Making connections through The Paston Letters

Last Wednesday I made time to partake of one of my favourite activities: I walked to my local second hand bookshop, The Bookseller, and spent an hour or so browsing unencumbered by companions or rush. As usual, the proprietor, Mr. Prins, had set aside a few hardcover Everyman’s Library Editions and an old blue hardcover Oxford World’s Classic for me to consider.  Unlike most visits, today I had time.  I left the four volumes on the counter, the seed of a number of large stacks I would build as I browsed.  Throughout my visit, Mr. Prins pottered about the store, flitting from the computer on his book-stacked desk, to the shelves and to “the back” where I imagine an infinity of yet-to-be- and never-to-be-catalogued books wait to be brought into the light.

The one volume I had come specifically seeking was H. G. Wells’ little war-time (WWII) anti-Catholic diatribe, Crux Ansata (“Why don’t we bomb Rome” it begins). I had been reading it online, but, as well as finding the digital a completely unsatisfying, indeed, unsettling manner of reading, I knew that I would someday require a real copy for the Wells collection I’ve been building since that day in about 1980 that I stumbled on a copy of Ann Veronica in that bookstore that used to be in Hub Mall on the University of Alberta Campus.  If I remember correctly, that bookstore, since shifted locations a number of times, is now The Edmonton Book Store on Whyte Avenue, in the location that one time was Bjarne’s Books, a shop and proprietor I sadly miss.  Edmonton’s loss — Victoria’s and Cyberspace’s gain.

I went straight to the Fiction section and was at first disappointed by the slimness of the Wells selection.  A few of the usual War of the Worldses and Time Machines. And, there in the middle, a slim little volume bound in dark leather. Crux Ansata! With a large smile on my face I strode back to the counter and plopped my find onto the Everyman Shelley and Langland and the little blue Paston Letters.  Now to some truly unencumbered browsing!

Oh, the treasures I found!

An early edition of the Tolkien/Gordon edition of Sir Gawain; Skeet’s two volume edition of Piers Plowman and Richard the Redeless (I already had one, but this was in better condition. The next day I traded the old one for a copy of  Bentham’s Fragment on Government); a lovely copy of the first edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (in four volumes); Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century; a 1959 copy of Vinaver’s Malory; nice old hardcovers of Quirk & Wrenn’s Old English Grammar and Campbell’s venerable volume on the same subject; The Oxford Book of Medieval Verse; nice editions of Ancrene Wisse and The Parlement of Foules . . .

And a copy of Sisam’s edition of 14th Century Verse and Prose, a volume I find oddly common in Edmonton — I have three copies now myself. But this latest copy, unusual in that it still had a (rubbed) dust jacket, had a little surprise for me which made me take a second look at the other books in my stacks. There on the flyleaf was written in small letters in ball-point “Raymond J. S. Grant”.

During my days at the University of Alberta, Dr. Grant was the senior Anglo-Saxonist in the English Department, standing in a venerable line stretching back to R. K. Gordon, a professor at the University’s foundation and, by the way, translator of number 794, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, in Everyman’s Library.

It was Dr. Grant who surprised me during an undergraduate directed reading of The Seafarer by saying “I think you might have a publication here.”  Because of Dr. Grant, I had my first scholarly publication accepted before I got my Bachelor’s degree.

I have gradually have fallen out of contact with the people of my University days. I regularly return to campus, but it’s a different world with different people now.  Not worse, not better, just different.  I had some sort of memory that Dr. Grant had retired and perhaps gone back to Scotland. As I gathered my thoughts for this piece I found on the University web page that Dr. Grant is, indeed, emeritus, as is my thesis supervisor, L. N. McKill, the man who first taught me Old English.  After I got home from the bookstore I discovered Dr. McKill’s name on the flyleaf of Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century.  I held in my hands volumes that had educated my educators. These books had been around me in those offices three decades ago as I puzzled my way through great poetry sadly experienced by only a few.

What I find of extreme interest in second hand books is the little bits of paper one finds tucked into them.  Dr. Grant’s copy of Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose (1959) is undoubtedly a text from his student days.  Tucked into book at the first page of the Introduction are two slips of paper, one laying out the geography of dialects of Middle English with representative authors (information repeated in the facing map) and the other a cryptic, multicoloured graph of English sound changes.

These are meticulous thoughts-on-paper of a student of a different time, brief glimpses of the learning process in an age of paper, conversation and information hard-won from beautiful, tactile, fragrant objects with their own individual histories — books in a library.

Mr. Prins filled a banker’s box with my selected volumes and agreed to hold the heavy collection for me to pick up later when I’d be out with a vehicle. When I returned two stacks of brick-red hardcovers were on the counter.  “I told you I thought I had a lot of Wells back there!” Mr. Prins announced with a grin.  Indeed, he had brought from “the back” a twelve volume matched set of Wells’ novels ranging from The Time Machine to The Undying Fire.  A fine day’s discovery!

Later Wednesday evening I looked more carefully at the World’s Classics copy of The Paston Letters.  There was no name on the fly leaf.  It seemed an anonymous book with no story to tell outside of its text.  But, tucked in the back was a small blue slip of paper which indicated that this, like some others of the volumes in the box, was a review copy sent out by the publisher in the hope that professors would say nice things about it. On the back of the slip was a hand written note:

Raymond:

pp. 41-72 seem to be missing from this book as also 73 to 104. I suppose that is a whole gathering! Give him hell next time — you might get a real find from them.

Joan

Sure enough, a gathering is misplaced in the book.  But of far more interest to me is the note. Considering the number of Dr. Grant’s books that had recently come into the Bookseller, I have no doubt that “Raymond” addressed in the book is Dr. Grant. And I am equally certain that “Joan” who wrote the note is Dr. Joan Crowther, a Chaucerian I never met during our shared time at the University.  But I did meet and get to know Dr. Crowther in her retirement as each weekday morning I got her clubs out of storage for her round of golf.  I lost touch with Dr. Crowther after leaving the world of golf just a few years before she left this world.

As I stood looking at that little blue note on Wednesday night I recalled a brief exchange, one of many conversations we shared over clattering golf clubs.  These words came shortly after my reading crossed a very special threshhold:

“Dr. Crowther, do you find that the more you read the more everything seems to connect together?”

Dr. Crowther held her golf bag still and looked at me.

“Oh, yes, John!”

“Mind at the End of Its Tether” by H. G. Wells: a final testament of hope

I’ve just revisited H.G. Wells’ last book (apart from that thing on which he collaborated with Uncle Joe Stalin) Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in November 1945.  I feel I must emphasize at the outset that the title is not A Mind at the End of Its Tether — Wells is explicitly not saying in the title that his own mind is at the end of its tether (although that may have been a fact). No, this little collection of odd essays is about the coming end of “self-conscious existence” as the European intellectual elite had conceived it for centuries and also about the probable (from the late 1945 point of view) obliteration of Life itself:

. . . within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by æons, there has been a fundamental change in conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.

I think too often Mind at the End of Its Tether is condemned or dismissed (or praised) as a disjointed (Orwell’s description) wallow in pessimism by an old man disappointed or even heartbroken over the failure of his life-mission as he feels that life winding down to an end he knows to be only days or weeks away.  When I consider another little book Wells published just before Mind at the End of Its Tether, I find the suggestion that Wells had lost hope and given up to be preposterous.  The Happy Turning concludes with an idea very similar to the conclusion of Mind at the End of It’s Tether:

So we found ourselves in agreement that the human mind may be in a phase of transition to a new, fearless, clear-headed way of living in which understanding will be the supreme interest in life, and beauty a mere smile of approval.  So it is at any rate in the Dreamland to which my particular Happy Turning takes me.  There shines a world “beyond good and evil”, and there, in a universe completely conscious of itself, Being achieves its end.

Well!  That’s nothing other than an evolutionary jump!

And how does Mind at the End of Its Tether end?

. . . my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.

What? Bloody convoluted British piling up of negatives to confound whether or not one is making a positive statement!  If I parse correctly, Wells is saying that, in fact, he can’t help but think that there *will* be that small successful group which will reach life’s inevitable end.

But what is that end?

I would argue that life’s inevitable end in Wells’ view is an intellectual evolutionary jump to the situation described in The Happy Turning, that world “beyond good and evil”, that “clear-headed way of living.”

Let’s look at the book.

I think the chapter headings can vital to an understanding of what Wells is arguing:

The End Closes In Upon Mind
Mind is Retrospective to the End
There is No “Pattern of Things to Come”
Recent Realisations of the Nature of Life
Race Suicide by Gigantism
Precocious Maturity, A Method of Survival
The Antagonism of Age and Youth
New Light on the Record of the Rocks

Here is the pattern of Wells’ discussion. Self-conscious life is facing conditions which will end it, but thought will look back to past patterns till the end because there is no pattern in the chaos of the future. So Wells himself looks back to the past through the lens of evolutionary biology and presents some patterns he sees, including a tendency to large body size, except in the case of humans who have evolved through a process of progressive infantilization. Just as humanity has survived by evolving a permanent arrested physical development, it is necessary that Mind remain vibrantly youthful if there is to be a future for life.

Throughout the book, Wells is frustratingly vague about the threats to Life he sees and use deceptive terms to describe exactly what he thinks is in danger.  Just as there may be a tendency to read the title as A Mind at the End of its Tether, it is easy to misunderstand Wells’ talk of “our universe” ending rather than “the Universe”: at one point he writes “our ‘universe’” and at another it is “Our universe”.  Wells is decidedly not talking about a rolling up of the firmament and God wandering off to start anew.   At most he is anticipating a nuclear sterilization of the planet. At least he is talking about a restructuring of human society and intellect into something his generation of old men would no longer recognize as human.

Now, in more detail:

Chapter One is partly a description of the Mind of Wells’ time, of the intellectual approach to existence that Wells sees in the common folk (keep calm and carry on) and in the educated classes (keep calm and carry on).  Wells describes what his own attitude has been:

The habitual interest in his life is critical anticipation. Of everything he asks: “To what will this lead?” And it was natural for him to assume that there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that the would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life.  So that in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality, an adaptation and a resumption.  It was merely a question, the fascinating question, of what forms the new rational phase would assume . . .

But Wells has come to the conclusion that there has come a complete breakdown in predictability, perhaps an anticipation of Chaos Theory, and he seems to be anticipating Toffler’s Future Shock in his description of the trauma of a world in which “everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity.”  And his description of his mid-twentieth century world is remarkable:

Distance had been abolished, events had become practically simultaneous throughout the planet . . .

If 1945 appeared to be at Tether’s End, what would Wells have done if confronted with the world today?

Although Wells has stated that prediction is no longer possible, he predicts that

the normal multitude, which will carry on in this every contracting NOW of our daily lives — quite unawake to what it is that is making so much of our existence distressful and evasive and intensifying our need for mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness.

and

We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty.

Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr Wells!

What I find troubling about Chapter One is Wells’ introduction of what he calls “The Antagonist”, some sort of almost-almost personal force which is Hell-bent on destroying life.  I have trouble reconciling Wells’ seeing acceptance that the world is purposeless and virtually lacking in causality with what seems a wholly unnecessary hypothesis of an Enemy of humanity.  He is vague to the point of meaninglessness about the nature of the Antagonist.  Is the Antagonist simply entropy?  Wells’ frequent references to radioactivity — they appear in almost every chapter — makes me wonder if the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan just a few months earlier are not the root of Wells dread.  Or is the Antagonist something about human nature, a race-suicidal imperative which nuclear fission could only exacerbate?  I don’t know, but I don’t understand why Wells felt it necessary to personify this “force” as “The Antagonist”.

The brief second Chapter is simply a condemnation of religion as a usually malicious fiction but also a necessary anodyne for the common person in the face of the futility of life:  the priests help the people keep calm and carry on until they die.

Chapter III is probably the one that causes people to judge Wells a pessimist:

After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly.  Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength.  We would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack.  But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

In Chapter IV Wells looks at evolutionary theory as it stood in his time and then applies it to humanity and the problem he sees coming.  Wells suggests that within his lifetime there has been a huge change in the relations of the sexes in Britain, a hint that evolution continues in humans.  And then, he suggests that the sorts of forces which bring about these relationship changes “may play incalculable parts in the production of a new humanity” capable of adapting to the new world.  A hint of a sort of absent-minded eugenics as the future hope.

In Chapter V Wells suggests that the first law of Life is “the imperative to aggression” which leads to large body size.  As I understand modern evolutionary theory — and the comparative numerical and biomass success of, for example, whales and beetles — Wells is beyond wrong in this detail (as he is on the diet of basking sharks).  But Wells is correct in his main point in the chapter: species rise and fall, usually to be replaced by other species but sometimes a species rebounds from an evolutionary bottle-neck.  Again, Wells is closing on a hopeful note.

In the title of Chapter VI, “Precocious Maturity, a Method of Survival”, and in the Chapter itself, Wells makes clear the basis of his hope for the future:

time after time Nature has cut out an adult form from the record altogether, abolished it, and made some larval stage the sexually mature form.

Wells is arguing that the future must be made by the young in youth, and as he closes the next chapter, he states such explicitly:  “The young are life, and there is no hope but in them.”  Is this pessimism?  I think not!

Wells’ final Chapter brings the suggestion that a small minority of highly adaptable individuals will survive the coming “end”.  Wells recaps human evolution, pointing out the progressive infantilization which must continue into any viable future and then concludes with his convoluted affirmation of his own hope for the future.

Certainly Mind at the End of Its Tether is uneven and at times frustratingly vague.  But I cannot call it disjointed — there is a very strong coherence in Wells’ discussion. And there is nothing pessimistic in the little book!  This is the final testament of a man who has seen his world very nearly destroyed in two world wars, of a man who has seen his life long work of building peace repeatedly dashed — this is the final testament of a man in a time of vanishingly little hope who stands up and points to a young couple daring to begin a life together and announces “There are the new Lords of Creation!”

And, you know what? Those young people Wells passed the torch to are our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  We’ve made it through the End Wells expected.  We are the New Humanity, navigating a world more complicated, chaotic and terrifying than Wells could have imagined or handled.   We navigate that world with all Humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips, in our back pockets. We chat instantly with a friend on the other side of the world, with people living off the planet, for goodness sake.  We are the Shape of Things to Come.

Let’s try to keep up the “mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness”.

An #IdleNoMore Reading List (sort of)

One Shelf Full

Some time ago Lise Frigault suggested to me on Twitter that I put together an #IdleNoMore reading list.  What follows I think is decidedly not exactly what she suggested. Rather, the following is a sparsely annotated bibliography of some of the things I’ve read over the years which have shaped my thinking on Aboriginal/Newcomer relations, on Canadian Constitutional and political matters and on the necessary way forward for all of us.

First, some online documents

The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763

The Durham Report, 1839

The Gradual Civilization Act, 1857 

The British North America Act, 1867

The Indian Act

Some Excerpts from the Bryce Report on conditions in Residential Schools, 1907

The White Paper, 1969

Citizens Plus (The Red Paper), 1970

Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996

Bill C-45, 2012

The Interim Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (pdf)

They Came for the Children narratives from the Residential School Experience (pdf)

Books on my shelf

I’m a bit of a book-hoarder. I keep my books. I don’t have much interest in e-books.  I always have a real book in my pocket. I have a lot of books.  Many of them bear directly on Canadian History and on First Nations issues.  As I grow older and read more, however, I find that everything is tied together.  This list could have been very long — I can see justification in including James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, but I won’t. I’ve tried to winnow the list down severely.

User-friendly volumes

An interesting introduction is the Chronicles of Canada Series, which was published a century ago. I’m fortunate to have a nice first edition of the thirty-two volume set, but all volumes seem to be available online at various places.   The first volume, The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada is by Stephen Leacock, and is far more sensitive than one might expect of the time.  A number of other volumes are also devoted to First Nations leaders and their roles in our shared history.  The series was written for young readers: they are brief but densly packed with information. Definitely worth a look both for stong information and as a window into historical attitudes a hundred years ago.

A modern version of something similar to the Chronicles of Canada is John Ralston Saul’s fascinating collection of biographies, Extraordinary Canadians. The biographies of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden and that of Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe are of particular relevence to the current subject, but making ones way through the entire collection would not be a wasted effort.  The volumes are very readable.  I would wish a set were in every High School library in the country.

A Big Influence

The American Empire and the Fourth World by Anthony J. Hall is a sweeping analysis of the legal/constitutional history of European/First Nations relations.  Professor Hall’s analysis has been a big influence on my thinking.

The Northwest Rebellion

One of the most user-friendly volumes on this list has to be Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, a massive graphic-novel biography of the Métis leader and Father of Confederation.

Loyal to Death: Indians and the Northwest Rebellion by Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser makes very clear that the First Nations never had any desire to be involved in the Metis Northwest Rebellion and indeed, desperately remained loyal to their treaties and the Crown.

Hugh Dempsey’s Crowfoot, a biography of the great Blackfoot leader, is one of so many of Dempsey’s vast output of Western Canadian history volumes directed at a popular audience.

Two fundamental works

The Fourth World by George Manuel and Michael Posluns
The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal

Two interesting companion volumes about the Stoney Nation in Southern Alberta

These Mountains are our Sacred Places by Chief John Snow of the Stoney Nation
Bad Medicine by Judge John Reilly.

 

Contrasting takes on Canada, it’s nature, and it’s future

Lament for a Nation George Grant
The Truth About Canada Mel Hurtig
Unlikely Utopia Michael Adams
Becoming Canada Ken Dryden
A Fair Country John Ralston Saul
Navigating a New World Lloyd Axworthy
Polar Imperative Shelagh D. Grant
Unfinished Business: Aboriginal Peoples and the 1983 Constitutional Conference  Norman K. Zlotkin
How Canadians Govern Themselves Eugene A. Forsey
The Inconvenient Indian Thomas King
Hidden in Plain Sight Ed. David R. Newhouse, cora J. Voyageur, etc. is a handy tonic to the tired racist suggestion that aboriginal people are lazy do-nothings and letters to the editor of newspapers in Nanaimo.

From the other non-U.S. part of the Western Hemisphere

The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz
Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano
Do the Americas Have a Common History? ed. Lewis Hanke
Our Word is our Weapon Subcommandante Marcos

White people going native in Canada and Namibia

The Sheltering Desert Henno Martin
Maps and Dreams Hugh Brody
The Other Side of Eden Hugh Brody

Microcosm reflecting Macrocosm where the Thomson meets the Fraser

The Western Avernus by Morley Roberts
Archdeacon on Horseback by Cyril E. H. Williams & Pixie McGeachie
Where the Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring

Poetry and near-poetry

Tobacco Wars by Paul Seesequasis
Assiniboia by Tim Lilburn A disturbing poetic alternative vision of Canada.
kiyâm by Naomi McIlwraith A fascinating bilingual collection of meditative poems.
Louis: The Heretic Poems by Gregory Scofield

Contact and post-contact history, ethnology, etc.

The Conquest of Paradise Kirkpatrick Sale The classic revisionist study of Columbus’ legacy.
Time Among the Maya Ronald Wright
Stolen Continents Ronald Wright
The History of the Conquest of Mexico William H. Prescott  Prescott’s history first gave me the realization that, contrary to many conceptions, the Aztecs and the Spaniards were technologically almost an even match and that the Spanish Conquest was only successful by the skin of Spanish teeth and with the vital and massive aid of military alliances with other native nations.
The History of the Conquest of Peru William H. Prescott
The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico Miguel Leon-Portilla
The Conquest of Mexico Hugh Thomas
La Capital Jonathan Kandell An epic history of Mexico City
Time Among the Highland Maya Barbara Tedlock
Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala W. George Lovell
All of Linda Schele’s books about the Maya
The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca An amazing narrative of first contact.
The Defeat of John Hawkins Rayner Unwin A modern telling of early British contact with the New World.
The Relation of David Ingram Richard Hakluyt Another amazing narrative of first contact.
Any of Chomsky’s political pieces (he just keeps hammering at the same ideas)

Fiction

Midnight Sweatlodge by Waubgeshig Rice
Indian Horse Richard Wagamese
Green Grass, Running Water Thomas King
Three Day Road Joseph Boyden
Porcupines and China Dolls by Robert Arthur Alexie
Beautiful Losers Leonard Cohen
Elle Douglas Glover
Volkswagen Blues Jacques Poulin
Wacousta Major John Richardson

Local History Alberta and Edmonton

Walking in the Woods: A Métis Journey by Herb Belcourt
Castles to Forts: A True History of Edmonton Philip R. coutu
Fort de Prairies Brock Silversides
The Place of Bows and The Battle for Banff E. J. Hart
Stoney History Notes Chief John Chiniki
Head-Smashed-In: 5500 Years of Bison Jumping in the Alberta Plains Brian O. K. Reeves
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Gordon Reid
Aboriginal Cultures in Alberta Five Hundred Generations  Susan Berry and Jack Brink
Medicine Wheels on the Northern Plains John H. Brumley

Some Classic pieces of European literature which are relevant

The Tempest William Shakespeare Later interpretations of Caliban have been important in discussions of colonialism.
The Aeneid Virgil perhaps Western Literature’s earliest poetic description of colonialism in action.
Candide Voltaire some fanciful descriptions of New World societies
Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais more fanciful descriptions of New World societies.
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift yet more fanciful descriptions of New World societies.
Some of Montaigne’s Essays more thoughtful consideration of the New World.
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad The Dark Heart of colonialism in Central Africa.

Still to read:

Ikonze: the Stones of Traditional Knowledge Philip Coutu and Lorraine Hoffman-Mercredi
Earth into Property Anthony J. Hall

I expect that’s enough for a start.

The Chronicles of Canada (minus the volume I’m reading)

On listening to Q from Edmonton (finally)

On the evening of November 22, 2012, the Myer Horowitz theatre on the University of Alberta Campus in Edmonton was filled to the rafters with people who payed money to see the taping of a radio show.  For the first time in its decade of broadcasting, the show with the mysterious name “Q” was visiting Edmonton after multiple visits to every other major city in Canada.  For those of you who live outside of Canada and the many parts of the United States which receive Q, Q is two hour morning radio show which is broadcast on CBC Radio One every weekday.  Oddly, it is also a TV show once a week.  And a YouTube channel.

The host of Q is one Jian Ghomeshi, a UK born Iranian-Canadian former drummer in a rock band, former TV host, best-selling author — in other words, a fairly representative Canadian, if there ever were such a thing.

Q, like its host, is a fairly unclassifiable thing:  in-depth interviews with writers, musicians, film makers, actors, politicians and panel discussions about politics, national and international and live music — Q is a cultural omnibus and, in fact, a national treasure.  The show generally is produced in Toronto, but regularly has journeyed around the country to various cities for live-to-tape episodes.  But in the six years or so of the shows run, as I mentioned, Q had never come to Edmonton.

On the morning of November 23, Q from Edmonton was broadcast and I sat listening carefully and happilly.  Jian had as his guests (or perhaps was the guest of) singer/songwriter Colleen Brown, band Shout Out Out Out Out, sketch comedy troop The Irrelevant Show, Novelist Todd Babiak, filmmaker Trevor Anderson and an all-Edmonton media panel.  It was, of course, exciting to hear these locals on National/International radio, but I couldn’t help feeling some of the same chippiness the guests seemed to be feeling as Jian kept trying to probe into Edmonton’s “identity”, which really seemed to be about finding an Edmonton “Brand”.

There was talk of Calgary vs. Edmonton.  I can’t help think of the tired old Canadian Identity question and the stupid insulting facile answer “not American”.  Sure, there’s a rivalry with Calgary on various issues from sports, which was touched on, to politics, which was touched on more lightly, but I don’t have any sort of impression that Edmontonians define themselves as “not Calgarians”.  Todd Babiuk’s term “Magpie City” was mentioned, as was the well known “Dirt City” nickname, but those names by no means indicate that we are a city of dirt or dirty birds.  Variations on “Do it” came up a few times, and I think that suggestion may reflect a little of Edmonton.

But for me, Edmonton was all summed up in the winning entry of the “Win a Trip to Edmonton” contest, and the audience’s response to that entry.  Listeners from outside Edmonton were invited to submit a six word reason they should win a trip to Magpie City.  Many submissions praised Edmonton either highly or faintly, but the winner was an entry from Sudbury, Ontario: “Poor student. Sad Life. Need Adventure.”

The audience responded to this submission with huge, roaring, friendly and unanimous applause, in effect repeating inarticulately and earsplittingly warmly the words on the old plaque on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor . . .”  But we’re not an American-style melting pot — we’re a fermentation vessel. As Babiuk mentioned, Edmontonians (when they’re not politicians) kind of sneer at phrases like “world class”.  We are more interested in getting together, working, playing, building, creating, writing, singing, painting, sculpting, acting, talking, helping — living, than we are in self-promotion.  Edmontonians are the people who are born here, who come here, who stay here, who leave here and who come back.  We’re uncomfortable telling people we’re the best because we’re absolutely certain that Edmonton isn’t perfect.   But we are equally dedicated to the crazy thought that we can and will help each other to make it better.

Sort of like Canadians.

Many years ago I coined a phrase in a very different context, but I think it applies here:  When you own the street, you don’t have to piss on the fire hydrants.  We own a pretty damn fine street full of fascinating and varied people.  We know what we have, what we want and we’re going to make it.  We’re not wasting our time bragging about it being world class.  That’d just be pissing on fire hydrants.

Decades ago I came here from Sudbury (by way of Windsor) and I have never imagined  leaving to live anywhere else.  To the winner from Sudbury, who’s name I won’t try to transcribe from what I heard on the radio, Enjoy your adventure in Edmonton. I bet you’ll be back.

And, Jian, great show.  Thanks for coming.

I bet you’ll be back.

Lester del Rey’s “The Eleventh Commandment”: An Elder Handmaid’s Tale

It’s funny.
I’m not actually a fan of Lester del Rey, but here I am writing about him again.  As a youngster I read very little of his work.  I was all Clarke and Asimov and Larry Niven.  But when I was rereading Nerves a while back this ad on the back cover caught my eye:

The back cover of “Nerves”

and I thought, “The Eleventh Commandment looks interesting, in a schlocky sort of way.”  Through the magic of Abebooks, within a week or two I had a copy of the exact edition advertised in my silly little hands:

The front cover of “The Eleventh Commandment”

What a pleasant surprise this two dollar (ten dollars shipping) book has been!  No, the writing continues to be pedestrian, the plot is perhaps a little contrived at times, the characters are more stock and wooden then  the yard at Totem down on 51st (that’s local, Edmonton colour), but . . .

This is a sort of mainstream, white bread work from 1962 somehow filled with drugged-out orgies in churches, socially sanctioned adultery, and empowered (in an odd way) women.

The Eleventh Commandment has a pretty standard old science fiction plot:  a colonial (from Mars in this case) finds himself exiled to Old Earth and must make a home for himself in this strange new old world.  The Martian, Boyd Jensen, seems like pretty much a typical mid-20th Century American fellow.  The reader is meant to find him familiar, I would think.  Post-nuclear-apocalyptic America, however, is quite different, it seems.  The land is full of fallout remnants, society is ruled by the American Catholic Eclectic Church and the Eleventh Commandment (Be Fruitful and Multiply!), and, we learn, the landscape is dotted with secret orphanages filled with the pitiful products of the mating of the Eleventh Commandment and  radioactivity-induced mutation.  Society is a completely Church-dominated pre-industrial cesspool in which women are indoctrinated to want nothing other than to produce babies until they die and men are similarly (but more easily, one would guess) brainwashed into a desire to father as many children as possible.  There is, however, a fairly clear emphasis in the Catholic Eclectic Church on trying to keep it all within the bounds of marriage, despite the orgies in the underground and Wiccan churches.  The Church wants to keep track of the genealogy of every birth.  As becomes clear at the end, all this breeding is the Catholic Eclectic Church’s eugenic system for purifying the genetically damaged human stock.

We are left with a sort of nausea.  Through the whole book the Church has seemed to be the horrid, psychotic institution bent on forcing women to be baby factories on the basis of ridiculous religious superstition.  Our conviction — cultivated by del Rey — that science needs to enlighten this superstitious world is suddenly overturned.  It isn’t superstition that drives the church — it is science after all!  We end the novel firmly impaled on the horns of the dilemma.  Everything about the lying Church and its horribly logical eugenics is beyond objectionable, but, in the world del Rey has created, is it not the only way to preserve humanity?  We know that Mars, which has been presented as a positive society, deals with its own genetic sports through exile to Earth, most often ending in death soon after arrival.  It is unclear what is happening on Earth outside of North America, but it is safe to assume that the entire globe is contaminated and that maintaining genetic health would be a challenge to any society.  The Church’s plan, to keep the population at a sustainable, if barely, level of development while breeding and selecting out harmful mutations in as few generations as possible, is disturbingly convincing.  But we can’t help but feel that this evil is only slightly the lesser to the alternatives.

The Eleventh Commandment is certainly a product of its time blending Cold War fears with some of the Dangerous Visions — the book is dedicated to Harlan Ellison — about to burst onto the science fiction scene and American society at large in the sixties.  But somehow The Eleventh Commandment seems to me a tale for our time, at least as much as Margaret Atwood’s later and much more famous The Handmaids Tale.  Del Rey shows us a fundamentalist religious society with some noticeable similarities to the perversities of fundamentalists in our own day (Talib, I’m looking at you.) And Father Epstein’s recitation about nature speaks eloquently to our time:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help . . . But there is no help left to the race of man.  The mountains have been stripped of their cover and their substance runs down with the unchecked rains to bury the valleys below.  The buffalo and the wolf are gone from the plains, along with the tough grass that evolved there, and dry dust sweeps like a cutting scythe before the pleasure of the wind.  The puma is missing from his den and the eagle from his lair.  The predators are vanished, and without them the game herds have suckled the weak among their young to bring forth more weak, until their gene pools have failed and even they are dead or dying. . .

Father Epstein continues to describe the accidental nuclear catastrophe as being the only thing that could have saved humanity from its own relentless, unthinking growth.  If not for the nuclear holocaust, there would have been a population and environmental apocalypse.  No alternative in del Rey’s imagined future is a pleasant one.

All in all, Lester del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment must be termed a hidden gem of mid-20th century science fiction, well worth seeking out by students of feminism, religion, environmentalism and the rights of the disabled.

A (Nuclear) Blast from the Past: Lester del Rey’s “Nerves”

In 1942 Lester del Rey, a second-string Golden Age science fiction stalwart, published a story titled “Nerves”. In 1956 he published an expanded version as a novel with the same title. It is to the 1956 version I refer here.  Nerves is the story of an accident at a nuclear plant, the political machinations which helped cause it, and the struggle to control the disaster and save the injured. Almost all the science in Nerves is what is sometimes called “rubber science”: to be less polite, it’s made up and inaccurate, although often based on speculation and hopeful expectation of mid-twentieth century popular science. The writing is unremarkably workmanlike. One might expect that this little book of science fiction, with its poor fiction and worse science would be best forgotten, but . . .

I can’t help but feel a fascination with the thing, principally because of del Rey’s confidence in the power of technology to solve our problems and remake the world for modern humanity.  This idea of the improvability of Nature has become largely foreign to modern public discourse (although we in the West silently continue to take part in just such an idea as we painlessly adopt every new bit of technology).  I happily acknowledge (guiltily confess?) my strong nostalgia for the nuclear-powered, sky-scrapered, monorailed future metropolis that never was to be.  So, del Rey’s future in which nuclear plants’ prime function is to produce inconceivably useful and beneficial trans-uranic elements in the (non-existent) Islands of Stability while generating vast amounts of power as a cheap byproduct — this world stirs my naive childhood technocratic dreams of a future life made better through chemistry and physics.  And I can’t help feeling sympathetic to del Rey’s depiction of the Ludite mobs opposed to the nuclear industry as a bunch of ignorant fools wanting to destroy all the benefits of the magnificent modern world in order to return to the brutish pre-Atomic age.

Of course, we know better now, don’t we?

Of particular interest in this Post-Chernobyl, post-Fukushima age, is del Rey’s description of the heroic efforts to shut down the out of control reactor.  Certainly these heroes are to some extent typical two-fisted, square-jawed  pulp fiction American heroes. But, think about those who dove into the radioactive water in the shredded reactor at Chernobyl and the volunteer workers in Fukushima, fully aware that theirs was likely a suicide mission.  Perhaps del Rey’s most reassuring achievement in Nerves is the prediction that nuclear catastrophe would produce self-sacrificing heroes.

Del Rey also makes a sadly accurate prediction in describing the machinations of the Congressional fellow from Missouri, playing his constituent cotton farmers, the anti-nuclear lobby and the nuclear industry off against each other in order to stay in office, all by forcing the attempt to produce a potentially earth-destroying isotope, the production attempt which leads to the meltdown.

Nerves has many shortcomings for the modern reader, not least the solution to the problem of the nuclear accident — dump the radioactive crud into the river out back and presto! the world is saved.  But as an historical document demonstrating mid-century attitudes to technology I find it fascinating. Right now I have beside me a copy of the July 1978 issue of Analog magazine containing a “Science Fact” article by Ralph Hamil titled “Terraforming the Earth”.  Even into the last quarter of the twentieth century, just a few years before Chernobyl changed everything, there was serious discussion and planning for megaprojects to divert rivers across continents and “reshape the face of the globe to [humanity's] liking.” How things have changed in a single generation.

A worthwhile cautionary tale, Nerves also warns both of the dangers of political interference in scientific research and of uninformed knee-jerk reactions to real or imagined threats from that research.  Certainly the thing was targeted at adolescent American boys like so much of the Science Fiction of the time and it induces near-constant eye-rolls.  But somehow bits of surprising progressivism slip in: a character with a disability; a number of female characters who are strong, competent professionals taking control of the situation and in command of all those two-fisted square-jawed heroic men; even a Japanese scientist (albeit with embarrassingly stereotypical dialect) as a part of the team in a story written only a few years after Pearl Harbour.

For all its flaws, and they are many, Nerves can be a remarkable trip back to the time before nuclear accidents were real history, before technology had in fact remade the world (for the worse), to a time when technology and hope for the future were to some degree synonymous.

Sadly, Nerves seems to be out of print at the moment.  Why not take a look in your local second-hand bookshop?

I also have a little something to say about del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment.

Update, within a few hours of the original post:  I’ve just reread Ralph Hamil’s Analog piece “Terraforming the Earth”, Analog, July, 1978, pp. 46-65 for the first time since I was in high school and . . . Oh, my Goodness!  This is going to need a blog post of its own!  But how’s this for a taste?

Other proposed peaceful uses of atomic devices include the blasting of  harbours in Alaska and Madagascar, and underground reservoirs, and facilitation of oil, gas, and mine production.  But the missing element of general world sanity may long inhibit such uses.

Yes, the “absence of general world sanity” is what inhibits the use of nuclear devices to aid the extraction of hydrocarbons from Alberta’s oil/tar sands, something that was actually proposed at one point in history.

It was a very different world, indeed.

On “Midnight Sweatlodge” by Waubgeshig Rice

 

A short way into Waubgeshig Rice’s Midnight Sweatlodge I said to myself “This little book is a gem!” but now that I’ve finished reading and rereading it I say loudly “This big, grand book is deceptive in it’s tininess and it is not a single gem but a glistening, sparkling, icy string of brutally sharp-edged diamonds.  Outwardly, Midnight Sweatlodge has the appearance of a short novel, but it is actually a collection of short stories linked together by a frame narrative — the titular Sweatlodge.  Because I’ve been rereading Bradbury lately I couldn’t help think of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, but Midnight Sweatlodge‘s frame is much more tightly bound to the stories than anything Bradbury threw together, and Rice’s stories are actually dense and challenging prose poems.  The poetry of Midnight Sweatlodge moves Rice’s novel/prose poem cycle into the company of The Decameron, the 1001 Nights and the Canterbury Tales.  Lest I seem to be giving absurdly high praise . . .  although I see Rice as serving at the same restaurant as Boccaccio, Scheherazade and Chaucer, those masters serve luxurious infinitely coursed banquets while Rice presents us with an exquisitely ballanced and beautifully plated appetizer. I hope a banquet is in the future of his career. And that metaphor has certainly run its course . . .

Midnight Sweatlodge is four stories, three told within the blackness of the healing sweatlodge, the fourth told in the days and weeks after the ritual is abruptly ended. The frame which ties the stories together is the course of the ritual and the words of the elder attempting to guide the young people of his community toward healing.

The stories in order in absurd nutshells:  “Dust” is childhood (“I bet we’d trade everything to be there again”), land rights, confrontation, death.  “Solace” is adolescence, peer pressure, human potential, tragedy. “Bloodlines” is young adulthood, Urban Indian life, integration, extended family, expectations, racism. “Aasinaabe” is maturity, parenting, prophecy and apocalypse.

Rice’s descriptions of the Rez on an island in Georgian Bay, of the woods and the lake, of the dusty roads and the run-down, leaky houses is remarkably vivid.  I have vague memories of being a child in the back of a car driving on Manitoulin Island and more recent memories of driving through First Nations land here in Alberta: Rice has nailed the light, the air, the very feel of Rez landscapes with all their beauties and tragic uglinesses and the phenomenal determination of the people.

I made copious notes throughout but the text is so tightly interwoven with metaphor and internal references that it is impossible to get into details without including spoilers, which I won’t do.  But I will reveal that Midnight Sweatlodge with disarming economy and amazing power envelopes us in Treaties, warriorhood, parenting, childhood, love, abuse of spouses and substances, Rez life, urban life, work, play, ritual, rebirth, transformation, corruption, death and the potential end of the world — an attentive reading of the novel is an experience I imagine to be similar to an actual sweatlodge experience.

I invite everyone, particularly non-native readers, to join Waubgeshig Rice in the Midnight Sweatlodge for a transformation and an education.
Midnight Sweatlodge is published by Theytus Books and if you are literate you should buy it and read it.

A Shout Out to the Planetary Society

It’s been about half a year now since I started throwing my thoughts out from Behind the Hedge (someday I may explain the blog title) and apart from a few hints and passing references, something fundamental has been missing:  Science.

When I was just tiny, a few years before watching Neil Armstrong smudge his way down that shadowy ladder with the really big step at the bottom, I poured over my father’s National Geographic Magazines, enthralled by two things:  the explorations of the sea, mostly by Jacques Cousteau, and the planned exploration of space, mostly by NASA.  When I moved out on my own, one of the first things I did, remembering the excitement of my childhood, was to get my own subscription to National Geographic Magazine.  Sometime later, my father handed over all his back issues stretching back to the mid-1950s.  Now I have almost sixty years of the things and I remain subscribed, although the sense of adventure has faded quite a bit.  Over and over I say to each month’s issue “You climbed a whole mountain!  Wow!  Did you know there’s a bunch of old men over there who WALKED ON THE MOON before you were born?!  And they got there in what amounts to little more than a  Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of big bombs strapped to the back of it!!”

Shortly after the moon landing, I took Charles Coombs’ Project Apollo out of the school library and then made my father order me my own copy from some bookstore in downtown Sudbury, Ontario.  I still have that book.  I spent my days making.  I made sharks out of plasticene and (strangly square) Saturn V rockets — complete with lunar module concealed in the top of the third stage — out of Lego.  And I craftily built the lunar module upside down so that it could dock with the command module.

Guess how I was turned onto the poetry of Yeats when I was in junior high school.

An epigram to a chapter in Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii was a bit from Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus”:

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow lands and hilly lands
I’ll find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands
and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And wither the threads from that poem through my life?

I reverently lifted one line for one of my few published (very obscurely published) bits of verse:

. . . on broken roads which lead nowhere
I search for unknown goals
through hollow lands and hilly lands
sun burning on my back . . .

I suspect that Yeats, together with a well timed visit to the banks of the River Wye, lead me to Wordsworth who was so obviously a pleasant uncle (but not a “funny uncle”, despite Ken Russell’s Clouds of Glory which quite probably led me to Tom Stoppard, charmingly guided by Felicity Kendall) to the child who was the father of the man I am.

And what about art?  I suspect that a strange meeting in my adolescent mind between Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, and David Hardy’s The Challenge of the Stars put me on that road.

As a barely-past-tween, when I privately decided that painting was to be one of my lives, my first purchase was a big tube of Mars Black, because all I was going to paint was David Hardyesque space scenes.  Now I buy huge jars of titanium white and very, very rarely buy a small tube of some very traditional earth pigment, and hardly ever use black.  On the surface, my painting owes more to pre-modern traditions than to the Space Age  But, when I honestly consider things, scientific exploration — which I consider art- and literary-criticism to be — is the only thing that makes me passionate. High School acquaintances told me later in life that they thought I’d follow a science path.  Nope.  Anglo-Saxon poetry for me.

Where did that come from?

A long, long time ago I held a copy of  The Lord of the Rings in my hands in a Public Library in Windsor, Ontario and said to myself “This looks like a cheap rip-off of the Narnia stories.”  In hindsight, I was an idiot at that moment, but, fortunately, my mother reintroduced Tolkien to me for a third time — I had, without making the connection, spent a moment with “Smith of Wooton Major” in some elementary school classroom.  Tolkien made me learn Old English and learning Old English vastly improved my understanding of language and poetry.  After five years, two degrees, and a couple of publications, I left formal academia behind, again to the surprise of professors and colleagues.

Now, decades later, I subscribe to five publications:  The Old English Newsletter, which arrives at odd intervals; Canada’s History (formerly the Beaver) which comes bimonthly as near as I can figure; the comfortable old National Geographic; Scientific American; and the increasingly infrequent Planetary Report, which is a part of the real point of this post.  Except for the Old English Newsletter, I read every issue of these magazines from cover to cover.  In fact, I first subscribed to Scientific American after reading Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ mention that he, too, read that magazine from cover to cover every month.  To me, all five magazines are about understanding the world and my place in it.

But, the Planetary Report is a voice from and to my childhood.  If you haven’t heard of this wonderful little publication, it is the newsletter of the Planetary Society, a think tank/lobbying organization/fanclub/cult/bunch of really varied and smart people founded by one of the smartest, Carl Sagan and two friends three decades ago with the sole and noble purpose of teaching people that space exploration is beautiful, inspiring, artistic, fascinating, gobsmackingly neat and absurdly inexpensive considering the wonders, both practical and human, it returns and, even more, considering the insane obsenities we spend obscene amounts of our labour and humanity on.

Early supporters were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury, before his death intervened, was scheduled to be a part of a little Planetary Society get-together in a few days.  The Planetary Society is perhaps the ultimate geek club — “I’m making space exploration happen!!!”, but for over three decades this bunch of ordinary and extraordinary people has quietly, soberly, and doggedly pushed governments to push the boundaries of knowledge and pushed the boundaries of knowledge themselves during times when governments have been remarkably loathe to learn much of anything.

Today the Planetary Society’s CEO is Bill Nye (yeah, that Science Guy) and has a remarkable  board of directors, including Niel deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and the coolest astrophysicist ever (“that black guy from PBS” as one friend of mine describes him.  Sometimes Canadians can be a little too blunt.)

Some of the Advisory Council of the Society are artists, writers, Star Trek actors and, yes, one of them is an old man who has WALKED ON THE MOON!! After travelling there in what amounts to a Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of bombs strapped to the back!!

The latest issue of the Planetary Report closes with a poem and a beautiful piece of art of the sort my thirteen year old self dreamed of painting.  Inside there are stories about urban Dark Skies efforts, about the Mars Science Laboratory which should land on Mars in a few days (it’s about the size of a Volkswagen Kombi, but the technology has advanced a bit), about near-Earth asteroids and extra-Solar planets.  And there are projects for kids.

Projects for kids.  One of the finest things the Planetary Society has done over the years, finer than sending digital copies of classic Science Fiction literature and art to Mars, finer than launching member-financed space missions, finer even than sending my name (and those of thousands of other Society members) to Saturn — about the finest, noblest thing the Society has done is to encourage young people to dream, to learn, and to achieve.  The Planetary Society provides grants to young scientists, to amateur scientists around the world.  The Society has provided brilliantly creative teenagers the opportunity to conduct real scientific investigation with robots on mars — hands on!

Although U.S. based, the Planetary Society is Planetary, with members around the world and making efforts to work with space agencies of all countries.  The societies grants are available to any nationality, its student outreach is global.

And, once a year they have this thing they call “Planetfest” in Pasadena and at science centres all over the planet.   A whole huge crowd of dreamers, scientists, poets, artists, writers get together to look up at the sky and say

“Wow.  Just Wow.”

And

“Thank you, Carl.”

This year Planetfest happens in just a few days, August 4th and 5th, timed to watch the landing of The Mars Science Laboratory.

I’ve never attended as I am, perhaps ironically in the context of the Planetary Society, a bit of a homebody, but if there were ever a crowd I’d have a laugh being a part of, it would be this one.  I’m not recruiting for the Society.  I’m not suggesting that anyone who might read this should run out and buy a membership (although that would be fine, if the fit is right).  What I am interested in doing is letting people know that the Planetary Society exists, what it’s for,  and what sort of person ends up as a member.

I am a working artist, a lover of theatre, a reader of poetry, and absolutely the most inspiring thing I can imagine is exactly what the Planetary Society was created to do and exactly what Art, Theatre and Poetry are for: to help us all to understand where we are in this inconceivably huge existence.

It’s a perfect fit.

Update, September 4, 2012:  A few days ago I was having a silly conversation about googling one’s self and I came across this brief blog post by Charlie Loyd in which Carl Sagan and I are associated through a fairly obscure aspect of Old English poetry.  It seems I have come full circle, in a sense: inspired to poetry  by Carl Sagan as a child and then associated with him through poetry much later in life.  It is a funny old Cosmos, isn’t it?

The Automatiste Revolution: two brief visits and a reading of “Refus Global”

The first part is a brief visit to the Art Gallery of Alberta.

I dropped by the AGA briefly a few days after the Automatiste Revolution opened. As I waited for my companion’s washroom break to finish, I noticed that the Gallery Shop had copies of The Automatiste Revolution by Nargaard and Ellenwood for sale. I always try to get a copy of the catalogue//book which goes with exhibits in order to read and study them between visits (this has been the one disappointment about the tremendous Janvier show). I leafed through the big book for a moment before we headed up to the second floor. I wasn’t sure what to expect. While I often appreciate abstraction in its various schools and forms, it rarely grabs me (Janvier being a great exception). We went through the doors, my companion making a bee-line for a bench (her ankle becomes painful quickly although the infected sore is almost healed due to the wonderful ministrations of Alberta’s public health care system.) As I remember it, I rounded a bit wall and was riveted. And then I was blown away. That first visit I didn’t know what I was looking at, who the painters were, what the theoretical underpinnings might be, or even where I was actually standing, I learned later. But the paintings – there’s no other verb fit for it – grabbed me. They reached out through my good eye and grabbed my brain/body. A moment later, after consulting one of the guides, I found my disappeared companion standing before Borduas’ Sans Titre (no. 6), somehow paralytically still and yet slowly and smoothly gliding toward the textured field of red. “Don’t touch it,” I said, although I had to resist the urge myself.

And the brief visit was over after stopping again at the shop to buy a copy of Ellenwood’s translation of Refus Global.

The second part is the reading of Refus Global.

Ray Ellenwood’s translation, particularly of the pieces by Claude Gauvreau, is a wonder and a bit of a mystery. The verbal abstraction of Gauvreau’s dramatic pieces leave one perplexed as to how such a collection of absurd yet evocative non sequiturs and neologisms could ever have been translated between languages.  But Ellenwood has given us something wonderful.

One passage in Paul-Emile Borduas’ “Comments on Some Current Words” seems particularly relevant to the present exhibition at the AGA:

Looking at the pictures in the exhibition your mind will be blank. You won’t even be allowed the idea of a picture. These paintings don’t correspond to a landscape, nor to a still life nor to any scene you’re familiar with, nor even to a geometrical abstraction. Thus, with all your mental habits put to flight, unable to make any kind of visual contact, you will have the uncomfortable feeling of a serious illness, a painful and needless amputation, a frustration.

You’ll want to cry sacrilege, madness, early senility, hoax. If you’re less honest, more cagey, you’ll talk about visual and intellectual clichés and phony drawing-room revolutions. And the more obviously impotent your sensitivities, the louder you’ll shout, despite the clarity of these written forms.   p. 30

“these written forms” is a very important phrase, for these paintings are in a real sense, written pieces, an argument flowing from initial gestures marked on the canvas, through revisions and additions building on what has gone before. Each painting is a record of the development of itself. As well as any illusion of physical space produced by line and colour, there is a real temporal space contained in the fully developed composition.

I find Gauvreau’s dramatic pieces, particularly “In the Heart of the Bulrushes”, to be melancholic to the point of tragedy. I can’t help but think that this (and much of the Automatiste thing) is sort of an early twenties (age, not period of the century) sophomore phenomenon. And the man who escapes down the stream and disappears off stage . . . has he achieved adulthood? Is the poem/play an unconscious acknowledgement of the childishness of the thing? And Gauvreau’s suicide after the suicide of his muse Muriel Guilbault? Did he himself later sink beneath the flow without escaping? I can’t help but feel that Gauvreau is the head in the river, doomed to never escape the absurdist flow past the angel into – what? And “The Good Life”, the next piece by Gauvreau, makes me feel the above even more. Gauvreau’s life followed the sad pattern his art anticipated.

Where Refus Global becomes most coherent – perhaps most compelling – is in Françoise Sullivan’s discussion of dance. Sullivan opens with

More than anything else, dance is a reflex, a spontaneous expression of intense emotion.  p.88

This is no Wordsworthian “strong emotion recollected in tranquility”. Automatism in dance (as in all art) is immediate expression and development of expression.

Sullivan argues that academic dance such as that taught by the ballet schools is a dead language, and she goes on in her densely argued essay to lay the theoretical groundwork for Modern dance. As I read “Dance and Hope” from 1948 the constant image in my mind was Louise Lecavalier circa 1985:

The dancer plays with his weight by falling, leaping, balancing, by the simple fact of standing, by wobbling, by whirling, etc. He can follow his impulse and make himself very heavy or very light, not by tricks designed to escape the laws of nature, but through the harmonious use of those laws.  p. 99.

Two bits I also found most interesting:

Today there are those who believe in a revolution to transform the world. The instrument of change will be instinct, and part of our effort must now be directed to unearthing that instinct so long stifled.

Fortunately, there are the basic needs of life, irresistible forces; there is hope, and there is also science, which is wrong to isolate itself but should instead, take the place it used to have in religion and magic. All our forces must be directed towards liberation, towards a rediscovery of ecstasy and love.   pp. 94-5

and

Art can only flourish if it grows from problems that concern the age, and it is always pushed in the direction of the unknown. Hence the marvelous in it.“p. 100

The third part is a return to the gallery.

The grabber? Borduas’ Abstraction Verte.

But it’s not around the corner. It’s the first painting you see, right at the entrance.

It’s a tiny piece but it reaches out from the wall and grabs again. It is stunning.

Some others I noticed:

Riopelle’s Composition1951 is phenomenal. This is a painting I noticed on the first visit with fascinating knife work in the upper right quadrant in green and blue.

Fernand Leduc’s Napoleon in La Dernière campagne de Napoléon is an hilarious vindication of the Automatist method.

Ferron’s Cerce Nacarat has stunning knife work creating a fascinating feeling of night, of the sea, of a city . . .

Barbeau’s Au château d’Argol has amazing depth, as though looking through a cracked stained glass window at a Mediterranean hill town in a heavy sunshower.

Pierre Gauvreau’s sans titre, 1946 is a tiny, beautiful gem.

Not to be missed are the collages by Jean-Paul Mousseau and the artifacts of Sullivan’s dance.

I found it disconcerting to walk into the gallery and find the first few paintings in different places than I remembered them. Somehow that first encounter truly disoriented me.

The fourth part is a political comment.

The Automatistes in Montreal have not been given the historical notice they deserve. Unlike the roughly contemporary Abstract Expressionists in New York, the Automatistes included designers, dancers, poets as well as painters and sculptors. And, perhaps more important from the Canadian point of view, the Automatistes were the political Avant-Garde, standard bearers of the revolt against the Church and Duplessis which would lead to the Quiet Revolution and the Quebec we know (or, sadly, don’t know) today. The great art of these artists’ manifesto, Refus Global, is that it is a political manifesto. Although few realize it, or are even aware of it today, Refus Global remains a foundation document of contemporary Canadian society.

The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941-1960 is showing at the Art Gallery of Alberta until October 14

I read Roo Borson’s “Rain; road; an open boat” and then I read it again!

What an exhilarating experience!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading and rereading Roo Borson’s Rain; road; an open boat, making notes as I go.  What a beautiful, challenging book it is!  The title of the book is a nesting of the titles of its three sections.  Within each section are interlaced poems in verse and prose riffing on landscape, nature, memory and everything else in imagination and out.  Many volumes and scholarly careers could be (and, I hope, will be) devoted to teasing out the structure Borson has erected.  Here I’ll just take a quick dip into the thunderous waterfall :

Rain

Of the opening poem, “Various Landscapes” I wrote in my notes:

What is going on?  is this pseudo-Haiku and commentary?  Are we seeing the various levels of a I Ching hexagram?

There is certainly a dialogue — or a call and response — between the verses and the prose poetry.

Although the atmosphere seems rural Japanese (or is this my expectation after Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida?) the mention of the sausage shop crashes us into urbanity  or at least suburbanity and European bratwurst.

Where is this house:  Where the river road meets the coast road.  One wall is all windows . . . It is Ossian’s Hall, which closes the book!

The prose poems have become visions, dreams, dream visions.  All floral, but cankered.  The fantasy guest room has become reality and reality is the vision.

But the Guest House is in China, not Japan.

§

I couldn’t help but think of my old Bollingen copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as I red “Various Landscapes”: while an unchanging digram replaces the varied hexagrams, the three line stanzas accompanied by long prose commentaries create something oracular about the appearance of the page.  I suspect Borson intends the resemblance.

My perplexity continued with the second poem, “California Nutmeg”:

What to make of this?  The place whence her night dreams proceed and around which her mental faculties take shape is where a solitary tree grows out of place in and alien forest.

“and makes itself at home wherever it happens to issue from the earth” as does Borson, I think.

§

“Wild Violets” (the first of this title, we later find out) at first blush is a pretty study of memory and nostalgia, much like “Radish Flowers” which follows.  I thought:

So much seems at first Impressionistic, but there’s sure to be an underlying order with Borson, I think.

Hints of future and signs of past on this day on the cusp of summer

“In the world but not of it.”

§

“Durham” made me remark that “I must reread Durham in Old English”.  A thousand years or so ago, another poet wrote of Durham, a poem both similar to and different from Borson’s.  Both are careful to mention the woods and the river, the natural landscape in which Durham is situated.  I find it very intriguing that two poets so far apart in time and tradition stood in the same spot and described the same place so similarly.  The Old English (with my translation):

     Is ðeos burch breome         geond Breotenrice,
     steppa gestaðolad,         stanas ymbutan
     wundrum gewæxen.         Weor ymbeornad,
     ea yðum stronge,         and ðer inne wunað
     feola fisca kyn         on floda gemonge.
     And ðær gewexen is         wudafæstern micel;
     wuniad in ðem wycum         wilda deor monige,
     in deope dalum         deora ungerim.
     Is in ðere byri eac         bearnum gecyðed
    ðe arfesta         eadig Cudberch
     and ðes clene         cyninges heafud,
     Osuualdes, Engle leo,         and Aidan biscop,
     Eadberch and Eadfrið,         æðele geferes.
     Is ðer inne midd heom         æðelwold biscop
    and breoma bocera Beda,         and Boisil abbot,
     ðe clene Cudberte         on gecheðe
     lerde lustum,         and he his lara wel genom.
     Eardiæð æt ðem eadige         in in ðem minstre
     unarimeda         reliquia,
    ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,         ðes ðe writ seggeð,
     midd ðene drihnes wer         domes bideð.

Fully known is this town
throughout the British realm
Steeply established, stones round about
grown up wondrously
A river strongly runs past weirs
in waves, and therein dwell
many fishes in the flood
and there is growing near
a woody fastness great.  There live
full many wild beasts
in that dwelling, in deep dales
beasts innumerable.
In that town, too, known to men
they’ll find, most full of grace
the Saint Cuthbert and the head
of the chaste King Oswald
England’s lion; Bishop Aidan;
noble travel partners
Eadberh and Eadfrith.
Bishop Æthelwold
is there with them and the well known
Bede the scholarly
and Abbot Boisil gladly taught
in youth the chaste Cuthbert:
and well he took his learning up.
Unnumbered relics lie
beside the saint inside the minster
there many wonders come,
as books make known, the while that man
of God for judgment waits.

Borson mentions the blackbird’s song and relates it to an old song of a blackbird.  What is this old song?  Is it the Beatles song or is it something other?

“A Place in the Woods” is a brief prose poem describing disappointed hopes made manifest, but hints that the manifestation will be swallowed by the silent past.

“Wild Violets” (2) brings Rain to a close with a recasting of the first “Wild Violets” and the clear indication that interlace is going to be a primary structural principle of the book.

Of particular note in the recasting:  after fifty years old papers dog-eared have replaced the wild violets.

Rain; road

“Late Sunshine” begins the second section with a quite lengthy return to the pseudo-haiku and prose response.  In my notes I recast the poem, quoting the brief verse bits and reducing the prose paragraphs to bullet points:

A riff on Borson’s “Late Sunshine”

1.

“Thin sun
Thin rain
the blossoming oats –”

The turtle and his eye
Entries on dead people on the internet
The fish laid out side by side.

2.

“The world in old photos
or the world in spring –
which is younger?”

The millipede
The masks and the borrowed instruments
Smells and things
Gifts and judgement thereof
False named plants
Reputation’s growth
Dead honey eater’s eye
The cats in the tree
Time
The shock of the familiar
Dream Mart
Three questions as we die
The moth on the sidewalk after rain
The arrival of the future
The dazzling become familiar
The Kingfisher necklace
Remembering birth and death.

3.

“The delicate scent of bottle-gourd blossoms
the wisteria beans long and glat
the repetative songs of the birds of early summer”

do memories return to us or we to them?
embroidered on a pillow
restoring significance
the name game
the other name game

4.

“Standing on the right foot
lifting pine seeds with the left –
cockatoo etiquette”

indispensible stereotypes
a third name game
envy
narrow minds and broad

5.

“A magpie lark
standing guard over the waterfall
water gliding past its feet –”

the inverse law of death and intentions
buildings
pigeons in the train station in prose and verse
the face in the mirror
buildings and art
illusion
the stranger
Goldenrod
White Duck Narrows

In “Blowing Clouds” Borson shows she loves to juggle words and syntax and punctuation.  This is a virtuoso juggle!

(with prose commentary.)

My notes on the last poems of Rain; road;:

“Dictionary”

preservation.

“Black Point

Verse then prose

Memory of time with friends long later when one friend has died.

“Road”

prose and then verse
echoes of all that’s gone before.

“Roads in the Berkeley Hills”

verse then prose

the thing, which no longer exists except in memory, exists still in you, in us (in we?).

The final section Rain: road; an open boat begins with “New Rain” another extended verse/prose call and response.  Again my notes are bullet point paraphrase:

prose then verse and so on

something white in the Japanese rain

Camellia buds
minnows
statues
deer
the rain pavilion

Something strange on the mountainside
fox-bear
the wind

the bus to a temple and the driver identifies the animal
dragonflies
statues and castle
the tanuki
the tooth-regrowing temple
heron
the tour guide
Hakuin’s sermon (this stanza, describing Hakuin’s untranslated ten word sermon, is ten words long)

Journeying to Japan
sweet peas
tend days of rain and snow

Kyoto and Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Pagoda verse
to the
Golden Pavilion

Colour and cold noodles
cool
cucumbers

Tended obscurities
snails painting
with moonlight

Subtracting the self
the person I’ve never met
whose ghost is this
lost morning
old pond
longing to be like others

The Gardens of Kyoto
the lost hat

The crow calls out to the friend with his recovered hat.
Osaka Bay
tonight’s moon
among the pines.

My notes on the last four poems:

“Baxter’s Grave”

The road to locally ignored grave of a poet

The prose is explanation.

I find myself wondering at this point whether the prose explanation is advantagious or detrimental to the poetry.

“A Chaise for Sharon”

patience.

“To go to Huangshan”

Prose about Huangshan

Rain
Pine
dragonfly

the identical tourist raincoats at first are (intentionally) absurd but by the end are jewels of perseverance.

“Cathedral”

The blackbird in a filigree of images high on Bucks Hill

“and the robin
small beneath the hedge”

“all the tropes spent”

This is Durham again.

§

I have a suspicion Borson has not spent all her tropes.

The book closes with an “Afterword and a Note” concerning the eighteenth century Scottish folly called “Ossian’s Hall” and then a poem, “Ossian’s Folly, Black Linn Falls” about Borson’s visit to that place.  Here we are returned to the guest house of “Various Landscapes” with it’s wall of windows and the river outside.

Rain; road; an open boat is a densely structured beautiful interlacing of images across all the poems, a seductive mesh drawing us to it over and over again, a braided woodland waterfall, calling to us with voices of memory and hopes and dreams.

“Enter it said the river’s falling
enter it and entered instead its thunderous names.”