The latest from Churchmouse After Hours, in which we meet ‘Endings and Beginnings.’
Image: Halley’s Comet, June 6, 1910. The Yerkes Observatory. Public domain.
https://www.stmarysoakbay.ca/blog/its-place-among-the-elements
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[‘A Woman’s Work’ (1912) by John French Sloane (1871-1951). Cleveland Museum of Art. Source]
The latest from Churchmouse After Hours…
I do have a new Henrietta & Me essay brewing (or two, or three) but meanwhile, here is the latest from Churchmouse After Hours, a report on our winter coffeehouse adventure—posted here just in time for winter’s last hurrahs…
https://www.stmarysoakbay.ca/blog/bears-tobogganed-down-the-hills
from Little Downy, or The History of a Field-Mouse, Catherine Parr Trail, (1822)
So, here is a way that, out in the world (well, the world of my own neighbourhood) I’m trying to act out the spirit of this blog. Out loud, with other people—
https://www.stmarysoakbay.ca/blog/churchmouse-after-hours-birth-of-a-21st-century-coffeehouse
This is the sort of piece I would normally post here. The good folks at The Puritan have given me room in their winter issue to parse my love of Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in their vital, energetic magazine.
The trio who ignite Miss Garnet’s imagination: Tobias, the Angel Rafael, and the dog. (Source and credit: Wellcome Library, London Tobias and the angel stroll through a classical landscape. Mezzotint by B. Lens.)
I first read Salley Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel several months ago, and its atmosphere persists, despite the many stories, poems and essays (some of them undeniably wonderful) that I’ve consumed in the interim. I feel, lingering around me, the musty air within ancient churches; I sense the kind gaze of an angel beaming straight out from the flat plane of a lost panel; I picture and re-picture an unfashionable, timid, yet determined woman traipsing the streets of Venice, driven by some curiosity and need she can’t articulate. I’m revisiting this book to try to understand why its aura is so persistent—why it has stuck.
Factor one: surprises carry extra punch, and this was an unexpected find, on several fronts. One, I had no prior knowledge of Vickers, and what a joy it was to encounter her no-nonsense style, her refusal to resort to obliqueness, her gentle humour and her absolute conviction in the validity of her characters’ experiences and ideas. Two, the Book of Tobit, the apocryphal tale about a righteous blind man, his son, the Angel Rafael and a dog, that Vickers embeds so beautifully and affectingly within her own, was a haunting revelation. Three, I had little prior interest in Venice, the novel’s setting. The place had, for me, taken on the aura of superficiality, nothing more than a tourist must-see. But after spending several fictional months roaming Miss Garnet’s Campo Angelo Raffaele and the wonders of Venice beyond it, I saw how snobbish and stupid my dismissal of the historic city’s seductive powers had been.
That comeuppance aside, it definitely wasn’t Venice that lured me. I plucked the novel, published in 2000 but set several decades prior, off the shelf at the local church’s thrift shop one Friday morning and read this on the back: “When a friend dies, Julia Garnet goes to stay in Venice, where a lifetime of caution is challenged.” As it happens, I was embroiled in revisions on a manuscript inspired by my own lost friend. I’d been lamenting how seldom one encounters this particular loss in literature, how we routinely parse the grief of lovers, spouses, parents, children, siblings, though so many of us would count our dearest friends among the greatest loves of our lives. I turned the book in my hand, looking it over, flipping its soft pages, claiming it. I paid a toonie to the volunteer behind the folding table, and allowed my son, who’d been yanking on my arm, to pull me toward the next room, where the toys are displayed.
I’ve been remembering this as a book about a politically strident, straitjacketed, judgmental woman’s awakening to beauty, mystery and the power of love. In essence, in a kind of trial-by-fire, loss offers life to a dried-out soul. What’s remarkable, coming back to the book, is to realize that Julia Garnet’s transformation begins to take shape so very early in the story. This isn’t a story culminating in a character’s evolution so much as one about what happens to her (and within her) throughout and on the other side of that changing. Though quiet, borne chiefly of seemingly innocuous moments, the initial changes in Miss Garnet are quick and profound. To compare it to your old-fashioned “happily ever after,” if this were a love story, it would be one that begins, as opposed to ends, on the wedding day.
When Julia Garnet first arrived in Venice, she removed an image like this one from the wall in her apartment. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child (Source: Wikimedia Commons, from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts)
On page 20, shortly after arriving in Venice armed with her steely sense of irony, Miss Garnet encounters Santa Maria della Salute, “like a vast soap bubble formed out of the circling, dove-coloured mists.” She is overcome. “‘Oh!’ cried Miss Garnet. She caught at her throat and then at Harriet’s veil, scrabbling it back from her eyes to see more clearly. And oh, the light! ‘Lord, Lord,’ sighed Julia Garnet. She did not know why she had used those words as she moved off, frightened to stay longer lest the unfamiliar beauty so captivate her that she turn to stone, as she later amusingly phrased it to herself.”
Eight pages later, after a glass cutter refuses payment for repair work on a Bellini portrait of the Virgin and Christ Child, there’s this: “But Miss Garnet, in whom insight, like an incipient forest fire, was beginning to catch and creep, sensed suddenly that there was more to it than that. The glass-cutter, she guessed, also liked the subject of Bellini’s painting and his love of Mary, and the bambino in her arms, was stronger than his love of money. How would Marx or even Lenin have explained that, she wondered…”
A few pages after this, after the opening of a perfunctory letter from a friend back home: “For a moment Julia Garnet remembered the impoverished little ceremony with which she had bidden Harriet a final farewell, and the utilitarian stone with the severely practical information carved upon its stony face, with which she had chosen to mark the passing of her closest friend’s life.”
Jabs of insight, memory and awe are laid like stepping stones throughout the book. Miss Garnet dutifully hops from one to the next, learning as she goes a talent for self-awareness, an openness she’d heretofore never imagined, and a tolerance for ambiguities: a humility before the mysteries of life and death. What’s puzzling is Vickers’ ability to keep us invested in Miss Garnet’s fate while revealing, so early on, that she’s facing and conquering her grief with aplomb. There’s no sense of pending disaster: we don’t fear for her safety or that she’ll be damaged by her new boldness. We do see her suffer for having put herself “out there”—in fact it’s her first broken heart, poignantly late in life—but this suffering, too, becomes part of her changing: it makes her less afraid, and only pushes her further in her reclamation of herself.
On some level it doesn’t matter what happens after Julia has begun to change: She’s finally living, yes? So who cares about the details? But oh, we do care. Vickers makes sure of that. We care about the twin restorers she befriends, and the odd tensions between them. We care about young Nicco who wants to learn English, and Carlos the art historian who pines after him. We care about the wealthy American couple who force Julia to confront her prejudices against the rich, and about the ageing Monsignore, who embodies all the excesses of the Catholic church as well as its redemptive spirit. We care about the intrigue Julia finally becomes embroiled in. But mostly we care how her own journey and her perception of its meaning becomes so elegantly interwoven with the Book of Tobit. Brilliantly, Vickers gives Julia splendid agency here: intrigued by its plot and by the artistic representations around her—especially those of the Angel Rafael and the dog—Julia conducts her own investigation into Tobit’s story. We discover it alongside her. She jots brief, sudden insights into a little notebook that had been intended for history notes on Venice. “Dogs lead the blind. Old Tobit is ‘blind’ because he doesn’t see the limitations of his own values. (Look how he treats his wife when she is working her fingers to the bone for him. He doesn’t ‘see’ her!)” As Julia had failed to see Harriet, an insight into her own ‘blindness’ that she has already begun to grasp. This is the character taking charge of her own evolution, through study of the human heart.
So, why does this book stay with me? When my own friend died, many years ago, I remember the world around me shimmering in a kind of unreal clarity. I felt able to see and understand things that had previously lain beyond perception. The surprise of each day and how much it might contain. My grief gave me an unasked for vitality and power—and even on the worst days, all around me was vivid, translucent. Porch railings, leaves, the faces of strangers. Once, jogging in my Toronto neighbourhood, I paused for a long time to watch a caterpillar cross the sidewalk. Its laborious journey from one grass edge to the next appeared epic. I was grateful, though confused by the fact that the reason for all this intense awareness was a reality I would wish reversed. Bring me back my friend, give her back her life, but don’t take what I’ve gained by her loss. Now there’s an emotional and psychological paradox, one mined to its core by Vickers.
This scene and others by Guardi feature in the novel’s intrigue. Giovanni Antonio Guardi “The Healing of Tobias’s Father” circa 1750, Chiesa dell’Angelo Raffaele, Venice
Miss Garnet’s Angel is a story of redemption, one that admits the impossible, that allows for human frailty and the beauty embedded even in that. Some might call this story soft, or “easy,” because of its optimism and its essential kindness toward its characters. We are so afraid, we skeptics, of anything that hints at reverence. But Vickers’ generosity is profoundly political. In her matter-of-fact yet loving telling of Miss Vickers’ journey through gradual enlightenment, Vickers reminds us why we require beauty every bit as much as food, and how because of this, if we allow ourselves, we’re able to find it in the most unlikely, even the most apparently ugly, of circumstances. Imagine being granted permission to simply live, to take in what is placed before you, through all your senses, in all the imperfection of your own humanity. Imagine that.
Manjith Kainickara at ml.wikipedia
(This post discusses books by Candace Savage, Dilys Leman and Fred Stenson.)
Since we moved to Toronto two and a half years ago, I’ve been drawn more and more to what we urban folk have been conditioned to call “green space”: the woods of nearby High Park, the trails along the Humber River, the parks along the lakeshore. It’s possible that growing older makes me more desperate for the nourishment of the natural world, which some research has shown actually bolsters cognition and well-being. [See this Globe and Mail article from 2012: “Why is walking in the woods so good for you?”] A lifetime in built-up environments can leave a body parched for the flash of a blood-red cardinal in thick greenery, for the optimistic calls of chickadees, for that barebones x-ray view right into the heart of the forest that winter allows. These days, I take any chance I can to venture into a lingering pocket or reminder of the wilderness that’s been tamed, used up, paved over and all-but obliterated by this smoggy, gridlocked, teeming, loveable city I call home.
A few years ago, I couldn’t tell a chickadee from a house sparrow. I had no idea that cardinals love to eat the sumac’s red fruit in winter, and that this diet is partly what gives them their intense colour—nor that the female cardinal is a dignified, muted brown, with a tuft of bright red feathers atop her head: she’s serious yet playful, mature with a whiff of youth. She reminds me of some of my best friends, women in midlife (or later) who embody a winning combination of hard-won wisdom, defiance, self-deprecation and wit. This stunning lady cardinal knows her worth, and how not to take it too seriously. I’m learning slowly and deliberately, gathering an ability to associate more directly and personally with the world—not the constructed world of humans but the world itself—a skill that, in ages past, most children learned incidentally (in many places they still do).
Basic facts, those I can retain, serve as both decoders and touchstones. Willows like water. Grey squirrels can actually be black, reddish-brown or even white; the true red squirrel is smaller, with a less bushy tail, and more rare around here. Oaks come in several varieties that can be distinguished by the shape of their leaves, the size and colour of their acorns, the texture of their bark. Starlings like to gather in crowds, in the tree tops. If you see a compact little bird skittering down a trunk, beak-first, it’s likely a nuthatch. Those slender, gawky, snow-white birds that tiptoe in the river shallows are egrets, an apt name for a bird that combines awkwardness and grace in such a beguiling way. It’s unofficially okay to harvest as much garlic mustard as you wish from Toronto’s High Park—it’s great in a soup—because this hardy plant is invasive, choking out native species such as trilliums. Teams of volunteers, called “stewards,” give over their Sunday mornings to digging up such undesirables, and seeding native plants in the loose soil left behind. (There exists among naturalists and ecologists and biologists a heated debate about this hands-on approach to native versus so-called invasive species that is too complex to get into here.)
All this forms part of a late education for me—one heavily facilitated by the not-for-profit High Park Nature Centre and its knowledgeable and enthusiastic family programs coordinator, Jon Hayes—and what sticks is random and piecemeal. I might recognize a leaf or a bird that was identified for me just yesterday; I might not. I might remember that the tall reed topped by what looks like a shortened horsetail, a pollution-tolerant invasive squeezing out the cattails of Grenadier Pond, is called phragmites (frag-my-tis), but that’s only because I’ve managed to associate it with the 1980s children’s show “Fraggle Rock,” which my younger sister loved and which starred a cast of gangly, mop-haired muppets.
In part due to the good work done by the local organization Lost Rivers Walks, I’ve also become keenly aware that any densely urban environment is home to hidden, lost or literally buried waterways. The slopes and hills of my chock-a-block neighbourhood streets represent the valleys and riverbanks that once teemed with vegetation and wildlife; the Don River in the east end of the city once meandered snakelike down the valley through which it’s now directed in a straight line through a brick and concrete-lined channel.
I’m grasping for a lost language and a nearly invisible geography, the remnants of which I wander through daily, running errands, exploring with my son, hurrying to appointments. I’m after the history tied to all these changes, which of course involves the people who thrived in that wilder landscape, before European explorers, early settlers, and all the industry and later immigrants that followed. The streets around High Park have names such as Indian Grove, Indian Road, Indian Crescent. There are tales of a lost First Nations burial ground in the park, and on the cliff above the Humber, in the neighbourhood now known as Baby Point, the Iroquoian village of Teiaiagon was home to a Seneca longhouse community during the 17th Century, thought to boast a population of 5,000. The burials of two Seneca women were uncovered here around the closing of the 20th Century, during installation of a natural gas line. The graves were dated to the 1680s, and the women were buried with combs carved from moose antlers, one of them depicting a First Nations figure clad in European-style clothes, the other a human figure, bear and rattle-snake-tailed panther, a possible representation of Mishipizheu, the water lynx. It also looks like a depiction of transformation from life to life, form to form, an appropriate symbol to take down into the grave.
It’s unclear what happened to these communities, except that around the time these women were buried, the village, which was ideally situated for control of traffic along the all-important Toronto Carrying Place (a portage route from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe) was abandoned. It’s telling, with regards to our faith in recorded history, that the graves are variously reported to have been discovered in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2007. Mohawk community member Haleigh Fox writes on FirstStoryTO, a blog dedicated to sharing the Aboriginal history of Toronto, that the locals may have moved on naturally (“Haudenosaunee villages are not meant to be permanent”) or returned to their New York homelands under duress, due to military threat from the Marquis de Denonville, Governor General of New France. Other articles I found contend Denonville actually destroyed the village. There’s also a recorded tale of a supposed three-day drunk at the village during the 1670s involving French brandy and every man, woman and child, during which two women were stabbed (the source is early Toronto historian Percy Robinson, but from my thus-far cursory studies I know little about his sources or their veracity). Prior to the Seneca, the location was inhabited by Huron-Wendat, who, Fox writes, may have “dispersed due to a combination of warfare, disease, and starvation brought on by inter-Indigenous and European conflict.” With few historical records and archeological clues to go on, Fox is pretty much covering all the bases.
In years past I would have noticed such markers and bits of history (and missing or conflicting history) in passing, without much thought. I’d have walked the steeply sloping Glenlake Road, which I descend after dropping my son at daycare, without thinking that it may once have led down to a pond teeming with cattails, ducks and fish. Now I want and need this more basic knowledge of things that precede us, or that persist despite us: I want to know what I’ve missed, what we’ve forgotten or are in danger of forgetting, the stories and memories and former ways of life connected with the spaces I inhabit.
Filling gaps, reclaiming lost or obscured history. This kind of impulse is in the air these days. To me, it feels more and more like an imperative. Or a compulsion. A necessary step in redressing the darker aspects of Canadian history, and possibly also a necessary step toward regaining respect—and with that comes a measure of awe—for the ailing world that sustains us. Three books, one nonfiction, one poetry, and one fiction, went a long way toward nudging me forward in this direction last year.
from the Alberta Geological Survey
To follow the stone circles where they lead
In her heart-wrenching, myth-buster of a book, A Geography of Bood: Unearthing the Memory of a Prairie Landscape, which was published in 2012 and won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize, Candace Savage collects and presents the counter-story to the “brave pioneers in the wilderness” history of Canada we’ve been fed since elementary school. There is truth in that old familiar history, sure, but there is more to it, so much more, and some of that has to do with the near-decimation of the plains buffalo—which was no mystery or act of God but a full-on, no-holds-barred, textbook unsustainable harvest—and the attendant near-decimation of various groups of plains First Nations, the latter of which involved broken treaties, massacres and intentional starving-out strategies.
Savage stumbles on such tragedies as the Hunger Camp at Cypress Lake in the early 1880s while escaping into the prairies, her childhood home, on holidays with her husband. Because she is curious about anything to which she’s drawn, she starts following her nose, looking into such phenomena as mysterious ancient tipi rings, asking questions. A Geography of Blood is born out of this appreciative looking, which first transforms into research, then into discovery (not happy discovery) over and over again. It becomes a painful exposé of a stain on Canada’s past, but it’s also a love story between a woman and the land, between human and geography, and a simple commitment to face up. “All I wanted to know,” writes Savage, “was who had made the stone circles, and yet here I am instead, surrounded by desperation and the nameless bodies of the dead. Yet if these memories are part of my inheritance as a prairie person, I am determined to accept them as my own. I will let them settle around me quietly, layer after layer, loss upon loss.”
It sounds passive, but this kind of work takes willingness, stamina and guts. What difference does it make? Who cares about this stuff, from so long ago, that’s mostly forgotten? I do! Savage calls, raising her hand. Standing to her full height, looking us straight in the eye. And maybe you should, too. Savage would have had to hold this defiant, uncomfortable posture for years, while continuing to follow her nose toward ever more unpleasant realities, before presenting us with this book and the honest, hardscrabble journey toward some semblance of truth that it relates. It takes time and determination to hunt through obscure museums and archives for unofficial but very real histories—it takes the existence of obscure museums and archives. It takes a willingness to accept implication. We are implicated by where and how we live today, how our own position in Canadian society—where we are nearly all immigrants or the progeny of immigrants—has come to pass. More to the point, we are implicated simply by being human and thereby capable, in some hidden corner of all ourselves, of committing or condoning or turning away from the very atrocities Savage doggedly, obediently unearths—surprise!—from under generations of denial and indifference and dust.
Cypress Hills
Cypress Hills Recipes
Dilys Leman’s 2014 poetry collection, The Winter Count, crosses time and space with Savage’s book: we’re on the prairies in the late 19th Century, when the buffalo (technically bison) are failing, tensions between hungry First Nations and Europeans (de facto ruled by the Hudson’s Bay Company) are high, and our nascent federal government has growing designs on the land, and the means (and will) to get what it wants. By bringing historical characters to light—by giving them voice through their own letters and through imagined inner monologues—Leman also challenges the more commonly known versions of Canadian history, which come to feel sanitized, and blindly patriotic. The impetus for her investigations was not geography but blood ties: her great-great-grandfather, Augustus Jukes, was a senior surgeon with the North-West Mounted Police assigned to the medical commission assessing the sanity of Louis Riel during his incarceration—an assessment that would determine whether Riel was put to death for treason. Dr. Jukes was also a thinker and a poet. He left letters and records that called and called to Leman, three generations on.
Researching Jukes’s papers, as well as the context and times in which he lived and worked, led Leman to a tour of horrors similar to Savage’s, and to an understanding of the role the federal government’s policies and deliberate mythmaking played in the notions that First Nations were a rising threat to nation-building—a strategy with implications and reverberations that continue to this day. Leman’s poems, like Savage’s prose, are wrenching but not wholly despairing. That’s because they’re simultaneously subversive and inventive, angry and elegant, sorrowful and sinuous, horrific and funny. By recasting actual letters and documents, by imagining the inner monologues of historical characters—with her gruesome “Cypress Hills Recipes and lines from “Big Bear’s Speech,” with her “How to Hang Eight Indians (at Once) at Battleford” and her “Notes on Band Behaviour During Rebellion,” with her “Rules for Polite Tea” and her notes on the “Lunacy Commission”—by building a rich, polyphonic chorus of testimony, Leman stages a reenactment of that lost, shameful past. In doing so she also offers us a glimpse of a way (painful but possible) through it.
![Fort Edmonton, 1910, By The Library of Congress (Bain News Service) (Flickr) [Public domain, Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://anitalahey.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/256px-fort_edmonton_1910.jpg)
Fort Edmonton, 1910, By The Library of Congress (Bain News Service) (Flickr) [Public domain, Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
So you think you know what the fur trade was all about?
Now a touch further back in time, to Fred Stenson’s 2000 novel The Trade: a gripping and often hilarious (and horrendous) wild west romp that takes us to the Bow River, Fort Edmonton, Fort Vancouver, Fort Assiniboine, Piegan Post, Fort Carlton and York Factory on Hudson Bay through the reign of the Hudson’s Bay Company during through the first half of the 1800s. Stenson isn’t out to glorify the fur traders or to sanctify the First Nations they traded with—there is, for example, no breathless homage to the coureurs de bois such as I recall from Canadian history class—but to immerse us in that hubristic economic empire of the Company, which ran like a dictatorship, and let us see and feel its fallout: the alliances and connections formed and broken (some military, some mercenary, some in the form of marriage), the missionary work facilitated (for better or worse), the damage wrought to creatures and land, the egos supported, the tensions and misunderstandings, the lure, the cost. In short, the humanity.
Stenson’s story, aside from being a great read, a colourful page-turner filled with cruelty and compassion and killer dialogue, is a reminder that history is made up of people, that the play of money and power is dangerous and far-reaching, that every event we learn about in a textbook might have happened differently, or not at all, given another mood, moment, happenstance, person in charge or kind of weather. It’s a reminder of the history beneath history, which can be partly filled in with research and facts, but must always, in some measure—because it’s driven by human beings, whose thoughts and motivations belong wholly to themselves, yet may not be wholly or even partially understood by themselves—be imagined.
By User:Kclama (Own work) Wikimedia Commons.
What did the egret see?
There is a big picture and there are the individual lives within it. Redemption and its first cousins, awareness and understanding, can only ever move piecemeal through the scene, soul by soul, waving their little flags. Sometimes, some of us see them beckoning. Sometimes none of us do. Sometimes one of us is compelled to raise our own ragged bit of cloth against the official story, against the only version easily and widely accessible to common memory.
I don’t know where my newfound love of egrets and female cardinals will lead, nor my belated awareness of hidden waterways and ghost First Nations villages. But one thing I know. Walking through my neighbourhood, I can feel that my eyes are more open than they used to be. That is not a metaphor: they literally feel more wide open. When I see the contours of a road, I now see more than the contours of a road. I see invisible creek beds, boulders, leaning willows with beaver-gnawed trunks. When I see a tidy, compact, rock-enclosed garden on the tip of the ravine, I also see a corn field that may once have been cultivated here. I see a tangle of herbs that a woman three hundred years before my time would have assessed with a practiced eye: her living pharmacy. The child on her back ails from some mysterious illness that arrived with the newcomers. The exquisite moose antler comb is tucked into her hair, keeping the strands back from her face, as she bends to collect greens and roots that represent hope. Way down the ravine, beyond the high flat lands where the corn and squash grow in rows, down there in the river shallows, an egret (much like the one I saw yesterday) stands stock still, its thin neck curled like a rope. It has spotted a fish…
This scene, built around the barest of facts, doesn’t seem like anything concrete. But it’s made of actual stuff, some of which constitutes my own attempts to see and understand, and some of which is real: little clues; sediment, residue. Layers. Layers that have always existed, that I never used to wonder about, or bother trying to see.
One of the alchemic qualities of Savage’s book is her belief—and the extension of that belief to her reader—that history lives on in the places where it happened, in the rocks and the soil and the trees, in the very air. She tells how she came to love visiting Ravenscrag, about 14 miles west of her home-away-from-home, Eastend, Saskatchewan. In between the two was a valley she describes as a “broad-floored, walled-in trench” from where “steep, dissected cutbanks rise to clip the horizon, enclosing a river of sky.” She writes that the embankments are ever-changing, “sometimes towering and majestic, sometimes hazy and withdrawn, sometimes outlined with snow so that their bones show.” Can you feel her love of this place, the permission she allows herself to wallow in beauty even when it comes bearing shadows? Maybe especially then?
The real wonder of this place, Savage learns, is what’s missing. She finds a geological guide book to the area that describes an “unconformity” at the top of the cliffs, a missing layer of sediment that amounts to a thousand metres of soil, or “the erasure of thirty million years.” Savage looks hard through binoculars and begins to see a “coarse jumble of stones” that, in some places, is absent. In its place lies far more recent debris and silt, left by receding glaciers. “Yet to an unschooled eye, nothing looked amiss; one layer overlaid another in complete innocence. Apparently, an unconformity could exist between the present and what we knew of the past, and very few of us would ever notice it.”
Few of us would notice, but it would be there.
Nude woman running, jumping, straight high jump. Eadweard Muybridge. Animal locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements. 1872-1885 / published under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania
I was invited to participate in this little branch of a vast blog hop by the poet Susan Gillis, whose recent, wonderful collection The Rapids is, incidentally, on my list of “books I’d really like to delve into on my blog.” But I’m not yet ready to do it justice; I’m still letting it sink in. Susan also curates Concrete & River, a blog rich with poetry talk. You’ll find her blog hop entry here.
What am I working on?
Assignments from others: An essay about rereading a beloved book (there are almost too many to pick from!). A review of Chava Rosenfarb’s Exile at Last: Selected Poems. An introduction to a poetry anthology (I shall avoid revisiting Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist during this phase.). Another review of a poetry collection: Summertime Swamp-Love, by Patricia Young. Stuff I assigned to myself: A memoir about a lost friend, and how both the friendship and the loss tints life afterward, and continues to, two decades on. A graphic-novel-in-poems (anyone got a better term for that?) with my partner-in-crime, artist Pauline Conley. Inspiration: The Great Fire of Main-à-dieu, Nova Scotia, 1976. Working title: Clarence the Welder.
Montreal clothesline, 2009
How does my work differ from other work in its genre?
Aside from the fact that I can’t stop writing about clotheslines (see previous entry)? My nonfiction and poetry is not “out there” in terms of form or content, so to say how it differs means talking about voice. The voice in my work is, I hope, distinct: its cadences mine, its preoccupations particular to my history and personality. I also hope it’s natural and unfeigned. What I’m trying harder and harder to do, the older I get, is to do away with the tricks and filters, any temptations to get fancy, or hide within obliqueness, and just write what I mean to say—and to imagine my reader as a trusted friend who doesn’t need everything spelled out. I don’t want to throw readers, rather welcome them, give them a place in which they can recognize something from their own experience or in themselves, but to see that truth from a slightly different angle. The light is of a different quality, and therefore so, too, the sense of reality, the understanding, the perspective that light unveils.
A Warsaw window, summer 2005
Why do I write what I do?
Necessity. It’s a way of reporting on, clarifying and wondering over thoughts, questions, doubts, memories and emotions, tackling them straight on in the hope that the resulting text will be useful (maybe even entertaining!) to others as well. It’s also, I think, an effort to stop time, to hold something I’d prefer not to let go, or allow to fade. That could be an event, an idea, a person, a sighting, a sound. That method of holding, through articulation, offers another benefit when successful, which is to reveal at least a glimmer of why that thing matters so much—why it begs to be held. A friend once said, impatient with himself for the recurring impulse, that not every significant moment can or should be turned into a poem. I agreed with him, but I also believe that when a poem needs to happen, it will.
The knitting machine that used to live in my friend Natasha’s studio. I sometimes wish I could thread my thoughts into a contraption like this and set it to weave them into something beautiful and coherent.
How does my writing process work?
It’s messy. I write big and pare back. I shape on the page. I seldom sit down knowing just what I need to say or how to say it: my mind is not so orderly. I’ll know a little part of it, or only the starting point. I must work out the rest as I go. Sometimes this is painstaking. I confuse myself. I get stuck. I get diverted by tangents—sometimes for years!
I start out with a scene like this Warsaw public square in my mind. I need to find the place or person to home in on. I zoom in, zoom back out, zoom in again from another angle—this goes on, and on…
But with practice, experience, age, a better understanding of the need for patience, I’m now able to do some of the hard work in my head before writing. I no longer race to write down every thought; I trust that the relevant, important ideas—and even phrases—will stick, or resurface when the time is right. I can now see connections between narrative threads, objects, moments, long before writing: there’s a big-picture view, or at least a glimpse of the whole, that I’m allowed, which wasn’t on offer when I was younger. Still, my first draft of anything, be it essay, poem, or some other form, is generally a lumpy, mucky heap of far too much. Ninety percent of writing, for me, is revision. Usually, several revisions in is when things start getting good, when I really start enjoying myself, when I can see something emerging, inch by inch, cut by cut, that may actually prove worthwhile.
Next week on the blog hop:
Fiction writer Alice Zorn, author of Ruins & Relics and Arrhythmia. She writes on life, travels, writing and her Montreal neighbourhood (and translates Grimms’ fairy tales straight from the German!) at Rapunzel’s Hair.
Teacher and writer Siobhan Curious, whose amazing tour of the joys and tribulations of life at the front of the class can be found at Classroom as Microcosm.
Wind on an ordinary day in Cape Breton, where we often spend time in the summer, necessitates a sturdy clothes peg and solid technique. I have had to run after my sheets more than once.
I have laundry on the line. Navy blue flannel sheets, a white blanket, a pair of my son’s tiny pants, an even tinier pair of socks, one bra. We installed the line and pulleys a few weeks ago. Tom, my husband, used some green army rope, leftover from his combat engineer days, to tie the far pulley to the Chinese sumac in our backyard, so we wouldn’t have to hammer a hole in the trunk. So far, the squirrels have not chewed through: it’s issue rope, it ought to be indestructible.
This marks the first time I have had a clothesline regularly at my disposal since 2006. That year, several months before my first collection of poems was published—called Out to Dry in Cape Breton, it was half-filled with poems about clotheslines—I moved from a house with a little yard in Ottawa to an apartment in the same neighbourhood with a fire escape for a balcony. The move was necessary; the new apartment wonderful; giving up the clothesline, difficult. A couple of years later I moved to Montreal, to another lovely apartment, with two balconies this time, but nowhere to hang a line. Then to Fredericton, to another apartment without a balcony or yard. Finally, in 2012, we moved to Toronto, to a house with, again, a little yard. Last summer, due to a sinkhole (yikes) and some other necessary repair work, we did not have the use of our outdoor space for much of the summer. This year, sometime in February or March, when the notion of spring began to creep into consciousness, I started adding “install clothesline” to our weekly to-do list.
On the mild April afternoon when Tom and I were finally putting up the clothesline—Henry, meant to be napping, was watching from his bedroom window—I did the math, and realized that aside from the brief periods we spend in summer on Cape Breton Island, it’s been eight years since I’ve been able to hang my clothes out to dry. That’s a good chunk of my adult life. Yet my sense of well-being, even my identity, remains tied up in this simple chore—a chore that’s spent decades in widespread disrepute in North America, a phenomenon I won’t delve into here (go to Project Laundry List for background on that front).
Putting clothes on the line again, I’ve been reminded that one of the things that makes them compelling, from a writer’s point of view, is what they reveal about the lives connected with them, and even the character of the launderer. I, for example, am not a purist when it comes to organizing laundry. Whatever needs to get thrown in, gets thrown in, regardless of type or colour. I also use a mish-mash of pins, of different colours and designs. There’s nothing uniform about my hanging style.
I’ve been revisiting a gorgeous little anthology, Washing Lines: a collection of poems, published in England in 2011 by Lautus Press. I’m lucky to have my poem “Woman at Clothes Line” appear in this book (it happens to sit on the page facing Seamus Heaney’s “The Clothes Shrine”!). Beautifully illustrated with woodcuts, the collection also contains, in addition to contributions by several lesser-knowns such as myself, pieces by Pablo Neruda, Anna Swir, Louise Glück, Fernando Pessoa, Louisa May Alcott, Simon Armitage, P. K. Page (her popular “Planet Earth,” actually a glosa built upon a stanza from Neruda’s “Ode to Ironing”).
One of the first poems I fell in love with when I started reading poetry in an earnest, deliberate way, Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” appears in Washing Lines. Rereading it the other day, I was struck by the darker side of the poem. I used to dwell on lines such as the one I borrowed for the title of this entry (“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry”), the brilliant opener (“The eyes open to a cry of pulleys”), and later in the first stanza, “The morning air is all awash with angels.” But now I note the menace of those angels dressed in bed-sheets, blouses and smocks: “Now they are flying in place, conveying/ The terrible speed of their omnipresence”). I also see how reluctant the “soul” is to re-enter the sleeping body that’s been awoken by the morning activity, how important that stanza break after “The soul shrinks”, and how deftly, through the metaphor of the hanging laundry, Wilbur has turned the soul’s daily entrapment within the self into a necessary suffering, one that is not without beauty but that works only by “keeping” a “difficult balance.”
Here’s another memorable transformation of laundry into metaphor, in a little poem with a fantastic lilt, by acclaimed U.K. poet Maura Dooley:
The Line
A heavy linen cloth,
her dress of shooting stars,
the brittle blue of spring,
his sodden woollen shirt.
The peg becomes a pen,
fills the line with cursive,
a changing word in wind,
love or duty or life.
The peg becomes a pen. I’m so grateful to Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught, the editors of this anthology, for noticing how many poets have been compelled to bring poems and washing together, the line composed on paper with the line composed in air, how many have seen and felt “love or duty or life” flapping madly through both.
(I’ve just learned the first edition of Washing Lines is sold out, but a reprint is under consideration. Email Lautus Press at barbara@ryton-house.co.uk and plead with them to do one!)
Maurice Sendak is one of many children’s authors who cite Crocket Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon as an inspiration and influence. When Harold turned 50 in 2005, NPR invited Sendak to reflect on the delightful classic, in which a young boy builds his own story, scene by scene, using a fat crayon. Sendak said Harold was “immense fun,” nothing but fun: “There are no lessons in Harold. You do what you like, you have fun, and no one’s going to punish you. You’re just a kid.”
Given that Sendak writes for kids himself, and given that he knew Johnson and his wife Ruth Krauss, another celebrated children’s author (Sendak illustrated several of her books), I should probably put some faith in his perspective. But having read Harold enough times to my two-year-old to be able to recite it, I find myself disagreeing. From where I sit, Harold is teeming with lessons. Not those tedious, obvious morals that conscientious people love to stuff into so-called children’s literature, but lessons about human nature, and about the messy, exciting business of navigating your way, scene by scene, moment by moment, through the adventure that is your very own life. I believe that even a toddler can appreciate this kind of truth mirrored and plumbed in a story. Real literature ought not have an Adults Only designation.
On the surface, Harold is a charming tale enhanced by lovely line drawings and elegant language. One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. This is the unassuming way the story begins. It’s simple and direct, yet already we have the makings of a plot and a sense of Harold’s character. He’s a deliberate child: he thinks things through.
And clearly, he’s not afraid of the dark.
With his magic crayon, Harold draws himself a “long, straight path” so he won’t get lost. But he quickly deviates from this plan: he takes a short cut. The moon goes with him. Harold takes precautions as he journeys. He doesn’t want to get lost in the woods, so he draws a forest containing only one tree. The tree’s apples seem so precious, he throws in a dragon to guard them. Alas, Harold’s dragon is convincing! Shaking with fear, he accidentally sketches waves, under which he starts to sink. He makes himself a boat, climbs in and sails away. Later, after slipping off a mountaintop, he draws a balloon, and then a basket under the balloon, “big enough to stand in.” When Harold is ready to go home, he starts drawing houses and buildings, filling their walls with windows, trying to find his own. Here is where the crayon’s magic fails. It can make a million windows, but none of them is his window.
I love how Harold’s crayon suggests that (to a point) superhuman powers might be within reach of any ordinary boy or girl. Who needs delivery owls, capes, wizards, magic wands? The matter-of-fact way that Harold takes ownership of the world and its possibilities is deeply satisfying. It’s refreshing to encounter this bold, imaginative, capable child—who’s still young enough to be wearing one-piece pajamas with feet—in a time when it’s no longer socially acceptable to let your child walk to school alone. Harold finds himself in danger over and over, and finally quite lost. In all events, he calmly uses what he has at hand: his crayon, his knowledge of how things work, and his understanding that when all else fails he can turn to an adult for help. Or can he? Unfortunately, the policeman Harold draws “points the way Harold was going anyway.” This reads (to the grown-up) like an unforgivable failure on the part of the adult world: a child has been abandoned to fate and his own devices. Harold, however, simply thanks the policeman before going on his way.
The magic of this book doesn’t reside in the crayon alone, but in the understated elegance of Johnson’s writing. He has a way with rhythm, with the gentle pun, with the apt, judicious and occasionally unexpected adjective. When Harold falls beneath the waves he comes up “thinking fast,” and climbs aboard “a trim little boat.” He “makes” land without much trouble. He “draws up the covers” on his bed. When our hero gets hungry, he lays out a “nice simple picnic lunch” featuring “all nine kinds of pie that Harold liked best.” The “deserving” porcupine that Harold leaves behind to help a hungry moose finish off this feast has won a spot, alongside far more illustrious literary characters, in my heart.
“Wow,” my son Henry says as we’re reading. “Mooooon.” When Harold finally figures out where his bedroom window is—“it’s always right around the moon”—we have closure. Our tired little boy has found his way home. Or has he? I think the ending of Harold, though it wears a sheen of comfort, is radical. Harold gets into a bed that he draws with his own crayon, beneath a window he has also drawn—around his own, purple-crayon moon. Is he truly home, or is he curling up in a make-believe substitute? It’s possible that Harold has come too far, that he may never find his way back, but his solution suggests that it doesn’t matter. Home is within you, home can be anywhere. The essentials—the moon, your own self—will not change.
In the course of his travels, it’s not the outside world that scares Harold most: it’s the dragon he draws, a creature that springs from his own mind. This is not what Harold, or the reader, expects, but it rings awfully true. I don’t know whether Crockett Johnson, whose real name was David Jonathan Leisk (1906-1975), was thinking about all of this when he wrote Harold. I don’t know whether he saw how Harold’s story works as a metaphor for so much about life—but then, don’t all journey tales become metaphors for life?
Harold has never gone out of print. It was still on the U.S. National Education Association’s “Teacher’s Top 100 Books for Children” in 2007 and on the School Library Journal’s “Top 100 Picture Books” in 2012. Sendak was right: this book is wickedly fun, and that must account for its success, at least in part. But no bit of fun, in the absence of deeper substance, has that much longevity. Harold shows us that we’re bound, in the course of life, to frighten ourselves, to make some disastrous moves, and to, at least temporarily, lose our way. Sometimes we’ll have to make do, no matter how desolate the figurative or literal locale we find ourselves in. This is the price of giving ourselves a story in which to live, our own plot. Harold’s journey is no heroic quest, no Jason and the Golden Fleece. He’s not out looking for treasure, he’s not trying to save anyone. He’s just going for a walk. He’s curious what will happen along the way, what he’ll conjure up. And so are we.
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Here is an analysis of Harold and the Purple Crayon through the window of cognitive science: The Frontal Cortex
I’ve also come across an online essay that asserts Harold is a story about deciphering reality from fiction. I don’t think real vs. imaginary is the point of Harold at all. There is, however, one worthwhile and somewhat chilling question in this blog entry: “Can there be accidents in Harold’s world even if he’s drawing them?”
And here is the NPR interview with Maurice Sendak about Harold
And here is the Crocket Johnson homepage, run by Philip Nel, director of the graduate program in children’s literature at Kansas State University, where you’ll learn, among other fascinating things, that Johnson’s editor’s first reaction to Harold was decidedly lukewarm.
