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.]