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.]
