Voices

Last spring, when I was teaching Esi Edugyan's remarkable Half Blood Blues, I found myself asking my students an off-kilter but strangely crucial question.  The novel's narrator, Syd, has to choose, he believes, between "getting the girl" and laying down a track of remarkable jazz--an apparent choice that leads to many ethical dilemmas.  I asked how many of them would be willing to spend the rest of their live without love.  Since they were in their early twenties, an eternity without love yawned before them, and they could understand the profundity of his dilemma.  Then I asked if they'd be willing to spend the rest of their lives without a voice that was heard and believed credible.  The room went startlingly silent as they imagined themselves faced with a future nearly as painful as living without love.  Bless them:  they proved something I've long believed:  that our need to have a voice is nearly as integral to our sense of well-being as our need to be loved by someone who sees us as we are and loves what she or he sees.

More recently, reading All My Puny Sorrows made me think about voice.  I always tell my creative writing students that the right voice is the foundation of almost anything we write; frequently I make them rewrite the opening to a story or a couple of stanzas of a poem in a different voice--to shift from first person to third, or third to first.  As writers, we can get into habits that seem merely technical preferences that turn out to have a profound effect on how we see or represent the world we are creating.  But Miriam Toews' novel makes so clear what can happen if you find the right voice--the right tone and perspective--to tell a story.  I suppose she could have used an omniscient narrator, but Yoli's slightly manic, disorderly, casual but loving voice provides the crucial counterweight to her serious artistic sister's decision to commit suicide.   The novel would have been either unbearable or pompous and stodgy told any other way.

I finished the novel on the same day that I undertook a massive revision of one of the poems I'd been finding slight and insubstantial, a poem that said "Cool!  There's a Rothko in a back lane in downtown Saskatoon" and not much more.  There was more to be gotten, and I certainly found the "more" when I slowed myself down to the pace of considered revision (rather than trying to keep up the pace of fevered composition).  I found the similarities between how the world around us changes constantly and how for some people forgetting is a kind of forced, speeded-up change.  Here were my final lines about the young woman who paints over the door to create the Rothko and her father, who has dementia:

In the untroubled silence between them

she’ll wonder how to tell change

from forgetting

except to think of doorways

and the words we write on them.

Okay, I've come to some metaphysical conclusions--or at least the statement of a metaphysical problem--but the whole poem was so stodgy.  When I went to bed that night, Toews' novel  threaded through my thoughts, and I realized that I needed to use the first person.  Here's the opening in the new version:

What does a Fine Arts

student know about business,

except maybe the difference

between what’s good and what sells?

So the insurance guy comes and says

the back door is all wrong.  The sidelight

breaks in two seconds and the perp

reaches in and unlocks my deadbolt

in a trice.  Also, don’t put your name

on the door back here:  keep ‘em

guessing.  He’s looked at my prices

but hasn’t thought about how someone

hungry for high or oblivion

can fence a Benjamin Chi Chi repro

or an owl by Josie Iaqluk

on a Saskatoon street corner.

The new voice brought a new sensibility into play, one who could think about perps and business.  Whew!  She had enough spirit to save the poem.  Once she got around to the problem of her father, we might have a better sense that the profound question she's asking is one that most of us face at one time or another.

One of the traditions of Sage Hill is two nights of student readings.  We're kept to a tight schedule--five minutes. Finding the right five minutes in your manuscript is an excellent exercise for finding a moment of weight and significance.  Then we introduce the next writer.

I've long been in awe of the fact that composers can work with a limited palette of tones and rhythms and create music that differs not only in melody and harmony, but in its expression of a frame of mind, a world view, an emotion, attitude, experience.  Night before last, half the students read and I experienced a similar awe:  we all have a similar set of vocal chords, and students at Sage Hill represent a paradoxically idiosyncratic and yet homogeneous part of the Canadian population.  We worry about the same kind of human challenges, though from different angles and temperaments, but our expression is often as singular as the voice our lover recognizes, even when the phone connection is bad.

I'll bet each one of you has sometimes opened a book you've taken from the shelves of a library or a bookstore, read a couple of paragraphs, and put it back.  Somehow this voice doesn't speak to you, or you don't quite trust its view of the world.  Stories are integral to who we are.  The well-told story enchants, enthralls, grabs you by the throat, as Lawrence Hill did in  his reading last night.  There is something ineffable about the well-told story:  it's one of those moments when vision--the sense of which stories are important and the knowledge of why this story is important--and craftsmanship--the knowledge of the story's structure, the ability to get a character to rise off a page--come together in a fusion that reaches right off the page.  But I wonder how many of us must first find a smaller pearl:  the right voice.  A voice that's made of vocabulary, syntax, world view; a voice that speaks a historical moment and a place in society.  Voices themselves are windows or doorways into new perspectives, new rhythms of thought. The more voices that rattle around in our heads, the richer our sense of the world.

Challenging Certainty

I have found that one of the effects of retiring is that I say, about almost anything, "It's not my problem."  Does the Faculty administrator insist on assigning all offices, even though she doesn't know the needs of individuals? (This is just one instance of administrative goofiness--a synecdoche of sorts.) Not my problem.  Are bobcats digging up my parking lot again, two years in a row? Not my problem.  Are trucks and SUVs taking up two parking spaces, leaving fewer for the rest of us? Not my problem. I have time for the extra bit of walking and it isn't beastly hot or pouring.  Though I do wish that the Parking Office would ticket them for this and perhaps even give them a dedicated parking lot with larger stalls as far away from central campus as possible.  (How else are we going to make these enormous vehicles ethically indefensible?)  But really, it's not my problem.

I've even found myself uttering this about world events.  I surprised myself this weekend when I read about the death of a young Palestinian man, Mohammad Abu Khdeir who was burned to death by youths from the Haredim, an ultra-conservative Jewish sect.  Now the Israelis and Hamas are now trading rockets back and forth, and Israel has killed 100 people in revenge for the three Israeli men who were kidnapped.  Not my problem.  Really, we should be past this kind of lunacy. Thinkers like Jonathan Haidt and Joseph Heath have summarized a lot of the work done on how we think and reason--or fail to think and reason.  We know a tremendous about how our brain divides people into "in group" and "out group," particularly when there are threats to our survival.  We know how to short-circuit those tendencies.  Even more, we know that our evolutionary brain is really only suited to live in small tribes on the savanna; but we know as well what to do about this. Seemingly, the work of thinkers and scientists hasn't sifted down into our everyday ways of solving conflicts, but the knowledge is there if anyone cared to lift their head above the fray and think. How long ago was it that Gandhi said "An eye for an eye makes men blind"?  (There were also reprisal rapes in India this weekend.) There must also be excellent histories about the similar conflict between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, between British loyalties and forces and the IRA; these could provide a model of how to short-circuit endless antagonism.  I'm appalled at the amount of willful bloody-mindedness that is going on in the Middle East (and not simply in Israel; Syria is another example.)  Perhaps in that part of the world, where our brains began, we simply haven't evolved much beyond our chimp ancestors. But really:  not my problem. I don't give these issues as much mind room, and today I surprised myself at the gym by simply turning off the TV, which I always tune to CBC News (because I hate coming in at the middle of a story and leaving before the end of the story.  So today I turned it off and with all my "not my problem" energy, I set a new record for myself).  Things are really bad on Eastern Ukraine, but this is not my problem.  

So what is my problem?  When you retire, it's hard not to be aware that you are beginning the third act of your life and that the narrative is going at some point to veer away from whatever comedy you have cast yourself in.  There's an intensity, a seriousness about this phase of life that walks right along with the sense of liberty and exploration, all holding hands.  When Darryl Whetter learned of my retirement he congratulated me on having "thinking time." Exactly so, I thought.  But why?  Am I going to spend the next twenty or thirty years of my life thinking so that I can die with wisdom and dignity? That seemed to me a little self-indulgent and a tremendous waste of time. I knew Darryl was right, but I haven't been sure what this thinking was supposed to be about and how it would make any difference to anyone but me.

I was quite sure earlier this summer that my garden was my problem.  I have an enthusiastic Henry Hudson rose that is unstoppable and now huge.  When it's in full bloom, you can smell roses from the street and frequently people on their walks stop to do just that.  I felt a little bit like Clarissa Dalloway who once commented that she loved her roses and didn't that help the Armenians or the Albanians (or whomever Richard was going to do something about in committee that afternoon)?  I continue to feel that beauty helps. Perhaps as my roses lift someone's spirits, they are like that butterfly in the Amazon which might change our weather by flying this way rather than that?  

The Globe and Mail interviews a writer every week, asking a slate of questions, some of which are asked of everyone. One of these is "Would you rather be famous in your lifetime and then forgotten, or a legend after you die?"  I hate this question, but it did help me focus my own query.  It has seemed to me really important that I think and that this thinking make its way into my writing, informally in my blog, more formally in poetry and fiction. But I'm not thinking about fame.  I think it's a pretty good bet that I will never be famous.  

What I want to do with my writing is to find the people with whom I can have conversations.  Starting "conversational hares" may be one of the most important things literature can do.  Don't you feel, when you've read a wonderful book or a poem that blew you away, that you want to talk to other people about it--but only after you've had a conversation with the writer herself or himself? (I finished Miriam Toews's wonderful All My Puny Sorrows this weekend, and boy, do I want to talk to her!) The writing has created a prompt to consider a problem and then left you a space to think in, a compelling setting for you to do your own thinking.  Think of that setting as a room, perhaps one with comfortable reading chairs in which you can think more deeply or one with nothing but hard-backed wooden chairs which make you sit at the wrong angle. You may decide it's more comfortable to stretch out on the floor for a good long think, and that your discomfort will keep you awake longer. Your thinking may be challenged by the writer, but she may also be on to something you've only intuited--she may see this more clearly. Now you can think about what this idea or world view means to your own life. You may have to consider what this language or that character's experience tells you about how to live.

The idea of art as an occasion for conversation does actually have something to do with problems in the Middle East and the Ukraine.  It challenges the whole notion of certainty. I have felt for years that evil existed when people were certain they had the right line on something.  I don't care whether it is the notion that the market will solve all social problems, whether it's a view that people of different races or sexual orientations are suspect (if not evil or stupid), or whether it's a religious belief that is intolerant of the beliefs and lives of others. The moment you are certain, you have absolved yourself of the responsibility to think. But the artist's aim is to get you to think alongside of her, to get you to have a conversation with him about the matters at hand. "We're in this together, this business of figuring out what the good life is for us," the artist says.  "Let's walk a while together and see what we figure out."    

The Odyssey II: Reading forward toward the past

The second summer after I graduated from the University of Michigan with what seemed like a not very practical B.A. in English, I found myself in Boston, living in married housing.  Boston is hot and humid in the summer. One of our strategies for coping with very hot evenings would be to walk to the Boston Public Library, where we would make ourselves comfortable in the reading room until they kicked us out.  Having spent much of that year in Boston reading long Russian novels (War and Peace in two weeks:  two hours on the bus each day gives you lots of time to read), I decided on a much more rational (!) strategy.  Why didn't I go back to literature's foundation among the Greeks and work my way forward?  I wrote a letter to Ralph Williams, my theory prof. at Michigan, easily one of the most brilliant, well-read people I knew, and asked for a reading list.   But wise Dr. Williams never replied.  I worked away at anthologies in the BPL Reading Room, but didn't really benefit from the piecemeal approach that gave me no context for the snippets they provided.  I wisely abandoned the project and returned to the Russians, adding Jane Austen and contemporary German writers to my repertoire.  In short, I floundered, which is not necessarily a bad thing. One learns a great deal about literature, about oneself, about taste, about the world from floundering.  

But as a phase, floundering should perhaps be  resorted to those moments in your life you need to turn a corner or find an adventure. "The Accidental Reader" you might call yourself during those times.  Renting a cottage makes for great accidental reading experiences, where you find old orange-spined Penguins of authors you'd always meant to read and now could--or perhaps now had to, given that the book you brought has either fallen in the lake or proven disappointing. So does going into a book store in Paris and finding few books in English.  I found Charles Baxter in just such a book store in Paris, Woolf's Jacob's Room somewhere in Italy.

Right now I'm trying to be both opportunistic and deliberate in my reading, picking up something recommended by a friend or a book that won an important award that doesn't really sound like my thing, but trying to get through The Odyssey so that I have no excuse not to read Ulysses.  Reading The Odyssey also takes me back to my past, to that youthful plan when I was an underemployed young woman who needed to do something meaningful and purposeful. It makes me feel young, as if I still have the years left for the kind of rigorous reading program Woolf describes in her essays on reading.

At the same time, even without Professor Williams's help, through the years I've learned to my core one of the foremost rules of reading:  try to take every text on its own terms.  You will fail sometimes, simply because you cannot wrap your head around those terms:  you find them puzzling,  unthinkable, offensive, wrong-headed or just trite.  But perhaps what "wide reading" gives us, besides an education in being human, a dress-rehearsal for our own joys and griefs, and practice at imaginative compassion, is a tour of possible ways of conceiving the world. Thus literature teaches both head and heart if you are willing to read widely, outside the comfort zone that contains only works that do not challenge your own world view.  Asking "How does this world work?" strengthens the mental muscles you need when you find yourself puzzled by your own world.

The Odyssey demands that I try to understand at least a sliver of a Greek world view, particularly how the Greeks saw the place of the gods in their lives.  In Book 18, "The Beggar-King of Ithaca," Odysseus is home, but only his son Telemachus knows this.  Penelope remains grieving for her long-gone husband and tells her importunate suitors "Now my life is torment...look at the griefs some god has loosed against me!" (384).  There was something about this cry that made me realize how ancient and how contemporary Penelope is, for what she is articulating is that she wants to know the meaning of her life.  If all she understands is that "some gods" have loosed griefs against her, she has no way of understanding her suffering.  She is asking the question "Why me?  Why my husband or my child?" that everyone startled by death, extraordinary illness, or random misfortune asks.

There is another way that I am finding The Odyssey contemporary.  Of course I've often used the phrase "deus ex machina" in my classes, which roughly translates to "god from the machine."  Normally it refers to plot device which solves a problem.  The author has painted himself or herself into a corner, and pulls a new character or an unknown fact out of the hat to solve it.  I wonder if the phrase could be extended to moment when plot is excessively complicated in unconvincing ways.  For example, in Book 12, "The Cattle of the Son," Odysseus and his crew land on the island where Helios keeps his sacred cattle.  To kill them brings the wrath of the gods.  Odysseus originally wants to sail straight past the island, but night is coming, the route is unclear, and his sailors want to rest.  They promise him not to harm the cattle.  But then Zeus decides to send them no wind so that they stay on the island for over a month and use up all their food.  Hunting and fishing are not feeding them well enough.  Zeus then puts Odysseus into a deep sleep just long enough for the sailors to decide that anything the gods can send is better than starvation, so they kill some of the cattle.  Why Zeus decides to make the sailors' temptation to slaughter the cattle so overwhelming is never explained.  Do the gods want mortals to break their laws? Clearly this is a device designed to make Odysseus's return to Ithaca harder and yet more heroic.  He will be the only member of his crew to survive the storm sent by the gods as punishment. But some element of the gods' meddling in human lives remains tantalizingly unexplained. 

You know these plot devices from television:  the lengths to which writers and producers will go to stall a romance or a discovery and create a cliffhanger to bring you back in the fall.  But I'm also finding them in modern fiction, particularly two well-regarded novels I read early this summer, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.  (It is perhaps no coincidence that both of these novels would make nice door stops.) I have given my copy of The Luminaries away, so I can only approximate my reaction. Like other people who have commented on Goodreads, I felt it was way too long. While each particular section was always well-written and insightful, some of those sections didn't further the novel as a whole, but simply put off the denouement.  Like other readers, I liked Walter Moody and was disappointed at the way he was more or less dropped.  The astrological construction didn't impress me:  rather, it gave the novel the feel of an exercise in cleverness.  I know a lot more about Victorian New Zealand. I understand how a developing country organized around a resource like gold which is a value unto itself, though is no use for actual food or clothing, needs even while it lacks a justice system which protects the vulnerable and punishes the opportunistic.  But I'm not sure this justifies the 832 pages.

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is even more frustrating because it's more brilliant.  Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but loses his mother.  Homeless (his father cannot be found), guilt-ridden (they were on their way together to his school for a meeting about his behaviour, and wouldn't otherwise have been in the museum), Theo is both saved and tormented by a small miraculous painting of a chained goldfinch that he takes from the museum after the bombing.  At its core, The Goldfinch is about Theo's quest to find the proper home for the painting and to create a family that will give him a place and purpose in the world. Theo's first-person musings are reflective, insightful, humane; he is a character one wants to spend time with.  As well, one of Tartt's strengths is to understand the complex interplay between character and world:  how some settings offer a character the chance to bloom while others stifle dampen spirits.

But I felt that Theo's adolescent relationship with Boris smacked of the kind of deus ex machina that loses control over the novel's coherence.  I understand how these two outsiders bond in suburban Las Vegas where parents seem to forget children need to be fed. But the number of times these two adolescents get drunk, drugged up, and violent seems unnecessarily, as does the plot to recover the painting, which involves Theo killing a hit man in a parkade in the Netherlands--only part of Boris's improbable plan to recover the work he'd stolen from Theo years before.

What has happened to the modern plot, even in novels that clearly seek and deserve the title "literary fiction"?  Are we catering to an audience that watches so much TV that we feel that we need to spin out romance, adultery, and vendettas (I'm thinking of Castle, The Good Wife, and The Mentalist, respectively ) to keep people's attention for 13 hours over 13 weeks?  (My taste is showing.)  Here is perhaps where we can read forward toward the past.  The month that Odysseus and his crew spend on Helios passes within a few sentences.  In the scenes that record his warnings and his reaction to their We learn much about Odysseus:  how much control he has over his sailors, where that control ends, how much more self-control he has of any of them, and how determined he is to get home.  Nuances of character are revealed on almost any page that shows Odysseus in action or records his words.  Although The Odyssey is long, Homer never loses control over what I found on my first reading to be the poem's central purpose:  to illustrate the complexities of character and to show these in the individual's purposeful relationship with other people and in the individual's sometimes vexed and sometimes amiable relationship with the gods and fate.

Of course, it's possible that I broke my own rules:  that I didn't understand either The Luminaries or The Goldfinch on their own terms. Except that I did find both books had an inner coherence and a world-view that I found intriguing and challenging.  I don't think I'm arguing with their vision; rather, I'm taking exception to the ways the constant drama of contemporary culture (whether we're talking about news or summer blockbusters is irrelevant) has shaped their sense of craft.  But then I get myself into a different dilemma: what is the relationship between a writer's vision and a writer's craft? Happily, I will have many, many more years to think this problem through. 

The Odyssey I: It rained and it rained and it rained

Like many people in Regina, where there's something in the clay that makes it expand (or contract) wildly if there is a lot of water (or a drought), we have problems with water in our basement. In order to begin to design the back yard for better drainage, we had our deck and the concrete at the back of the house taken out a week ago. Consequently, this relentless rain knew exactly where it needed to flow:  into the low spot at the back of the house and from there into the basement.

Fortunately, the winter we had major snow (which also wanted to take that route when it melted) there was a single pump for shallow water left at Peavey Mart east of town.  So when it was clear that there were about three inches of water in the 6' X 15' space left by the concrete, we got out our pump, propped it up on a screen, unwound the ridiculously long coil of hose sold to us at Peavey Mart, and started pumping.  

Where exactly to pump the water was a problem.  The hose didn't quite reach to the back lane, so I stood in the rain, under our trees, and studied the back yard.  We have a whole row of trees on the west side of the house and always let the leaves simply remain there, creating lovely layers of loam.  It's essentially a large compost bin.  Unlike the clay, it would absorb water.  And some of it actually ran downhill toward the lane.  So I continued for an hour to stand in the rain and spray the water into the trees and think.

My first thoughts were of gratitude.  I was oddly grateful that my garden is happy with all this water.  I was grateful to the young man at Peavey Mart who knew we were using this pump indoors but also felt he should explain how to use it outside.  There are two "thou shalt nots" about a pump.  Never let it run dry.  And never let debris get stuck in it.  So he carefully explained how to use an old screen under the pump to keep out debris.  I was also grateful he sold us a hose we thought was way longer than it needed to be. He clearly knows something about people's houses and the ways of water that was well beyond our knowledge.  I was grateful for loam and for places in my yard that ran downhill away from the foundation.  

I was also grateful to my father.  The fact that I can put my thumb into a hose and get it to spray about three metres away prompted me to think about his teaching me to do that.  That thinking about being taught this skill came with the memory of warm summer nights in Michigan when we would stand together to water the lawn was a bonus in the cool rain. I was also grateful for the fact that he left both Karen and me with a sense of agency; he felt confident his girls could do just about anything. He also taught us quite a lot of basic homeowner skills (I can do simple wiring like change a plug, a light switch, or even put in a new light).  But more than that, with the confidence and the basic skills came a calm approach to solving problems.  I was channelling my father when I stood in the back yard with water flowing out of the hose thinking clearly about the best place to send it.

My second thoughts were of solidarity.  I knew quite clearly that we were lucky the water was only seeping into our basement.  We weren't on Calgary's floodplane. We weren't battling feet of water in our basement. We didn't have a crop to worry about.  So I was sending out wishes of solidarity to people whose clean up had been or would be way more complicated than ours.

But mostly I thought about reading The Odyssey. Some time late this afternoon, my retirement became official, and now that I'm retired I think it's time I finished reading one of the books I've never been able to get into: James Joyce's Ulysses.  If I were a character in David Lodge's academic novel that includes the English-nerd game, "Embarrassments," wherein English professors try to trump one another for the most embarrassing text they have failed to read, I would win hands down.  My brilliant plan was to read Robert Fagles' translation of The Odyssey, and then worry less about the ways Joyce is referring to it in Ulysses.  I don't yet know whether that will work, but The Odyssey is in some ways perfect summer reading.  Fagles' translation is lively and idiomatic; scenes move quickly over the pages and characters and their motives come alive. 

One of Odysseus's difficulties getting home from the Trojan war has two causes:  first, he blinds the Cyclops, a disgusting uncivilized barbarian child of Poseidon who violates all the Greek laws of hospitality, and then after blinding him, he brags and tells Cyclops who he is.  Poseidon is not pleased and takes great pains to see the Ulysses suffers as much as possible--if not dying in the process, at least not returning home the hero of the Trojan war. As I stood in the rain, spraying a robust stream of water being pumped out of the pond along the foundation of my house, I felt in some way that I too was being punished by Poseidon.

But there is a trickier parallel that kept me distracted for a while as my thumb got colder and colder.  I'm an inexperienced reader of the Greek classics, though someone at Michigan taught me the correct pronunciation of most of the main and secondary characters' names, according to the pronunciation guide at the end of the book.  What I've noted, however, is the Greeks' inconsistent attitudes toward the role of the gods in their lives.  Sometimes the gods make life easier; sometimes more difficult.  Sometimes a sacrifice gets you what you need; other times it's insufficient.  But it's unclear in many cases whether the mortals have deserved in any way the attention of the gods. Odysseus' son Telemachus, for example, is mentored by Athena, who appears to the young man as a person named "Mentor."  Mentor suggests that Telemachus needs to make his own voyage to see if other people have heard about Odysseus' fate, but when Telemachus says he will have no idea how to speak to these famous and powerful people, Mentor/Athena replies

"some of the words you'll find within yourself, 
and the rest some power will inspire you to say.
You least of all--I know--
were born and reared without the gods' good will" (108).

So the individuals' gifts and the gods' support seem to exist on a hazy continuum.  Moreover, if Telemachus has "the gods' good will," why is it that he cannot dislodge the importunate suitors from his door?  Fagles' rather colloquial translation makes clear that the suitors are a bunch of frat boys who believe they are entitled to carouse, eat, and drink the food and wine of another.  So the gods might well be outraged, or Telemachus's society might well support him in shaming the suitors into departing, but neither of these things happens.  Of course it doesn't happen because it's a much better story for Odysseus to return home unrecognized, to win the contest of stringing up Odysseus's great bow, and to kill the suitors himself, with his son's help.  So even the psychological requirements of a powerful story come into this relationship between man and god in ancient Greek times.  

Similarly, we can't know if it's the weather gods who have simply dropped rain on us, or whether we have brought this fate upon us--and upon the 67 communities in Saskatchewan and Manitoba that have declared states of emergency.  Some communities talk about 50-year floods or 20-year snows, acknowledging that some weather events cycle around inside normals that go well back into history.  Except for Hurricane Sandy, whose force could easily be correlated back to the abnormally high temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists are unwilling to assign any particular weather event to global warming. Scientists are more likely to say that climate change causes trends rather than single events.

Nevertheless, just as Odysseus needs to come home and clean up his own house, we need to clean up ours.  The weather gods aren't going to be any help.  Humans find it difficult to plan for the future, philosopher Joseph Heath explains, particularly when that future belongs to someone besides themselves.  Nevertheless, this is precisely what we are going to have to do. Similarly, governments need to stop hiding behind the excuse that addressing climate change will have an adverse impact on the economy.  (Yes, it will: creating sustainable energy also creates jobs.) Can they not see that weather is having a profound impact on economies?  Construction in Regina is at a standstill.  More than this, climate change has an impact on people's everyday lives as they go about the business of pumping out basements and figuring out how much damage has been done to their crops.  Weather and its after-effects leave people exhausted, dispirited, helpless, just like Telemachus. The weather gods aren't going to intervene.  We need to.   
   

The Black Hills, the Bad Lands, and Hasty Conclusions

I've never met a landscape I didn't love. The moment I say that, I think of the central plains of Florida, which are flat and whose green is never breathless or vibrant or new. But other than that, I've never met a landscape I didn't love. Our drive down to South Dakota for a vacation in the Black Hills and Bad Lands confirmed that fact once again.  A lot of what one drives through is prairie, but it is prairie that continues to change, often subtly, as ploughed fields with their fuzz of new crop give way to the more rolling hills of mustard and cattle.  This is a very green year, all the way from Regina down to South Dakota, so the green hills feed your eyes and your mind in some ineffable way.  But punctuating those subtle changes are formations like the one above, which seem to rise up out of the peaceful green to taunt one's confident knowledge of prairie.  If I know anything, having spent 7 days looking at what happens in the middle of prairies, it's that I need to read Candace Savage's book, Prairie:  A Natural History.  

The Black Hills and the Bad Lands fifty miles away are an area of enormous and complicated activity in the inland sea that the prairie comes out of.  The Black Hills contain many different kinds of geological activity arranged like a donut that got squeezed in the box and is now more like an oval than a circle. In the outer areas, uplift has created mountains made of rock over 2 million years old. You can see the striations from the sediment of the old seas that flooded the prairie from time to time, but they are now at improbable angles where the uplift thrust them up into mountains. The photograph above was taken from the edge of one of these, and you can see both how high up I am and how the foothills go on for mile upon blue mile. 

Closer to the centre of the donut is volcanic activity that gave rise to enormous formations that seem to rise out of the earth.

Further to the east are the Bad Lands--another complicated landscape.  Here the inland seas and volcanic activity and erosion from the Black Hills created unstable formations of sediment sometimes layered with stone.  As the waterways changed, the stone was worn away in patterns that seem entirely random.

Bill did the best job of articulating the effect of this landscape on us.  Its immensity and age dwarf us.  In the context of rock that is over two billion years old, our lives are but an errant thought that whisks through your mind in a traffic jam and is now gone.  Looking at the world from the top of Harney's Peak (over 7,000 feet high) makes clear how tiny we all are.  It is a landscape that brings perspective to bear, even as its beauty and grandeur and even whimsicality delight.  Yes, the formations here are huge and ancient, but the tiny violet that manages to survive in the sediment that has gathered on a horizontal rock also surprises with its unpredictable beauty.

In the malls that ring Rapid City, we found a kind of independent, truck-drivin', gun-totin' culture that had given over many of its stores to the vacationer's hunger for souvenirs. Downtown, however, you find something altogether different.  There's a wonderful bookstore, the Hotel Alex Johnson, which combines German architecture with Native motifs and which was featured in Hitchcock's North by Northwest and which has hosted many presidents.  There is the Dahl Arts Centre, which featured the colourful, expressionistic paintings of animals by Tom Thorson--paintings that are entirely unsentimental, that give the animals energy and lives so entirely unlike our own.  There was an exhibition of photographs by Chris Benson (with Annie Woodle and Leah Diggins) called Inspire:  The Project.  It featured spirited, candid photographs of young people who had come through tough times of abuse, of parents whose alcohol and drug use made their lives chaotic and painful, kids whose appearance or sexuality gave rise to bullying. The photographs were accompanied by panels with each of the kids' stories: stories of creativity and self-discovery and determination.  Many of them found their way out of despair through self-expression, music, or sport; through Alcoholics Anonymous or a great teacher. They are all a testament to human resilience, ingenuity, and determination.

I had an odd experience at the border:  the Customs guy welcomed me home. For some reason, his words set up both a curiosity and a distancing attitude. What, exactly, is different when you cross an arbitrary boundary in something as immense and yet varied as the prairies?  I suspect that when many of us go on holidays, we look for those differences and quickly draw conclusions about them.  We do this for two reasons:  other cultures and their practices, other landscapes and urban environments are chaotic, and we want the sense of order that helps us negotiate this foreignness.  As well, we go with a desire for the unfamiliar that will shake us up a bit and give us a new perspective. 

But I suspect we come to conclusions way too quickly.  I have been reading Joseph Heath's Enlightenment 2.0, where he talks about the latest research into how human beings "do" rationality (which is not very well).  Analogous to Kahneman's System One and System Two styles of thinking, Heath observes that we have an "old" brain that evolved to draw conclusions that would have once been crucial to our survival. One of these is the tendency to find patterns.  If a berry makes you sick twice, you quickly come to the conclusion that it's poisonous, which means that when someone in your tribe offers you a nice slice of berry pie you will give it a miss and survive, unlike the less well-experienced and pattern-perceiving people in your community.  You'll have recognized this tendency in the way you see a pattern in someone's treatment of you or in the kinds of stories you are seeing in the news and will draw a brilliant but hasty conclusion of what this all means--only to find out that what you have observed is really pretty random and means nothing at all or something entirely different than your astute conclusions. What Heath says we do too seldom is to ask "the negative."  What if what I'm seeing isn't really there? What if it doesn't explain everything or if I'm asking it to explain too much? What if there's evidence I don't know about?

I suspect this way of thinking kicks into high gear when we visit unfamiliar places, partly because unfamiliarity overwhelms us and we need the comfort from having mastered it, from having frog-marched it into our conclusions about how this culture works.  I'd done exactly that until I went down town and saw a different Rapid City, one with a Gay Pride Week, a mayor with a committee devoted to accessibility, the art gallery and the book store. 

Still, that "welcome home" was a burr under my saddle, as it were.  And I knew Canadians and Americans were fundamentally different on my last night there when Bill and I were stopped at a light that gave us a full view of one of those big electronic billboards.  There was the face of a plainly Native man (I'm using the American vocabulary here; it's probably politically incorrect) with the words, in capitals "DO NOT APPROACH" and the local sheriff's phone number.  Fortunately, we sat through three more lights (the left-turn light was very short and it was rush hour) and between the ads for realtors and pubs, I glimpsed the faces of two more people--a white man and a woman, just to show that crime is equal opportunity in South Dakota.  Still, there was something rather "wild west" about the billboard and the sheriff's phone number.  

Later that evening, we strolled down the Main Street, where Rapid City organizes two different concerts every summer Thursday night.  At one end of the street there's a rock concert set up on a stage in the intersection.  Farther down at Main Street Square there's a jazz band or a Beach Boys tribute.  In between are places for the kids to get their faces painted or to do crafts or grab a hot dog, or places for parents to grab a beer (though there are also alcohol-free zones).  It's a pretty impressive undertaking for a city of under 60,000.  That night, we heard The Glenn Miller Orchestra under its current director Nick Hilscher (Miller having disappeared and presumably died in 1944). There were places near the stage for people to dance, and though the best dancers were well over sixty, they weren't the only ones dancing.  The audience was wonderfully varied, and as I looked across at all those faces, faces that had brought their lawn chairs out to cover an entire city block, I wondered how I could have drawn all those clever conclusions.  Maybe at that moment when I recognized how complicated and even contradictory the culture around Rapid City was, like any culture, I could go home.  My holiday had done its work. 

Woolf in Chicago: Street Haunting

I am just back from the 24th annual Virginia Woolf Conference, which was held at Loyola University this year, co-hosted by Pamela Caughie, who teaches at Loyola, and Diana Swanson, who teaches at Northern Illinois University, about an hour west of Chicago.  It was a wonderful mix: old farts like me talking about the latest instalment of the work they've been doing now for ten years, and graduate (and even some undergraduate) students talking about their newfound love for Woolf.  I will freely admit that I found the young 'uns the most inspiring:  no matter how much I talk about the 2008 generation and their indifference or lack of discipline, that vision is undermined by the strongest students of that generation, young people who think carefully and passionately and express themselves with such grace and clarity.  They made me hopeful.

They also reminded me of two important principles.  First, nothing I learn is ever useless.  Second, all of my disparate interests somehow connect at their furthest reach, perhaps like the caves Woolf wrote of as she thought about the back stories of her characters when she was working on Mrs Dalloway.  For example, right now I'm reading Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, which considers how we experience cities in all their myriad manifestations.  Who knew that I would recommend this book to several Woolf scholars? Or that Woolf scholars would prompt me to realize that Woolf might have ideas that belong in the book of ekphrastic poems I'm writing that are inspired by Veronica's photographs?  Or that these two things would converge in the walking I did in the Loyola neighbourhood to clear my head after being bombarded by ideas?

One of my favourite panels occurred at 9 a.m. on the last day.  Called "Flanerie and City Spaces," it featured three young scholars, Elizabeth Goetz, Candis Bond, and Yike He, thinking about how characters' experience of the city is represented and how the characters interact with the city.  Candis Bond even argued that Woolf, along with de Certeau and Georg Simmel, is a spatial theorist of a kind.  They pointed out how transgressive her characters sometimes are, and reminded me of an essay that I've long loved and needed to re-read:  Woolf's "Street Haunting."  So I did re-read it a couple of mornings ago and realized how different her experience of London in the nineteen twenties and my experience of Chicago in 2014 were.  Woolf makes the point early on that she is walking late in the afternoon--between teatime and dinner--on a winter day:  

"The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room."

The effect, as any wintertime walker will note, is that the darkness outside brings the light from inside out onto the street, so that our imaginations roam among possibilities:  

"With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses."

Walking in Chicago during the early summer is quite a different experience, though Woolf's engagement and imagination provide the tools we need. Coming from Regina, one first notices and hears traffic.  At the same time, however, Chicago is farther into summer than we are, so I smelled lilacs and roses (sometimes among the exhaust).  Among the enthusiastic Chicago runners who flood the streets on Saturday, though, one has the same anonymity that Woolf sought in the dusk of the London street.  

West of Loyola about four or five blocks is an older residential district with some grand old houses and many elegant brick apartment buildings, but the sunshine left them closed to the onlooker.  So I studied their facades to see how my imagination might play with this setting.  Small front yards mean that people are quite creative; sometimes the city even narrows the street briefly with small gardens enclosed by curbs.  Where space is at a premium, people make as much beauty with it as they possibly can.  This was true as well of the apartment buildings which made fine use of the 2 metres or so between the building's foundation and the side walk.  

Both the houses and the apartments threw one back into an earlier time as well as into a community much more culturally sophisticated than the average Regina neighbourhood is now.  The apartments in particular seemed the setting for a 50s black and white movie about the wealthy, creative class. Because you couldn't see into the rooms, you didn't imagine a setting, but instead invented a life to take place in those buildings. Kingwell notes that "freedom is both defined and limited by the drawing of boundaries," and that "every interior you enter or inhabit challenges you to ask who you are, this apparently individual consciousness among others" (Concrete Reveries 211, 195).   Woolf's winter time street haunting erases some of these boundaries, giving Woolf's imagination particular rugs or bowls to suit the boundaries of her imagination, allowing her to control the way the imagined interior challenges her.  In some strange way, my summer time street haunting left me more free to create that "apparently individual consciousness among others."  While she called her practice "street haunting," I might call mine "street daydreaming."  Something of one's mood, something abstract in one's circumstances is changed, as if Clotho had clipped the threads of one's fate in one place rather than another and as if a summer evening's stroll gave you a chance to imagine what that other fate might look like.

What is singular about street haunting or street daydreaming--Woolf's and mine--is that on some level it's a quest for unfamiliar, unexpected beauty. Both depend on purposefully setting out to see the beauty in the unfamiliar, the beauty in the strangeness of different lives. But the differences between our practices also suggest that while the search for everyday beauty is important, how we undertake that search, what we choose to notice, what assumptions we bring to the process, are equally part of our experience.