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.

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.