Flashing Memories

It’s been a while since I got onto this site or added anything to it, but some reading, and a few days of relative semi-shut-in while we recover from a surprise visit from COVID, turned into opportunity. I have been revisiting some books that had me going a few years ago, and they still have that effect, it seems.

Pema Chödrön, in Welcoming the Unwelcome, writes of a practice she calls “stepping into the flow of impermanence”: “The practice is very simple. Recollect an event or a moment from yesterday or earlier today. Contemplate how it is gone forever, like a past lifetime” (109).  Well, yesterday, I was browsing back through Patti Smith’s The Year of the Monkey. She has been sifting through boxes of old Polaroids, looking for a shot of the games of Roberto Bolaño, stacked in his closet. She finds it. Not much of a shot, really.

But it got me thinking of the other day, scrolling through the photos in our smartphones of our trips to Nice, Paris, etc. One is a shot, of me at a table on Cours Saleya, at midnight, my “Leonardo” pen in hand, up against my jaw, paused while writing in my trip journal. Behind me, a lot of younger – much younger – couples out for an evening. We (Ewa and I) had just enjoyed late-night sangrias (Ewa’s idea. She had read about some characters in a novel sipping them, and wondered, so we had some. Surprisingly good on a hot night on the Riviera).

That image of me took a tiny fraction of  a second to create as a memento, but that moment was already gone (had arguably never truly existed except as created as a gathering of pixels in a phone Ewa no longer even owns) by the time it was taken, before she showed it to me, before she shared it with me, before I considered it as a possible portrait for my own phone or for Facebook. Long before yesterday morning when Patti Smith’s tale of her search brought it to mind.

My phone is full of such photos of me “being a writer”  – and, I suppose, full of missed because unrecorded ghost moments when I was doing much the same thing without Ewa or anyone else there to take (make) the picture. Moments like the time last September outside Les Distilleries on Rue Benoit Bunico, having a Grimbergen Double Ambre and writing a poem about the passing scene as a moment in the history of such passing scenes at that corner.

I read that poem at the Edmonton Stroll of Poets a few weeks later. Right after a smooth-voiced young French woman had rad several of her own poems, a delicious, soft, flowing delivery. Then I got up and read my piece, with its bits of “tourist francais.” Sigh. But she smiled graciously, as did a friend, Pierette, who is Franco-Albertan.

So – where was I? Oh, yes, the photos in my phone. Dozens of them. All created by other phones and their cameras. It’s odd to recall such moments just because they were created digitally in passing. Not that flash of part of a second earlier or later in that ongoing incidental occasion. We had that marvellously relaxing evening on Cours Saleya, but have never (yet) gone back to that table at that time for another sangria. Not yet, anyway.

The T-shirt I am wearing in that photo was a new one, bought, as I recall, the day before, or possible earlier that same day. Definitely on that trip. I still have it, still in my T-shirt drawer, much faded, and currently too large because of the 15+ kilos I have lost since February.

What I really wante4d to say – my phone and many albums of printed photos are full of such created “memorable moments.” Moments in no way more or less memorable than the instants just before or after, though digitally or chemically memorialized. We “make” memories in the random instant. We recall them through random browsing or deliberate searches, for particular or not-too-particular reasons. Such makings are sometimes “official” records of life’s ceremonial moments. Weddings, births children, bits of honeymoon or anniversary trips. Some might even be of places or events we did not truly enjoy, but that as recorded don’t look so bad, looking back.

Then there’s the portrait of me at 32 or 33 (as nearly as I can recall. My “Sherlock Holmes” pose (though I have an Irish hat, not a deerstalker; a briar, not a meerschaum). It was one of a bunch of studies my first wife and I took of each other, learning some tricks of lighting and exposure in our SLR days. I was never that guy, except for that pose for 1/60 or 1/125 of a second.

So – a trick of the light, and a trip of the shutter, and there a non-version of me looks out at another passing version of me, wondering when that version “was,” even if only for a flash. I no longer have that hat or that pipe, or even the sweater I am wearing. That moment has passed, piece by piece, from any chance of being reposed and re-memorialized, even supposing I should ever have wanted to. The negatives? Long-since lost or misfiled. The other shots taken on that occasion? Most never printed except on a contact sheet, I suppose. Passed like the pages in the journal I wrote that night in Nice, or the notes in the notebook I splashed out the original draft of this piece in will or might become, soon enough. Or like the digital record in the phones or in this blog might, one day, in a power or magnetic surge or some other such act of erasure.

Joining the Tempest of Voices

Joining the Tempest

13 Nov. 2019

Years ago—the spring of 1971, to be more precise—The Paris Review printed “A Song and the Sultan,” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Rose Styron.

It contains a firm message to talk back to stifling authoritarian single-mindedness, and a pattern to pursue to that end:

“[The Sultan] said, ‘The fault is in the mirror

So let your singer be silent…’"

To which the Song replies:

“Songs are the logic of the sun…”

“…the pebbles of the Square are becoming

like open wounds …”

When the Sultan resisted me

I grasped the key of the morning

And groped my way with the lamps of wounds.

Oh how wise I was when I gave my heart

To the call of the tempest!

So many signals here:

“the lamps of wounds”—as with Rumi’s “The wound is the place where the light enters you,” and Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack, a crack, in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The cuts and slashes, the painful wounds inflicted to keep us in line, establish our private and public boundaries. The wounds and the pain establish when and where we are being misled or going wrong, and indicate the need to turn ourselves aside to pursue more positive results. They enlighten us to the errors of our ways and of those who would lead us.

The wounds hold out the “key of the morning,” awaken us to “the logic of the sun” we are here ever to grope our way towards, guided by the message of the enlightening wounds.

My favourite part tonight under the influence of a full moon shining in my window across this desk, is the business of giving your heart to “call of the tempest.” Joining it is multifarious. 

• It is to join the tempest of voices saying “No,” “No More,” or asserting “Not this way.” 

• It is to blow against whatever creates and sustains the wounds as mere pain and destruction of what would advance the quality of individual and collective life. 

• It is to recognize and point out that “more of the same,” or “getting back what we have lost,” reclaiming lost greatness, or any claim trying to pass itself off as the permanent, immovable answer to all, for they are: the building blocks of the wall that says “Beyond me is all hell,” when it is actually what walls us in to the hell it creates for the enrichment of the Sultan and his cronies.

So learn to welcome the blandishments and warnings for what they are—the knives that open the wounds that indicate it is time to grasp that key of the morning, and to refuse the invitation to silence. Join the tempest of voices, be part of the “loud mirror” that the Sultan so resents. The more desperately he protests the fault of the mirror, its "fake news," the better.

" . . . and be counted . . .

I was at a late-summer poetry retreat on Saturday (August 25). Our second session was to write a poem in one of four modes or themes: Protest/Death/List/Biblical story rewrite. I thought of  David and Goliath, and of cases such as those who fought Big Tobacco for so many years, and of those like Dewayne Johnson, who recently won a major award in a suit against Monsanto over the effects of Roundup upon his health. In the end, I think all four modes are at play here.

“. . . and be counted”    Don Perkins

The Bible tells us, over and over,

how God relies on outsiders,

wanderers in the wilderness,

outcasts from society,

barren women, unwed mothers,

shepherd boys, unwelcome prophets,

the weak, the lame, the sick,

to show his power

to make winners from losers,

to reward the faithful.

We read these stories;

we take hope that faith

in that kind of power in our own time

can still rightfully and righteously

arrive at positive ends.

And sometimes…a sickened school gardener

takes on the boardroom

and profit margins;

puts his faith in the rule of law,

makes his cancer the springboard

to hold wealth to the sticking point

of its own all-devouring greed,

stands up and says, “To Hell

with your falsified research

your self-serving cover-ups.

Don’t deny me. I am the evidence,

standing in this court of law

and before the court

of public opinion,

as the only-just-still-living proof

of the evil your poisonous work has done.”

And sometimes…Justice divines

a vital truth behind the smokescreen,

and rules: “Bless you. I agree.”