Light #3

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. It turned out to be not so much the anticipated bright and shining exit into fulfillment, but the entrance to a different kind of darkness. Not Milton’s “darkness made visible,” nothing as hellish as that. The grey let-down of a lesser enlightenment into the fact that the end of the tunnel that had been funneling him claustrophobically towards its glow in the distance just extended that same highway to a point where it disappeared around a bend and over a horizon. Out here was not “there,” not the destination, but a different milestone of a never-ending getting there. 

That was not why Eric had put so many years into perfecting himself, honing his technique, polishing his delivery. Shining his shoes. At least, it was not why he thought he had been doing it. He had just wanted to get finished with all that preparation for being a fully realized, participatory grown-up when he hit eighteen. But the nineteen-year-olds were still that tiny bit ahead of him they had been last year as eighteen-year-olds. And the twenty-eight-year-olds who had been eighteen when he was looking up to them when he was eight? Now solid. Respectable. Mortgaged. Parents. And none of them seemed very impressed by his arrival--not enough to look behind to see if he might be gaining on them, much less care.

Eighteen candles on the cake laughed up at him as they melted into the lemon peppermint icing that had been his favorite about one year too long. One by one they puddled and extinguished. "Happy fucking birthday to me," he grumbled. His first adult curse. 

He shrugged.

He stuffed in a couple of extra clips for his 9mm in his bookbag. 

"Not so much for them...." 

Light #2

“The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment.” What a line—the substance of how many biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Lifetime: a trip down a tunnel trying to reach the light one touchstone experience at a time. 

Can hardly wait to start school, and be one of the big kids.

Can hardly wait to be in Junior High, to be a teenager.

Can hardly wait to be in high school. Be through with high school.

To get my driver’s license.

To get my first kiss, feel, sex. Sex with a partner it really matters with. Sex with an appropriate partner. A partner worth building a life with.

To get my degree and get a job. To get a job somehow in line with my degree.

To get my first promotion. 

To be the boss.

To have my own business and be my own boss.

To be a Dad/Mom.

To see the kids in school and have some time back to myself.

To slow down a bit and find time to smell the flowers.

To retire and travel.

To . . . 

 

To see the full light at the end of the Tunnel of Sequential Dissatisfactions that we call Life: the light that in some narratives of near-death experiences takes us out of this dimly lit sequence of experiences that never seem to measure up to anticipation, and in some way or other never could. The full light that takes us into another tunnel that is the wherever and whatever is next, nourished by the hope it will be a distinct improvement. 

Light #1 Rathole

Here's the first:

The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment. A distinct and sunny glow was what he had been expecting—clearer, cleaner, more a final goodbye to the dim. This last gasp afterglow sort of fuzzed the transition from the tube of darkness into the not very light open spaces. 

Then Garth realized he had come through shortly after nightfall. Now that was a surprise. He’d entered that mouth in the mountain at highway speed. At noon. On the day of the summer solstice. And he would swear (if swearing weren’t a sin) that he had been inside the throat of that tunnel for only five minutes.

“Where does the time go?... he giggled nervously. There had to be a rational explanation, or even an irrational one, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear either.

“It was the time version of a wormhole,” explained a low voice from a back seat that had been empty when he’d entered that tunnel. “Sort of.”

Damn, thought Garth, in an unguarded moment that was a little more out loud than he’d have preferred or was aware of before he continued musing. If I had to cross the line into an alternate verisimilitude, why did it have to be into SciFi? I hate that stuff. I would much rather come out in a San Francisco alley in the Twenties, wearing a trench coat and a fedora. A broad-brimmed fedora. The coat not quite disguising the muscular breadth of my heavy shoulders.

“Don’t give up hope yet, sweetheart,” came the voice. 

"How does it do that?"

“It’s easy to read minds when you are in Urban Fantasy,” said the voice. “You’re just misreading the tropes. Or just learning them. This story is still waiting to land up somewhere and somewhen, and it could just as easily be San Fr….  Nope. Your wormhole was actually a memory of the Rathole--looks like you get Edmonton. In a blizzard. With a snowblower.”

“I haven’t a CLUE what he’s on about,” Garth mumbled, swinging into an uncharacteristic for him but strangely natural feeling illegal U-turn in a school zone. At lunch hour ("How does it keep doing that????"). In a crosswalk. "But I’ve got to stop …."

“Not here, not now,” insisted the voice. “We haven’t even got to the part where you get groped by the leggy red-headed hitchhiker, yet. And we would both hate for you to miss out on that bit of development.”

My own Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Garth imagined. 

“Not quite,” the voice sounded uncomfortably closer, just a breath past his neck. “We’ve got business, you and I. Take the next left and stop under the Mausoleum carpark. That’s where we’re partying.”

“The Mausoleum?” Garth checked to make sure he’d heard correctly. 

“Yeah, that big hockey arena looking thing in the heart of downtown. That's what my friends call it”

“But it isn’t finished yet. And it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to party there.”

A large, reddish-furred paw pressed on his shoulder. “Something along those lines, yeah.”

The last sound was a crunch, but Garth didn’t exactly hear it through his gurgled, choked-off scream.

A question came up Wednesday (Feb. 6) on the Narrative Magazine site: What's everybody's favorite writing instrument? Answers were anywhere from a favorite pencil to a favorite keyboard. A lot mentioned favorite fountain pens. Watermans came up many times. Nobody mentioned my favorite, a Visconti Van Gogh in the "Starry Night" color scheme. But I haven't been using it much lately. It or any other writing instrument except the computers on which I compose course notes, record marks and do committee stuff. That flu or whatever it was I had in late December took a lot of the will and all of the wish to write energy right out of me. I must have been sick.

One answer to the Narrative question struck me for its Puritanical snottiness: Somebody called Exploding Mary responded "If what you write with matters more, or as much, as how you write-- then what you write won't matter much." Nobody had asked whether the "what" matters as much as or more than the "what with." But the "what with" does matter. It's the source of the sheer aesthetic physical pleasure of pulling letters, words, phrases, sentences, metaphors, images, out of the not-yet into the here-it-is. And there is physical pleasure that is part of the writing process. Just ask Laraine Herring (Writing Begins with the Breath).

Later that night--this is still Wednesday we are talking about--about midnight I was lying in bed when I wasn't tossing in bed, and realized I just had to get up and put my pen to work across the patiently waiting pages of my new APICA CD15HN scribbler with the linen-finish covers in sage green. The scribbler with the silky-finished paper that welcomes fountain pen nibs and ink without the scratchy fibrous tendrils bleeding off in more random directions than the words themselves follow or take up. The scribbler that  I keep in a Conception Cuir leather folder my wife bought me three summers ago in Quebec City. The leather scribbler cover with the embossed red flower on it. The embossed red flower she selected instead of the geometric in black and white pattern she thought  I might find a bit more "masculine." Or at least less "feminine." I think she thought the flower was more feminine because she liked it better. And she is a woman. So . . .  Anyway, she expressed her doubts to the salesman. He asked the perfectly logical question to settle the issue: "Does your husband ever wear pink shirts or shirts with pink in them?"  She had to admit that, yes, I did. That's how I got the gorgeous embossed red flower patterned notebook cover. When she pointed out the geometric the next day as we passed the same shop, I shrugged at it. Boring. Maybe that's why she thought it was more masculine.

As very late Wednesday became very early Thursday, I took my favorite writing instrument in hand and spent a late hour filling page after page. It took a while to get fluid and fluent again, after doing nothing but practical writing for six weeks and then some. But eventually, after having to stop to refill the ink reservoir with Private Reserve Midnight Blues ink, I found the words began to get more lively. 

And a later eventually, I flagged a bit and headed back to bed. Then I got up and came back to the pen and notebook.

I had ended by putting down a sentence (or an interrogative clause) from Haraki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which my son, David, had left for me when he went back to Montreal after Christmas: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" It seemed a promising place to start one of the exercises Natalie Goldberg suggests in Writing Down the Bones, an exercise she learned from Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with a teasing, often absurd, but strong first sentence. I wrote about that on November 14 last, enclosing some products of such outings. Some of them begun with a fountain pen in the predecessor of the CD15HR, a CD15NV. The HR and NV are color codes, evidently. NV was a darker teal blue. There is also a marvelous WN that is a creamy white.

What I realized when I got back to bed was that there was another sentence asking for the same opportunity, one I hadn't got from any source I was aware of but my own playing mind: "The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment."

My plan, being no Russell Edson, is to try a few extensions of that sentence over the next week or so--probably in narrative, but who knows. And maybe some from the Murakami clause.

If you are tuned, stay that way.

Oh, by the way--I've been filling pages ever since. Not always with my "Starry Night." It's my favorite, but I'm not, Exploding Mary, incapacitated without it.

One inspiration was going to a poetry reading by Richard Harrison after work on Friday. Among other things, Richard writes of hockey and of superheroes. Lately he has also been writing of his father, who died a year and a half ago, or about six months after mine. His father was also a World War II vet, who carried a lot of baggage from that experience.

One line from Richard about his father, referring to how his father had thought of the war, sticks with me. Richard writes of how his father found in his wartime duties "the last days in his life he knew exactly what to do." It has a ring to it when I think of my own father. It meant I got another several pages filled within hours. Some of that might make its way here one day soon, too.


P.S.: this was executed mainly on a Toshiba Protege Z830 Satellite Series Ultrabook laptop keyboard. Not my favorite writing instrument, Exploding Mary, but one of many different computer keyboards and configurations I have used since the late 1970's, one of many that has helped and continues to help get the job done. 

Never Idle--Surviving

On the DividedNoMore blogsite, in a piece called “Fish Broth & Fasting,” Leanne Simpson has redefined and explained what the press has been calling Chief Theresa Spence’s “hunger strike.” She calls it a ceremonial and symbolic fast, while renaming and redefining “Chief” Spence as a holy woman, “Ogichidaakwe Spence”:

Fish broth. It carries cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg. It symbolizes hardship and sacrifice.  It symbolizes the strength of our Ancestors.  It means survival.  Fish broth sustained us through the hardest of circumstances, with the parallel understanding that it can’t sustain one forever. We exist today because of fish broth. It connects us to the water and to the fish who gave up its life so we could sustain ourselves. Chief Spence is eating fish broth because metaphorically, colonialism has kept Indigenous Peoples on a fish broth diet for generations upon generations. This is utterly lost on mainstream Canada, as media continues to call Ogichidaakwe Spence’s fast a “liquid diet” while the right winged media refers to it as much worse.

Not Chief Spence, but Ogichidaakwe Spence – a holy woman, a woman that would do anything for her family and community, the one that goes over and makes things happen, a warrior, a leader because Ogichidaakwe Spence isn’t just on a hunger strike.  She is fasting and this also has cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg.  She is in ceremony.

One commentator, generally sympathetic, points out that “Chief” and “hunger strike” are apparently Spence’s words, too. Partly what is at work here seems to be bad translation not of language but of concept. Or maybe Theresa Spence is trying to talk a language the media can understand or that they expect, or that she has been trained to use because that’s what she keeps hearing and reading. Or she is talking a language she has learned through colonization, a language that is misrepresenting the full scope of what she is attempting.

In the end, Idle No More, regardless of its many objectives and spokespeople, is about survival on the scale the narrator “Angel” speaks of in Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms:

The devastation and ruin that had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and perhaps that had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get back their lives? She and others knew the protest against the dams and river diversions was their only hope. Those who protested were the ones who could still believe they might survive as a people. (226)

That kind of survival, not just as "a people," but with a sense of one's own fundamental humanity intact, can be achieved only through constant action in resistance, in a world in which creation is not a finished product for us to mine out for the fun and profit of the few, but an everyday activity, a process of constant reinvention for the preservation of us all.  After all, as Roger Epp puts it so eloquently and obviously in the title of his collection of prairie essays, “We Are All Treaty People.” Both the First Nations and Canada, on behalf of non-Native Canadians, signed those treaties. Undermine the treaties for one party, undermine them for all.


It is survival in the face of the three key elements of colonial thinking that result not only in dispossession of resources but of a claim to full humanity. J.M. Blaut terms these elements the “myth of emptiness”:

(i) A non-European region is empty or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples). (ii) The region is empty of of settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory). (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of private property--that is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give the land to settlers since no one owns it). (The Colonizer’s Model of the World 15)

These elements are behind centuries of dispossessing and dehumanizing legislation, as Thomas King has explained: “...legislation, in relation to Native people, has had two basic goals. One, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence” (The Truth About Stories 130). This is “termination legislation” writ large, and the root cause of many actions similar to Idle No More over the years, not to mention the current sense not just among the Native populations that the country will indeed become "empty" once all its resources have been sold off to corporate interests, most of them abroad  (what is euphemistically called "offshore"), with no real "investment" in the future of anything called "Canada."

I recall one such earlier action in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as a group walked across the country in support of Native concerns. I was working at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix at the time, and we had reported the action as a “protest march.” A few days later I was riding with Peter Wilson, our head photographer, to a pow wow near Lumsden, and we met the marchers along the way. Their leader took me to task (though I was not the reporter or editor who had used the term “protest march.” I wasn’t actually a news reporter at all, but the librarian, using up some booked time off to go for a bit of a joy ride on a really nice summer afternoon). The leader glared at me and said “This is not a protest march. It is a cultural and spiritual walk for survival.” I repeated that later for the reporter and editor. They shrugged. Then and now, the press uses its own shorthand.

Maybe we should stop calling Spence and the Idle No More and similar demonstrators "protesters," anyway, and call them what they are: “activists for survival.”  “Activism for Survival” is maybe not as full a term as we need, either, but it does express the idea of "Not Idle," not that there have not been Not Idle Native people all along, of course. Some in groups. Some as individuals speaking out when the situation has made it necessary. People like a former student I recall (but cannot name here, as I do  not have permission to invade her privacy to that degree) from my days teaching introductory academic skills courses for the U. of A. Faculty of Native Studies.

A most dynamic Cree woman from Hobbema, she told me a story that illustrates her experiences across a lifetime, experiences I accept as fairly typical. It was of an exchange she had had one day with her high school literature teacher. She had been going to school in Wetaskiwin, the city nearest her reserve, in order to get better preparation for post secondary education than she could get at her reserve school. One day, after class, she had asked the teacher if maybe they could read some stories by Native writers. There were several Native students in the class, after all. The teacher retorted with something along the lines of “If you want to read Indian stories, go to an Indian school.” That could turn the gentlest soul into an activist, I would think, if her grasp on her own fundamental humanity were to have a chance at survival.

When in Doubt, Shoot it Out

So now the NRA wants to pull out all the economic stops (an odd proposition from so conservative an organization) to afford an armed guard in every school in the U.S.  There's no money for teachers, books, librarians, etc., but now there needs to be money for armed guards, so that when a bad guy with a gun enters a school, he (and it seems always to be a he) will be met by a good guy with a gun. What  logic. What's next: "The only way to keep our kids safe from drugs in schools is to make sure every bad guy with drugs who enters a school comes face to face with a good guy with drugs?"

Feeding or Starving the Fears

Towards the end of an unpublished one-woman show called The Passage of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Pam Bustin, Georgia advises “You want to be an artist—do the work—and get the work out there . . .  Create for yourself.

“We work. We must work. It’s why we are here. To search. To explore our world. . .

“Do not let the fear stop you.

“You must not let them stop you from marking your passage.

Although the advice in this context is aimed at an audience of would-be artists, I think it explains a lot about what is in the background of a lot of things left undone or unsaid in a lot of lives in general.  In my life most particularly (because isn't it all always about me?). In a fundamentally truly Protestant sense, we all have a search to conduct, are here for our passage through to mark.  But there is a level at which this is romantic guff suitable only for the relatively safe world of urban, educated, sort-of-middle class Western European to North American straight culture.

For Bustin’s O’Keeffe, for example, the risks would seem to be mostly in the realm of symbolic violence—some bad reviews: “Let them write what they will—knowing you did what you must.” Emotional bruising of a rather precious sort. What if the “marker” of the “passage” is an acid-throwing, gun-slinging bomb tosser, or a white-power, gay bashing troglodyte? For a little girl in Taliban territory, the writing medium on which that passage gets marked is going to be her own body, and the text will be inscribed at best in blood, missing limbs, and scars. As it will be for members of any disadvantaged population whose deprivation is the price of someone else’s comfort, peace of mind, and relative privilege.

There are a lot of “house-elves” in the world who are trained to believe and conditioned to act on the belief that their existence is merely to stand and wait. To Milton, the whole human race and much of the heavenly host had that function: to stand and wait for the opportunity to post and speed at God’s bidding o’er land and ocean without rest was itself a privilege. 

The house-elves in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are the unpaid, unpensioned, unrewarded, unclothed toilers in the kitchens; they are the bed makers, clothes washers, floor scrubbers who, even the children assume, love their lives and do not want any more out of it than to work for the comfort of their masters. Should they displease their masters, they can be sent off merely by giving them the “gift” of an article of clothing—even a mismatched pair of old socks. And good luck finding work with that on their record.

Hermione Granger, at the start of her fourth year at Hogwarts is shocked to learn that all that food and luxury that appears at the start of each term and at each feasting day in the school year is the product of the largest staff of house-elves in the world. She has been the unwitting beneficiary of the massive “magic” of slave labour. So she launches a movement (of three) to improve the lot of the house-elves: the Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare (S.P.E.W.). Oddly enough (or predictably enough), when the movie version of The Goblet of Fire had to make cuts to fit a 600+ page novel into a two-hour movie, that whole sub-plot of the house-elves was one of the deep cuts, a disposable secondary passage in the story that could be sacrificed in telling a tale of the battle of good against evil. 

This all does not completely negate the advice Bustin’s Georgia gives, of course. Given the opportunities and the necessary skills, marking one’s passage without or even in the face of fear is a rite if not a right. In our relatively safe society it might be a tag on a public wall. A symbol carved into a tree (if one can find a tree). A tent occupying a vacant lot or a public square not designated for public camping. A secret posted on the internet. Even a few seconds of exhibitionism recorded for a posterity that the poser might regret one day but that seems like a good idea at the time. The marking can take so many forms and lead to so many consequences. A bad review might take the form of getting laughed at. It might be getting shunned. It might be getting driven to suicide because of public and cyber bullying. Even our relatively safe culture has a capacity for blood sports.

Georgia (and Bustin through her) speaks of risk taking on the level of “daring” to send a poem or short story or bit of dramatic dialogue off for publication, and risking rejection. I’ve experienced it at the level of sitting at a table in a public place and offering to write a page of prose or poetry on a topic of the audience’s choosing, though in a protected middle-class North American life, that can seem pretty daring, too. 

That’s part of the problem, I think. We let our fears get so precious, or we get so precious in our fears, that we assume we are changing the world when we step for a few seconds outside our own comfort zones, or redefine our comfort zones at the expense of a few moments of relatively safe risk. 

Like posting to a blog site that maybe half a dozen people look into on a good week. Man, that’s guts . . .

Yet, given the way I was raised, and let myself get comfortable, it’s taken a long time to get even to that stage. 

So when I look back at some of the theatre reviews I used to write in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, and some of the more acidic assessments I expressed, I wonder who I was back then, that I could write such stuff for public consumption. About people with the courage to put themselves and their talents out there for public viewing. Or who were more afraid of anonymity, of not going public  than of risking the violence of a bad review.

I didn’t keep a scrapbook of those musings and mud-slingings, by the way. It’s just that I read a book recently on the early years of Twenty-fifth Street House Theatre in Saskatoon, and Dwayne Brenna, the author, quoted several of my reviews and interviews. I did remember writing those things, once I saw them quoted. I didn’t always remember the state of mind I was in at the time I wrote them. But apparently I was not as fearful as I recall. Or I was more afraid of being thought a wuss with no critical standards who loved everything than of being thought a mean-spirited jerk. Both opinions were expressed at various times over those years. Sometimes about the same review. And in retrospect, I wouldn’t want to take back any of what I wrote, because I do recall a level of self-editing that went into those pieces in the first place--taking out some of the more cruel-sounding assessments.

I recall meeting a history grad student at a concert in the Centennial Auditorium one evening, someone my first wife, Sam, was taking a course with at the U. of  S.  He was from Toronto, and scorning the arts in Saskatoon in general, the public critical attitude in particular. He snorted that the performers knew they could come out “and spit on the stage” and know they would get a positive review from the timorous reviewers from the StarPhoenix, the local newspaper. He went on and on. Then he asked me, condescendingly, what I did. I replied, blandly, “Oh, I’m a reviewer for the StarPhoenix.” 

He thought / half-hoped I was kidding: a startled, half-chuckled “No…”.

Then he got confirmation from Sam.

Then he tried to backtrack and exclude me from the previous comment.

Then he shut up. 

The coward.