The Admen Move on Lhasa: Writing and Culture in a Virtual World

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

In the title essay of this collection of 13 essays, the city of Lhasa in
Tibet becomes for Steven Heighton the very essence of art, “both a
consolation and an abiding challenge.” By contrast, he finds much in
our own age and place to be irrelevant and irreverent: an expression of
a will to confiscate and control. Our zeitgeist either contaminates art
or transforms it into advertising.

In “The Age of Clowns,” Heighton participates in a one-mile
footrace down Princess Street in Kingston in the 1980s, contemplates the
ideas expressed by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, and
proposes that this is an age in which people’s lives are “intensely
felt, but nasty and short.” The farcically costumed runners in the
McMile typify a culture composed of clowns and believers.

“Still Possible to Be Haunted,” subtitled “Religion and Writing
in the Age of Career,” argues that all art is religious, tied as it is
to the elemental mysteries that religions struggle to explore and
explain. “Literature,” Heighton writes, “even the most secular and
seemingly off-hand, [is] a search for the opening in the wall.” The
wall is our spiritual home—the home lost in our search for endless
growth.

Heighton, an accomplished writer of fiction and poetry, has written a
book that is ambitious in scope and brilliant in parts; unfortunately,
some of the individual pieces attempt more than they achieve.