Expect change, / Nothing is strange.
1) I’m taking a Dene language course. It is in a basement of a building serpentine in layout, once a dorm, now the departments of Anthropology and Sociology. Last week I left by a side door and climbed up the mossy stairs; I looked north and saw the Pacific Ranges lit blinding vermillion in the sunset. The Ranges are high and steep and vast, and currently covered in snow. Where seams of raw tree and rock ran through the snow, pale indigo light shone dark instead.
2) After dusk, across the Inlet, the same Pacific Ranges obscured by clouds like bruises, heavy with northern darkness flowing down Vancouverwards in the wake of the weak, southern-tilted sun, a daystar, only, in the winter. This roil of bruising, fog, and blackness was pinned back against the mountains’ feet by many freighters’ bridges, lit towers of molten gold. The suburbs on the slopes were a gridwork of carnelian. No: a gridwork of sodium, neon, and argon–no: marine ash, new air, rare, and ab-active influence on filaments encoiled, fiery, and fine. In the language of Vancouver City, street lighting poles are nodes; conduits, ducts. Abandoned conduits and boxes for the junctions moulder in tusks of ivy tangled, rain-slimed, and shot through with parabolae of thorny blackberry canes.
3) Robinson Jeffers died today, in 1962. His poetry is grotesque and sublime, it is vivid and viscid in detail, sometimes grandiloquescent, sometimes sheer and understated. Apparently he died alone; it must have been hard. Una, his wife, died before him. I have winced at some of his sentimental and condescending letters to her, but here is a poem about her, or at least for her, that I like. I like it because although it is likewise sentimental, it expresses very well the tension between love of life and love for death that becomes complicated when you love someone and live with them for years and years, knowing all the while that it ends, and is always ending.
For Una
I
I built her a tower when I was young—
Sometime she will die—
I built it with my hands, I hung
Stones in the sky.
Old but still strong I climb the stone—
Sometime she will die—
Climb the steep rough steps alone,
And weep in the sky.
Never weep, never weep.
II
Never be astonished, dear.
Expect change,
Nothing is strange.
We have seen the human race
Capture all its dreams,
All except peace.
We have watched mankind like Christ
Toil up and up,
To be hanged at the top.
No longer envying the birds,
That ancient prayer for
Wings granted: therefore
The heavy sky over London
Stallion-hoofed
Falls on the roofs.
These are the falling years,
They will go deep,
Never weep, never weep.
With clear eyes explore the pit.
Watch the great fall
With religious awe.
III
It is not Europe alone that is falling
Into blood and fire.
Decline and fall have been dancing in all men’s souls
For a long while.
Sometime at the last gasp comes peace
To every soul.
Never to mine until I find out and speak
The things that I know.
IV
To-morrow I will take up that heavy poem again
About Ferguson, deceived and jealous man
Who bawled for the truth, the truth, and failed to endure
Its first least gleam. That poem bores me, and I hope will bore
Any sweet soul that reads it, being some ways
My very self but mostly my antipodes;
But having waved the heavy artillery to fire
I must hammer on to an end.
To-night, dear,
Let’s forget all that, that and the war,
And enisle ourselves a little beyond time,
You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine
While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,
And sometime after midnight I’ll pluck you a wreath
Of chosen ones; we’ll talk about love and death,
Rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea,
Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real
While the stars go over the timeless ocean,
And when they vanish we’ll have spent the night well.
Top five things about spending the hols in Vancouver
1) Walking around the woods in the Endowment Lands/Pacific Spirit Regional Park/unceded Musqueam territory. It is all columns of grey deciduous tree trunks and monolithic red, ropey tree trunks of darkling cedars; it is full of liquorice ferns, oyster mushrooms, fallen but still bright yellow and green alder leaves, the occasional holly, and billions of clumps of sword ferns cropping up waist high out of a shifting, dead, rustling carpet of rust-coloured maple leaves that rolls continuously throughout the forest floor.
2) Pine mushrooms/Ponderosa mushrooms/matsutake with udon. The mushrooms are available at Whole Foods, but we have really got to learn to hunt them for ourselves. I’d never realized, before we began to make this recipe, how intensely good pine mushrooms are. We’ve made this food twice in the last two weeks and are on the verge of buying out the store’s stock.
Chop pine mushrooms into two handfuls of 1″x1″ pieces
Heat butter in a wok or large frying pan till brown
Inhale the cinnamon aroma of the pine mushrooms and then throw them into the pan
Deglaze with good saké, not too sweet
Throw fresh udon into the sauce created by the mushrooms, butter, and sake
Squeeze wedges of lemon over everything; eat slowly
3) The MOA, Museum of Anthropology. There is, among other things, a South Seas collection made by the former owner of the house I live in now. He was the son of a whaler; he became something of an entrepreneur, moved around Canada, settled in Vancouver, and then sailed all around the South Pacific in a schooner–collecting shrunken heads, wooden swords, beads, shells, carven figures, shields, and so on. He had these on display all through the house. He somehow also accumulated a collection of things belonging to Inuit in the Coppermine River region.
4) The house I’m living in is 99 years old. I’m in the attic, which is good for the light and for seeing the mountains and the cedar trees, the skyscrapers and the ski hills lit up at dusk. It’s been renovated nicely, which is helpful for avoiding the bedbugs that seem to inhabit even the library books in this city. It is at the top of three landings and three flights of stairs.
One begins by climbing slippery, frost-coated exterior stairs of unpainted wood to the second floor entrance. The second floor itself is at the top of a second set of interior stairs that are carpeted, dusty, steep, and dark. Then one has to walk through the second floor, which is a weird communal boarding room arrangement between hippies who work for MEC. Mostly this just means photos of Bob Marley in clouds of sorcerous-looking pot smoke and sentimental quotations on little banners on the wall. Sadly, it also means incense; I’m working on putting seals on my door, because I’m a grinch. The common area belonging to the second floor is full of shelves of ski boots and camping gear, and it’s always very dark, with heavy, dark wooden trim on all the windows and doors and wainscotting. The area is lit only by a large, dingy wall of stained glass on one side and a paper lantern painted with Zen characters on the other.
There is a tiny rainbow sticker on the door to my apartment (which is at the top of the steepest stairs of all), because for the thirty years before I moved in, it was inhabited by Brenda and Lucy, who used to live in separate apartments in the house, and fell in love, and one of them moved up into the attic with the other one.
5) Frost. The combination of mountain and sea air in Vancouver is quite unusual. It’s very fresh, and produces heavy, sharp, shining hoarfrost on all the leaves and the pavement and even the sand along the ocean. And on the stairs.
Also 6) There is a baby grey squirrel that lives in a pile of yard trimmings on one edge of the forest. It watches us pass by and we watch how it roams its little home–every branch in the heap and every little cavern of leaves–with intimate familiarity.
The shortest day of the year post
Do you ever have those moments where you’re just going along mundanely, persistently, sometimes furiously, and then you’re stopped suddenly by some clear and imperfect cut to the heart of everything? Here are the top five recent cuts:
1)
2) Damned folk (even if it is folk rock):
3) Sunset on Mars:
4) Fairly infrequently one can follow a stream from its origin to end–depending how you define origins and ends:
From the beach below Spanish Bank. At low tide the stream welled up out of the sand and ran straight into the ocean. Why does this blow my mind? Because the big city is SO not epic. And this little stream was epic.
5) A new blog is out, from a good friend and someone I miss, and it really is in a state of near-perfection: http://aaronkreuter.com/blog.
Three times I didn’t have a camera
1) Mark and I drove and camped down the 101 and 1 in northern California one spring. We marked places we liked in our trucker’s atlas of America that we inherited from my father, but we didn’t bring a camera. Photographing gigantic redwoods with their feet covered in carpets of perfect little green shamrocks, and grey zen monasteries, and elk grazing on high, grassy cliffs over black rock- and pearly, abalone-pocked beaches, and baby mule deer and large black-tailed jackrabbits bounding together through yellow, post-winter grasses so tall that the two species were almost indistinguishable, and blue-green-clear papery-gelatinous sheaves and reams and ropes of dead and dying by-the-wind sailors along the sand would probably have been difficult with a little camera, anyways. I drew pictures in my journal. Very funny-looking ones.
2) Vestmannaeyjar.
3) Out for a walk the other night along Spanish Bank, the tide was out. I walked out on sand settled and rippled into unending edges by the ocean, and watched the sunset turn the waterlogged sand orange and pink and gold and blue–no: mandarin and peony and lemon and indigo; no: long-wavelength hues and non-spectral purples. Blue herons and gulls fished in fingers of water. The mountains in the cleft beyond the end of the Strait were high-lofted by the atmosphere and white and orange with snow and light. The freighters in the Inlet–and there are always so many of them–were Tonka-bright, monolithic stripes of red and black and blue on smooth, dark water. Standing in rippling, tide-soaked sand and looking up at the rippling sky proved such a good illusory sense of elevation that two other strangers came out to join me even though our shoes slowly soaked through with brine.
Top five Christmas things
1) Music: Just when I’ve ascertained that I hate all folk music, I remember John Denver’s “Christmas for Cowboys” – the only good Christmas song there is, and probably the only good folk song:
2) Movie: Eyes Wide Shut, uncut. All the non-LED Christmas lights glowing on all the breasts one could ever want in a schmaltzy, psychoanalytical sex cult movie. Must be watched late at night, while slightly depressed. Enchanting.
3) Drink: Forget eggnog (even the vegan kind), forget champagne. Scotch and soda.
4) Gift: Next in the collection of crystals (the Vancouver years) is sulphur. There is a very old store with a rather old rock man in it who is dusting off some large sulphur crystals for me to look at. The best thing about sulphur crystals, besides the theory that they’re formed through a combination of chemical and bacterial action, is that they smell faintly of, yes, sulphur.
5) Venue: The cold, wet, crashy beach. Where else?
Here is a photo of Tom Cruise looking paranoid, which he does quite well:
Loneliness and minerals
The real question is, when you have moved to a new city where the friendliest acquaintances are the squirrels, what do you do when all the seminar readings are researched, the Internet read, the essays written, the woods and alleys walked? It’s easy to drink too much–coffee, wine, that fizzy water that tastes so good but leaves the mouth dry, after. It’s easy to shop too much, too. I keep buying rocks. I have already got plenty, and for free–pale red slabs of sandstone and fatty chunks of quartzes from the cliffs at Carcross in the Yukon; crystals and basalts from the edges of hot rivers in Iceland; leprous sponges of grey sandstones from Oregon beaches; salt-polished agates from Dungeness Spit; round, giantish, speckled granite and conglomerate eggs from Sombrio. But in Vancouver, there are hippies; and hippies mean crystals. So the lonelier I have gotten, the more crystals I’ve acquired, some made into lamps, some just meant for staring at. I stare at my swirly, green, translucent fluorite lamp, and my columnar, white, crystally-shardy selenite lamp, and my salty, pink Himalayan lamp. I stare at my tangerine quartz and rutilated quartz, my boxy-square-planed pale green fluorine, my rose quartz and my blue. There was this dream I had before I moved here in which I met two middle-aged women in Ross Bay Cemetery, and they asked me if I was ready for the truth that will take everything away from me. Almost I could answer, with another pouty writer (though I contemplate rocks and he contemplated treachery and death), “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance is darkness.”
But all this is an exaggeration, and boring. The real question is, where can I find red crystals? Yes, the pattern: all the colours of the rainbow. Much more exciting, yes? Do you have time for anything else?
“Forgotten years”
is really pretty good:
Ways to heaven
While writing about roads, the following:
Constraint! Wendy Lewis’s deadpan vocals at the start with Reid Anderson’s spare bass. Wait for the last two minutes, when Ethan Iverson’s piano takes itself apart up into the sky, only to float on down at the end into total quiet, wonderful depression.
Also:
-from “On Making ‘The Meaning of Life‘: An Interview with Hugh Brody,” Deena Rymhs, Canadian Literature 208 (2011): 30.
Cunning organica
From the ASLE listserv:
“The Problem of Describing Trees” from Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, Robert Hass
The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.
The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.
The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.
Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
“It was difficult to differentiate between
living and nonliving things, because of the resemblance in structures. Like plants and animals, minerals and gems were filled with small pores, tublets, cavities, and streaks, through which they seemed to nourish themselves. Crystalline salts were compared to plant forms, but criteria by which to differentiate the living from the nonliving could not successfully be formulated. . . . By virtue of the vegetative soul, minerals and stones grew in the human body, in animal bodies, within trees, in the air and water, and on the earth’s surface in open country.”
“Nature as Female,” The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant (28)
It’s a part of him, an essential part. All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them. We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing – insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal. I have to go back to the real world, of course, and pick up the sane part. But if I didn’t have the insane part, the sick part, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182,” Haruki Murakami interviewed by John Wray, The Paris Review 170 (2004)
“The living character of the world organism meant
not only that the stars and planets were alive, but that the earth too was pervaded by a force giving life and motion to the living beings on it. . . . The earth’s springs were akin to human blood systems; its other various fluids were likened to the mucus, saliva, sweat, and other forms of lubrication in the human body, the earth being organized ‘. . . much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both veins and arteries, the former blood vessels, the latter air vessels . . . . So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature’s formations of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins [springs] of water.’ Just as the human body contained blood, marrow, mucus, saliva, tears, and lubricating fluids, so in the earth there were various fluids. Liquids that turned hard became metals, such as gold and silver; other fluids turned into stones, bitumens, and veins of sulfur. Like the human body, the earth gave forth sweat: ‘There is often a gathering of thin, scattered moisture like dew, which from many points flows into one spot. The dowsers call it sweat, because a kind of drop is either squeezed out by the pressure of the ground or raised by the heat.’”
“Nature as Female,” The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant (23-24)
That knowledge-freshening wind
is blowing cold and low, today. Halloween morning, the sunlight is pale and crisp; starlings purl, crows yak, pigeons furtively peck at the street. I walked up to these community gardens that run along an old railway track. The city hasn’t torn up the rails, but people have been growing sweet peas and asparagus and roses and zucchini along it for years. A woman with red hair walked by; she had a red Hibiscus flower tattooed to the inside of her ankle. Is she a devotee of Kali? Locust trees are loosing the last of their curling little yellow leaves. Sweetgum stars are turning burgundy and gold. The massive, finely-drawn maple tree growing outside my window is a shining and shifting red; its pointy leaves are falling pretty fast, now.
There’s this old documentary about wayang. It shows that in Bali, some people pray with small, sweet-smelling frangipanni blossoms held between their fingertips when they address the god Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, also known as Acintya, or the Unthinkable. His alter is an empty lotus throne. When these prayers, Sryanamastuti, are done, the frangipanni is flicked away, out of the hands and into the air.
I think Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is a poem addressed to death.
I think whatever Heraclitean fire is here had better makes its move.
