Triangularity: Magpies, Metaphors and Alice Major, Redux

 

Some ten years ago I was commissioned to write the introductory essay to Alice Major’s contribution to Ten Canadian Writers in Context, produced the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. Alice’s piece is the “The Office Romeo’s Tale,” excerpted from Office Tower Tales (2008).

 

Office Tower Tales was a key text in a course I taught called “Reading the Local,” in which I introduced students to selected works of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative non-fiction by Edmonton writers. The book is in the tradition of stories set in a narrative (sometimes poetic narrative) frame that, as I wrote then, “map the themes and connections” between the stories. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the tales of The Arabian Nights and Boccaccio's Decameron are familiar predecessor’s of Alice’s book. Like Chaucer, Alice begins in April:

 

April’s entrance. A city on the plains

gives frost the silver brush-off, lays

its welcome mat for pilgrim robins.

The planet’s orbit spins into the phase

of northern warmth

 

like a coffee mug revolving

slightly off centre in a microwave,

absorbing heat into its porcelain bones –

morning sun the caffeine we all crave.

Black-billed magpies,

 

rhomboids with long tails, usher spring

along the green carpet of the river

like resident Black Rods. April scripts

her throne speech, while leafing alder

rustles sceptres.

 

Office towers, visible from far

across the prairie in the lengthening days,

are rolling up the lengths of rubber rug

that guard the marble of their foyers

from winter slush.

 

 Alice’s “pilgrims,” not the robins, but three women who work in a downtown office tower: Pandora, Aphrodite, and Sheherazad, meet in the coffee shop to discuss problematic events and experiences in their working and personal lives, and the lives of other women. Each Tale has a prologue that raises the focus issue, and Sheherazad provides a tale from history, literature, the daily news, etc., stories “that arise from some deep cauldron…” to provide analogy and empathetic commentary on the problematic behaviour or attitude.

In the lines from the “Prologue,” quoted here, the magpie is a central figure, not just as the usher, but as a metaphor Alice prominently applies to herself. And my interest in the essay became Alice’s extensive consideration of metaphor and its function, something that has long been a topic of concern in Alice’s writing, in essay collections, lectures, and author’s introductions to her poetry collections.

As I wrote then, and as has continued to be her practice:

                By her own frequent self-defining metaphor, to read the world through the words                          and vision of Alice Major is to read it through the eyes and scavenging impulses of a “magpie.” Major explains in “The Magpie’s Eye,” the introduction to Intersecting Sets [a collection of essays], how she has been forever, “picking up bright, oddly shaped ideas the attracted me from various disciplines and arranging them along with anecdotes that I hope give them context” (xvi).

She calls those collections of “glittery things” the raw material for “home structures.” Metaphors abound.

Metaphor is at the core of how Alice understands the human mind at work to make sense of the world. In her lecture “A Superposition of Brains,” she observes that as “pattern recognizing, pattern-making animals,” humans  “think metaphorically all the time.” She continues: “…we are always making connections, realizing analogies, and getting that ‘little kick of satisfaction that says “You’ve correctly figured out a pattern. You’ve recognized something.’”

In her essay “Metaphor at Play,” from Intersecting Sets, Alice observes that the essence of metaphor is the “ability to hold two situations in the mind at once,… and to fool around with the combo” (18). Metaphor is, then, recognizing the links between the “here” and the “not here,” as she amplifies in “A Superposition of Brains.”

All the above is by way of getting to Alice’s newest book, a collection of essays, supported by illustrative poems: Triangularity: Essays on Poetry, Science, and Spirit (University of Alberta Press, 2026). In particular, the essay “Scansion and Science” addresses once again  Alice’s understanding of metaphor. And gets us back to a word I used with no prescience in my Introductory essay quoted from, above: “map.”

She observes how science “is driven by the human desire shared by poets to understand how things hang together” (120): "We also like to share that understanding – to map from one area of experience to             another, using metaphors that are not small, neat bulls-eyes on a target, nor fuzzy generalities that observe no constraints of accuracy, but metaphors that preserve the meaningful relationships of this world. . . . (emphasis added)

                She continues, this shared understanding “is an enterprise that weaves together the individual and the whole” (121), a “map of the range of things that humans are: not a single thing called ‘human nature,’ but a landscape within a landscape.” In this sharing, science and poetry are parts of the “journey to fill in a map that we’ve been sketching throughout human history,” a map that includes “things we’ve known about ourselves forever,” but also things we have yet to figure out. Things like “Why are we like this?” so we can be “part of the widening circles of understanding. Which means trying to be as truthful as [we] can.”

[“As truthful as [we] can,” that’s a bit of “the rub,” given that as parts of a metaphor, the “here” and the “not here” (referred to in some critical circles as the “tenor” and the “vehicle”) share some properties, are analogous, not identical, are aids to understanding, expressing and preserving something about each other, but are not whole equals to each other. Note the number of metaphors Alice employs in that few sentences: weave, map, range, landscape, journey, circles of understanding. Recognized or perceived resemblance fills in part of the picture, maps out something, but always leaves something else (maybe a lot of somethings else) to be sketched in with other metaphors. Always leaves room for more glittery objects to bring back to the magpie's nest.]

 A rather "instant poem" 

 

This was my March 19/25 twelve-minute free write beginning from the lines 

“Look soft upon my legends . . .

                        . . . for myths contain the wings,”

 in Clint McElwaine's poem “Illusions,”

 which he brought to our monthly Poetry Circle:

 

 

Myths contain the wings

of hope, of grief, of love,

of fear, of wishes for a better story

wherein we can live in peace

and the joy that comes

with butterflies and dragons

landing softly upon legendary pads 

designed to bring light to

creep into wounded souls  

 

The trick, if trick it is,

the trick is not to give

a second chance to things

that shriek and howl

out of the darks of night

and the shadows of days

on which the sun’s overabundance

adds a sharper edge to the dim

where the light can’t

quite

get in

but can’t quite 

be blocked, completely,

out of touch with complex realities           

 

Look soft upon the scenes      

where help arrives

too late, too little   

the stuff of myth

of lessons offered up

 

 

This isn’t working

this attempt to equalize

light and dark

and glow and shadow

Free the pen – let it find

its own way, create its own legends    

fit for a time not so different

from the legends we inherit

and try to call history

stories of monumental achievement

casting a colourful shroud

over the prices paid

by the pained and suffering and

dispossessed

whose story looks for the cracks

in the artistry

of the perfect plot arc

from failure to success

 

Remember – even when the ink

                runs out

the story isn’t at its end –

the winning and the losing

remain eternally

                relative

 

 RE-ENGAGING

 It's been two years since I wrote anything here. Time for Benny, our young labradoodle to die suddenly of some sort of undetected tumour, and for a new labradoodle, Lily, to begin to find a home with us, as we with her.

 Time for me to develop some heart issues of my own, and I don't mean of the romantic kind. Time to write a lot of poems, saved elsewhere. Time to read a lot about poetry, and a lot of poetry. 

Reading Alice Major, Triangularity: Essays on Poetry, Science, and Spirit, right now. Alice is a marvel the way make connections, and question them at the same time, digging into and participating in "[a]ll our ongoing, complicated conversations" (75).

Time to reconnect this blog with some of those conversations. At least, that is the intent, though it rests on the usual flimsy expectation I can follow up.

Maybe it's time to get back into the habit of responding to what I'm reading, beginning with the essays in Triangularity? There's an ambition for an old guy like me to be getting on with. Wish me luck.

 

                                                 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.