AS an inveterate trend watcher, it’s become clear to me that Feminism is in a crisis, a kind of protracted hangover from the excesses of post modernism. Important post-feminist writers like Mary Harrington et al are writing books about how much better off we women would be if we simply returned to circa 1959. Before they invented the pill and women no longer had a choice as to whether or not they worked. Echoing the disaffected feminists is a chorus of talking heads informing us that the West in general is over, we’re done, finished, kaput. But before we go rushing forward into the past, we should have a hard, cold look at it. And as luck would have it, I have a handy dandy memoir that might be quite useful. You see, I was young in those halcyon years between 1959 to 1985 or so. I lived through them and wrote down what it felt like. I really am a voice from the past. And whatever we think now: it wasn’t paradise either.
In May of 2017, I published REBEL MUSE My life with Peter Paul Ochs, a memoir of a marriage set in a time so different from today that it is fast disappearing into a misty fog bank. Peter and I lived what is now regarded as a ‘traditional marriage’ that was the norm in those days: he worked, I stayed home and raised two sons. Apart from that, we were anything but ‘traditional’—Peter being a gifted and driven Artist; I the loyal but somewhat conflicted Muse. And we were recent immigrants from East Prussia and Germany. For us, everything was difficult and new, but we had something the young generation today seems to lack: abundant hope for the future. We never questioned that it would be better than today. We didn’t fret about overpopulation or climate catastrophes. We were busy simply surviving and adapting to a new country.
Monika and Peter, dancing on their wedding day, August 21 1959
I am republishing parts of this book with comments in Italics for my substack readers because it seems to me that we’re living through a convoluted cultural reckoning that inevitably involves delving into the past. At the moment, we’re being urged to flagellate ourselves for the sins our ancestors supposedly committed. I wonder how sane such a quest is and where it may lead. We shall see. But in comparing the life we lived some 60 years ago to the life on offer for young couples today, it does seem as if we lived in a golden age of hope and opportunity. In contrast, being a young couple today seems a fraught enterprise in a society losing its mind over how to define what a woman is, unmooring from reality by living online and fretting about AI, digital currencies, and general economic collapse. Not to mention the ravages of a totally mishandled pandemic, climate change madness, the hot war in Ukraine and a brand new Cold War with China. All we had to worry about then was the VietNam war, and terrible though it was, it didn’t take centre stage in our lives. Today, we cannot easily ignore the endless problems besetting us. Being a ‘normal young couple’ today is, to may way of thinking, a truly difficult thing to do. So, I am delving into my past and asking: when did all the trouble begin, and were the roots of today’s deep malaise already visible? Or are we just fooling ourselves and seeing the past through the proverbial rose tinted glasses?
Let’s begin with the cover of the book, a grid showing photos of our married life interspersed with text and some of Peter’s works. I still think it’s a good design.
CHAPTER ONE
Overture: how REBEL MUSE began with a visit to STORY OF RAVEN
When you walk around to the back of the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives on Bellevue Street in lovely old Victoria, you will stumble across a bunch of food trucks arranged around a massive sculpture made of cast concrete. It had been gracing this spot for fifty years without any title, or explanation of who its creator was or what it might mean. The sculpture was installed in 1968, and was Peter Ochs’ one public commission, which he called Story of Raven. I began a campaign to get a plaque installed in 2014, which finally happened in 2016. I even wrote the text, after extensive research and revisions.
Peter Ochs leaning against STORY OF RAVEN, 1969
STORY OF RAVEN, 1967
Peter Paul Ochs, (1931-1994).
This is one of six sculptures by BC artists the BC government commissioned for the new Provincial Museum and Archives complex - a 1967 Canadian Centennial project. Cast in white cement and onyx aggregate, it represents - in the words of the artist - an "homage to the creative spirit" which he experienced during contact with Gitxsan artists in the Skeena area in 1965.
Born in East Prussia, Peter Ochs came to Canada in 1952. He worked in forest logging camps before studying sculpture in Paris (1956) and then Hamburg (1957). Ochs taught high school in Summerland and the Fraser Valley. His work was shown at the University of British Columbia, (1958), the Seattle Art Museum (1959), the National Gallery of Canada, (1964), and in numerous private exhibitions. He was a founding member of the Sculptors' Society of BC in 1974.
I realized I needed to do something after visiting the sculpture in the fall of 2014, shortly after moving to Victoria from Vancouver. I hadn’t seen it for four decades and had not realized that there was no plaque to identify the sculpture or its creator. My son, Vincent Ochs, had tried to get some action on a plaque about a decade earlier, to no avail. I vowed that this time, it would be different. Fortunately, I had no idea how trying this little project was going to be, though at first, things went smoothly. I contacted one of the senior curators at the Museum and a cordial meeting was arranged that included Vincent’s brother, Eric. We enjoyed a wide-ranging discussion about the sculpture and the artist who created it. Perhaps it should be on their website, said the curator, who was upbeat and promised that something would be done. After all, the 150th Centennial celebrations in 2017 were almost upon us, so my timing was good. I was thrilled; I hadn’t expected this to be quite so easy. And once a plaque was in place, I thought I would revisit the idea of writing a memoir based on Peter’s legacy and our long, complicated relationship.
What follows is a lengthy and not totally fascinating description of how I managed to get my hands on the papers that I needed to write about the birth of the sculpture. Suffice it to say that the Museum staff was only partially helpful though I finally found someone who actually acted like a Museum employee and found the ‘missing’ documents for me. It took several months and I am sure the staff was hoping that I would simply give up and go away. Oddly enough, my relationship with the Museum resumed when it became obvious that wokism had infected the current staff to such a degree that they were threatening to close the museum in its entirety. And build a new woke, inclusive and improved version that would have cost close to a billion dollars. The ensuing public outcry finally forced them into retreat, and at present, there is a stalemate between public opinion and the powers of the Woke Cult. You can read all about it in a couple of my sub stacks called Murder at the Museum.
The File that was dug up for me turned out to be a veritable treasure trove of information, complete with Peter's scathing letters to the committee in charge of art, as well as general background on the project. Peter referred to the work as An Homage to the Creative Spirit, according to the booklet published when the Museum was opened in 1967. I was finally able to write a text and in due course, the handsome plaque, Story of Raven, was installed on the last day of April 2016. Ende gut, alles gut.
This event kicked off the ruminations that precede writing a book. I had made stabs at a memoir before, but always abandoned the task. Story of Raven inspired me to try again. I began with re-reading my diaries and two family histories that Peter wrote shortly before his death. My diaries—dozens of them—resurrected life with Peter and the woman I used to be. Unfortunately, encountering my former self was too much like reading Alice in Wonderland. I was changing size at inconvenient moments, falling into pools of my own tears and forever losing the key to the magic garden. Who was this incoherent woman? Surely not I.
So, while writing this memoir turned out to be a painful process, it also brought back the story behind Story of Raven, and why the sculpture had such a profound impact on our life. Peter was thirty-seven years old, just hitting his stride as an artist, and I was a young mother, twenty-eight years old, when it was completed. We had two boys aged six and eight, and were living on Island Avenue in Vancouver, a stone’s throw from my in-laws, Opi and Omi. Encountering the sculpture after such a long time was rather like unearthing a huge time capsule. And there was no telling what I would find if and when I opened it.
Nobody was begging me to do this, neither my family nor my former publisher, Mona Fertig. She had originally committed to a book on Peter Ochs in the series The Unheralded Artists of BC, but decided she actually didn’t want a Memoir. However, to me, the memoir form was the only authentic voice possible, since I was not only writing the story but had also lived it. Since there were plenty of ‘loose ends’ I wanted to explore, I decided to self-publish and be damned. What I wrote was a story hovering uneasily between confession and complicated half-truth. I admit that I am an ‘unreliable narrator’. How could it be otherwise? Memory is a distorting mirror, so I make no claims to revealing ‘the truth’.
But this story does illuminate the complexities and paradoxes of life as we live it, then as well as now. Above all, it is a story of what it’s like to live a life dedicated to Art, and a deep dive into the question of what art means in a society like ours, if it indeed it has any meaning left. I am thinking that the question we are asking ourselves today is whether we can re discover our mojo. Our cultural confidence. Or whether those talking heads are right and we’re on the way out. I believe that Art is the weathervane, then as well as now.