Wanderlust

Moez Surani, in his GEIST Magazine essay "Driving to the Grave of Thomas Mann," (http://www.geist.com/articles/driving-with-maurice-sambert/)  recounts this delightful exchange over why his friend Maurice Sambert would take such trips, and why he was so interested in the final resting places of writers past: "We spend all of our years living in different houses, in different cities, we travel around, trying different cultures, and all we are looking for is the place where we want to die. Then we stay there and wait for it. We wait to be taken. For these writers, it is the final decision they make." 

Apart from the fact that we can finally afford it, maybe that's why I have developed a desire to travel a bit more these last few years. I don't mind having lived and made a living in Edmonton the last 27 years, and to be counting down an indeterminate few more to retirement. But I just do not want to die here. Or to be interred here. Many people achieve those ends or make their endings in Edmonton--the cemeteries prove it, even of they are not the reason for the city's notorious nickname: "Deadmonton." I just do not want to be one of those people. If I have to wait for death, in terms of climate and amenities, there are so many more comfortable and hospitable places, and in terms of company there must be somewhere with more people I can appreciate and maybe connect with. That might even appreciate and welcome me.

It's not Edmonton's fault. But I have this gnawing sense that I have never truly fit in here. At work, I am in a limbo position between the short-term temporary teaching staff in my department, and the permanent, tenured faculty--not quite part of either. I have made no lasting friendships here, formed no unbreakable bonds. Oh, I have found ways to make myself useful, and all that. But my departure would be unremarkable, and, I think,  largely unremarked. 

Edmonton for me has always been rather an accidental way station: it was not the place I chose to spend by far the longest period of residency in my working life.  It was meant to be a place I came to for an education and to complete a degree and to move on from. Only . . . I never moved on. And I never really committed to it as "home," just as the place I lived. It became by default the place Eva and I married, had a baby, raised a son, and watched him leave for his own education, leaving us behind. 

That seems to be the larger source of agitation and motive for wanderlust. I hate the sense of stasis that comes of living in a default setting and of being left behind when there is so much out there out there. 

Maybe I'm inheritor of the same restlessness expressed by Tennyson's Ulysses, who found he could not abide sitting, that he could not rest from travel. It's just that I never was that much of an adventurer to begin with, so the urge is rather late in arriving. I might not have spent all of my life traveling, but it is time to get on with it, time to shake off routine and be en route. 

Last week was the Edmonton Poetry Festival, a legacy of the city's first Poet Laureate, Alice Major. One activity was the Short Order Poetry booth on Churchill Square, where I took a chair three shifts, and part of a fourth, out among the lunch-break crowd in the most public outdoor space in the heart of the city.  A Short Order Poetry booth, by the way, invites the public to come up and give us a topic, a line, a prompt, and then we have to produce something the one(s) requesting will find acceptable as a poem, and do it while they wait in front of us instead of in front of the hot dog stand or food van on either side of us.

Some of the topics are silly, some sober and serious--like the request from a woman who, as the big sister, wanted a poem to give to her "beloved younger brother" (that was the prompt), who had just come through cancer treatments. I didn't make a copy of that one--too personal and for too private a special occasion, but I also think it was the best one I did that week (or maybe I'm fishing for validation here).

The poems, admittedly, are not uniformly fine examples of the art (that last clause would be a euphemism), but the thing is, the public seems intrigued enough at the sheer unlikelihood of it all, and there is often a look of appreciation at seeing their own words and phrases come back at them in the context of patterned and playful language.

Pasted in below are a few of my (slightly edited) pieces that emerged "on order" from some of the over fifty requests we took over the five days.

Edmonton Poetry Festival Short Order Poems

22 April 2013

Bonsai Trees 

Stunted perfection

forest in a teacup

bonsai thrives on

destructive attention

botanical malfeasance

becomes beauty

mediated, meditation

on the grain of sand

     universal

"Early English"   (a phrase used by a middle-aged Chinese ESL learner to explain why he could not write a poem of his own in the guest book. He had, he explained, only “early English,” then inscribed a Li Po poem, in Chinese symbols, into the book.)

Early English

or Late-Mid-Mandarin:

a language fresh each day

ancient metaphors meet

modern necessity

across oceans

across airways

and understandings

forged in two languages

learning toward each

    other

Canada Goose in Churchill Square

Putting the public in their place

waddling in congruous

concrete marshless city centre

proud, curved neck

mocking, bird out of step,

remodeling our public park-

ing lot into a hard

stiff parody of the wild

April 25

Jukebox ….Springtime (the challenge set by two women on their break, calling out prompts together at the same time)

Season in which all songs

all sounds, all rhythms

come round and round;

season of requests, of  programmed

resonance, of choices stacked

and pending, waiting only

to be demanded, commanded

into performance, to join

desire with fulfillment

fresh, refreshed, refreshing,

shared meaning—joined cycles

celebrating love and life

April 26  Queen of the Moon/Rainbows

The Queen of the Moon

mopes at her window,

       mourns

the silver predictability

    of night after

         night

of waxing and waning---

   eyes enviously

the flash and vigorous

   hues of cousin

     Rainbow’s

explosions drawing

ooohhs and aaaahs--

    while he frowns,

       mourns

a life lived brightly

     but too

      briefly

The Saving Grace of the Everyday

The day after the Marathon bombings in Boston, I was intrigued by something while watching the news. I was not taken up by the repeated more and more of what was not known and not even subject to an educated guess as all the promises were made to get to the bottom of all of this and to bring the perpetrators to justice and all the things that have to be said on such occasion. This is all predictable and part of reassuring a panicked public that there is nothing to panic about, that the authorities are on it. And they were, with almost television espionage and crime scene series efficiency, as the events of only a couple of days later demonstrated.

What caught my attention was a number of person-in-the-street and people-going-about-their-daily-routines stories. In particular, there was a couple opening their coffee shop for the regular morning traffic of regular morning customers, with apparently no expectation that the customers would not be there. And there they were.

It was a reminder of an idea I sometimes work with in Popular Culture courses, the grounding of our sense of the spectacular and sensational in our sense not so much of the “normal,”which is a concept that gets stretched and redefined with every experience (even a traumatic one such as the bombing), but of the ordinary routines we call the “everyday.”

Sociology, of course, has debates going on about this, with names like De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Living) and Lefebvre (Critique of Everyday Life) the names I encounter most often (not being a specialist in the field, I get the ones most often cited in my field of literary cultural studies).  But the looks on the faces of the people in Boston just getting up and going back to work was such a graphic image of some of the principles in action. They needed to hold to routine, and looked more surprised that they were being quizzed about it than that they were doing it.

The issue is, as explained in an article by Michael Gardiner from Western, in the journal Cultural Studies, is the matter of habit—not as a dull  daily grind but as a set of what are in fact skilled accomplishments that serve as a grounding  “mode of relating to the world acquired in specific contexts” (“Everyday Utopianism”: 2004: 235). It’s the kind of grounding that among other things allows people, in words I modify only slightly from Kipling, to keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs, and blaming it on everyone else around them—especially the calm.

Routine, it seems, does not turn us into dehumanized robots. 

Routine is part of the very thing that makes us individuals. We do not live a standard shared routine (houses made of ticky-tacky notwithstanding). We each of us have our own routines, quirks, and learned preferences. It provides, as Gardiner summarizes from the work of Rita Felski, an “anchor of personal meaning” in a world with apparently less and less certainty and apparently more and more randomness. Anthony Giddens called this need (in a usefully polysyllabic way) “ontological security”: it has to do (if my digest of a digest of a summary has it more or less correct) with developing a stable sense of who we are as individual “selves,” and giving ourselves something to trust in when we need to believe there is something predictable out there to begin from. The routine, the everyday, oddly enough, can even provide the foundation for resisting what would otherwise feel like uncontrolled or outwardly imposed change. 

Understoon this way, the everyday, the routine, smacks of “paradigm”: it is a frame of reference we develop over time and out of repetition, so engrained we just take it for granted as our daily business, and get ourselves back to a reasonable semblance of it as soon as possible after a marked disruption. 

In that sense, the everyday can be a life-saver. Or a sanity saver.

It can also be a trap. Demobilized troops coming home from combat, after being sent off to make the world a better place, used to be told (and maybe still are, but through a better decompression system of PTSD counselling), “Time to get things back to normal,”  with an implication “normal” meant back to the routine of daily civilian life. 

And bless them, after WWI and WWII and all the other massive deployments of blood and bone for the good of us all, they tried, and still try. I wonder if those who could not get it all back, or who could and can at best pretend to for only so long before the floodgates of nightmare reopen, felt and continue to feel themselves failures because they could not get into a routine “ontologically secure” enough to frame and contain the selves they had found themselves to be when survival depended on it. 

Their ordinary, everyday selves just could not create routine solid enough to anchor them safely once they had learned what their out-of-the-ordinary selves were capable of.

Samurai Serenader

Strolling incongruity

Samurai serenader,
unsheathes his guitar,

patrols the evening beach at Nice;

overhead the airlines come and go

flaring in sunset afterglow;

sun reddishes and purples horizons of

peacefulness and pleasure

waves timeless as Homer’s
rolling new this night

up the stone
froth their azure challenge:

Make sense of this, . . .
Tourist.

Stompin' Tom and the Accents of Canada

Two things I have read this last week strike chords--whether the chords are related or not, I have had an inkling, but no clear idea. Here is where the investigation begins.

First, was something attributed to Stompin' Tom Connors:"I think people should die without their dreams being fulfilled, so maybe they can have an excuse for coming around again." It's a curiously happy thought in the week of his death: I wish him many unfulfilled dreams and many happy returns.

The other was a line by 97-year-old Harry Bernstein, who had recently had his first book, The Invisible Wall, published. Pat Fagan tells the story in the most recent Writer's Digest that he had been sitting literally at the feet, looking for feedback on some writing he had been doing. Bernstein had asked "Who're you trying to write like," and Fagan had answered "Rick Bragg." Bragg is from Alabama, and was raised the hard way in tough times. Bernstein observed: "Probably bleeds red dirt. A fella' like that just has to open a vein and his whole culture comes out barefoot. You're from the North. Write what comes natural. You can't fake place."

"You can't fake place." That's the line that made me sit up and pay attention. That and, "You don't try to write like somebody you're not."

Maybe, but we are a lot of different people in the course of a lifetime, or in the course of a lot of returns to unfinished work for other lifetimes. And we can be in and from a lot of different places. If he's right, and I hope he is, Connors has to come back to collect a whole lot of new parts of himself, to fill out his voices. And the rest of us had better hope we can do something to fill the void until he does come back to work.

Stompin' Tom followed another piece of Bernstein's advice without ever hearing it, and was doing it long before Bernstein gave it: Bernstein told Fagan to do just what Connors did by necessity, to get off the interstate and poke around in the unfamiliar. Stompin' Tom travelled the whole of Canada for the whole of his life, and picked up bits of himself in us, everywhere he went, so in the end he was everyone he wrote about and sang as. He was the tobacco picker in Tillsonburg, Bud the Spud, a hockey fan, and all the other kinds of Canadian dirt he bled from on top of his stompin' board.

The many voices of Tom Connors are what made his voice authentic every time out. They made him such an original that the New York Times ran an obituary, fascinated in part with his success as an entertainer who made has name by and for shunning the U.S. star-maker machinery.

Douglas Martin's March 7 obit marvels:

         Canadians who sought American success, [Connors] said, were  “border jumpers.”

          In 1978, Mr. Connors began a decade-long retirement to protest what he saw as the Americanization of Canada’s music industry. A particular gripe was Canadian songwriters who rhapsodized about places like Alabama and Tennessee. [Bernstein would have loved that line.] He returned only after a new generation of Canadian punk performers had discovered his music. 

        With three-quarters of Canadians living within 100 miles of the United States border and flooded by American media, many Canadians strive to preserve a distinct cultural identity. Mr. Connors seemed eager to lead the fight. In a letter he had asked be published after his death, he said that all his work had been inspired by “Canada, the greatest country in the world.” 

Paul Thompson, the artistic director at Passe Mureille early in the 1970s used to audition actors by asking then to give him five Canadian accents. Most at that time could not name five Canadian accents, let alone deliver lines, let alone perform characters in them. He used to complain that when he asked for a rural Canadian, he got Paul Newman doing Hud. 

But the accents were out there. In 1970 or so, I once stood in line in a highway construction camp in northern BC, just east of the Alaska panhandle. The heavy-equipment operator ahead of me in line placed his supper order to the cook. I said, "Melfort, Saskatchewan."  He answered "Carrot River." They are maybe twenty minutes apart. A generation ago, Thompson's and a community of like-minded theatres like like Twenty-fifth Street House Theatre and Theatre Network, and The Mummers, used to go out and collect those accents, those voices telling their stories.

And the accents are out there now. This is a country in constant revision of itself, in which new stories are happening all the time, and new accents are coming to life to tell them, as we migrate inter-provincially or inter-regionally (mostly from East to West these days--or from south to north).

Ours is now, as it always has been and I hope always will be, a country with an opening for a voice collector or a whole community of voice collectors to do the rounds off the Trans Canada Highways, and to come around and come around and come around again, poking around gathering stories in their authentic accents.

Stompin' Tom's 61 albums are part of the proof. In every place and at every time, Canada has work for someone in and on every corner, someone getting that dirt worked into veins willing then to be opened so our "whole culture comes out"--barefoot, work-booted, moccasined, loafered, sandaled, and shod every which way.

Using Loneliness

Natalie Goldberg writes a chapter under the above title, in Writing Down the Bones. She writes of her own confrontation with being alone and lonely after separating from her husband, and of how she learned that loneliness was also a time of activity. She had been complaining to her Zen master of how hard it was to be alone, and he asked her what she did when she was alone: “Suddenly, it had a fascination” (149). She kept track of how she filled her loneliness.

My recurrently sporadic “activity” around the concepts of “alone” and “lonely” several times in my life, so far, has been to fantasize all the time about being alone, with no thought of the parallel condition of feeling lonely.

The two states, alone and lonely, are named from the same root, of course. Ironically, the root, according to my dictionary, is the Middle English concept of “all one.”  But the two are distinctly different states:  It is possible to be alone and feel complete, adequate to the occasion; the feeling of loneliness is that one is not enough.

“Alone” can be rather attractive. In fact, it is possible to seek and even crave the state of being alone, on your own, solo, living in solitude. It is especially possible to seek that state in an overly eventful life. I realized that one year, taking a Management Effectiveness Training workshop that among other things explained why I was marginal management material.

One of the exercises was to imagine a ship, and to staff and populate that ship deck by deck with friends and others who needed to be part of your voyage. And I realized the only ship I wanted was for a crew of one, equipped for a solo sail around the world. There was no one I wanted to share it with. I just wanted to be left alone. And I had no experience with sailing.

At that time I was effectively working two jobs. One was a fairly contained and boring day job looking after the library of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, a small daily newspaper.  The other, the night job, was the very public one of reviewing theatre and books in the same newspaper, writing some magazine features, and otherwise having my name and voice out on display all the time. I couldn’t go shopping or walk downtown on a Saturday afternoon without seeing somebody I knew, or running into someone who wanted to talk.

At first that felt pretty good--the satisfaction of being a modestly talented fingerling in a manageable pond. Then I began to doubt that talent and to detest that level of visibility--the need always to be “on.” That was probably part of it. I realized later that I had also been going through a depressive state at the time—I realized that when I was going through another, bigger, one later and had to go for treatment. And what I had been experiencing was a kind of painfully crowded loneliness—the kind it is possible to feel only in a crowd you cannot connect with or find much joy in.

Or sharing a small house with a spouse on a different journey. I think my first wife married me partly because she was afraid of being alone, and afraid of feeling lonely. I married her because she said she would marry me, and we were a pretty dynamic and passionate pair at the start. She divorced me when she realized there were worse things than being alone—and being lonely in a marriage was one of them. We had gone our separate and lonely ways across the yawning abyss of a double mattress long since. Being alone together with someone else in a shared space full of memories of more companionable times and activities is a devastating kind of loneliness. It proved harder on her than on me, so she called a halt first.

So suddenly there I was: alone.

Separated.

And lonely.

In one sense it was a state I had helped orchestrate. The alone part was maybe okay—but the lonely part was a shock. I would walk the city, looking for company that somehow suddenly seemed disappointingly elusive. Was I running into fewer people? Not really. I had not really been running into so many, previously: it had simple felt that way.

I was also unemployed—or seriously underemployed and underpaid, scraping together a living from free lance writing and part-time library work. That’s a different kind of loneliness. Suddenly every advertisement on tv was an insult to my sense of myself as a consuming member of the educated, professional adult middle class. Not only did it feel like I would never again have friends or friendly company, or even again have sex; no, worse, I would never again buy anything foolishly expensive and undeniably unnecessary.

Now I live in Edmonton, a city in which even after 27 years I have little public presence and no real “friends,” none I can drop in on for a laugh at any time. Well, not quite none. I have the friendship of my wife of over twenty-five years. Eva is a woman of amazing resilience in the face of my recurrent but less and less frequent downers. She has friends, and so “we” have many acquaintances, usually maintained through her outwardness.

But as I considered Goldberg's invitation to muse about the state of solitude and the activity of loneliness, I began to realize I have not craved the solo life much in the last many years. That’s a good sign, because one day soon enough, it looks like, Eva and I will be retired together.

It was sad watching my parents’ marriage go apparently suddenly and irretrievably to hell once Dad had to take early retirement, at 60, on stress leave. (I say “apparently suddenly” because the tensions had probably been there for years, but manageable. And I had been out of the house for years, so had not witnessed the slide.) So he stayed home and drove himself and Mom crazy. And maybe in self defense, she helped return the favour.

I won’t be quitting work until closer to 70 (not getting on the pension plan till 59 has had something to do with that). I can’t see quitting at 65 to be home alone, eating ceaselessly while trying to keep busy and entertained while Eva is still at work for several more years.  

In fact, in my much more private life as an educator, even the once relatively attractive idea of being alone has lost a lot of its sparkle. Even if for practical purposes, because of committee commitments, I am still doing two jobs.

As for the idea of feeling “usefully lonely” so I have to manufacture busyness, it has no appeal at all.