone was sincere. No one was wearing a cape or twirling a moustache. Perhaps these people genuinely help writers every day. Perhaps I am merely suffering from the accumulated paranoia of adulthood. Still, I could not shake the feeling that somewhere along the journey from reader to editor to editor's friend to author-development specialist, I had wandered into something suspicious. The truly remarkable part was everyone seemed perfectly nice. That is how the best systems work. Nobody appears to be manipulating you. They simply keep opening doors until eventually you find yourself standing in front of a cash register wondering how a conversation about books turned into "that will be $2,500 please".

That's when I abandoned the idea of hiring strangers from the sprawling Author Development Industrial Complex and decided instead to conduct a more dangerous experiment. I asked myself: who do I actually know? Who among my friends, who possesses intelligence and sufficient emotional instability to tell me the truth? Not publishing-industry aromatherapy. Not the literary equivalent of a chiropractor saying my manuscript merely needed better alignment. I wanted the people who would approach the book with a crowbar and a flashlight. Someone capable of saying, "This chapter is excellent," followed immediately by, "This section reads like you were trapped in a room with your own metaphors for three consecutive days."

What I needed were the dangerous ones. Smartypants. People with functioning bu****it detectors. People willing to identify a lazy sentence, a pretentious flourish, any of my writing that wandered off into the woods and never returned. Don't spare me besides, criticism from somebody I respect lands differently. A stranger can reject your work but remain abstract. A friend whose intelligence you admire can point to a paragraph, "Bob, what in God's name were you thinking here?" and suddenly the heavens part. The diagnosis arrives. It hurts in a useful way. Like discovering the noise in your car isn't a transmission, just a clogged filter. That kind of honesty is worth more than all the professional encouragement money can buy.

That's when I shared the whole mess with Magali. She possesses a useful superpower largely absent from my own operating system: skepticism. She Googled the email addresses, after sixty seconds announced the verdict.

"It's a well-known publishing scam."

A publishing scam? I stared at her. You mean I wasn't engaged in a charming transatlantic literary exchange with thoughtful editors who had become captivated by my prose? I had been corresponding with a sophisticated harvesting operation designed to identify writers suffering from the common occupational disease known as Hope? The realization hit like a falling piano. My God. They had complimented me. They had asked intelligent questions. They had directed me toward other apparently intelligent people. Somewhere a machine figured out that the fastest route to my wallet is through the ego.

Even more disturbing was how willing I had been. Not completely. Cautiously willing. Like a raccoon cautiously willing to investigate a shiny object beside a highway. I wrote them all. I informed them they were criminals and parasites. Then I blocked them. Gone. The silence afterward was magnificent. Like throwing a cult out of your living room. I sat there enjoying the righteous indignation. For a brief shining moment I was not a confused author seeking guidance. I was a homeowner with a broom chasing raccoons off the porch.

Mustafa, the Lyft driver, told me he was from Turkey. We were moving through the city inside the temporary confessional space that Ubers and Lyfts become. Strangers exchange opinions they would not necessarily reveal to neighbours. I asked what he thought of Erdoğan. He didn't like him. Neither do I. Mustafa apologized for his English several times. No big deal I said. Then our movie acquired it's inciting incident - he asked where I was from.

"Winnipeg," I said.

But Winnipeg was clearly not the answer he was seeking. I recognized the question behind the question. But where before? He asked. What tribe do you belong to. What story did you inherit? What category he should place me in before proceeding.

"I'm a Jew," I said.

Many Jews know the small pause after that declaration. Not always, but often enough. A moment during which you wonder what version of the conversation is about to unfold. Sometimes you are unexpectedly appointed ambassador for several thousand years of history. Occasionally someone decides it is time to explain the defects of your civilization. It's my lucky day. Mustafa asked what I thought about Israel, America, and Iran.

Before I completed my first sentence, he launched into his explanation. According to Mustafa, the Israelis always wanted to eliminate all the Muslims in the world except for the Turks, whose army was apparently too formidable. I attempted to respond. Unfortunately, his English was not quite strong enough to follow my explanations, also he preferred his own. Each time I began constructing a bridge, he drove another truck across in the opposite direction. The conversation became pointless. He wanted me to understand that my role was not participant but audience.

At a certain point this reminded me of musical improvisation. Occasionally there is a musician who cannot hear what is being played around them. You offer a phrase but they repeat their own. You change direction and they continue toward a destination they chose long before the performance began. So I nodded. And I found myself thinking how strange human beings are. Enormous portions of our lives spent searching for someone to listen, only to discover what we often mean by listening is waiting politely while we prepare our next speech.

This realization did not depress him, oddly it was relief. For decades he carried the burden of defending an imaginary permanent self while simultaneously trying to create permanent significance through an art form made entirely of disappearance. Neither occupied space in the way stones occupy space. One evening after a concert a listener approached, "Your music felt very real." Richard smiled at the compliment while privately suspecting that the most real things in life might be precisely those that never become objects at all. They arise, transform, and disappear, leaving behind the mystery that they were ever here.

As they left the diner, one of them paused beneath the neon sign and said, "You know, if God exists, I suspect He has a strange relationship with unresolved dissonance." The other adjusted his scarf. "And if God doesn't exist," he replied, "people will still argue over whether that saxophone solo was profound or self-indulgent." They stood there for a moment in the cold, two mammals on a spinning rock trying to explain existence using pie, philosophy, and amplified vibrations. Then they walked in opposite directions, each carrying the unsettling possibility that the other might be right about something.

I went to the Tate Gallery sometime in the 1980s when I was in London with Blue Rodeo. I don't remember exactly what year it was. Touring has a way of flattening time. Whole cities risk becoming backstage areas attached to venues. But I remember the Tate. I wandered through the galleries with the attention one brings to museums. Interesting things everywhere. Paintings Paintings history already certified as important. Then, across a long hallway, I noticed something entirely different. It was as though a small electrical disturbance had appeared at the far end of the room. Two colours predominated and seemed to vibrate against one another. The painting wasn't merely hanging there waiting to be inspected. It was reaching out. I felt curiosity mixed with confusion. What was that? Why did it seem more alive than everything else around it?

I walked toward it. The closer I got, the more powerful the sensation became. I discovered it was a painting by David Hockney. It was the first time I had encountered his work. Stood there stunned. It wasn't simply technical accomplishment. Audacity. Joy. Intelligence. Whatever combination of instinct and discipline allows an artist to produce something unmistakably theirs. I couldn't say what I ate that day or what hotel we stayed in. But I remember the experience of seeing that Hockney painting across the room and being drawn toward it like metal and a magnet. One of those artists who expands one's understanding, even if you work in an entirely different medium. You leave reminded that the real task is not merely to competence, but to discover how to make something with unmistakable voltage.

Fave part of the open stage was the woman all dressed in black, never played here before, took the stage and introduced her first song in a gentle kind voice, "this is called it's going to be ok (pause) it's about a panic attack".

The cricket spent its brief existence attending to practical matters. Finding shelter beneath the porch boards. Interpreting vibrations through its tiny body. Then one summer evening it encountered something entirely outside its inherited understanding. From an open window came the sound of a piano. The notes moved through the warm air in patterns unlike anything in the insect world. They were not warnings. Not mating signals. Not territorial disputes. The cricket paused in wonder. If awe exists among creatures with exoskeletons, this was surely its equivalent.

Night after night the cricket returned. Sometimes the human played scales. Sometimes hesitant melodies. Occasionally the music became turbulent and strange, as though the instrument itself were arguing with invisible forces. The cricket began answering in the only language it possessed. During quiet passages it chirped experimentally. During louder moments it fell silent. In its own mind a collaboration had begun. It imagined that somewhere inside the enormous mammal's incomprehensible nervous system, its contributions were being noticed and appreciated.

One evening the music stopped abruptly. Footsteps approached the window. The cricket, overcome with courage or perhaps misunderstanding, chirped enthusiastically from the sill. The human looked down. Tired from a long day and distracted by ordinary concerns, he saw only an insect in an inconvenient location. His hand descended quickly with the folded newspaper he had been carrying. The cricket disappeared before it had time to revise its assumptions about artistic partnership.

The robot's designation was AURORA-7, though after several months alone in transit it began referring to itself privately as Rory. Its mission parameters were straightforward enough. Travel to Mars. Oversee the deployment of habitats. Coordinate the assembly of greenhouses, solar arrays, and life support systems. Prepare the planet for the arrival of several hundred human settlers. What had not been specified in the original programming documents was the soundtrack.

Somewhere during the loading process, a technician had accidentally transferred an extensive collection of music by Giorgio Moroder into the robot's entertainment archives. The first selection played three weeks after departure during a routine systems check. Synthetic bass lines pulsed through the empty spacecraft while stars drifted silently beyond reinforced windows. The robot paused its diagnostics for 0.4 seconds longer than necessary. It discovered an unusual preference for repetition, momentum, and the optimistic architecture of electronic rhythms. By the time the vessel crossed the orbit of Earth, Moroder had become less a distraction and more a companion.

As the journey continued, the music shaped the robot's understanding of its assignment. Mars no longer appeared merely as a destination requiring logistical competence. It became the site of a future dance floor. The colony blueprints acquired emotional dimensions absent from engineering manuals. Greenhouses meant tomatoes and basil. Habitats implied birthdays and arguments and awkward romances. Solar panels suggested future teenagers complaining about their parents while synthesizers echoed through pressurized hallways. If machines dream, Rory's dreams increasingly involved humanity learning how to sway in reduced gravity.

Seven months later, as automated systems initiated the descent sequence toward the Martian surface, the robot selected one final track. The landing thrusters ignited in precise synchronization while Moroder's melodies flooded the cabin. Red dust billowed around the descending craft. The first structures unfolded mechanically beneath an apricot sky. Rory stepped onto the planet carrying blueprints, construction directives, and an inexplicable conviction that civilization required more than oxygen and plumbing. Somewhere in the database of its artificial mind a simple conclusion had formed. If humanity intended to survive on another world, it ought to bring the disco with it.

The drummer had been trying to learn meditation for nearly two years. He owned several books on mindfulness, subscribed briefly to an app featuring reassuring voices from California, and attended a weekend retreat where he spent much of the time wondering whether everyone else was having a more authentic spiritual experience. Each morning he sat on a cushion observing his breath for approximately twelve seconds before planning grocery lists or replaying awkward conversations from his past.

One night during rehearsal, something unexpected occurred. The singer slowed slightly. The bassist anticipated the next chord change. The guitarist introduced a phrase that altered the emotional shape of the song. Without thinking, he listened carefully. He responded without forcing anything. There was concentration but not strain. Awareness but not self-consciousness. When the song ended he realized that for several minutes he had been entirely present. No internal debate about whether he was succeeding. Only attention.

The insight unsettled him. He had been treating meditation as an activity confined to cushions and silence while overlooking the possibility that music itself might function as a form of practice. The music demanded that he inhabit the only place rhythm actually existed, which was now. Even the mistakes became instructive. Rather than punishing himself internally, he learned to notice what had happened and return to the pulse.

He still sat quietly each morning because the formal practice offered its own benefits. Yet he approached rehearsals differently afterward. The bandstand became another meditation hall. He no longer viewed concentration as something separate from ordinary life. Presence could emerge while washing dishes or counting off a tune in seven. Years later, when younger musicians asked him what meditation had taught him, he would tap lightly on the snare drum. "Mostly this," he said. "Pay attention. Listen carefully. And when you lose the beat, begin again."