Sun Rain Wind Stone

Matthew Holmes' Hitch as a Broadside Ballad

2006-11-26T17:55:00.000-08:00

Now, here's a curious thing: a book, no doubt about that, beautifully printed, for sure, cleverly designed and manufactured to look like a book from the anti-book tradition of Canadian poetry publishing.

Matthew Holmes, The Virtual Reality Version
Hitch.Nightwood Editions, 2006, 96 pp., $16.95
A fine example of an early 21st century technical writing manual,
with close-up diagram showing the procedure for linking the nerves to the spinal cord.

(Optometrist’s Note: This is the version put out for public show by the publisher. The physical-interface version is conveniently larger, for interface with Anthropological OS1.)

Highlights of the Canadian anti-book tradition include the Gestettner of the TISH poets in 1963 Vancouver, the purposefully badly photocopied and/or elegantly designed poetry books of the anarchist tradition of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and mail artists bent on distributing work without either art or a book.

John Barlow's In The Power of Poetry
And that's just the cover!

The sleight of mind that can even conceive of such a challenge is the very definition of being Canadian — living as we do in a country that prefers to read books from other countries and has few places to sell those from our own, and all in all sees this as the ultimate in sophistication.

Oh, wait. That's not Canada. That’s almost everyone.

A little evidence to that effect:

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to
leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not
only different, but have different origins ... Society is in
every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state,
is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

--Thomas Paine,
Common Sense, 1776

Barlow's (and Holmes') kind of publishing as the true act of a free man has, it seems, a long history.

Thomas Paine, the Final Draft

throwing what looks like a Paper Airplane... or, damn it, isn't that a California Quail?

(Fashion note: not a bad outfit for a man who died a pauper, eh.

Household budgeting note: One can see why.

Photographic composition note: a flagpole in his back pocket? It breaks the rules, yet it works!)

I suspect that what Paine had in mind with his title, Common Sense is not what we necessarily mean by it today, as something reasonable and obvious to all men without the application or corruption of intellect, but something akin to Common Law, as in from the people, not from their lords and masters.

Now we use it to describe the cohabitation of a man and a woman with the sanctifying blessings of (and obligations to) the Church. Nice!

Other definitions of the essence of being Canadian:

A Canadian knows how to make love in a canoe. Pierre Burton
A Canadian loves hockey. Peter Gzowski
Canadians say "Sorry!" way too much. Everyone else in the world.

Oh dear. But, you know, meaning is a slippery business, after all. You just can never nail it down to one thing or another. I mean, like all good books, of course, even Paine's Common Sense had earlier drafts. Here's a sample of one of its earlier evolutions:

California Quail

(Fashion note: notice the Hungarian Hussar's plume!)

Oh, wait, Thomas Paine, American patriot, was an anarchist? The United States is an Anarchist society? The United States is in favour of extra-marital cohabitation?

Well, well, well, leaving aside the notion that Canadian anarchist publishing was American-inspired, anarchist publishing was the kind of thing that in the 1960s gave us Canadian literature as we know it today, with the gliterati at the Gillers in all their new dresses and black suits and the writers sitting around in their v-neck sweaters wondering what they are doing there. Back then it was just samizdat.

Illegal books, illegally typed by hand, and illegally distributed in Cold War Eastern Europe. The kind of thing that could get you hurled into the Gulag.

You ever wondered what happened to samizdat? Simple. The American version has become a point of pilgrimage for the tourists of Revolution.

The Final Draft of Thomas Paine's Common Sense
Abbreviated for instantaneous transmission along the imagistic cortex
An example of American Anarchist Post-Gutenberg Publishing.
(Anarchist’s Helpful Note: Maybe you can melt a book like this down into shell casings, but burning it is simply out of the question.)

The Soviet version has become a point of pilgrimage for the tourists of Revolution.

Russian version of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair.
Samizdat museum in the former Soviet Union.
What was forbidden is now a shrine.
Crowded, too!

(Note for Pilgrims: follow the Light at the End of the Tunnel)

In fact, Sono Nis Press even did a series of samizdat books back in 1971: imitations of the books privately printed on typewriters and passed out by hand at great peril in Soviet Europe.

For the most part, the poets published in the series were graduates of the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia, back in the days when the department was not the establishment, but was trying to throw paper airplanes over its walls.

Charles Lillard’s Cultus Coulee
One of Sono Nis Press's Samizdat Poetry Series

Check out the funky retro courier font, typed on a typewriter for sure, in Andreas Schroeder's version, file of uncertainties below. Just the perfect thing for Matthew Holmes, what with all the tricky rope work and all.

35 year old typing by Andreas Schroeder

In the Soviet Union, of course, publishing in samizdat could get you into the Gulag. And back in non-aligned British Columbia? What about that? Back in the days when the entire Hungarian forestry department was ensconced at the University of British Columbia?

Na. The peril wasn’t there. I mean, these were poets, sure, so they were rather unwanted social accidents, granted, but they were British Columbian poets, which is to say they felt like they were on the right side of the Rockies, and they were Canadian poets, which is to say they were just as good as creating virtual realities for themselves as they were at writing poetry.

Here's a piece of virtual reality from another and very distant Canadian coast, from New Brunswick:

A few bytes of holographic code
for the re-creation of the world of Matthew Holmes inside your head,
from Owl Shaped in Reeds

Hey, what's that peeking in from the other side? Check it out.

Collector’s Card Version of Matthew Holmes
Useful, too!
(Note for Travellers: It remains unclear whether these rooms come with private bath,
or whether you have to share the w.c. down the hall.)

See what I mean? Mail art between covers. Absolutely everything is in there. It seems to be Holmes' desire that they all cohabit in there.

How common!

Back in the 1960s, everyone was getting in on this act. Fiddlehead Books in Fredericton, New Brunswick, just published everyone who sent them a manuscript. So did bill bissett's blewointment press in Vancouver. He rejected no one. Of his writing in that time, bill says that he was trying to change the world. And, sure, production standards in this genre were, well, low, but the craziness of the environment was invigorating. Invigorating is good.

Illustration from Marilyn Bowering's The Liberation of Newfoundland
published by Fiddlehead Books in 1973.

What is it? Pretty hard to say, actually, but the idea of breaking the surface of poetry, to relegate images to photography and to sit outside of them, was ahead of its time. And certainly ahead of photocopy technology.

Then came canlit.

IKEA moved into the country and sold knockdown beds cheap.

Time passed.

Past time came again.

Past time passed.

Everyone forgot everything. Everyone slept in.

People, understandably enough, started to get pissed.

Starbucks came onto the Canadian scene, to wake everyone up.

Then all the writers of Vancouver started to haul their laptops to Starbucks and write from there, so they could get away from it all and (in a writerly way, of course) rub shoulders with people.

Then Matthew Holmes started to send out his messages, in code, to show there was still life out there. You know, it's nice to see the original craziness honoured in Matthew Holmes’ first book of poetry, Hitch, put out by the resurrected Blewointment Press and made to look like something run off on a photocopier that somehow learned how to print beautifully, full of objects made to look like poems, and presented as a combined guide to semaphore and knot-making.

A Sample of Matthew Holmes' Doing his Houdini Act
from Traditional Dances for Tourists

Notice how the knots are in the rope that is the silence between the iterations of the sound that is the nod to the poems of the past.
Don’t you love the random static coming through from the transmissions on the other side of the paper, from the future, so to speak?

A nice nod to Fiddlehead, don't you think?

Oh. Hitch comes with a warning, though: if you squoosh it down too long in your scanner and hold down the lid, the pages will never close again. Yeah, I know. Everyone's using cheaper paper these days.he

Pretty soon, poetry will have folded itself down into origami.

It's like listening to something by the American composer of silence, John Cage, or by the Canadian composer of solitude, Glen Gould.

Starlings in the Blenkinsop Valley,

cueing up on the bars for a performance of Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy, now that the composer has gone back to the elements. November 12, 2006. Lest we forget.

Of course, all these nods to the past, all this mail art and powerline art, has to have a root somewhere, in more than the question, saucily put: Which came first? The blackbird or the egg?

Well, forget about making love in a canoe. A modern street balladeer is someone who knows how to wear armour. In some cases, it might be furnace ducting.

Hugo Ball Dresses Up Like the Tin Man
to read a nonsense poem in Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916,
while WWI was raging not all so far away.
Expecting tomatoes, are you, Hugo?

In other cases, it might just be the covers of a book.

Hitch: to hook a tent trailer to your bumper and take the kids to the lake for the weekend; to tie the knot before the altar, wearing a suit that is not going to fit you in ten years, believe it (As opposed to living commong law), to tie up your Al Purdy to the railing in front of the general store, while you go in for some groceries; not to mention clove hitch, half hitch and other specialized knots that hold only when the rope is under tension.

Want to get away? Just let the pressure go.

Come on, let it go. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ahhhhhhhh. Feels good, huh? Remember:

To attempt and "re-live" old and long gone moments of glory and joy is already in the hard world of physical objects a true nightmare, but on the energy levels it is the greatest catastrophe, for it turns our forward flowing timelines into the equivalent of a Gordian knot, a Minotaur labyrinth in which people get lost altogether, with no hope of finding an exit, with no hope of escape, ever.
 Sylvia Harman. The Enchanted World.

Matthew Holmes lets the pressure go, but it's a sly sleight of hand, built on humour. Hugo Ball didn't mind a little bit of humour, either. Just getting up in front of a crowd was funny enough for him.

You see, both Hugo and Mathew stand at the end of a long tradition of street balladeers. Well, past the end, actually, because, really, they can only reference something that has gone. There just aren't any street balladeers anymore.

That's what we have the magazine racks at the grocery store for, come on.

No poets, either, actually.

But, here's the miracle: I once ran into one in Toronto. The year was 1998. The summer was hot and muggy. He had a tray strapped in front of himself and was selling poetry: USED DOG URINE.

Well, that's what his sign said. The poems were photocopied on bright, yellow paper.
It was like seeing a Great Auk.

Kind of the Canadian equivalent of this English Dude:

Street Bard in London.

Hmm... don't you think he looks a bit like Robert Graves?

That’s what poetry will do to you.
The damn stuff will kill you in the end.

Graves ran his own printing press, too, but that was on Mallorca, where he had gone to put England behind him, and where he published beautiful, artistic volumes of poetry for an elite market.

Kind of like this:

The Poetry Book as Fetish Article
Hitch Yourself to Hitch Right Here Today.

Except, of course, this isn't Mallorca, it’s Canada, in 2006, which means that, in the true schizophrenia of Canadian society, playing the cute American game of privileged elites pretending to be defending the rights of common law, while Matthew is trying to remake 1967, other people are trying to remake this:

English Bylaw meant to stamp out street ballads once and for all.

That’s the context Matthew Holmes is writing in. Everything you learned (or experienced) about the development of society in the 20th Century? About the bloody battles that eventually handed power to the people from aristocratic and intellectual elites?

Well, that’s over.

It just doesn’t apply any more. All we have are ruins, and in those ruins, young poets like Holmes are left trying to create a world, a poetic, out of the shards. It’s all shards. Everywhere you look, there are shards: shards of sestinas and shards of sonnets, shards of language poetry and shards of visual poetry, shards of modernist free verse and shards of Gray’s Elegy on a Country Churchyard, all smashed up and lying somewhere on the tundra. The gig is up. The poetry is over. Now we have Canlit. Now we have Carmine Starnino railing against Canlit, in this 'art' learned at school.

Whereas the real poetry was meant to act upon the world. Kind of like this.

What looks like a photoshopped poster of contemporary politics in Palestine.
See what I mean?

The thing about reality is that it doesn't exist anymore. It, too, went the way of the Great Auk. The thing about street ballads is that they were the refuge of the working class. This was their art. Silencing them was more than an aesthetic statement.

It was politics.

So, how on earth, then, did some of it survive for Matthew to reference and within the context of poetry-as-an-aesthetic-object write a virtual street poet experience?

How did such a fragile thing survive, so late past history, for him to nod to, and how did there survive enough readers familiar enough with the weaker points of the new genre to get his joke?

Well, let me suggest it was these guys who smuggled it through:

Street Balladeers at Oktoberfest.
That’s the playwright Bertolt Brecht, second from the left.

Brecht went on to use his art for political ends, as agit prop for communism. Nice picture of Hitler up on the wall, too! And is that Stalin the circus strong man being run over by the cart? And I’d love to know what they had in mind for the balls. Bowling, perhaps?
Dramatists, eh!

The poets might have been complicit with modernism, but the dramatists were not. In fact, they were trying for a little bit of improvisation, gently and not-so-gently testing and probing their audiences. Here is one of the twentieth century's greatest dramatists:

The Dramatist and Impressario Josef Stalin
(Note to Conspiracy Buffs: Notice how he is losing his head in his role)

Stalin was really keen on spectacle and on audience participation. It was his aesthetic stance that the audience members were, in themselves, nothing, that the individual human experience was an illusion. Collective experience, the experience of an audience also playing the roles, was all. The brutality that can come out of such an aesthetic has, of course, caused it to have some pretty nasty reviews. After all, it's not the job of a playwright to enslave or even kill his audiences, but to hound them out of the theatre and into the streets.

Where, of course, society forbade them to sing their ballads.

Nowadays, a strong man is someone you blow up with hot air.

I think Brecht would have liked that.

Man and his Ego
Circus strongman as an advertising gimic.

The tradition of a free peasant class, untramelled by art, was, however, not doing very well in Brecht's time, either, in the 1920s when the picture of his comedy troupe was taken, but had far, far older roots. If history has been a war between, shall we say, street ballad and politically expedient and distracting spectacle, I mean, well, here's an older picture, that shows that even two hundred years before George W. Bush's crusade against the Democratic Party in Iraq it was going badly:

Bankelsang
Daniel Chodowiecki, The Improvement of Manners, 1786

A Bänkelsänger, a German street balladeer, points to a board, on which thirteen representations of human happiness, misery and criminality can be made out.

A piece of political satire, for sure. Notice how the traditional fertility god's goat foot has been replaced by an amputated leg, and the peasant bankelsingers have ben replaced by Renaissance soldiers in Spanish Dress and how the peasants in the audience don't, well, don't look exactly impoverished, do they.

The modern world, folks, had already begun.

Writers are not exactly getting good press here, either.

A writer writing on the back of a boy in a compromising position.

Nope, even in the 18th century, the tradition was not being taken seriously anymore. The 'peasants' are still mesmerized by the 'swashbuckling' singers, of course, yet just in case you missed it, in the background the modern world is beginning: a man falling out of a balloon painted as the world, on fire, someone else falling out of Juliet's tower, a soldier from the Napoleonic era patrolling the edges of the scene,

a naked ...man? woman? doing a somersault,

and devils in the border, thumbing their noses, too.

And who is that short little guy in the toga up front? He looks a bit like someone we may have seen before.

Is this Socrates?

I dunno. It looks like he has eyes in the back of his head. No, no, that’s not it: his head is screwed on backwards.

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates

Sheesh.

Compare for yourself. Here he is with a stonier pose.

Socrates with his head screwed on properly.

So, let's screw our heads on properly, too, and not look out of the etching to see who is etching us, shall we.

And let's take it one step at a time.

1. If the street ballad tradition these days is referencing the street ballad tradition,
2. but not continuing it, and if
3. poetry has gone the way of the fletcher's workshop, and,
4. if poetry has been trying to become an image for a century,
5. what if it had actually worked, and it’s now the natural world that lies outside the corridors of power and plays music?
6. What if the early modernist poets were actually successful and almost everything we knew as literature today was reactionary, counter-revolutionary spin?

What if that?

Would a poetry book today, then, be like this?

Matthew Holmes’ origami: Trans Canada
Map for the construction of the Northwest Passage
complete with Post It Note.

It has all the requisite parts, straight out of the shipping department at the canlit warehouses:

loose but effective prose rhythms, like a pallet of cardboard boxes being loaded on a truck, an effective minimalist slide of the rhetorical pattern against the alternate pattern set up by the silences created by the poem’s spine, fine self-referential but nonetheless humble humour, and a nod to Stan Rogers and the Fraser running home to the sea.

Which is perhaps the quintessential Canadian poetic theme: Guess what? Wherever you started out and wherever you're going, you're already there.

And no one could ever argue that Stan Rogers, or his brother Garnet, aren't of the people.

I mean, Garnet recently played in Riske Creek.

The Chilcotin Lodge, Riske Creek, 1944
Sitting on the edge of the B.C. Interior Grasslands, it hasn't changed in all the intervening years.
It's the kind of place that Garnet Rogers has been playing in this season.

Or would it be like this?

Blackbirds sitting in a tuning fork in the spring, imitating a poem by Matthew Holmes.
Kokanee Bay, Lac La Hache, April 2006

Or both?

Such as this one:

Matthew Holmes' Ghazal of July Storm

Again, the nod at the end to silence, but, again, the fine Canadian use of the echoes of lyrical linebreaks, within prose rhythms, to create the framework that will support it.

(Note to Studio Audience: Applaud here!)

Where on earth does such mastery of the interface between prose and poetic language come from? Canada, sure, Matthew Holmes, sure, but what is it about Canada that has given rise to it?

Ah, this, I would think:

Poetry On the Straight and Narrow
Translating a Beetle-killed Lodgepole Pine Tree into stanzas
150 Mile House
July, 2006

Back in the heydays of street ballads, some performers felt it was better to take their family behind a screen and show the little puppets of your mind, acting out the parts through a window, like the little window of light at the top of a dungeon, through which your soul could escape, leaving your body behind, or like Juliet’s window on her tower, with Romeo toking on his asthma inhaler in the rose bushes below.

In other words, not the aristocracy, installed by the Pope, God's scrying bowl on earth, but the puppeteer, the representative of a gnostic adept, who saw out of the darkness to a greater light, got to play God, and got to bring the wooden puppets to life.

Performance as Political and Sacramental Subterfuge:
a Performance of Punchinello in Italy, c. 1850

Life and society might have been a prison, but there were ways around it.

I mean, if the world's a dungeon, what, exactly do we see out the window?

The View on the Lip of Paradise

1. The sphinx, 2. the Wild Man (who gets to make the landscape) and 3. Punch. The only bit of any kind of a natural world out there is a dead tree sticking out of the Wild Man's nose.

That was, of course, a different age of the world. The Wild Man, the Sasquatch of the forests west of the Urals, a fellow believed by many to have been extant in Europe, and especially Germany, from before the incursions by the Romans and the Christians, had been used for a long time to give legitimacy to the Coats of Arms of noble houses from one end of Europe to the other.

Taming the Wild Man, or:
How to Become Civilized by Suppressing the Other, Humanizing Nature, and, in true Schizophrenic Fashion that would do even British Columbia politcs proud, Dehumanizing the Peasantry

Some time after that, in Brecht's age, shall we say, in the age in which men first contemplated turning into machines, art was already dead — dead, yes, dead and severed from the contexts in which it had a political and social life, dead and turned into aesthetic objects, but still so recently dead and so recently anaestheticized that it was still revered as a badge of sophistication, even by its murderers and their willing henchmen. Witness:

Rembrandt’s 'The Nightwatch' rolled up for transport,
after being stolen by the Nazis in World War II.

Ah, those Nazis, they were acting just like an anthropologist coming to the west coast of Canada in the 19th century and buying up all the treasures of a civilization. They expected that, soon enough, they alone would be the only heirs of the European tradition.

It was kind of an anthropological statement.

What does Holmes respond with? An aesthetic statement! He's going to come back out of the grocery store and pass us an apple that we can chaw down on while he packs the saddle bags and gets ready to ride out of town. Such daring!

But don’t kid yourself: art has a strong political role to play, especially in the minds of propagandists, who know very well the values people are willing to ascribe to it.

In World War II, for example, Italian propagandists distributed the following photograph of (absent, of course) stolen artworks and disrespectful graffitti in Cyrene, left by the American Army.

Oh, Those Barbarian Americans!

Sigh. Only the graffiti was real.

The giveaway? Why, the artfully arranged white slab and the darkness of the empty stand. Just too perfect. Those Italians! Even the propagandists can’t help turning out aesthetically beautiful work.

And the funny thing? It just wouldn’t look the same if it were true.

But what are you going to do? Take them to court? In Canada?

Why, here’s the courthouse in 150 Mile House, B.C. How about there?

150 Mile House, Courthouse,
British Columbia Interior, February 2006
Moved out of the way to widen the highway, it stands waiting to pass judgement.
Sorry, but in the interests of efficiency, the anteroom had to go.
Notice the effects of global warming.

No, there’s no room in Canada for such historical niceties.

Still, there is room for sending them up in style, for embodying all the contradictions at the end of one civilization and the beginning of another.

Or at least a bunch of them.

Such is Matthew Holmes’ Hitch. It’s a bit of a grab bag, as the blewointment genre demands: a few visuals, some lyrical poems, some prose poems laid out as lyrical poems, to walk on tippy toes through the minefields of their silences, some humour, a nod here and there to deconstructionist language poetry,

Matthew Holmes' Poem as Shopping List

a little bit of stuff which is just too earnest, because it actually believes its own rhetoric,

Redshadow Poems Again
Matthew Holmes’ Nod to Canlit
(Note to readers: Take the advice at this point and skip to the next poem),

and, hey, look at that, a sequence of prose poems that put Rimbaud to shame.

I'm not kidding. Only rarely does a poet pull off a prose poem anymore, but Holmes sure can.

“Smith’s Invisible Hand”, “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle”, “Avogadro’s Law”, “Baeir’s Law [I and II]”, and “Starling’s Law of the Heart” are masterpieces of the form.

It sure beats trying to get the messge out this way, doesn’t it:

British Airman Dropping Propaganda Leaflets Over Nazi Germany
Notice the parcel post behind him, ready to go!

Well, ok, the prose poems might be Holmes' real strength, but the playfulness of the collection as a whole shows that Holmes has the ability to extend the prose poem into the conception of book, and to turn out highly-crafted, constantly inventive and refractive books of poetry, prose, lyrical, and walking the edge between them.

I mean, there lies as potential within Hitch the book of prose poems, the book of Redshadow Poems (So far, all we have are the notes), the book of ghazals, the book of canal poems, the book of...

I for one, look forward to watching Holmes follow all these seeds and extend them as the foundations for a 21st Century Canadian poetry that understands the past in all its compromised positions and successfully evades the lures of materialism and aestheticism.

There is still hope that we will remain a people.

Adam (dressed as Wild Man): Ha ha ha!

Harold: Ha ha ha, yourself. Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?

Adam: Ha ha ha!

Harold: The nakedness, certainly, but it’s something else.

Eve (Giggling.): Guess!

Harold (Understanding at last.): Oh, you guys. You had me on there.

Adam: That we will become one. Did you get it?

Harold: Get what?

Eve: That we will become a people!

History, it seems, must repeat itself.

So, in true Canadian fashion:

Tolko Lumber Company Driveway Stop and Go Sign
Formerly the Ministry of Forests
Williams Lake, B.C.
November, 2006

It must be the result of global warming.

*

Coming Soon: Penn Kemp, Jen Currin

The text of this article is copyright Harold Rhenisch, 2006. All rights reserved.

Mona Fertig's Moon

2006-11-08T15:21:00.000-08:00

Invoking the Moon
Reviewing Mona Fertig’s Selected Poems as a Game of Poker

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, said Theodore Adorno in 1949.

To put the statement in context, here are a few other memorable events of 1949:

January 11: First recorded snowfall in Los Angeles.
February 22. Grady the Cow, a 1,200-pound cow gets stuck inside a silo on a farm in Yukon, Oklahoma and garners national media attention.
March 4: NATO is formed.
July 29: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
September 15: The Lone Ranger premiers on ABC

Talk about barbarism!

Is it possible? Dare we hope that there is a way to write lyrically and not be barbaric?

There is good news from Mona Fertig: we dare hope.

Theodor Adorno: Barbarian Alone With a Pricey Mirror
Before this, he composed music.

Ok, still. So, it might be a long time since whacky old 1949, but what gets written in Canada, more than anything, and, yeah, what gets read, less than anything?

Poetry!

But then again, Canada has come late to the poetry game. When Mona Fertig was first getting her teeth into the earliest poems in Invoking the Moon, Canada was just testing its oats, poetically, so to speak. Having recently shucked off the British ermine and moved into the embrace of its own North American continence.

So to speak.

It Took a Sinhalese-Canadian Living in Toronto and testing his poetic oats
to Write the Definitive Book about the American anti-hero Billy the Kid.
In poetry, yet.

Folks, you might laugh, but that’s the Canadian way. This is the perspective one gets living on the edge of an Empire in decline.

We are the barbarians.

Without us, what would the Americans be, really? A bunch of revolutionaries, I suspect.

21st Century Military Waiting Room In a Time of Budget Restraint.

Revolutionaries, pick your weapons! Before you do, however, notice that the guy with the poetry book gets the girl. Ain’t that the way.

>

The thing is, life is often a game of poker.

This should, in fact, be the disclaimer on every book of poetry — especially on every book of selected poems. Mind you, the thing is, if life is a game of poker, the question should also be: is everyone playing the same game?
Yeah, well, that is the question.

News Flash! Just dealt in today here on the plateau is Mona Fertig’s Invoking the Moon. Selected Poems. 1975-1989, from Black Moss Press.

The other players have their shot glasses of whiskey, their illegal handguns at their waists, some with grizzled beards and some with beauty spots and hair in braids, and they’re laying down their bets. Money is slipped out of garters, out of hat bands, out of money clips.

The whole lot of the players look like Billy the Kid wannabes, actually, but, really, they are poets. Uh-huh, that’s right. Poets, declared extinct in five continents, are everywhere. Like starlings. These are the Canadian poets, that’s all, incredible as it sounds. But are they going to tell Mona that they’re poets, too? No, they’re not.

Playing With Someone Else’s Money

And is she going to tell them that she is? You bet she is!

You think they’re all bluffing? Hell, some of them most probably are. Some of them most probably are about as Canadian as George W. Bush. Some of them are positively about as poetic as Stephen Harper.

But that’s the way the game is played now that it’s no longer possible to openly write poetry.

Now that it’s all made up.

Now that even the New Formalists have to make up the old forms out of the new ones, and getting themselves all steamed up in the process.

Unless you’re Mona. Mona keeps her cool. In this game of mirrors, she knows who she is.

Billy the Kid’s Stunt Double.
Prime Minister Harper wearing his poetry face.

You know, if you’re not Canadian, or maybe even if you’re the kind of Canadian who forgets it sometimes, you should be careful playing this game, because the rules appear to be the same as the rules played everywhere else in our blue world coughing, but they’re not.

(Just a friendly warning.)

For instance, betting. You think you’re betting here on who’s going to have the winning hand and walk away with all the chips?

Stephen Harper Meets George W. Bush’s Stunt Double.
Prime Minister Harper without his poetry face.

I admit, it looks a lot like that, but, really, the poem-slingers here are betting on who’s going to get a Canada Council grant, what hot new thing of the week is going to come into town and shoot the place up while they’re having a sestina, who’s going to make the loneliness go away tonight, who’s going to do a Leonard and run away to Greece, and who they’re going to sign on to play their stunt double when they finally sign a contract with a big publisher, like, oh, Mclelland and Stewart or, or, or, hard at work and ever constructive... Black Moss Press.

Well, my name’s Harold Rhenisch. I tend bar here and I’m a poet, too. I mainline the junk, to tell the truth. This little joint out in the desert is my treaty with the world. I’m not exactly shipping the stuff out the door in semi-trailer loads, and I’m not exactly digging a hole for it out in the cactus, either. I’m making peace with obsolescence. That’s what I’m doing. For instance, I’ve posted my stunt double (I call him Adam) at the door and told him to watch out for angels dressed in black suits and with rhyming couplets strung in bandoliers around their shoulders. His girlfriend, Eve, is waiting on tables.

Two More Refugees from Poetry
on Their Way to Minimum Wage Food Service Jobs in Canada

Yeah, that is American critic Dana Gioia in the background.

Now, one thing I’ve learned in this business is that a poet needs a stunt double. (If you have to ask Why? you really aren’t from around here, are you?) Here, I’ll whisper you the answer: because poets cheat. And they don’t always play by the rules.

Canadian Poet’s Stunt Double, Generic Model
approved for export to the United States.

(This is when Eve whispers in sisterly solidarity (and, oh, we’ve been waiting for it):

Eve: Mona, darling. Are you saying that the way to play poetry poker after Auschwitz is to cheat?)

Well, there you go. Mona’s not going to answer, because, after all, she’s in the game, isn’t she. It’s not for her to say that Paul Celan killed himself because it was the natural consequence of continuing to write poetry after his parents were murdered in the camps. It’s not for her to say that the poor bastard wrote in German, the language of the men who murdered them. Or that it was the most civilized and most brutalized language in the world. Or that to write was to be damned to knowledge and complicit in your own imprisonment.

Canadian Poet Imprisoned Between the Pages of a Book
A common fate of poets in this age (and another reason for having a stunt double).

But that was the philosophy of writing that was in the air when Mona started publishing poetry back in 1975. The world was divided by an iron curtain. One half of the world was getting ready to have a shower. The other half was shivering naked in a shower cubicle, without water, a towel, or soap.

Cold and Hot Showers in Berlin
Note the bountiful numbers of cold shower attendants, but the general lack of clientele.

Nobody was really satisfied with this arrangement.

As a result, in his later poems, Celan wrote only those parts of the European lyrical poem which were not the European lyrical poem.

It was like playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet, without the trout.

Or the Quintet.

You know: the trees on the bank of the stream, but not the stream, the fly on the end of the line, but not the line, the satellites flying among the stars above, like mayflies, but neither mayflies nor stars, and words singing a woman, but no woman singing a song, leaning against a piano on a terrace in the moonlight, the consequence of ten thousand poems and songs of roses and moons and love written in the whole history of Mitteleuropa...

Why a Poet Needs a Stunt Double,
or The Trout Quintet Without the Trout
Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley in the film version of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden

Lyricism? It was left to the spam artists. Witness (oh, just a slice of Spam haiku):

Split the Spam atom
Enormous pink mushroom cloud
World covered in pork.
Tom Elliot

Which all leaves a lot of room for Mona and her poems of birth and "the ring of fire," should she want to take it, should she be able to pull off the correspondence between the tides of women and the sea, the birth of generations of women from women, out of those cycles, the setting of words down on the page, and the sharing of them with others.
But first, business.

Eve: I need four bottles of Villanelle 2005 for table four. Those Montreal poets are really nuzzling the Villanelle tonight. They’re sloshing it around like it was sonnet water! (Whispers. I’m hoping for a big tip.

So, I busy myself dusting off bottles and uncorking them and sliding them over to Eve, and say:

As for the moon, the Nazis have a base up there, don’t you know. When Aldrin landed? They had a big reception, with stolen Russian goblets.

Eve stares at me incredulously as she loads up her tray.

Eve: Aldrin?

Yeah, Aldrin. That’s why the landing had to be faked.

Eve: Faked?

Yeah, Kubrick.

Adam: Honey, we came across his set out in the desert, remember?

Kubrick’s Greatest Production?
A set in the desert?

Eve: (Smiles.) Oh, yeah. Thanks, honey! (Earnestly, with a slight frown.) And that’s why Mona is cheating?

You tell me. Here is Mona’s play. She leads with "The Archer," a lean little hard-edged cupid outfit, clean cut like something worn by Lieutenant Ohura on Star Trek, a little bit of 3-D mental chess with Spock while the captain is on an alien world check out the tentacles on the local babes.

Lieutenant Ohura Herself as Herself
Writing a poem while wearing a designer space helmet
ain’t the easiest thing!

I mean, look at it:

dream deep / thorn sharp
wound red / love red

wings of kings
so fate spaced
so time tipped

All edges, isn’t it. All the fragments from a fragmentation grenade, without the boom. All a little bit of oh, here’s another Pat Lowther, that’s ok, then, whew, harmless, we know this territory.

Because you had to think about being recognizable as a poet back then. You really did.
Because you could be blown back to the stone age at any moment. You really could.
Because we were at war with the cold. We really were.

You see, nobody had Margaret Atwood as a stunt double yet.

Margaret Atwood’s Stunt Double Signing a book

You see, Margaret Atwood was still doing her own stunts way back then.
You see, Mona is stilldoing her own stunts.
You see, that was the year Pat Lowther was killed by her husband (You got it, another poet.) with a hammer.
You see, Pat Lowther didn’t have a stunt double.
Because we’ve been missing her ever since.

Because: is it possible to write poetry after Pat Lowther?

Those were revolutionary times. Mona wasn’t the only one playing the game of writing poems as if they were cipher codes to be smuggled across the Iron Curtain by John le Carré. Look at what Linda Rogers, another West Coast poet, made of it, back then when Canlit looked like it was going to put Spam right out of the sandwich meat market.

Lightweight Motor Retainer
Spread the word! For instructions on how to build your own moon rocket, go here.

Ah, those were the days.

Did you actually click on Donkey O.D. above? Here’s a teaser:

It must also be remembered here that Finland probably has FinLit, and Turkey probably has TurkLit, and that Canada isn’t at all unique in having CanLit. It’s just newer to the game.

To put Mona’s poem in context, here’s a piece from Linda Rogers’ "Some Flowers," also written in those last days of poetry, before Adorno’s bitterness turned all poets inward, to silence:

Bury her shadow.
The stain
jumps out of purdah to spit
ink in the funeral
fire, casts the sundrag
moon into new
orbit.
Linda Rogers

Another piece in intellectual purdah!

Mona’s Stunt Double in Intellectual Purdah.

And, as you can see...

fire, casts the sundrag
moon into new
orbit.

... another moon. Tricksy.

In kind of the reverse process, I once did an experiment with a Celan poem, in which I translated the poem not word for word, but by rebuilding the lyrical poem that Celan had merely outlined with tricks of shadow and light, by building negative space.

Kind of like this:

A Scanner’s Stunt Double of Mona Fertig
Notice the lines. Poetry is big on lines. Big on scanning, too!

The result was a lot like the later poems in Mona’s Invoking the Moon. A lot like the following one, in which Mona calls the bets in around the table and asks everyone to show their hands, and in which she reveals that she’s holding a royal flush:

Her hands untie unknot themselves legs twist free
and the cords become velvet ribbons invisible manacles
blue sails ashes and cages failing behind. Messages
beat in her breasts. Sprout small as fiddleheads at her
ankles her shoulderblades. Flashes of light mouthfuls
of water pouring forth an undeniable new sound breathing
in and out. Flight p. 63.

It’s an undeniable new sound, alright. A woman is becoming the earth. With poetry buried in the mass graves of the camps, there seemed only one way out: to go earlier than even poetry — to go for magic.

(With a child tugging at the hem of her skirts.)

Mona Fertig’s Royal Flush
(With poker chip.)

Does everyone around the table throw down their hands, though? No, they do not. They throw some more Ann Carsons into the pot, some even the Purdys off their backs, the old timers even their very last Patrick Lane first editions, and raise the stakes.

I like to think that the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shines through.Anne Carson

Does Mona fold? Does she smile, like her namesake?

Mona Fertig’s Stunt Double
Just Back from a Holiday in Mona Fertig’s Sex, Death and Travel
and Now On Holiday on the Baltic Coast, Sigh

Not in the least. This is poker, and Mona is going to see it out to the finish. To keep others in the game, this is what she throws into the pot, a little bit of Gently Invoking the Moon:

I need partial shade and waterwater
for you moon
are falling from your starry world
into my pelvic cradle
the holding place
where I rock you walk you
and long to pass over to the other side
joining the mothers
through the ring of fire.Page 87

All the men around the table fold. They know when they’re beat.

Unmasked, Leonardo da Vinci Throws in His Cards.

In the 14 year span of this slight book, Mona Fertig replaced poetry with herself, and discovered community there, "three millions years of genetics" staring her in the face, and found that for all that time women had been thinking they were facing the future alone, when, in fact, they were not alone at all.

But no more. Now they know better.

No small feat.

Invoking the Moon is a record of Mona Fertig’s journey.

And a system of spells for making it ours.

And, yes, don’t worry: in the book’s concluding lines, Mona Fertig finally lays her cards on the table and addresses women who might still be toying with strapping on the bandoliers of poetry and marching in clipped ranks with a red star on the epaulets of their green uniform jackets:

Embrace the magical child.

Mona Fertig

Lei Yan’s "If the Long March was a Women's Rights Movement"
Source.

"Live your spirit, or talk around it," said Robin Skelton once. "Blake lived it. Wordsworth talked about it."

Mona Fertig lives it.

And the moon is born on earth.

Next time, Hitch by Matthew Holmes.

Refugees

2006-06-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

As Leonard Cohen, said,

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn't.

As Christine Whelan, Regional Director for Chapters/Indigo Edmonton says,

and some of it, if, you know,
if it sat on your shelf for a year,
you probably don't want it to come back.
You're glad it's gone, and good riddance to that,
you know?

Indeed.

What’s a poor writer to do?

Another Writer Surrendering

Truth be told, writing is, like, um, like an obsolete art form, eh. It used to be that writers were, um, like, you know, the Walmart of the artistic world: propped up by huge university English Departments, eh, which trained dutiful readers by the, well, gadzillions, and with a complete monopoly on getting the word out.

So, the English Departments were kind of like warehouses, really, and the writers?

Forklifts.

Who knew!

A Writer With Her Groom

Gail Anderson Dargatz and Robert Kroetsch
might have written about bees, but, hey, as you can see, they were already outflanked.

Warehouses are not a really good way of selling books, though. Books kind of get lost in there. They wind up gathering dust on the shelf, eh Christine.

You just ask Christine. She knows.

But, hey, that was then.

Chapters might crow that they aren’t selling midlist books anymore and are going to be as successful as Walmart, but don't be tooooooo sure. It could well be that they’re really just going down with

Badgers

(Licensed paupers who wore a badge to prove it, and started the whole business of badgering -- like, well, like this blog, really),

Back Tenters

(small boys who scurried behind operating looms and cleared away debris)

and, my favourite, Bang Beggars

(parish officers who controlled how long strangers could stay in the parish -- an early iteration of family planners, perhaps?)

All gone, I’m afraid. Tschüß, baby!

Nope, now readers are writers. As Joseph Bednarik said as marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, American writing schools turn out more writers than the market can bear. His answer?

That everyone who writes should buy a bunch of books and read them.

Like, how old. It’s like, so old it's like, well Eben-Emael, that's what. You know, the impregnable Belgian fortress, which the Germans captured in 1940 by landing parachute troops on the unguarded roof. Well, ok, onto a low hill in behind, but same diff.

A Typical Creative Writing Department
Showing the Scars of Battle

When the Germans tried it again in Crete, the farmers got annoyed and stood down below with pitchforks while General Student’s pretty boys floated down, begging for mercy.

Well, guys, it’s a war. What can I say.

But, hey, wars aren’t new in the world, and writing is not the first fine craft to go obsolete. When I was a kid, back in the late 1960s, I used to go out in the orchard and scythe grass, an ancient skill which my father learned in Germany during World War II.

That was as high tech as things got then.

Now, it’s weedeaters. You just go on down to your local hardware store and try to buy a scythe. What’s it matter if it does a quicker, better job than a weedeater. That’s not the point. It’s just too darn low tech.

Weedeater Formation Descending on the Untrimmed Fields of Australia
A scyther might be an artist, but what’s the use of becoming the tool when you can become the machine?
Yeah, really.

Other obsolete occupations: Bellmaker, fletcher, horse collarer, salter, garlic monger, cloth trampler, girdlemaker, messiah.

But, hey, not so fast.

Check out this old picture of what looks like an Easter Celebration of the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia.

Jesus Christ as a Forklift, Becoming One With His Cross
Notice the jerry-rigged steering wheel

See what I mean?

You wouldn’t want your messiah to go careening out of control now, would you.

But, again, that was then.

How are things going in the war right now? Right now, while the US President is dancing on his lawn and dervishes are kicking up dust in Iraq?

Right now when the Chapters bookstore in Kamloops, British Columbia offered to host a book signing, if I brought my own books, cuz they don't carry them, see, and if I sold them to them at a 45% discount -- a 50% greater discount than I receive from my publisher myself?

Right now like that?

Well, pretty quiet really. Here are three poets I chanced on in a grove of wild apple trees in the Beaver Valley a couple weeks ago.

Poets on the Run
A Rare Sighting of a Doomed Breed
Fare well, Travellers.

I should have quoted some Leonard Cohen to them, but I was just trying to keep my dog from noticing they were there.

Like, dogs gotta learn some respect. More specifically? Well, my dog can’t see very well, but he’s got a good schnoz.

And those poets smell soooooooo good.

Poets Up Close

Get too close to a poet -- or a poem for that matter, I suppose -- and they get all blurry, don't they.

Well, as Leonard said:

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,

And to give Christine the last word for this week:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there—but then, at the same time, there's a lot of Romance novels that are in our core list like, we have a list of about 1,800 to 2,000 books for a large-format store that are expected to always be in stock.

Thanks, Christine. Thanks, Leonard. Thanks, Poets. Good Night, Sweet Ladies, Good Night. Good night.

p.s.

Napoleon: Out of what, 70,000 titles?
Sphinx:

To be continued...

Poets and Novelists: A Land Use Conflict

2006-05-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

I've been growing increasingly aware that poetry and novels have incompatible operating systems.

It’s not that people aren’t trying to make universal programs.

Of course they are.

For example, this shot from the early days of the invasion of Iraq:

A Poet and a Novelist Try to Puzzle Out their Differences in Iraq

No.

No, no, no no no, no, no.

That can’t be it. ( I do think that’s two novelists. Notice the matching glasses.)

OK, let’s try again:

Sports fans! In the left hand corner of the ring, there’s a frock-coated novelist, laced up tight on coffee, or at least on all the lovely petrochemicals that make it come out with a real kick.

Samuel Richardson, Novelist,
With His Gloves off, and
giving his best imitation of God.
(Note the Itty Bitty Novelistic characters on the mantle.)
This is called the Omniscient Point of View.

Thanks for stepping into the ring, Samuel.

Putting the old omniscient point of view into play, you will note that in the right hand corner of the ring there’s a poet, wearing nothing more than nothing less than what your imagination cares to add or take away, or at least trying to convince you that that’s the case.

OK, ok. That’s the romantic version, English style.

For the romantic version, German style, try this:

The Poor Poet (Der Arme Poet), by Spitzweg
Maybe he’s starving to death, but, hey, he can still do a passable imitation of Mary Poppins!
Who knew!

The problem is going to be even getting these characters in the middle of the ring!

I mean, notice how the novelist has china figurines, while the poet has a battered umbrella and some old (battered) books. Notice that the novelist doesn’t need any books.

One presumes he writes them instead?

Oh, how passé.

One is, sadly, left only with presumptions.

Such as this:

I do think there’s just not a good fit between a way of thinking that sets up dominos in a line and then knocks them down and claps its hands at the end when they all come out right, and one that lets its eyes go out of focus so it can see every ant in an anthill at the same time.

Whoa! Wayyyyy too much coffee. Let’s try yet another tactic.

Ahem.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have deconstructed a novel and a poem just for you.

Here’s the novel: let’s say The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

The Magic Mountain
Notice how Mann’s plot get’s a little rough in the middle, although he does hold pretty well to the Napoleonic form of War and Peace.

Mann’s got a pretty clear sight of his goal, doesn’t he. I’d say he wins the first round.

I mean, here’s what Napoleon had to say about Tolstoy’s novel about him at the battle of Borodino:

Napoleon himself was not very sure that what he had was a victory or not, but the sight of the retreating army reassured him.
(Source: that link just under the magic mountain.)

Compare this sly ambiguity with the poets:

Poets at The End of the Road
Heck, they’re completely off the road.
Looks like they’re blocking the road, actually.
Looks like they’ve been there a while, too.

Do note the novel with its door open in the background.
Source: University of Nevada, Reno, Seismology Department.

Did any poets crawl in?

One does, as you can see, wonder.

And that brings me to the point of my concern.

A couple weeks ago, which is to say in early May, I was enjoying an hour of early spring sun, when I came across the Battle of Borodino, being played out in slowwwwwwwww time.

Here it is, with the French and Russian cavalry and everything:

The Straight People and the Round People
Land Use Conflict on the Cariboo Plateau.

Notice that the round people have to cross the line in the sand. Most of the time they’re going to get away with it, but occasionally there’s going to be a dirt bike.

Harold’s First Rule for Land Use Conflicts:

When you encounter a dirt bike on the trail, get out of the way.

Oh, yeah, that coffee that the 18th Century gave to the novelists, who, in turn, gave it to us as their greatest starbucking gift?

In their honour, I respectfully submit the Found Poem of the day.

Poem for Samuel Richardson

A six-legged, soft-bodied
insect called coffee
green scale can

plague gardenia,
ginger, and a host
of other

crops — including citrus
and, of course, coffee. The insect,

*

known as Coccus viridis,
stunts growth and causes leaves to yellow.

*

The adults are
oval and greenish
yellow. Various

species of ants befriend them,

*

chasing away predators and parasites
that might otherwise
make a quick
snack of the scales.

*

In return,
ants get to nosh on honeydew.

By the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps?

Novelists Feeding on the Poets?

Or is it Just Cocchus Viridis vs. Ecophylla Smaragdina?

Have a look.

(To be continued!)

Mad Cows

2006-04-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what the fuss is about. Mad cow disease? Hmmph. This is news?

Fact: cows have been mad for a long time. Saying that Mad Cow Disease is news is like saying it snows in Winnipeg or it floods in North Dakota.

Ok. Cows get sick from eating the brains of other cows.

See?

You can’t say stuff like this seriously.

This is like saying first year university students get sick from pulling all nighters with their first essay assignment on the history of hermeneutics.

Student in His Study
by Jan Davidsz de Heem, 1628.
It looks like he needs a little essay help from his friends!at youressay.com

Oh, in case you were wondering, hermeneutics is a study practiced by people called Hermeneuts. Really.

Really, really, really.

It is definitely a word to avoid at 4:30 a.m. with a 8 a.m. deadline on a paper worth 40% of your mark, which you started at 1:30 a.m., is it.

What it is, though, is the study of how we create meaning.

Yeah, not old nobodaddy-meaning, all full of hair and judgement and fire and horse’s feet that don’t even touch the ground, that look like the pedestals of a queen anne chair, actually, if you must ask, but the new stuff. The real stuff.

The Meaning In Makeup

And the lyrics are:

(Eve sings:)

Every day is another face,
Every day is another fake across the street.
Every night is an alibi.
Every night is another lie in your eyes.
Is there a meaning in the makeup?
Is there a meaning in the makeup?

Adam: You mean you don’t know?

You just can’t afford to be doing too much of that at 4:30 a.m. now, can you.

Eve: Maybe you can’t afford to do it at all.

Right. For instance, the Greek God Hermes, a cattle boy, snake wrangler and trickster, had the sad job of interpreting the words of Zeus, God of the Gods, and passing them on to people.

An eagle, for instance, flies overhead with a snake in its beak, or it catches a blackbird, or (more likely, if you’ve ever watched birds) a bunch of blackbirds fly overhead and peck an eagle to Kingdom Come.

Eve: Gone. Kingdom Gone, Harold.

(Harold bows in deference and turns back to the audience.)

Right. (He shuffles papers. He coughs.)

The problem is that Hermes has to say that it means that George W. Bush is going to be a) victorious, b) horsewhipped, or c) none of the above.

In Iraq.

Adam (shouting from the back row): Hermes had wings on his sandals so he could get out of the way.

(Eve laughs out loud.)

(Harold smiles wanly.)

Right.

(Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.)

For his part, Zeus sometimes dressed up as a bull so young girls, maybe less than the statutory age of 14, could ride on his, ahem, back. (He waves papers in the air.) See?

Tricksy.

Mad Cows Giving the Greek God Hermes the Once Over.

So, you see, sometimes the cows got just the teensiest bit mad.

Eve (applying her lipstick and blowing kisses in the mirror): Well, I guess.

God Blows His Whistle
Phweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
Source.

Sigh. (Muttering from the penalty box.) Stuff like this used to be a game. Stuff like meaning, and all.

It used to be that you could laugh about stuff like this. It used to be that a guy could get half-naked and use the bull as a symbol of his masculinity and a symbol of wild sex at 1:00 a.m. and a geography lesson, too.

You know how Shakespeare said "The world’s a stage?" Yeah, well, it’s not. The whole world is bull.

Eve: Really?

Mad Cows Lowing in Chorus: Really, really, really.

Final Examination of Minoan Students
Studying to Be Federally Approved Meat Inspectors,
Geographers, and Literary Hermeneuts
Note the map of the Mediterranean on the bull’s flank.
Tricksy.

This is definitely the root of the problem.

(Reading...)

NAFTA free trade disputes, live or dead cattle crossing the Canadian/U.S. border, feedlot capacity, human infection, contamination of cattle feed, blah blah blah. Hey, that’s not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that a guy can just get freaking tired of hermeneutics and tries to get real instead.

In other words, he tries poetry.

Reality Bites
Young poet running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

Eve: Looking at that picture, it’s hard to see why we started feeding brains to cows. It looks to me like we were just feeding them to the wrong end of the equation (blowing Adam a kiss).

Adam (leaning over her shoulder and smelling her hair as he whispers into her ear): Maybe what we need is just a little Mad Human Disease.

Phweeeeeeeeeeeet!!!

Oh, right. We got that already.

Dang.

Egyptian Mummy as Poet in a Bound Sack
of Rhyme and Circumstance
Charing Cross Road, London

Hey, it’s a living.

Next week: Everything You Wanted to Know About Slaughterhouses*
*(but were afraid to ask)

A Guide for Aspiring Politicians

2006-03-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
showing the way.

Speech making is a delicate art, especially without a teleprompter.

And there’s the trouble. Dollars.

Teleprompter from Prompter People,
with its mouth open, cheeping for more dollars.

In fact, the whole package (color LCD, 60/40 glass beamsplitter and dual screen teleprompter software) is going to set you back US$799. Now, granted, that isn’t a lot for a piece of quantum mechanical software, but, still, why squander split beams of light like that?

Fiscal prudence is, after all, hard to talk about, and hard to practice. Better to just do it quietly, without a lot of fuss.

If it’s fuss you want, you might end up with something like this, from The Financial Express:

NEW DELHI, FEB 27: The Economic Survey has underlined the need for resuming the fiscal consolidation programme from the next fiscal to eventually meet the fiscal and revenue deficit targets prescribed in the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act by the terminal year 2008-09.

The Budget for 2005-06, it may be recalled, temporarily halted the fiscal consolidation programme because of various factors, including the implementation of the Finance Commission award.

It kind of reads like a poetry terrorist insinuated himself into an Indian government accounting department.

Fortunately, there is help. When all else fails, turn to the alchemists and their interest in the ancient Art of Memory. In their hands, what was originally an ancient art, like history, music, poetry or sculpture, became an attempt to contain the whole world within an alphabet.

After mastering that, if you said your ABC’s in the right order, you could remember the Garden of Eden.

Heck, you could speak the Garden of Eden.

Reentry to the Garden of Eden
An Alchemist Practicing Memory in a Memory Garden
Note Eve at the bottom, about to reenter, to the marriage with her soul.

Of course, we have OCR software for that now. Kind of the hair shirt version of poetry writing.

The following is a paid political announcement:

Eve: Does this mean you’re going to be out of a job now, Harold?

Harold: Not at all, my dear. But poetry is getting more expensive to write all the time.

Eve: I like the look of that garden, Harold.

Harold: Me, too.

Sponsored by the committee to reelect Adam.

We now return to regular programming.

Teleprompter scrolling up: While preparing a speech, Roman orators imagined themselves walking through their villas, room by room, or, if the speech was particularly long, through some important public building, even between adjoining buildings, even making their way building by building around a civic square or down a street.

Wanna try it?

Eve (interjecting from the press scrum): Okay.

View From a Roman Orator’s SUV: Route 66
Lemmee see: the highway’s bristling with gas, coffee, Motel, Liquor, and, of course, Best Western, all reaching for the light out of the undergrowth.

Easy as pie, isn’t it.

Walking down this baby, you could have American foreign policy down pat in about twenty seconds.

And you maybe thought the Yanomamo were an isolated tribe of stone age Indians with strange customs worthy of study by anthropologists?

Man.

Just drive south of the 49th parallel and write it all down. That’s all you need to do. What you see is what you get.

As Wikipedia puts it, so alchemically:

The term describes a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document or image is being created.

It implies the ability to modify the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.

Yanomamo Children Bristling With Good Humour at the Thought

But we were talking about how to survive the hurly burly of contemporary politics and look good, without splitting in two.

After all, even that Wikipedia reference came with a warning:

Applications may deliberately deviate or offer alternative composing layouts from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the user's preference to enter commands or code directly.

That’s where the line between poetry and politics becomes a little blurred, to say the least, and that’s where the romans come in.

Adam: Ah, the catholics.

No, just the Romans.

Eve: Why the Romans, Harold? I don’t think I like the romans. (She shivers.)

Roman Orator Looking for His Next Soundbite
Note the stacked tiers of the memory garden around him.
This method of appealing to the voters is why the art of memory declined in late roman times.

Eve has every right to shiver.

Well, the romans were masters of the art of memory. Think of it as playing the stradivarius with your mind. Think of it as writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with your hands tied behind your back.

Since desire was imputed as a crime, and marriage was tolerated as a defect, it was consistent with the same principles to consider a state of celibacy as the nearest approach to the Divine perfection. Gibbon, on the state of addressing your conscience in late Rome: another example of a teleprompter gone wrong.

Still, memory was, and remains an art, a kind of yoga most dangerous to political centrism, because it’s something you definitely can do at home.

Bruno Wagner’s Depiction of Eve Working her Magic
from the April 2000 exhibition "Light years...ago" in Warsaw.

Ah, memory.

Adam: Takes you back, doesn’t it!

It’s like doing the Jackson Pollock with your audience, while they sit out there in ranked rows, with their alchemical Blackberries in their hands: the prompted prompted to prompt the prompted who is prompting them to prompt him!

Hence the shiny apple in Eve’s hand.

You run the risk of putting yourself out of the loop, sure, but, hey, what’s life without risk, right?

I mean, that’s why it might be useful to remember things, right?

American Painter Jackson Pollock Preparing His Teleprompter
Note the steel-toed boots.
Note the matching colours of his clothing and his paint
(displays fiscal prudence in regards to laundry bills).
These are the little technical details that mean the difference
between success and failure.
You’re welcome.

Right.

Teleprompter (scrolling up): Upon entering a building, a Roman orator would imagine a character in a corner of the entrance hall, a man with winged sandals, Hermes for instance, or a woman with flowers blooming in her eyes and whose fingers were snakes, anything dramatic and memorable and, preferably, tied to a character, or a combination of characters, from mythology, and somehow reminiscent of the opening thought of the speech.

To try it out, what image would you like to put with this quote from Prime Minister Harper:

There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders.
Stephen Harper

Do you understand that?

Eve: No.

Adam?

Adam: Nope.

Did you know Canada had such an international presence?

Adam: I bet you didn’t.

Harold: Just a sec... hold that thought...

Ta da! An Art of Memory Placeholder
No sirree, it ain’t Barbie.
It’s Bild Lilli, a German sex doll from the 1950s.
She sold a lot of newspapers.

No surprise there.

See, now when you want to remember the quote from Harper, just think of Lilli’s pointed shoes, and you’ll have it.

Nice, huh!

Ah, yes, Stephen, it’s easy when you have the right technique.

Stephen Harper Demonstrating His Technique for Making Apple Pie
Easy isn’t the half of it!
The sugar coating helps, too.

So, now that we’ve practiced that, let’s try it out by throwing the teleprompter out the window.

To a character like Lilli, an orator would assign the opening of his speech, according to some intuitive symbolic connection.

After that initial plunge, he was on his way, walking in step with his thoughts. As he strolled along through his villa, real or imagined, he would populate it with characters room by room, corner by corner, until the whole speech was inhabited or, to put it another way, until the whole speech was civilized, made civic, made into a city, such as, say, oh, I dunno, Toronto with the moon falling on its head.

Or Maybe An Apple with a Little Codling Moth Problem
Just a little example of what happens when a gardener turns his back for five minutes in his little garden paradise.

Hey, it could happen.

To deliver the speech, the orator stepped back into the building in his mind, confronted the images he encountered there, and spoke to their significance. An elegant speech of some four or five hours could be laid down in this way — without the resort to alchemy.

Memory Lying in Wait for Woman on Her Way Up
from The Wit of the Staircase
As they say, they take their name from the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit d'escalier," she replied. "Esprit d'escalier. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete till afterwards it suddenly comes to you when it is too late."

So, enough theory.
Now that you’re an accomplished memory artiste, you’ll probably like to know how it all works out in practice.

I don’t blame you.

I warn you, though. All these teleprompters have divided the world into two. Bringing it back together again may prove a little shocking.

Here, for example, is one downside of eating every shiny apple that a pretty girl hands to you from a pear tree.

Orator Speaking to the Significance of Eve’s Resurrection as Bild Lilli
Oh, give the man an apple.

And here, here is a master politician displaying that rarest of political attributes: knowing when to stop.

George W. Bush Giving a Speech
Yup, it looks Like He Can’t Eat Another Piece

Next Week: Mad Cows.

Goethe's Nose

2006-03-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

Goethe, you see, German poet extraordinaire, hero of the nation, flower of the language, child of the soil, loved roses. He had this oh so romantic idea that in a world of regimentation, a poet could actually add something, that it was actually possible to see the world as a poem, that things rhymed.

Goethe’s Spineless Nose
(A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Shakespeare said that.)

So, Goethe lived in a garden house given to him in 1776 by Duke Carl August, to lure him into keeping close to the court.

Roses, were, it seems, his special love as well.

And what did Goethe do with these roses? Well, he classified them. That was the age of Linnaeus, the Great Classifier.

Goethe classified them as poems. It was a sort of code. A sort of crossword puzzle cipher. Spy stuff. Shh. Hush hush.

This is not Goethe!
This is Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), dressed for the hard work of classifying
all living things into a hierarchy, like courtiers around Louis XIV.

Here’s Goethe, writing in 1798, in his poem "Song of the Imprisoned Count." Think of it as the lamentations of a courtier, hoping to get the ear of the king. Think of it as Goethe playing Romeo below Juliet’s window. Think of it as a poor soul lamenting to its God.

Think of it as a poor German count stirring his people up for rebellion.

You don’t make a great nation out of a punch of principalities just any old whichway, after all. For that, you need good propaganda. So, heeeeeeeeeeeere’s Wolfgang!:

I KNOW a flower of beauty rare,

Ah, how I hold it dear!
To seek it I would fain repair,

Were I not prison'd here.
My sorrow sore oppresses me,
For when I was at liberty,

I had it close beside me.

Though from this castle's walls so steep

I cast mine eyes around,
And gaze oft from the lofty keep,

The flower can not be found.
Whoe'er would bring it to my sight,
Whether a vassal he, or knight,

My dearest friend I'd deem him.

For that, you need a poet.

This is Not Goethe.
These are Courtiers Jockeying For Position in Versailles

So, Goethe and Linnaeus rhymed the world.

Well, they didn’t exactly think of it first.

That was probably Louis XIV. He’s the one who commissioned the palace of Versailles. He’s the one who had the gardens, the Tuilleries, laid out like a gothic church.

Courtiers Assaulting Police Assaulting Courtiers in Quebec
Thursday, October 27, 2005

300 people demanded free education. Some waved anarchist black flags and threw paint-bombs and rocks at police. Police made no arrests.

See. This is what you get when you stop rhyming in your poetry.

Unlike the church, which relied on stained glass windows to purify the light of the sun and the moon, so that, through the act of the mind they became the true, original light of God, which flooded the dark stone crypt of the Church, and, by extension, our lives in this vale of tears, the Tuilleries were in the blinding, shall we say radioactive, light of day.

This is Not Goethe
This is Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien
Telling the Gomery Inquiry that he Did not Dispense Favours to Gain Favours

Yessirree, to Louis XIV, you didn’t need astrologers to read the Heavens. Civilization had come a long way since those early days. You didn’t need gloomy cathedrals, big stone crypts, lit with light shining through the stories of Heaven. Pshaw.

The sun and moon were right there, without intermediary.

Well, without intermediary other than the formality of a garden set aside to rhyme the world into order.

Witness:

The Tuilleries, or
A Poem A Reader Could Walk Within
It kind of looks like a landing pad for God.

Actually, it kind of looks like one of the magical rooms of an alchemist: perfectly aligned to focus the thought of a perfect God.

No wonder Goethe tried to suggest that life, country life, life as common people lived it, physical life as they experienced it, had within it the potential for art as well. So, he wrote a lot of poems about roses.

Angels of God Assisting Islamic
Penitent in the Subtleties
of Rhyming Verse

Oh, yes, rhyme was everywhere in Goethe’s day. Old lead presses just did a most god-awful job of translating it, that’s all. Like this:

Saw a youth the morning rose
Blooming in the heather,
As her dainty leaves unclose,
Straight to gaze on her he goes,
‘Twas in summer weather.
Rose, thou pretty rose so red,
Rose among the heather.

Rose Among the Heather, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
as translated by hand crank.

This is Goethe
Turning Out Roses by Hand Crank
Well, okay, okay: his soul, anyway

What started as a pretty little poem about a pretty little peasant girl, doesn’t waste much time in becoming a nasty little piece of evidence for why rhyming poetry had a hard time for a century.

And all Goethe wanted to do was write a pious little tract about Mary, Mother of Christ. Christ.

He repeated the theme in his Christmas song, Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen, which he wrote for none other than the King of Rock and Roll himself, the pant-suited glitter king of Graceland, Elvis Presley.

This is Not Elvis
This is Justice Gomery Smiling Down Benificently at Prime Minister Jean Cretien
He looks a bit like God in Time Bandits, doesn’t he.

The rose, you see, was a tidy little Christian symbol for a martyr, and what better religion for martyrs than Christianity?

Or Elvis?

This is Not Elvis
This is Ralph Richardson Playing God in Time Bandits.
He got his first break playing in The Ghoul in 1933.
Here he’s telling the little guys to pick up all those pieces of evil.

You know, the red bloom on your chest from a fatal wound, the fleetness of life, the beauty of the next world, the convenience of MP3, the transitory nature of fame, all that holy bliss.

All this:

Early Sketch for the Tuilleries Gardens
The Rose Window of Notre Dame de Paris

Eve: So, what happened after poetry left off trying to rhyme the world?

Erato, Muse of Poetry: Honey, what makes you think poetry left off trying to rhyme the world?

Eve: Well, I thought Harold said it did. Oh, Erato, I’m in a whirl.

Harold: I thought I said so, too, girl.

Erato: Not at all. I’ve been around. I’ve looked in that ball. I’ve seen it all.

Harold: Oh, Muse, tell us if it is your will.

Erato: I will.

Erato Looks into Her Crystal Ball
In a world of arcs and circles cut by one straight black stick.
Note how Erato’s wearing the Rose Window.
Some things never change.
Painting by John William Waterhouse

Or do they?

Prophetic Disks at the Tuilleries

I wonder if Copernicus knew it was going to turn out like this when he declared that the earth was not at the centre of the universe? That the pattern of continents on the earth did not rhyme with the patterns of the stars? That it wasn’t, well, you know, wasn’t so pretty?

Heck, I wonder if Columbus knew it was going to come to this, when he proved the world was round by sailing around it to get to Jakarta, and wound up in Trinidad instead?

I wonder if Erato knew this.

I wonder if Goethe’s happy rose-sniffing peasants in Russia knew about this when they told the capitalists where to go in 1917:

"Captitalist, get off!"
Old Russian Postcard, with Capitalist
Squatting Right on Hudson’s Bay,
drawn by Gerardus Mercator on Erato’s Magic Sphere

Note that the worker’s pipe has not even been lit.
Oh, the trouble you can get into when you don’t share a light!

I wonder if they all knew that when the world was flat, Erato’s crystal ball was a sphere; now that the world is a sphere, the crystal ball is a disk (flat), telling us not to ride our bikes and telling dogs taking themselves for walks not to bother, actually. Actually. Telling us to go alone, and to go on foot. Actually.

Eve: And did people listen?

Adam: No, they did not listen. Aside: That was my mistake, too.

Harold: I know what you mean. Here are three U.S. Marines in Vietnam. By the looks of it, the marine in the back has just been shot. Of the other two, one is throwing Erato’s lucky ball back at the North Vietnamese Army. No doubt, he’s hoping it’s going to blow up in their faces, but if you ask me, he’s suddenly the only one standing up there.

Erato: Why, look. He’s standing up there all alone.

Marine in the Vietnamese Version of the Tuilleries, Throwing Rocks

What goes around, comes around.

I mean, look what’s happened to Mary. Here she is, having transformed herself into not one but four Vietnamese nuns, waving good-bye: the colonized, waving good-bye to their recolonizers, after their colonizers were given the heave-ho, knowing they’re now going to be left behind to be recolonized by themselves.

Erato: Alone.

Harold: Alone.

Vietnamese Nuns Waving Good-bye to the Tuilleries,
As it Prepares to Fly Back to the United States.

And that’s where poetry has brought us in our time.

Poet dressing up in period costume to try to get a little respect.
Hypocrite Lecteur: Is This Goethe?
Hypocrite Auteur: Yes, this is Goethe.

Harold: I’ve grown a little hard of hearing. What’s Goethe saying, Eve?
Eve: Tweet. I think he’s saying Tweet.
Adam: Oh, let me. I’ve got this new scanner. May I?
Erato: I liked gestettners myself.

Erato’s Found Poem. She calls it: PTA. Source.

Erato: That rhythm, you know. (Pause) You do know, don’t you?
Adam and Eve (together): We know!

And now there's this!

Canadian Poet Carmine Starnino Doing his Goethe Impression
in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry
Erato: Et tu, Brutus!

Eve: That’s what poetry has come to?
Harold: Yes.
Adam: But what does it mean?
Erato: Meaning is over-rated.
Adam: Oh.
Eve: Oh!

Ohhhh.

Next Week: Mark Anthony Speaks to the Romans

Hypocrite Lecteur

2006-03-06T23:05:00.000-08:00

Mon Semblable, Mon Frère.
A Poet and his Reader Prepare Themselves for a Round Around the Indoor Track.

But which is which?

Do you remember when computer salesmen told us that computers would reduce the amount of paper in our lives? For your sake, I hope you’re too young for that disappointment, but chances are, with our collective demographic slide into Grecian Formula, you remember well enough.

If you could just dig yourself out from underneath the darn stuff, that is.

British Woman Demonstrating What to Do With All that Recycled Paper
(1940s)

Oh, yes, you can’t avoid it forever; life is a series of betrayals, sure. Sure. Sure, heard all that before. We’re in this all together — heard that, too. Take my grandmother, for instance, Martha Marsel, born in 1904, Breslau.

1904. Breslau. Man, there isn’t even a Breslau anymore.

Breslau, After British Airmen Dropped Paper On It in 1945

No matter.

No matter, because for Martha, it was about paper, too. Not Greater London’s recycling program. Not Scotties Little Softy. And not 20 lb. bond, 84 bright, of course, on sale this week down at Staples, no. Not even 20% post consumer recycled, with the stretch marks to show for it. Nope. For her, for Grandma herself, who came through the Depression with a depression and a collection of flour sack dresses that even Immelda Marcos wouldn’t be able to match with shoes, it was about paper dishes and paper clothes: the great disappointment in Martha’s life.

That’s what it was.

Canadian Farm Woman’s Dream of the Good Life
British Airways Stewardess in a Paper Dress

Yes, it seems that some advertising folks had assured Martha, during the Second World War, if I remember correctly her disappointment, that in her time a woman’s work would vanish. In her time! Maytag dishwasher? Pshaw! Throw the plates away. Wipe up with a paper towel. Done! Wringer washer, or, for her, yes, a washtub? Nothing doing! Throw the skimpy duds away after one wear. Sure beats those old flour sack dresses. Sure does.

It’s kind of like I Dream of Jeannie!

That’s what it is.

Larry Hagman is Dreaming of Jeannie

Barbara Eden's navel was banned by the network in the original "I Dream of Jeannie." By "I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later" standards had changed, and the navel winked at the world.

The Empress, it seems, was, in the end, not wearing any clothes.

Of course, as the world knew, next to the earlobe, the navel is the most socially acceptable place to ante up to the hardware plate.

Healing Time? 3-6 months.

Hypocrite Lecteur: Not so fast, huh.

Auteur: Ah, but, not so fast yourself. Here’s the Muse herself, the Goddess of poetry. I think she’s contemplating giving up the whole romantic love project for motherhood. That inward, centred gaze, that roundedness. It’s a giveaway.

Hypocrite Lecteur: 9 months, more like.

Erato, the Muse of Lyric Poetry
All Wrapped Up in a Flemish Fabric Mill and
Holding the Whole World in Her Good Hand
(sans continents)
by Hendrik Goltzius.
(I think the other hand had an argument with the machinery.)

Oh, do you hear that? Can you make it out?

Hypocrite Lecteur: Why, I think I hear readers waking from their Eternal Rest.

Auteur: Shh!

Hypocrite Lecteur: Let’s listen, shall we...

Eve (Waking from a nap. She peers.): Honey? (She shakes Adam by the shoulder.) What’s that stuff in the background of Erato’s bedchamber?

Adam (Peers.): Rocks. (Casually.) Just rocks. Just old ruins and stuff. Rocks. It’s nothing. Pshaw. Go back to sleep.

Erato (Stage whisper.): Oh, Evi. Here, let me blow those rocks up a little for you.

Adam (Breaking out into a sweat.): Oh, that’s not necessary.

Erato (blows Adam a kiss): Inspiration is inspiration, darling. Necessity doesn’t enter into it. If you’ve got the technology, use it. Don’t hold back. Are you holding back, Adi? Adi?

Adam: (Blush).

Eve: Who are we talking to dear?

Hypocrite Lecteur: Yourselves. Who do you think?

Evidence Presented to the Court: Adam’s Drawings on Erato’s Wall, detail.

Green: Captain Hook
Yellow: Kilroy Was Here
Blue: Munch’s The Scream

(I’m not making this up. Really!)

Hypocrite Lecteur: Adam, you dog!

Adam: Shh! Keep it down, would you.

Eve: Adi....

Let’s close the door on this little melodrama, shall we, while the Happy Couple sorts it out about just how Adam got to be in Erato’s bedchamber.

Of course, we know better. Robin Skelton was a poet who sang his songs to the muse as well as anyone. He believed that there was only one woman who ever lived, and one man, whose story we tell ourselves over, and over, and over again.

Robin Skelton, Poet
In His Trademark White Suit
Doing his best Gandalf impression
and getting ready to start telling the one story
all over again

Hypocrite Lecteur: How does that repetition come about? Good grief.

Auteur: I’m glad you asked. Evidence abounds. For example, just below there’s an updated picture of Erato, from 1913, when Martha wasn’t even old enough to take First Communion. (Note: Martha was a good catholic girl at that time, and just like the last time, in Goltzius’s 16th Century, Erato’s wearing her sheet along the sweet curve of her thigh, and just like the time before, her head is all tucked and pinned.)
Little known factoid: the goddess of lyric poetry has suffered for centuries from massive headaches.

I mean, it can’t be easy to hold all that stuff up. Move your head too quickly and, wham, you’ve lost your equilibrium, that’s what.

For women like that, ballet was not an aesthetic pursuit. It was chiropractry.

Who knew?

Careful to Keep Her Body in Perfect Alignment
The Muse Keeps Her Eyes on Her Victorian Copier

No Flour Sack Dress for her! Nossir. (Note how she has removed her sewing machine from the table, and replaced it with this little number.)

The muse is a girl on the move, isn’t she! She knows how to change with changing times.

Hypocrite Lecteur: No wonder all those fin de siècle poems were rhymed and in the rhythms of a metronome, though.

No wonder modernist poets like T.S. Eliot got to thinking that poetry could be produced by machine. Check out the rhymes in his original draft of The Waste Land, before Ezra Pound scribbled them all out. Ezra Pound, medievalist, who studied fencing at university, actually.

Hypocrite Lecteur: No wonder new formalist poets want those rhymes back.

No wonder paper dresses didn’t catch on.

And just think. Just think where it all started: in Goethe’s garden.

Hypocrite Lecteur: Goethe’s Garden?

Adam and Eve (Together, as one): Garden?

Auteur: Yes, take a look:

Erato’s Beach Ball at the Entrance to Goethe’s Garden

So, that’s where it got to!
Eve: Adam!
Adam: (Blush.)

And that, folks, is how poetry came to look, up to the modern age.

Next Week: The Modern Age
Next Week, too: Flat Earth Theory

Detailed Plans for Ezra Pound’s Atomic Bomb

2006-02-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

Plans for a bomb, huh.

By a poet. My my.

Bulls Eye
The Mind: a Nuclear First Strike Zone
Oh, those poets. I tell ya.

Good idea, huh! I mean, check this astrologer out:

My message is simple: astrology is a tool. Knowing the energy patterns of the day (or month or year) help us make better decisions. Of course, feelings still overwhelm us, but when a person thinks in cycles, situations blend and flow without requiring constant absolutes. When we view life as always 'becoming', beginnings and endings take on new meaning - bring hope and excitement. Life always holds great promise. We read the messages in the stars' movements to better dance in tune.
Astrologer’s Description of Well... What, exactly?

Ain’t that a found poem, now.

Becoming?

Yeah, check out the Canadian poet Christian Bök on this notion:

The new millennium brings with it the prospect of poetry becoming a weird genre of science-fiction, fusing aesthetic concepts with technical conceits...

If you think that’s weird and exciting, you should read the whole thing.

We are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write poetry for inhuman readers, be they aliens, robots, or clones.

See what I mean?

Poetry is, like, everywhere.

Here, for example, is a found poem, by a poet who has found his way into a world of action beyond most poet’s wildest dreams.

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Found Poem by a Poet lost in Byzantium

As Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch puts it, poets have been working for a long time with a medieval view of the universe.

Robert Kroetsch, Poet With Rounded Corners
and an upgraded version of Eve’s apple, a kind of intellectual astrolabe.

Among poets, Kroetsch is perhaps best known for his long poem "Seed Catalogue" It was inspired by vegetables.

Here’s an inspiring vegetable from the T& Online Seed Catalogue. Just for Robert.

Found Poem Showing Its Found Poem Heart

‘Purple Haze’ is a unique smooth purple Carrot that tapers to a point and reveals a bright orange center when cut. Carrots are good size at 25-28 cm (10-11 in) long! AAS Judges noted the sweet flavor during taste tests. The best presentation of ‘Purple Haze’ Carrots will be when used raw, since cooking will dissolve the purple color. Only normal Carrot growing conditions are needed to produce an abundance of 'Purple Haze' Carrots. Grow 'Purple Haze' Carrots in large containers, with herbs such as parsley and sage.

Of course, seed makers aren’t the only ones riffing off of gardening. Here’s an interview with the Kronos Quartet, in which the musicians talk about adapting Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze to the classical music scene. When they played it as an encore in Vancouver in January, 2006, they blew the electrical system onstage in the Chan Centre, and had to stop before they were done playing back to their own feedback on cello and viola and violin and bass.

Kronos Quartet Choreographing Themselves for an Image in Light
It’s all in the Hands and the Heads
All else is darkness.

Plans for a bomb, huh.

By a poet.

So, let’s just follow up on Kroetsch’s idea for a sec, that poets are still medievalists, alchemists, if you will. Well, Kroetsch and his games in Eden aside, of course.

An Early Version of Kroetsch’s Computer

Cutting an apple through it's girth was the secret handshake of the mysterious Pythagoreans, those masterly mathematicians who understood well, the magical divine proportion (aka the golden section) of the pentagram ... for only through it's girth is the arrangement of the apple's five inner seeds revealed. Check it out at Pregnant Earth.

Another early version of the computer was the astrolabe.

Navigating Through Astrology: the Astrolabe

The astrolabe could be used to solve many problems.
• Night and day timepiece.
• Surveying tool (to measure distances and make more accurate maps).
• Astronomical calculator. A kind of HP calculator of its day.

In its most usual form, the mariner's astrolabe consists of an evenly balanced disk hung by a ring (on a thread or line) and provided with a rotatable alidade with sights. Turning within the circle of degrees marked on the outer edge, the alidade was used to measure the altitudes of the sun or stars. To shoot the sun, the navigator would hold the astrolabe so that sun's rays passed through the upper vane, then turn the alidade until the small beam of light fell on the hole of the lower vane. Presto.

World War II Photographer Shooting the Sun
Build Your Own Version of this Art Installation Here.
For your own safety, do, please, pay special attention to the eye shield. Thanks.

So, what’s a guy to do? He wants to be true to God, but God doesn’t speak to people in words, so you want to be true to God without words, but all you have is words. That’s the poet’s problem.

So, suddenly you have to talk to God without your head, but you’re an intellectual, right, you know how to use that head of yours, right, and suddenly God says, na na, try it without the noggin.

Give a guy a headache, that’s what.

A Poet’s Headache: Flyer Found in Newspaper Box in Chicago
48 Flyers were found over the course of a year.
Distribution was often erratic and unpredictable.
See the entire series.

This is a headache that even Tylenol won’t fix, and Bayer Aspirin? Aw, crumb. Bayer invested in Auschwitz.

It used to be that you could just go to confession, take a cookie on the tongue, transform it through your faith into Christ’s body, have a swig of sanctified wine, transform it through Christ’s Grace into his blood, and swallow hard. That’s how you talked to God. In your gut.

Fortunately, there is relief! Don’t be sad. We have good news! We have new technology to talk to God with now!

A Handheld Found Poem, Primed to Talk with God
Astrological relief is always no more than a button away.

Of course, you’ve got to know how to read the graphs. They go up, and they go down. Like a seesaw. It’s dizzying, that’s what it is. In the Realpolitik of modern life, most people just give up and start a war. Those more bound up with alchemy give up and start a church. (For an exhausting list of new churches, just go to the Watchman Fellowship. For the full experience, scrolling down is more efficient than searching.)

Poor poets. In the modernist century we’ve just come through, the two, wars and churches, often got kind of confused. Here’s an experimental US Navy aircraft, showing just how difficult it was at times for alchemists lost in the byzantine corridors of the new poetics:

The Hiller Helicopter: The Ascension of the Virgin Mary for Everyman

The hardest thing for people to get their heads around in the last century is that a poem has real consequences for real lives. That’s the kicker.

Trying to sort it all out, here’s what the American Catholic Church has to say about justifications for war, which, if you think about it, isn’t a particularly Christian act, is it:

• Just cause. War is permissible only to confront "a real and certain danger," i.e., to protect innocent life, to preserve conditions necessary for decent human existence and to secure basic human rights.
• Competent authority. War must be declared by those with responsibility for public order, not by private groups or individuals.
• Comparative justice. In essence: Which side is sufficiently "right" in a dispute, and are the values at stake critical enough to override the presumption against war? Do the rights and values involved justify killing? Given techniques of propaganda and the ease with which nations and individuals either assume or delude themselves into believing that God or right is clearly on their side, the test of comparative justice may be extremely difficult to apply.
• Right intention. War can be legitimately intended only for the reasons set forth above as a just cause.
•Last resort. For resort to war to be justified, all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted.
•Probability of success. This is a difficult criterion to apply, but its purpose is to prevent irrational resort to force or hopeless resistance when the outcome of either will clearly be disproportionate or futile.
• Proportionality. This means that the damage to be inflicted and the costs incurred by war must be proportionate to the good expected by taking up arms.

How to Fight War and Maintain Your Soul
A handbook for war, meant to prevent war. Source.
Check out the Saint Anthony search engine. And the St. Anthony Messenger. Free!

Poets, all.

Just think, though: the Astrolabe led Columbus to the New World, like a jumping jack upon a string, and then what?

The Czechoslovakian Columbus Discovering the New World
portrayed as an astrolabe.
Pull on his cleverlY-positioned string and he raises arms and legs in surprise.

Then what, indeed. You gotta feel for the guys in the New World our little dancing puppet found. A little alchemical science and suddenly they had a whole world to remake. Here, for an example, are a bunch of them rebuilding the Matterhorn:

Rebuilding the Matterhorn for the New World.
March 1959. Anaheim, California.
God’s work is never done.

And then, there’s ballet. There’s another throwback. There’s another one of God’s hints to how He likes to conduct a conversation, or how people think he likes to conduct one, or just the best we can do, damn it.

Damn it, see: in ballet, nobody talks, because dancers understand this thorny problem with God very well: if you want to dance with God, you gotta dance with your body, but the body doesn’t talk, although it does have vocal cords; although it has vocal cords it can’t use them to talk, because the music, the damned, enthralling music is making all the noise, the damned enthralling Hallelujah of God, and you can’t sing it, because, well, what are you going to do? Shout down God? Not likely. Dance it? Well, hardly. If God has a body, it’s ours.

Ballet is a kind of prayer.

Crossing the Toes and Hoping for the Best:
Ballet’s Dizzying Fifth Position

Yes, you can try this at home: Place one foot in front of the other foot, with both turned out. Feet should be toe to heel.

Here’s the long version, from Mae Blacker Freeman’s Fun With Ballet: A Beginners’ Book for Future Ballerinas, photographed in her own living room, to show girls that they can do this at home:

Poetry by the Seat of Your Pants:
the Fifth Position of Corporeal Poetics

Note the problem Columbus knew all too well: "Now you will have to remember to keep your knees straight because your front knee will want very much to bend a little."
Ain’t that always the way.

In the Twentieth Century, in Pound’s era, photographers gave dance a whirl. That was the rage in those days: to make everything new, to see just how far the new technology could take all of us. It sounded like a reasonable plan. Where did it take us? Aha!

Ballet, that’s where it took us. Check it out:

Here is the flag being raised after the capture of Iwo Jima in World War II.
Photo by Lou Lowery.
Lou had a rather bleak view of the war, didn’t he.

Wait a minute? Not the one you know from the history books? Yeah, I know what you mean. That one was posed for the photographer. I mean, for the first one, they needed a gun. They needed to keep their bearings. They needed to be on the lookout. They were, in effect, looking out. On the second one, we get to look in. It was, thus, understandably enough, the second one that became the most reproduced photo of all time, not the first. Iwo Jima II, the Sequel, captured, so they said at the time and so they still say, the soul of a nation.

You can’t just leave a thing like that to chance. A thing like that is theatre. Check it out:

The Flag: Act Two
No gun required for this one, and this time you actually have a view.
Photo by Joe Rosenthal.

(Joe understood that reality was a fabrication that had to be fabricated.) Good man.

Hey, note the Piscatorial set.

Yup, the German theatre director Erwin Piscator was fooling around with these techniques two decades before the Americans started staging them. Who knew?

Still, the evidence speaks for itself:

Here’s a photograph of his production of Tidal Wave

Film, Live Action, and Statuary
First Rehearsals for the Taking of Iwo Jima
from Erwin Piscator’s 1926 production of Tidal Wave at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Like any good artist looking for perfection, and unwilling to remove himself from the picture, Rosenthal didn’t stop there, at all the helping hands lifting the 100 pound flagpole on top of a mound of what looks like protoparts for the Matterhorn. Here he is having another go at it:

Cast Party
Joe Rosenthal Taking a Picture of the Boys After the Second Flag Was Safely Up
Ahh... that’s better. Hat’s off to you, Joe.

Question is: Who took this picture?
Question is: How many photographers did the marines have for that show?

Want to see it again? Here it is on Instant Replay: Live: The Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima Yes, in this bloody awful battle, this fight to the death, they had a film cameraman along, too.

Who was Best Boy, I wonder?
Who was Grip?

Talk about poetry ahead of its time. There at the end of lyrical poetry, spontaneity of emotion took careful planning. A guy had to organize this stuff like clockwork. No longer could one man scribbling on paper in one attic get the job done.

Chatterton in His Garret: Lyrical Poet Overdosing on Romanticism
but Getting The Job Done
For two centuries, Chatterton has been the image of the poet starving himself for the betterment of a society that, cruelly, didn’t care.
What is that on the left? Pandora’s box?
And those feet: is that fifth position?

Ballet. Everywhere you look.

So, let’s look at it. To solve the problem of silence, the quandary of speaking with God when you can’t speak with God and telling your emotions on stage when the music is drowning you out with its choirs of angels, ballet has come up with code, to help the audience understand the emotions in a dance. It’s as much as giving up in defeat before you even begin, but there it is. If you’re going to understand 20th century journalism, if you’re going to understand those war correspondents in the Pacific Theatre of World War II, you’re going to need to understand this.

Kind of the iambic pentameter of our time.

Kind of.

Ballerinas descending on a Hilltop in Vietnam
We’re a long way from the Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee Flying Plathome, aren’t we.

Oh, yeah, here’s the soundtrack:

LOVE Hands cupped under the heart.
MARRY With the index finger of the right hand make a large circle and then point to the wedding-ring finger of the left hand.
BEAUTIFUL With the back of the right hand, circle the face in a caress.
SADNESS Trace tears running down the face with fingers.
WEEPING Hide the face in both hands or rub eyes with clenched fists.
DANCE Circle the hands around each other above the head.
KISS Touch the lips with the finger.
BEG Clasp hands, elbows dropped.
ANGER Arms above the head, clenched fists are shaken.
QUEEN With the thumb in and fingers lifted, make a three-pointed crown above the head.

As usual, the ballerinas were there first. Who knew.

The Influence of Ballet on the American Marines
Note the clever choreography and the webcam on the MP’s helmet.
Note as well the gardener’s kneepads.
Planting a seed in the garden of the Lord.
And the Greek Chorus in the background.
Amen.

The marines, for one. They knew. Here’s their slogan:
First to Fight. Marines have been in the forefront of every American war. They entered the Revolution in 1775, even before the Declaration of Independence was signed! Source: Marine Wives.

And that’s just the difficulty of taking poetry to the streets. The streets start to mess with your head.

You see, I could show you plans for a nuclear bomb, like this German sketch:

Astrolabe with a Core of Enriched Uranium

Just one version of the German Atomic Bomb. This was the low tech version. Basically a nuclear reactor in a Bathysphere, the force of impact would replace the carefully-aligned high explosives necessary to trigger the American version.

Hitler was loath to use it, because he thought it would melt down to the core of the earth and blow his 1000 Year Reich into atoms. No one knew the answer to that fear.

As if fear has any answer other than more fear.

The problem is, as the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges said in his essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins":

Obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is. "This world", wrote David Hume, "...was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on..." We must go even further; we must suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense inherent in that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonymies of God’s secret dictionary.

Jorge Luis Borges
The ghostwriter of God’s secret dictionary.

The world recedes in infinite regression, like a hall of mirrors.

So does Ezra Pound’s nuclear bomb. So, let’s catch it quick, before it scuttles into its hole in the wainscoting.

Hot on the trail, here’s one of Pound’s blueprints, rescued from the US Army Detention Camp at Pisa, where he was up against a charge of treason, and where his fellow inmates were occasionally taken out and hung by the neck until dead:

Schematic Diagram of a Nuclear Bomb
in an ancient cipher
buried within Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXIV

Taking a bomb like that apart is, of course, a tricky business. After all, you don’t want to set it off. Here, however, are the pieces:

•introductory statement (like any good essay)
The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders

• soundbite, like any good radio news report:
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed

• historical commentary (death of Mussolini), like any good newsreel
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano...

• Reference back to the soundbite, like any good play-by-play at the superbowl:
That maggots shd/eat the dead bullock
Digenes,

• Narrator making a plea to the audience, breaking the proscenium arch:
but the twice crucified, where in history will you find it?

• Literary reference to T.S. Eliot (de rigeur)
yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper

• Literary reference, to tie all the themes together (Dante)
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.

So, that’s how it’s done.

Here’s the fuse mechanism:

Fuse Mechanism for the Pound Atomic Bomb
Its counterpart in music would be the drone, like the bagpipe. HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.

Hear that?

HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Members of the RAAF Central Band discovering the importance of homely tunes while playing for personnel in the Middle East Area of Operations.
Note: In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout much or all of a piece, sustained or repeated, and most often establishing a tonality upon which the rest of the piece is built.

Truth is stranger than fiction: that’s what poetry does, too. Who knew!

Early Bagpipe Player
In poetry, just as in bagpipe playing, structure is not a device. It is the message.

Eve: How does Pound get away with making a bomb?

Adam: Yeah. We weren’t too good at getting away with anything.

Harold: Um, Eve?

Eve: Yes, Harold?

Harold: What’s your middle name, Eve?

Adam: Don’t tell him Eve. He can’t ask you that.

Eve: Oh, it’s all right, Adam. Pandora, Harold. It’s Pandora. Your turn, Harold.

Harold: Arthur.

Eve: No, not the name. What a curious name. No, I mean how Pound got away with it.

Harold. Oh. It’s the frame. That’s what it is. It’s the principle of the found poem. That’s how Pound got away with it.

The Medium is the Message

A stamp imitating alchemist Marshall Mcluhan holding an Astrolabe Bagpipe focussed on an image of Marshall Mcluhan, all in an easy-tear, lick with your tongue and stick frame. That’s how Pound got away with it.

Adam: That’s what it is?

Harold: That’s what it is.

Adam: By taking a piece of writing out of context, no matter where it is found, it becomes a poem?

Harold: That’s the principle. But actually, it’s not just a poem.

Eve: It’s not?

Harold: No.

A poetry machine, the ultimate struggle with silence.

Poetry composed by a machine for its own instinctive purposes and projected on a wall for a human audience.
Marshall Mcluhan, who coined the phrase, "The Medium is the Message," was a friend of Ezra Pound. He used to go down to Washington to visit him in the insane asylum.
Note the split ray of light.

"A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him."
Ezra Pound.

But, you know, Pound started off in the age of steam engines:

Old Steam Engine in Fremont, California
The internet of its day.
Now? Off-line. I mean, this baby was even pre-Commodore 64.

Robert Kroetsch was right. It’s all getting a little rusty. All this heavy industry, this bang the world out of coal and iron, I mean, it’s so old. Better to plant a garden, indeed.

Now the world is just a poem, that’s all. Now we’re in the age like this:

Electronic Steam Train

It’s just the whistle, really. Instead of an entire industrial establishment to support it, with section stops and coal mines and water towers sprinkled down the track at towns that never became towns but which were marked on maps nonetheless, all you need is a nine volt battery. Toot toot.

Ain’t that the thing. In all his struggle to beat silence, through words, Pound succeeded, and then found himself trapped in words. He was so annoyed, that for his last eight years he did not say a thing. Well, not to poets and literary critics, anyway. He still had lots of time to chat with people he knew from the street, in Venice. But to the rest of them he clammed up and glared.

Well, it was a nice gesture, but it was too late. The cat’s out of the bag. There’s no going back, not even to the Hiller VZ-1E Flying Plahome VTOL Experimental Vehicle.

Pandora’s Washtub?
The US Army gets in on the poetry game, lifting a man to God with the force of an idea.

Thing is, now that Pound opened up Pandora’s box, the mind has invaded the territory of the body. The ballerinas were there first, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

Eve: I was there.
Adam: It was heavy holding her up there so she could pick the apple.

Eve: Pas de deux, Adam.

Adam: Pardon?

Eve: A duet. In its traditional form, it begins with an entree and adagio, followed by solo variations for each dancer, and a coda.

Adam: Yeah, whatever. A coda? What’s the coda?

There’s no going back.

Feet as Quantum Particles.
No-one knows the half life on these things.

Like the dancers say: it’s all about the body. It’s all about the body and covering it up.

A Walrus in First Position,
without her ballet slippers on.
Photo by Paul Nicklen.

Blush.

Poetry, huh.

Next week: Goethe’s Garden

The Canadian-American Poetry Wars

2006-02-01T22:59:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1970s, it was the ultimate in Canadian fashion to traipse around Europe with a Canadian flag sewn to your backpack. You wouldn’t, you see, be mistaken for an American.

Canadian Backpack In Thailand
In the New World Order, a Canadian Flag is No Longer Enough

We got here, what, the Ontario flag (maple leaf), the Quebec flag (fleur de lys), and a stuffed moose with, what’s that? Oak leaf antlers?

But, that’s the Canadian way. I’ve been in the Geneva airport, when a soldier kneeled down in the middle of the waiting hall and changed a clip in his submachine gun. I’ve been in the Amsterdam airport, with the suitcases spread out on the asphalt below the plane. I had to identify my suitcases to a heavily armed soldier, before I could board. And in Vancouver, Canada? In Vancouver they make you wait. That’s the ticket. A half hour at customs (30 seconds in Amsterdam), and you’re ready to give yourself away, I tell you. By the time it’s your turn in line, you’ve been observed, filmed, and observed again. They got your number.

Piece of cake, really.

This is called the sweat-it-out method of security.

Raven, Grizzly Bear, and Friends Paddling Through the Sweat
Security detail at the Vancouver International Airport
Sculpture by Bill Reid
Sometimes, of course, people get through. Hey, no one’s perfect.

Oh, dear. Well, there’s a long history of Canada going it alone, isn’t there. After all, when Ezra Pound was shacked up in Europe, creating modern poetry, what were the Canadian poets doing, exactly?

Well, um, yeah. Well, Al Purdy was flying around over Europe looking for Ezra’s friends, that’s what. He only became a poet after that experience.

Here’s a picture of Purdy demonstrating his flying technique, from Forget Magazine.

Al Purdy Preparing to Drop a Poetry Bomb
Canada: the low-tech answer to global security. This picture heads a lyrical memoir of Al Purdy.

Ain’t that just the thing, though.

You see, Canada is big. Canada has more geography than people. Canada has more cows than people. Canada has more potholes in more roads than people. While Walt Whitman and friends were singing America into the West, Canada was still trying to map its west.

So, by the time civilization got to Ezra Pound, who kneeled at Whitman’s feet, and went on to make a map of civilization, mostly so he could blow the whole project up, and, get this, save it that way!, Canada was still fussing around with visual poetry.

The poems they used proved to be pretty good. Way better than the darned WWII bombsights. Those couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn door. Heck, they couldn’t even hit the barn.

Norden Bombsight from World War II
Barn Doors proved to be quite safe.
Yes sirree, while American pilots were busy writing, and reading, poetry about their bombsights, Canadians were off putting them to the test in real Poetry Slam conditions.

(In the view of its exponents, the point of slam is to challenge the authority of anyone who pretends to know absolutely what literary quality is. So sayeth Wikipedia.)

Don’t believe me that the Americans were being more dutiful about their poetry? Here is a poetry excerpt from the Pilot Training Manual of the B-17 Flying Fortress. Notice the very Whitmanesque phrasing:

He must know and understand his bombsight, what it does, and how it does it.
He must thoroughly understand the operation and upkeep of his bombing instruments and equipment.
He must know that his racks, switches, controls, releases, doors, linkage, etc., are in first class operating condition.
He must understand the automatic pilot as it pertains to bombing.
He must know how to set it up, make any adjustments and minor repairs while in flight.
He must know how to operate all gun positions in the airplane.
He must know how to load and clear simple stoppages and jams of machine guns while in flight.
He must be able to load and fuse his own bombs.
He must understand the destructive power of bombs and must know the vulnerable spots on various types of targets.
He must understand the bombing problem, bombing probabilities, bombing errors, etc.
He must be thoroughly versed in target identification and in aircraft identification.

American Pilots taking the Oath
before being shown their bombsight.

Doesn’t it all remind you just a little bit of Monty Python’s Holy Hand Grenade?

More to the point: are you tempted to build your own?

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, without fanfare, here’s an example of a map the Canadians used to locate Pound’s friends and blow them, preferably, to hell.

Top Secret British Bombing Map of the Peenemünde Rocket Site in WWII

When the British and Canadians Bombed this Rocket Factory, they killed mostly the concentration camp inmates who were building the future headquarters of the German Atomic Project.

Poetry, that’s to say Pound’s poetry, had gone nuclear, and it had to be stopped. The Canadians saw that.

This was years before Iraq. This was years before Iran. This was before Korea, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel.

Canada has always been interested in keeping the peace.

Well, almost.

Canadian Songwriter Stan Rogers
Wishing He, Too, could take the Northwest Passage.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea. Stan Rogers.
(More on that next week, folks.)

The Germans, Pound’s buddies in taking poetry to the people, wound up building their reactor in a schoolhouse in Stadtilm, a small town south of Berlin, instead of locating it to the now-compromised Peenemünde. Poetry, after all, has been kept alive by the school system for a long, long time.

In fact, splinters of wood and radioactive paraffin from the explosion of one of their failed reactor experiments still lie scattered around in the yard.

Yes, without heavy water, the Germans resorted to paraffin to slow down their reaction, so that it didn’t blow up. Who knew!

Paraffin is the favourite fuel of fire breathers. It works great in candles, too, and in hybrid rockets, and is just great for manicures and pedicures, but it’s not so good at cooling down a nuclear reactor, except maybe to make them smell nice. Here are some basic recipes.

Oops.

One of the School Boys Expelled
to Make Way for the German Nuclear Project?
Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebels Shaking the Hand
of a Hitler Youth Off to Find Free Verse

Ezra said he could write better propaganda than this man.
The third guy in thinks so, too, but the second guy, he’s not so sure about this art thing. After all, when the artists start using real bullets, what then?

What then, indeed. It must have been hard to have been a poet in that time.

I mean, look at this:

Poetry Control Panel from B-17 Bomber
It all started with the Dadaists and their automatic writing.

Here’s a picture from the anti-art magazine Der Dada, showing a German prototype of the poetry autopilot in action. (Notice how Dada-- Nonsense -- comes lovingly out of the autopilot's inky mouth, just like, well, data.)

A quick comparison with the American version above ought to make it clear why the Germans lost the war.

Ok, I’ll give the ending away. I’ll tell you what happens: down in Italy, Pound ran out of paraffin candles, and had to turn on the electric light.

Eve (waking languorously in Hamlet’s garden): Gasp!

This was in the last days of WWII, when Hitler was stalling, trying to keep the war going long enough to finish his Atomic bomb.

Apparently he did. In his book Hitlers Bombe, historian Rainer Karsch proposes that German atomic scientists had created, well, a bazooka shell, basically, powered by two ounces of heavy water, that would blow up a lot more than a tank.

By that time, Pound was already in jail for reading the world as a poem.

The 150 Mile House, B.C. Courthouse
Justice: As a Poet Sees It

Once you invent an atomic bomb, someone is always going to try to get you to go back and live in a book instead.

Who said that art didn’t have its risks? Sheesh.

Pound Stuck Back Into a Book
and Taking it Hard
A German Edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos
(First published when Pound was incarcerated
in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane.)

Why was that?

Oh, the usual thing.

Here he is, speaking to the BBC, outlining his antipathy towards all forms of bureaucracy.

Dangerous work.

Yeah, tell me about it. I was in Copenhagen the day this baby blew, and dropped bits of itself over me.

I didn’t exactly glow in the dark, but, well, still.

Still.

The Chernobyl Reactor After the Poets Turned Off All the Safety Controls and Played Around

I live with abandon!
I live, breathing you!
And for you, I am ready to go
into the inferno again!
But with merciful hands you extinguish
the fatal fire under me.
My beloved,
may God protect you!
May the flame of the redeemed soul shield you!
Libuov Sirata, from Chernobyl Poems

They grew the greatest strawberries there once.

Here’s what Chernobyl writer Vesa Goldsworthy has to say about that little poetic experiment, in her memoir Chernobyl Strawberries:

Chernobyl Strawberries is, on the face of it, a narrative that has frequently been written before: intellectual grows up under communism before making new life on cushier side of Iron Curtain. Its author is conscious that she has none of the usual horror stories to offer the Amnesty diehards and Schadenfreude junkies who form the genre's traditional fan base. "I have never seen the inside of a prison cell," Vesna Goldsworthy warns, "never been tortured for any beliefs. I didn't escape to the West under a train or through barbed-wire fences. Much though I would have liked to, I've never had to memorize any poetry." Listen.

Who knew.

Damn, but the poets have a lot to answer for.

Next Week: The American-Canadian Dispute Over the Northwest Passage, and Detailed Plans for Pound’s Bomb, so You can Build one at home, and Drive it Away in comfort.

Sneak Preview:

Early Desktop computer, complete With Steering Wheel
for easier cornering around line breaks. 1949.
(Next week find out how Pound had a far simpler system. Sheesh.)

If you need something done, ask an experimental poet. Even if he’s in the nut house.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
Pablo Picasso

Thanks for All the Fish

2006-01-23T14:39:00.000-08:00

An Endangered Canadian Poet, Once that Most Abundant of Species, Giving His Two Cents Worth
Poet Carmine Starnino Wants New Fishing Regulations

First it was the cod. There were lots. There were lots and lots of cod. There were cod coming out of Newfoundland’s magic waters for 400 years. There were big cod and little cod, all with their mouths like ladies' silk purses. You could row a wooden boat off of any bay on Newfoundland, dodge the icebergs, drop down an old bent-up coathanger, and catch cod until you thought cod were God.

God were cod.

Newfoundlanders were fishing for cod before the Plains Indian got the horse.
They used to sing songs and dance dances, as maps to the fishing grounds.

There were a lot of cod.

X Marks the Spot
1693 Newfoundland Pirate Map
Showing all the singing dories of Newfoundland, on the right.

Here’s an excerpt about that from the showing Living On Earth:

BEST: [SINGING] From Bonavist' Cape to the stinkin' isles, The course is north for 40 miles, When you must steer away noreast till Cape Freells Gull Island bears nor' norwest. Then nor' norwest 33 miles, three leagues offshore lies Whadhams Isles, where all the rock you must take there, two miles south scuddies from miles it bears...

BEST: Sometimes songs were used as navigational aids for people who couldn't really read charts and maps. And you wanted to be able to make the right turns to get around the reefs and rocks and stuff, you know.

BROOKES: So, it's kind of a sung map? The Whole Show. (Audio, too.)

All gone.

It’s for the tourists now.

Now.

Now, according to Carmine Starnino, in his book A Lover’s Quarrel, it’s poets, too.

Whichever Way You Look at it: Carmine Starnino is Unhappy

Poets.

The heart and soul of the nation.

The mapmakers of the fishing grounds of our heads and our hearts.

Poof.

Gone.

Unhappy doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Who would have thought it! Poetry as tourist attraction. Is that all we have left? It’s not as if we’re talking about the carrier pigeon here, folks. After four generations of government support, they’re everywhere. Who knew! Poets by the thousands. Poetry books popping out of the woodwork.

And few readers.

Ah, ahem. Really?

Canadian Poetry Reader Keeping His Eye on the By Catch
Worldwide, 1/4 of all fish caught in the sea are thrown back, dead.
Readers have never had it so good.

It is, of course, a wasteful way to make fish and chips.

But that’s what you get when you introduce foreign species into an ecosystem. Look what happened to the Plains Indians when they got the horse:

Horses helped Indians do virtually everything—move, hunt, trade, and wage war—more effectively, but they also disrupted subsistence economies, wrecked grassland and bison ecologies, created new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare.
The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures by Pekka Hämäläinen

Ouch.

They are left with masks. In museums.

I guess that's a choice we have to make sometimes: to keep using something, even if it goes ragged, or to pin it up to a wall and charge people to come and shoot at it.

Sooooooo.... while you're adjusting your aim, why not check out this little piece of museum work?

Newfoundland Poets Sing for their Supper (and their editors)
In his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the WorldMark Kurlansky has written what Library Journal describes as an "engaging history of a ‘1000-year fishing spree.’"

Well, that's one way of going about it.

Starnino’s solution to the disruption of ecology by the introduction of the poet to the Canadian diet is to institute a new list of fishing regulations:

Carmine Starnino’s New Fishing Regulations

A poem will rhyme.
A poem will use classical English metrics.
Anything else will be thrown back as a fraud.

Thanks, Carmine.

Fraudulent Poets, Thrown Back Into the Sea to Sink or Swim

Yes, that’s the ticket.

Go for the biggest fish. Nothing else will do. Take your big ideological trawler and hit the high seas, outside Canada’s 200 Mile Nautical limit. Let down your nets. Drag them around for awhile, and bring them back up. Put it all on ice, and Bring all those real Canadian poets home to Montreal!

Hint: You can serve them (or enjoy them) here.

Another hint: Here’s the seafood Menu:

Warning! This is not a poem! Read at your own risk!

Seafood Menu

Mussels Marinière
Fillet of Sole Meunière
Halibut Steak
Doré Amandine
Coquille Saint-Jacques
Frog Legs Provençale
Shrimps Sautéed in Garlic Butter
Scallops Sautéed in Garlic Butter
Fried Squid
Fillet of Red Salmon
Broiled Icelandic Scampis
Broiled Alaska King Crab Legs
Lobster Tail
Fresh Lobster Boiled or Broiled (market price)
Seafood Platter
Fresh Lobster Boiled or Broiled

Don’t forget. Specials start from $7.95.

The trouble with drifts nets, though, is they have a lot of by-catch. You know: stuff you throw back. Weird stuff. Stuff the gulls eat.

The Always Clever and Passionate Canadian Poet Carmine Starnino
He believes that the best way to have a Canadian identity is to be cool about it.

The question is: is it possible to have a country with no identity?

With the exception of Starnino, who is really annoyed that Canadian poetry is unknown around the world, the answer, appears to be, yes, it is possible — at least among those who realize, these days, that poetry is not written on paper, that it is, instead, written on the world.

Even Shakespeare knew that, though. Don’t believe it? Let’s peek in on the late night feature screening of his play As You Like It, shall we?

O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books
And in their barks my thoughts I'll character;
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness'd every where.
Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she.

See: you don’t need pulp and paper plants when you write right on the trees. You don’t need Ancient Forest Friendly Paper. That’s what Shakespeare imagined: a return to the garden of Eden. Poems on every tree trunk.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Reborn
and Happily Turning Trees into Trochees, Dactyls, and Iambs
Paper Mill in Quesnel B.C.
http://www.joeyonly.com/pics/quesnel/IMG_0071.jpg
Check it Out. Here’s a whole forest waiting to go on stage.
Of course, you don’t get that view from Montreal.

No wonder Canadians are confused. Such a huge stage and the audiences don’t come. No wonder Carmine is trying to do something about it. My God Cod, I’m with him on that one.

I like those big trees. Here’s a few with poems nailed to their trunks:

Shakespeare on the Hit and Run
Poetry Without a Book to Rest In

Because we’re never ones to rest on our laurels, Canadians have internalized the disappointment. Has this helped?

Equality for all, we say. From $600 US.

Harold: Has equality for all helped, Eve?

Eve: Well, let’s backtrack and take it one step at a time, OK?

Harold: Ok.

Eve: Because you’re getting a little ahead of me here.

Harold: Ok. You want me to dance it instead?

Adam: No, no, Harold. That won’t be necessary.

Eve: Thanks, Adam. (Turning to me with a big smile.) So, you’re saying, up to now, we’ve tried to slip this identity angst through parliament as an issue of equity?

Adam: Including recent and controversial bills to legalize same sex marriage?

Harold: Well, yes. Without identity, the body is a blank slate for the mind.

The Body is a Blank Slate for the Mind, or
No Canadian poet can shoot down those futurist poets in Europe without the help of the working man.
Coming Soon to a Pulp Mill Near You.
Yessir.

Eve: Harold, that’s just what I mean. (Softening.) Oh, Harold. It’s good to see that poetry can still whip up some interest, indeed, but, you know, still. And, yesssss, maybe transgenderism and homosexuality are not quite the way to sneak it past the neighbour’s radar, but, well, still, right. Right?

Harold: (Crestfallen) Right. Would this work, then? I mean, to slip it past the neighbour’s radar?

Eve: (Shrugs and turns to Adam in despair.)

Adam: (Trying a new angle of approach.) So, it’s a nation of poets?

Harold: And politicians, yes.

Canadian Politician and Auto Parts Heiress Belinda Stronach
Puckering Up for the Voters
She doesn’t look too happy about it, though, does she.

Eve: (Exasperating! Making another try.) So, if Canadian poets don’t get on Oprah. I mean, if they don’t get any useful recognition ...

Harold : Um... that would be all poets.

Adam: Right, if poets can’t get on Oprah, what reward have they had for their work? What possible reward could there be for turning yourself into by-catch?

Harold: Well, this, actually...

Poetic By-Catch
The Italian Renaissance Poet Petrarch Turning into a Teenaged Girl
Note the plucked eyebrows
This is what has traditionally been called Literary Cross Dressing.
Note the eyes that don’t line up!

Eve: (Still confused.) For this he invented the sonnet? I’m not sure I’d give that man a God to eat.

Adam: He looks a bit like a Cod.

Harold: The thing is, Petrarch was a Canadian before his time.

Eve: And there’s the trouble.

The COD has no entry for "sexual desire"
According to Lorie Boucher.

Here’s a teaser of what she says:

The reader’s noble quest for dirty knowledge ends thusly in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary; searching for sexual desire is fruitless. It’s not as though valuable dictionary real estate cannot afford one more compound word related to sexuality — the COD includes definitions for sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual interference, and sexually transmitted disease. If one were in the habit of highlighting coincidental omissions to suit his or her own theses and had no aversion to non-scientific, correlative deductions, one might wonder whether the absent definition for sexual desire is deliberate. As the Canadian language authority, is the COD making a statement about the Canadian sexual consciousness by circumscribing the points of reference to abuse, assault, harassment, interference, and disease?

Succinctly, she adds:

Luckily, the COD does not have the last word on Canadian sex language.

Indeed.

Still, in this age of overfishing, can you see Canada’s poets dressing up like Petrarch? Can you see them buying their laurel leaves here? (scroll down) Real quality: hand-made out of formed rubber, not paper? $3.00 each or 12 at $2.50? Sure, in the 14th Century, even, yes, in the 1970s, but now....?

Or maybe this?

Codfish Imitating Canadian Poet John Ralston Saul

Eve: Exactly. Cod was always playing with fish.

Oh, what a tangle of lines and lures! Now the poets of Canada are writing poetry reviews. Now they’re dancing for the tourists. Now they’re off leading poetry workshops. Now they’re, gasp!, turning away from cod, to ... wild salmon.

Here’s a picture of Canadian poet D.C. Reid, after landing a real vilanelle.

In fact, now they’re secretely writing novels.

Hey, sometimes not so secretely.

Margaret Atwood is a Poet Who Writes Novels
She outed herself years ago, with a novel called, appropriately enough, Surfacing

Now she’s outed herself again with a device that will sign books at a distance.

She claims it will better allow her to stare her readers in the eye. Vote here on Atwood’s poem about the fish hooks and eyes. When I last checked, it had a user approval rating of 82%

Eve: Gasp!

Adam: (With notebook in hand.) Ummm.... how many poets are still in the closet?

Harold: That’s not the point. That’s not what Leonard Cohen has been asking us to realize for fifty years. Leonard wants us to realize that we’re all guilty. Being from Montreal, you see, he had a healthy confrontation with French culture, like, I would expect, this police photography session from the movie Les Quatre Cents Coups/ The 400 Blows:

Demonstration of French Aesthetic Technique
from Les Quatre Cents Coups

334 CU. Mme Doniel is sitting in the Judge's chambers. During the interview, she is very nervous and continually fidgets with her scarf and shifts her eyes.

MME DOINEL: If it came to that we could take him back, but he'd have to promise to change completely. If only you could scare him, Your Honor.

335 CU of the Judge.
,
JUDGE: But that's not my role, Madame.

336 CU of Mme Doinel.

MME DOINEL: But we can't control him.

337 CU of the Judge.

JUDGE: Perhaps you exercise control, too . . . intermittently. Tell me, is it true that for an entire weekend he was left . . . alone at home?

338 CU OF Mme Doinel.

MME DOINEL (pausing a moment): My husband is busy with an automobile club . . . It's possible we left the child alone sometimes . . . He hates sports - he'd rather stay shut up for hours at the movies and ruin his eyes.
scene from Les Quatre Cents Coups / The 400 Blows

Those French know how to take a shot.

Oh, but that’s not all that’s out of line in the Canadian house of literature. Now the novelists are complaining that no one buys novels anymore. Now the non-fiction writers claim that no one buys non fiction. Well, what are they buying? Poetry?

Aha, so That’s What People Are Reading in There!

I think it’s fair to say that nobody knows what they’re buying, actually. To combat this, though, some poets are bringing out the heavy guns.

Canadian Poetry Field Artillery:

"I used to hate poetry. I still do at times - another clever image, another felicitous line and I'll go crazy." Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino, Montreal poet and critic,
who believes that "a Canadian poem must, in a sense, be cold to its Canadianness" (The Danforth Review), and who says, his voice drenched with good old chill-you-to-the-bone Canadian snow,

"I’m having a lot of healthy fun hurting my career, especially when the concern for one’s "career" is, as you well know, part of the sophisticated payback system of checks and balances put into place to better maintain our conspiracy of silence,"

believes that Canadian poetry is the confrontation of English poetry with Canadian experience.

Christian Vézina: A Canadian Poet
I ask you: is this English?

Poète, récitaliste, amoureux des mots, Christian Vézina réinvente l'art de dire. Depuis près de vingt ans, Christian Vézina monte sur scène pour nous faire découvrir les trésors de la littérature et démythifier la poésie.

I’m not so sure what Starnino thinks of French Canadian poets, or poets in the west who, because of isolation from Starnino’s beloved and lovable Montreal or just a completely different history altogether, have confronted American or European poetry instead, or, even, have confronted Canadian poetry from the outside, because that’s the kind of country it is, but, you know, I think Carmine Starnino, who passionately wants Canadian poetry to be part of the world, well, he should be more careful with this words.

Otherwise it’s not even funny anymore.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien
Proud to be French
He kept us out of the Iraq mess, too.

I don’t get it.

English tradition? Canadian experience?

Yeah, maybe. Still, Starnino’s parents came from Italy in the same decade during which my father came from Germany. If we’ve confronted British tradition, it has been from a Canadian experience rooted as much in Europe as in Canada.

Mussolini the Toy Soldier (Centre):
A Piece of European Tradition Which I Can’t Get Out of My Head

The symbol of Italian fascism was the bundle of sticks tied up with a rope and an ax, carried by the soldier to the right. In this old roman device, each stick symbolizes industries, people, or nations bound together. Individually they can be broken, but together, and bound by an axe, a single strong leader, they are invincible.

Mussolini liked that idea. He put this symbol on his flag.

He also got his very own cigarette lighter.

Dictator With a Fiery Tongue: Flip Top Mussolini

He also got his very own poet, although the evidence suggests that he didn’t really want him: Ezra Pound, American, modernist, angry, devoted. During World War II, Pound considered himself the only patriot left in the United States — so much so that he spent the war in Italy, broadcasting to the American troops that if they understood their constitution, if they understood economics, if they read poetry, for God’s sake, they would realize there was no need for war, that the war was, in fact, not only inconstitutional, but in really bad taste.

Pound was interred for 13 years in an insane asylum for that one.

Needless to say, he did not get his very own cigarette lighter.

Still, even when you’re a strong-willed man used to telling people what to do, when tradition tells you to look in one direction and your heart tells you to look in another, where, exactly are you going to look?

The Elderly Ezra Pound,
returned to Italy as an unrepentent Fascist,
showing his readers where to look.

Here’s what he wrote about Mussolini, while the American Army held him in a gorilla cage:

"The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders."

The other inmates housed along with him were the murderers and rapists of the American Army. Murderers and rapists, in an army? Now, that takes some doing, I would expect.

With his line about the shoulders, Pound, the man who invented modern poetry in English, suggests that Mussolini was a peasant who brought a real message of the people from the land itself. Pound goes on (and on) to make links, links to ancient sacrifice. In fact, the suggestion is that Mussolini’s blood is going to fertilize another revival of people from the good earth.

Something like this maybe?

Dictator as Future Fertilizer
Martin Sheen Sacrifices Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now
British Literature Meets American Literature Meets Vietnamese Experience

For a modernist, Pound wasn’t so modern in the end, now was he!

Pound wrote his famous lines about Mussolini, of course, after his experiment with poetry as dictatorship came to ruin, and before he was sickened by the brutality he saw within human nature: before he figured out that the only way to win a war was to become the war.

Fast forwarding to Ezra’s final years, when soldiers from his country were going on manhunts in the jungles of Vietnam...

in Apocalpyse Now it becomes pretty clear to everybody that no civilized man can win a war. Nobody likes it much, but there you have it.

It’s in the script. Did you see it?

Kurtz, Marlon Brando’s character in the movie, has this to say about war:

Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now
We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army....

Sound familiar? Just compare:

Mussolini: Poster Boy for Italian Wine
Compare the image on the Right with Colonel Kurtz Above

Still not convinced that the blood sacrifice worked, that the American sacrifice of Mussolini in World War II came back to haunt American experience? Try this:

Was it Really Marlon Brando Playing Colonel Kurtz?

Literary influences are awfully hard to track down, aren’t they, but there it is, in a nutshell: Pound’s map to poetry, put in practice: image set against image, set against image, and out of that a world is born, human consciousness is born, as a spark of light.

Poetry as quick work with a pair of sharp scissors and some glue.

That’s how Pound saw it.

Or as Pound said himself: A poet uses an axe to fashion an axehandle out of a stick. The model for the handle is right there in his hands.

The Difficulty of Making Axe Handles in a Beetle-Killed Forest
Here in the Interior of British Columbia, in the West of Canada, the problem with applying fascist principles is readily apparent: just try bundling this firewood (and the axe, too) up with a rope.

Na, truth is, when it was still a tree, that’s when it had some strength.

Nothing that a few beetles pumped up on global warming can’t take care of, though.

Nothing that a few beetles rich as kings in a province that replaced all of its forests with quick-growing lodgepole pine can’t take care of, though.

In Chinook Jargon, the trade language of old British Columbia, that’s what trees were: sticks.

Such as: I live in the sticks. Meaning, I live in the bush, meaning "This is beyond the end of the earth."

What with our pulp mills and global warming, can we really afford to say that anymore?

Central Planning Kingpin Benito Krampus Mussolini
Hanging onto his stick to the very end

Eve: OK, OK, so central planning has had its successes and failures in British Columbia.

Harold: It sure has.

Eve: How did it work for Pound and poetry?

Adam: Yes, that’s the thing. Did people pick up Pound’s books and follow the map? That’s what Carmine wants to know.

Eve: Yes, that’s what I was asking.

Adam: And if they did, if they picked up his books on art, economics, poetry, and the love songs of Ancient Egypt, where on earth did they end up?

Eve: Yes. Love songs. Precisely.

Adam: (Looking up brightly.) In the confrontation of British Tradition with North American Experience?

Harold: Not exactly.

What Confrontation?
U.S. Revolutionary War Reenactment, down home style.

Next week: Ezra Pound’s Atomic Bomb

Poetry Has An Image Problem

2006-01-16T00:17:00.000-08:00

The Poet’s Oath
to be sworn before and after writing a poem
or reading one
(Taken from a 19th Century Shropshire Court House)

This notice is posted because I'm writing from Canada — and during a Federal Election, too. Not just that, but I'm also writing from British Columbia, which is the part of Canada cut off from the rest of the country by the cookie cutter of the Rocky Mountains.

Canadians like to say that British Columbia politics is a circus. Na, it’s just that we’re at war, that’s all.

As evidence, I submit a World War II document, published by the C.C.F. Party, the forerunner of the contemporary New Democratic Party.

Rather than being a purely historical document, it reads like a pretty good explanation of British Columbian literature today, because in British Columbia poetry follows politics, not the other way around. Read on:

from Economics for Workers by Geo. W. Weaver,
Published Under the Auspices of the Education Committee, C.C.F. -- B.C. Section. 1942.
The Cold War must have been murder on C.C.F. morale!

Eve: Oh, Harold?

Harold:Yes, Eve?

Eve: So, what kind of rewards do poets get in a society in which they are sixty years behind the times?

Harold: I’m glad you asked, Eve. Here’s a nice leading question that the C.C.F. asked on just that issue:

Adam: No, Harold. What Eve is asking, I think, is if in the past, a poet, like, oh, A.E. Houseman, say...

Harold: Ah, Eve, he was a British poet.

Eve: But, Harold, it is British Columbia, isn’t it?

Adam: Yes, Harold. Back then all poets were British. This was a high holy law. Even today British poetry is the mainstay of the British Columbia high school curriculum. They do not teach poetry written in the 20th Century. Not in British Columbia. In British Columbia the 20th Century has not happened yet. I mean, come on.

Eve: Thank you, Adam.

Adam: Right. So, if this Houseman wrote something truly great, did he get on Oprah? That’s what Eve wants to know.

Eve: That’s what I want to know, alright.

It was a good question, she asked.

Now, I must confess, I really doubted it would happen, time being what it is, but, of course, since there ain’t nothing like going to the poet’s mouth, I cracked open a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and what did I find? Well, this really, from A Shropshire Lad:

We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time.
from "Terrence, this is Stupid Stuff" by A.E. Houseman

Well, he was pretty good with titles, but, well, still, ahem.

Adam: Ok, Ok, did he get appointed to jury duty for the Canada Council, then, because the Canada Council is awfully proud about giving out its awards by jury — awfully proud, may I say?

Well, no, not exactly. Not exactly.

Trial by Fury
British Columbian Poets Rebel Against A.E. Houseman
Click here for the web opera.
(That’s Eve in the front row, making the little ‘o’ with her mouth.)

So, turning the tables...

Judge With the Big Stick: Say hello to the audience, Eve.

Eve: Hello.

Judge: So, did the esteemed poet, the one who lived in a time in which he could still be esteemed, praise God, turn away from it all and build a salmon stream inside his house, like Bill Gates?

Eve: Yes, the Canadian poet who penned immortal lines...

Adam (standing beside Eve, with the goatee and the white vest): Something, say, like Al Purdy’s,

Get your ass out of my beer!?

Al Purdy (presenting testimony to the court): Every time I read my poem "Homemade Beer" it affects me. The audience thinks, "male chauvinist." It's a bawdy, exaggerated poem. Then I can read "The Horseman of Agawa" and it's exactly the opposite. People think you want to be one thing. You're not one thing. You're everything.

Poet Al Purdy Chasing After Beer Thieves

"We (beer parlour operators) can refuse to serve anybody that comes into our premises, and even my own mother I can refuse to serve....If I told my waiter to refuse my own mother, he has the power to refuse to serve my mother, if I gave my waiter instructions to do so." Owner of the Clarence Hotel, 1940. Here is an overview of his court case, after he refused service to a black man.

Eve: Thanks for the explanation, Al! ... or even a serious epic like Leonard Cohen’s...

Adam: Queen Victoria,
My father and all of his tobacco loved you.

His Father Loved Queen Victoria
His father’s tobacco loved Queen Victoria, too.
Leonard appears to be smoking his father’s tobacco.
And so dies the royalty.
Sigh.

Eve: (Blush.) A poet like that, he got crowned with laurel leaves, didn’t he. You remember that, Adam? The kind that stay green all year long, that are eternal? You know, the kind of floral designer’s filler that Daphne, lithe, smooth-skinned, twelve-year-old Daphne turned into when Apollo tried to catch her for a little, ahem, (smile) shall we say, unsolicited pleasure?

Evidence Presented to the Court
Santa Claus’s Arch Enemy Under a Laurel Tree in the Garden of Eden

Adam: That wasn’t a laurel tree in the Garden, was it? I thought it was a pear tree.

Eve: Maybe it was.

He Likes Little Girls

Eve: He was also the god of plague.
Adam: And the God of Reason.
Eve: Notice that someone tried to glue his head on straight.
Harold: Forget that. Notice the helmet head, the ring around his temples just perfect for holding a ring of laurel leaves. I bet you haven't seen that for awhile, have you?

This, folks, is the problem with trial by jury, when you’re simultaneously just as likely to be prosecutor and defendant, but, well, there you have it, straight from Grandma and Granddad themselves, back in the old days, when the deal was that poetry made you young again...

Eve: It was a kind of hair tonic, actually.

Incredible, isn’t it! Who knew!

The Poet Ezra Pound Reading a book in Sylvia Beach’s Bookstore in Paris
It looks like he has had a good dose of hair tonic.

But, wait, isn’t this him again?

Austrian Christmas Postcard from the Early Modernist Period
My friend, the sum of your sins is complete...

The seated figure poring over a book is the Krampus, a pagan fertility god who survived right up and into World War II (and was Santa Claus’s Arch Enemy), but who went under shortly afterwards. He liked to chase after young girls, too. And older ones.

Looks like he’s writing a poem.

He also had a nine inch tongue, wink wink, and carried a switch.

Krampus Sends His Christmas Greetings

The making of Krampus cards was a very successful cottage industry in Austria at the turn of the 20th Century. Take a good look at that bundle of sticks. We are definitely going to see them again next week. They are pretty much all of Krampus that has survived the last century.

But, hey, doesn’t he look a lot like Ezra Pound? Like Pound, the bugger has been largely forgotten.

Adam: It is at times the prerogative of a civilized man

Eve: or woman!

Adam: or woman... (Smiles.) ...to forget.

Eve: You’re sure right there, Adam. There’d be no progress in the world if we didn’t forget everything and then have to make it up all over again. As Queen Victoria said of childbirth:

"Doctor Snow gave that blessed chloroform and the effect was soothing, quieting, and delightful beyond measure."

Queen Victoria, Defender of the Faith, Was in Favour of Anaesthesia
Some things are too painful to remember.

Some poetry is like that. As Al Purdy wrote:

In a world so abundant with both good and bad things, in which my own unique lighted space of human consciousness burns and flickers, at this moment when the past and future converge to pinpoint now, at am age when the body says, "Slow down, you silly bugger," there are still important things in my life, and still poems I want to write.

Which is a very long sentence: it makes me thirsty for a beer or two. And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

The French Poet and Lifeguard Arthur Rimbaud in His Drunken Boat
Coming to Rescue The Canadian Poet Al Purdy in His Sea of Angst

And as I was drifting, down a careless river,
I realized the hawkers had gone from the banks.
The squawking Redskins had nailed them, such
easy targets - stripped them and tied them to the pointed stake.
Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Jeremy Reed.

So, there you go: just as I thought — it was not just poetry. It was about whose land this is.

It was about who was shooting arrows at whom.

That’s what Al Purdy was going on about: Al, who used to go to poetry readings with a case of beer under his arm. He didn’t necessarily drink the beer, but it was a successful stage prop.

Eve: Well, for young men anyway. The young women were willing to wait for Oprah.

Canadian Poet Al Purdy On His Way to Another Poetry Reading

Either way, though, back before Al’s time, and even in Al’s time, Canada used to be a country dominated by conservative elites. Civilization itself used to be the job of keeping the working classes at bay.

Harold: If I may just interject into my own interjection, the word itself, civilization was meant as an active process, not a description of a heritage of complex social organization. It was something that was done to you.

Eve: Oh, I can identify with that. That’s for sure.

Al Purdy changed all that.

Moroccan Soldiers and their Oh-So-Literate Officer
Getting Ready to Move into the Line in France Early in World War I
At least he had the decency to dress in red, as an easy target.
Note the identical standing men, one sharp (a particle?) and one blurry (a wave?) staring at each other in the mirror of their mutual self in the centre rear.
(Hey, is that a camel saddle in the foreground? In France? Check it out.)

In Canada, things were just as fraught with chance and control and their implications. When Al Purdy made his beer at home, and when he chased the neighbour’s kid out of it, too, he knew what he was doing. The alternative to self-sufficiency and pride, such as it was, was something like this:

According to arbiters of decency, beer parlours were spaces of moral turpitude and working-class dissipation which required constant surveillance. The tireless regulation of these spaces drew on social codes of decency and respectability, and those denied entry to the parlours were those similarly marginalized by the society at large.
Lindsay McMaster, in Canadian Literature, reviewing Robert A. Campbell ‘s Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925-1954.

Sadly, the war goes on, and it's not just about beer anymore, either. It’s about trees. We build houses out of trees around here: gigantic games of pickup sticks. Or we cut our trees up into boards and ship them to the United States where men build houses like cricket cages. We do it so that we can pay illegal tariffs imposed by a positively comic legal system.

All that heavy truck traffic is murder on our roads though.

It helps keep us in line, doesn't it. Oh, now, I don’t mean politically. I mean, the roads are so rutted that you just have to sit your car in the ruts and, whoa!, it’s like a Walt Disney Ride, leading south.

Log House Construction in Sugarcane, B.C.
That’s the Indian Reserve Village in the background, along the curve of the hill. It was the only Reserve in British Columbia which was bought by the province, as all the other land here in the Secwepemc heartland had been preempted by ranchers, before the opening date for preemptions.

And here are the trees on the hill in behind, who have to watch the whole process, day in and day out.

The Trees Are Not Amused.

As Leonard Cohen sings:

There is a war, between the rich and poor,
between the man and the woman.
There is a war, between those who say there is a war,
and those who say that there isn’t.

We’ve already met one of the combatants in this war, Krampus himself, with two kid’s horns, one goat foot and one human foot, with chains tying his hands together, and that dandy, dandy little switch.

Here’s an snapshot of the other combatant, hard at work saving civilization with a jumping jack:

Santa Claus Saving Civilization

Notice Jumping Jack in Santa’s hands, the Jack in the Box getting ready for a fight to the death, and, my personal favourite, the Foot-in-the Box.

And Santa’s sleigh? What’s that all about? A bed from the Sears Catalogue, complete with throw cushions and lots and lots of linen? Oh, cozy!

This was, of course, before Santa accepted a long-term endorsement from Coca Cola, and dressed in red and white, and moved to the North Pole. Here he’s dressed in a spare American flag, and, what is that anyway, a Prussian spiked Helmet?

The British Columbian circus comes to mind, doesn’t it.

Let’s have a closer look.

A Closeup View of Santa’s Hat
Prussian Helmet, with a Tea House on its Peak.

Eve: Oh, I like that. Can we have a closer look? I do feel like a cup of tea.

Adam: You’re starting to sound like Queen Victoria.

Eve (Coquettish): Maybe I am Queen Victoria.

Closeup View of the Tea House on Santa’s Helmet
as replicated in Frederick The Great’s Garden at Sans Souci

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, whose wars for European dominance led to the loss of Quebec to the British and the consequent formation of both the United States and Canada, had the garden itself planted with satyrs carrying away naked nymphs. That’s what he liked. Himself? He had gout. He could only watch.

Adam: Talk about reading the world as a poem.

Eve: Well, is that any better or worse than reading a poem as the world?

Well, that’s what you get when you live out here in one of Al Purdy’s poems. Up to now, every year we have had to put up with snow knocking the whole world for a loop until, after six months of the frosty stuff, we’ve been convinced the flowers won’t bloom again.

Except now. Now with global warming, it’s been spring all winter, with a couple days of summer thrown in for good measure. Pretty soon we won’t need to go to the Bahamas or Disneyland in the middle of the winter to warm up, because,

All Together Now: Disneyland will want to come to us.

Voice Over (Santa Claus): Stop it. Talking about stuff like that is murder on a sense of national identity. What will Al Purdy think?

Eve: Oh, but, really, Santa! What will the neighbours think?

President George W. Bush, Commander in Chief, in His Flight Suit
He seems to like Canadian poetry well enough, doesn’t he.

Doesn’t he?

Next Week: Poet Carmine Starnino, Mussolini’s Favourite Wine, Ezra Pound’s Bomb, an experiment in social engineering, and the state of the Canadian justice system.

Uncle Ez's Atomic Bomb

2006-01-08T01:39:00.000-08:00

So, Santa has finished his annual stint of overseeing the Garden of Eden, and God has finished another stint of shopping mall photography, and all is right in the world, and... whoa! What’s this?

Oh, Look! The Quantum Physicists Have Been Splitting Atoms Again.

Quick, which subatomic particle are you? Alfred on the left? Max on the right? What an enigma. It’s true, though, you know: once light passes through the lens of the eye, it is like the twin Helixes of a DNA molecule.

Upside down!

Adam: Shoot.

Harold: Not to worry, Adam, because that takes us to our mascot of the week: Gorgeous Genome!

Check Out Gorgeous at Whyfiles.org today!

Eve: Oooooh. Nice biceps, Gorgeous.

Gorgeous: And the hair. Don’t forget the hair!

Adam: Ooooooh. Llovely sideburns.

Harold, the Circus Director: Yes, folks, over there at Gorgeous Genome, you will get to fill in a genetic scratch and win ticket:

Checking the Human Genome
Note the levitating hand!
Eve: I don’t like those. Mine always come up: Better Luck Next Time!

Adam: Here. Maybe you’re not scratching in the right place.

Eve: Ahhhh!! Yes. Mmmmmmmmm.

Harold, the Circus Director: Ahem! (Blushes.) And Gorgeous will teach you the secret behind this nifty bit of code:
GGCACGAGGGTAAATATGGCATAAGTTAATAACA
CTTTTCCCCAAAATGGTGCTTTGGATTTGAAAAGG
GTCTGATGGGGAGAAGGAGAACGTATCATCCTAGC
TTCCTCTCTTAATAAACCTAGAAAAACGGGTAGTA
AACTGTGGATAGTCAGGAAAACACCCAGCAAGGGA
CACAGC TGTCAGGAAATGAATCTTCCCCCCAACCC
CCACCATGCAGATGGATAGACAGAATCTTTCCTGA
CTAGTCATTAGGATCAGGGGCCTCTGTTGGATTTGT
GTTTCTTGAAGAATAGCTGGCAGAGTGGTATAAAA
GACACGAATATCTCCTGGTCTATAAGGATACTCTGA
TTTGGGGTTTGCATTTTTCATGGTTTTTATTTCCTGT
TCCCCCTGGAGTTTTCCATTAGTGAGTTTTTG

Eve: Oh, that was when God’s typewriter was on the fritz. There were only a few letters working. Do you remember that, dear?

Adam: Yes, I do. And the Caps Lock was stuck down, too.

Eve (turning to face the audience in the Big Top): He got himself his first Commodore 64 soon after that.

Adam: And there was no looking back!

Harold, the Circus Director: So, go on over to Whyfiles.org Today! (Harold draws the curtains.)

Eve: Why, Harold?

Adam: Yes, why, Harold?

Harold: Because the brain is going to have to decode those particles of light before they can be turned into art.

Eve: But it’s old technology. Make it new!

Adam: Yeah. You need something closer to your own time. How about this:

Image of Alfred and Max Cast Upon the Retina
German Enigma Machine Codebook Captured from UBoot 505 in World War II.
Note the nifty water-soluble pink ink on pink paper.

Adam: The thing is: the physicist and cryptographers were not the only ones to set themselves this puzzle, and not the only ones to come up with a solution.

God (coming out of the woodwork): Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest consequences.

Santa Claus (lurking by the wiling poinsettas): How about this?

A Solution Birthing at the Heart of the Sun

Eve: Awwww....What a great idea! Adam, look at that cute little thing! Let’s get one!

Adam: GGCACGAGGGTAAATATGGCATAAGTTAATAACA
CTTTTCCCCAAAATGGTGCTTTGGATTTGAAAAGG
GTCTGATGGGGAGAAGGAGAACGTATCATCCTAGC

The poets got pretty handy with decoding God’s Word, too. Take the case of that modernist poet and radio broadcaster, Ezra Loomis Pound, for instance. Ez got his head around the problem a century ago, too, even before the German Enigma Machine was patented in 1918. Here’s the image that tipped Pound off at the outbreak of World War I that there was something going on that nobody knew anything about:

Ezra Pound’s Conspiracy Theory
Is it a map of the German and French lines at Verdun?
Is it an early map of the German Atomic Bomb?
No! It’s the Magnetic Lines of Force Around the Poles of a Bar Magnet
as Shown by Iron Filings!
Note the Black Hole at the centre.
Who knew?

Yes, kids, you can build a black hole like this at home!

Pound should have come to the circus, shouldn’t he! Alfred and Max could have set him straight. Or, at least, they could have made him take a second look. But, then, Pound was a serious character. As American novelist Gertrude Stein said of him in Paris a few years later: "He talks like a village....Which is all right if you’re a village."

It’s like the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard’s play "Force of Habit" (die Macht der Gewohnheit), in which a circus director has spent twenty years trying to transform his circus into a string quintet, so they could play something truly very edifying and important: Schubert's Trout Quintet. Check out composer Thomas Adès, tickling those fish.

The Effect of Heavy Water on Truly Very Important Music
Water Soluble Formal Attire Required
Note Walt Disney’s first animated sketches at the right.
(For a closer view, click on the link and scroll down.)

In Force of Habit, Bernhard’s circus troupe spends twenty years refusing to practice. In doing so they use every bit of theatrics, slapstick, and gymnastics in their not inconsiderable repertoire. By the time we arrive, it’s the night before their inaugural performance of Schubert. It soon becomes clear that their circus has collapsed because of their neglect, while their transformation into high artists has failed because of their inability to be earnest. The circus director is beside himself with frustration.

The Evanescence of Being Earnest
from the Vienna Burgtheater Production of Thomas Bernhard’s Die Macht der Gewohnheit.
(For more pictures, just fingertiptoe your way over to their site and click "Szenenphotos", in the central (red) column.

What is remarkable about Bernhard’s play, is that the play is in verse, and the action and words of the play are in the rhythms of, you guessed it, Schubert’s Trout Quintet, right down to the lion tamer, his mauled hand crudely bandaged, pounding on the piano in spite, in just the right chords, at just the right time.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

It’s enough to make a guy think there’s no way to escape the Trout Quintet.

What is It?
God and a Friend Trying and Not Trying to Escape the Trout Quintet?
Alfred and Max Later in Life, Not Knowing Whether They Should Laugh or Cry?
No, it’s the 1997 Hungarian Production of Bernhard’s "Force of Habit."
Notice that after the rusting of the Iron Curtain, Hungarian Circus directors appear to wear American corduroy jackets and, by the looks of it, cufflinks.

Oh, yes, that’s funny, guys.

But that’s Pound’s problem, too, isn’t it: seriousness. In this world. I mean, come on. In this world, in which there are more genes in a grain of rice than in a human being?

Ezra!

Reverse Evolution: Rice Pudding Being Eaten by a Human
During a Danish Christmas Feast
Somewhere in that pudding is a whole almond.

Adam: Mmmmm. If you get the almond, you get a box of chocolates, eh.

Eve: At least it’s not a pear!

God: Harold, if all that whipped cream has you worried about your arteries, relax:
Death statistics for cardiovascular disease in males in various countries:

1167 deaths per 100,000 population. Russia 1998.
348 deaths per 100,000 population. United States, 2000.
316 deaths per 100,000 population. Denmark 1998.
280 deaths per 100,000 population. Canada, 1998.
186 deaths per 100,000 population. Japan, 1999.

Harold: Whew.

But that was Ezra: poetry as cufflink. Yessirree, Ladeeeeeees and Gentlemennnnn! While other young men of Ezra’s generation were creating art out of their bodies in the French and Belgian mud, he was looking into the glorious European past, trying to save the poetry in it by making it into a machine.

God:Which is, of course, pretty much exactly the same thing.

Not surprisingly, Ezra Pound’s slogan was: Make it New!

Here’s a snatch of Ezra which I had when I was a boy on the pear orchard, before I ever heard of Ezra:

By the looks of it, if Ezra had been a young man in the 1960’s,
he wouldn’t have had a 19th Century intellectual’s dream of a 12th Century poet’s beard,
but he would have had real nifty sideburns.

But Pound was looking back to the 19th and 12th centuries, and the other side of this particular quantum coin, of course, was the old 19th century proverb:

Looking for the Trout in the Trout Quintet
Notice God’s blue fishhook.

That’s right: God forgot the bait.

But a bare hook was good enough for Ezra...

God: as it should be when hooks come from God and you are named after an old testament prophet.

Santa Claus: There’s no getting around it.

Ah, yes. Baitless, hooked, and caught, then, that’s our Ezra, and to put the divided world back together again, he hit on the idea that a poet could write a poem by setting one word beside another word beside another word, without drawing a single conclusion between them. What he had in mind was Chinese ideogrammatic writing, such as that from the top of the poem below, which he translated in 1914, as part of the action of the world going to war.

The Cutting Edge of Practical Mathematics in the Early 20th Century
A First Attempt at Decoding the Genetic Code of Rice

What he created, though, was a kind of atomic bomb. To hell with trench warfare. I mean, how old!

Rightfully enough, in an interview with Robert Enright in Border Crossings 96, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye notes:

"When did artists start to make lithographs? When it wasn’t a decent way of mass communicating anymore. Then artists chose this out-of-date and dying printing form. At the ed of the 19th century, when offset was invented, only then do artists start to make lithographs. So when you see art doing something, you wonder if it isn’t dying."

This is, I take it, good news, because a century on, the attempt at outrunning death continues, even though death has claimed Ezra Pound and all his lovers, while his readers are still wandering into the magnetic entrapment fields of his poetic grids and still going zzzzzztttt like a mosquito trapped in a mosquito bat with rechargeable batteries right in the handle.

This particular atomic bomb was the speech of God.

God:Pretty cool technology, all right.

Indeed. Here is Ezra and his reunited Lover, as Wim Delvoye found them in their eternal romantic bower:

Poet Reuniting With His Reader?
Kiss 2, X-Ray art, Wim Delvoye, 2000
Notice the black hole in the background. Source.

Now, of course, in, Gasp! 2006, Pound’s cryptograms of rice farmers in ancient China are just, maybe, starting to appear more than a little quaint: precious relics of old emotional technologies.

Here’s an example:

A Fragment of Old Emotional Recombinant Gene Technology
from Ezra Pound’s Poetic Lab in Kensington. 1914

Art used to rely on devices like, but now, as Wim Delvoye illustrates, it is hardwired.

That’s to say: in his lab, Pound combined and recombined images of the body. Now the body itself has become the art. Now the cryptograms are taking place in DNA itself. Now, art is the ultimate in plastic surgery!

And even so, with his tea parties, Ezra was there first. Spooky.

If it’s proof you want, here you go:

Ezra Pound’s Poetics Independently Verified,
as found in an early 21st century geneticist’s codebook.
Notice how the right hand code is reversed.

Rice. That’s what Ezra and the geneticist were both translating. A simple dish, really: simple old genetically superior rice. One of the grains that founded civilization and sustained it for millennia.

So, here’s how it works: in the old biological technologies, in the art of cooking, you set the genetically mellow rice in a blue pottery dish beside your steaming plate of Thai green curry, and enjoy the way it cuts through the sharpness on the tongue.

(Nostalgia like that has always been the most popular form of art.}

Still, in the spirit of scientific adventure, you understand, with our pith helmets and our elephant guns, in the new art, here’s what happens when you cross rice with people.

To whet your appetite, here’s a quote from that little feast:

A human gene that Japanese researchers have inserted into rice enables the plant to break down a portfolio of chemicals now used on farms to kill weeds. The unusual breadth of that herbicide resistance could circumvent a major shortcoming of existing genetically engineered crops and also open new avenues for cleaning up contaminated soils.

Some scientists, however, are concerned that weeds growing with the rice could eventually acquire the human gene and become herbicide-resistant superweeds."

Hey, artists and poets could have told them that. The people of Vietnam could still tell us that.

U.S. planes spray the defoliant Agent Orange over the rice paddies of southern Vietnam. 1966.

Adam: Whatcha reading, Eve?

Eve: How to pick a good plastic surgeon. It’s pure poetry. Here’s a teaser:
Dr. Derrick Antell, Plastic Surgeon: Absolutely. You can't forget that it's surgery, and there are potential complications. That's why it's critical that you invest time to pick a surgeon properly. Some people spend more time picking a toaster oven than they do their surgeon.

Eve: Oh, I have another one around here someplace. Let me see. Oh, here it is! Look at this, Adam...

A Plastic Surgeon Through the Looking Glass
Adam (paging through): Hmmm...
Dr. Derrick Antell: In the right hands, plastic surgery is both a complex discipline and a subtle art. The ancient and sometimes suspect practice, which took a quantum leap forward in the first decades of the twentieth century, is by definition the very essence of creativity. With a knowing eye, deft hands, and skills both learned and innate, plastic surgeons can perfect that which nature made imperfectly. They can accomplish Einstein's dream of manipulating time and undo the inexorable drag of the years on muscle and flesh. More....

Harold: Mind you, scientists need proof. A magazine article alone is just not going to do. These avant-garde artists of the anti-metaphysical need verifiable results. If they’re going to prove human redundancy in the new world order, in the now-so-serious world, the old artistic proofs of emotional integrity and resonance, those old cufflinks just won’t do, will they.....

Eve: Like: When’s the last time you wore cufflinks?

Adam: Exactly.

Harold: It’s been thirty years if it’s been a day.

Adam: The thought that we are not at the top of our mental form, that’s kind of unsettling, isn’t it.

Eve: Don’t worry. Be happy.

Anyway...

Ladies and Gentlemen, you can see what I’m up against. This is why, I searched the web high and low to find a way for you to test the results of this cross-species gene transfer, this avian flu of the rice-human continuum, shall we say, for yourself.

Yes, you, too, get to put Pound’s futuristic technique to the sophisticated 21st century test.

Ready?

Adam and Eve: Ready!

Verification Test of the New and Old Aesthetic Technologies
You can see the original (and more) by clicking here.

Feel better?

Good.

Just remember: here again, Pound was there before us. The method behind the madness of Ezra Pound was that he was trying to take the machine age and humanize it. The poem would come about for Pound when the reader read it: it was the reader who put all the scattered links together. The jolt of energy the mind formed between words, that was the thing Pound wanted to force the reader to create. In fact, he wanted the reader to create the poem.

Eve: Oh, we tried that.

Adam: Yes, I don't exactly recommend it.

Eve: No.

No passive readers for him. No acceptance of the transparent connect between word and sense. No ‘tree’ = ‘tree’. Nosirree!

Eve: Well, that's a relief.

In fact, after awhile, he even stopped translating the Chinese:

Fragment from Pound’s Cantox XLIX
Poem as Enigma Code

Adam: I get it! Lazy, huh.

Harold: Or maybe not.

God: Yes. Maybe he just wanted to tell his readers where to look.

One of Pound’s Readers Decoding One of Pound’s Poems During World War II
Machine for Decoding the Enigma Machine

Maybe.

God's Doppelganger with the long tongue and the red fur muff: Maybe not.

Take two of these and call me in the morning.
(Before it finishes dividing into two.)

Next week: Where to look, the Three Little Pigs, Mussolini, and Santa Claus’s arch enemy.

Kangaroos for Christmas

2005-12-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

There are no Kangaroos in Austria.

It took me awhile at the T-shirt shops in Salzburg to figure out why they were selling Australian T-shirts. This is a consequence of Austrian beer. I'm sure of it. On the side the T-shirt merchants will also sell you a bottle of cold water while you sweat out your lunchtime beer in the ozone heat.

“Would you,” they ask you, themselves completely worn out by the crowds, too, “like that with or without gas?” You have a half second to decide.

Don't let Austrian Beer Make an Ass of You Over the Holidays.
but if it does, go out in great style, eh!

Or maybe not.

Here we have a bunch of German art collectors and critics poking fun of a sculpture that definately has the upper hand on them.

Hermann Goering and Friends Abandoning the Artistic Project
Don't they know that cigarettes contain formaldeyde?
Nope. They don't yet have the benefit of Canadian Health programs.
Only in Canada, eh? ... Pity.

That was in Dresden, in 1936.

Beer doesn't seem to have been involved. Cigarettes seem to be the poison of choice.

Negro Art, the Nazis called it.

There are, you see, two civilizations on earth. Let's hope that in this holiday season they can find, at least for a moment, a little space for each other.

The Square Dance of Civilization and the Oil Industry Allemand Right.
Desert Storm Chess Set, by E. Howard Kellogg, Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, ca. 1991
Gift to President George Bush. Wood, plastic, tile, 2 x 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches

In early January, I will continue with Ezra Pound and what his attempts to break the stalemate between them have to say for our contemporary cultural wars.

Blessings on you and your house.

Swallowing Swords

2005-12-15T12:39:00.000-08:00

A Russian Icon of the Archangel Michael

Guardian of the Garden of Eden and all around God’s Real Good Guy, Enforcer, and poster boy who’s got his wig on just a bit crooked.
Oh, yeah, he’s got a flaming sword, too.
Doesn’t he look just a bit like John Lennon?

In medieval gardens, the Garden of Eden was the thing, alright. People grew roses there, for their scent. For that you needed special roses: none of our tea roses and rugosa roses meant to survive the winters in Churchill, Manitoba, no sirree. Damask roses were the thing. The petals fell off, went all blowzy overnight, right. You had piles of rose petals along the walkways, which was very useful for reminding you of the transience of life on this earthly plane. On the other hand, you also had the perfume, though, which was very good for reminding you of eternity. You could put it in a glass, put a stopper in it, and keep it for a year, and you could put it on a woman’s neck, and you could be back in the garden of Eden, just like that, because it was the spirit of the rose you had caught, and not just its petals. On their own, petals just fell off.

This was felt to be a very civilizing influence.

A Rose Connoisseur
Enjoying a Moment at the Top of the
Evolutionary Ladder
(This was before global warming and the melting of the polar ice cap)

So, there, you could take a stroll in the castle garden with your true love, and you could have Adam’s choice in front of you, all over again, and you had to take it. You just had to take it. Mmmmmm.

The Rose Petal Path Leading up to the Moment
When Adam and Eve Got Hitched.
Really Hitched.

At US$40 for every 10 feet, airfreighted from Columbia, God was pulling out all the stops for his favourite couple.

This was called wit.

The people over at Petal Garden, they know. Here’s what they have to say about the proper way to strew your petals:

When shopping for rose petals, there are many things to keep in mind. First, you have to choose between fresh, freeze dried, and silk. What you plan to use them for will help determine what type is most appropriate. For any outdoor use, fresh or freeze dried petals are the most appropriate since they are a natural, biodegradable product. Freeze dried petals can be obtained well in advance, avoiding last minute worries.More.

Who knew?

God Knew

I spent a couple days in the Garden of Eden recently. I walked up before breakfast onto the stone mountains of Wales, under a slate sky. The wind was coming out of the slate and the water was coming out from under the hill. Blackberries hung over the stone fences, and a woman was there, walking her dog before dawn, with black hair and fair skin, a forty year old woman with a black dog, and she smiled, and in that smile I felt I had walked with her under the hill and spent a lifetime there.

Welsh Woman Smiling,
without a prickle in sight.

The Welsh had a lot of fairy tales like that, about how if you went under the hill, you never came back. This could be why God put Michael as a bouncer at the gate of his garden, checking people’s ID.

God’s Bouncers on the West German Border, 1960
Waiting for Adam and Eve to sneak across

I believe that’s Michael in the middle, with the wings on the back of his head.

It wasn’t just the perfume manufacturers who were into purifying the soul from the things of this earth. Shakespeare did it with his sonnets, and the monks up in the Black Forest and the Tyrol made schnapps, or spirits, if you like, and drank it purely to purify their faith.

Here’s my translation of the last half of Shakespeare’s sonnet 5, from my book Living Will.

If no-one in the past had picked rose petals,
distilled perfume and stopped it up
in vials of cut glass, pink and glowing,
just like you, the prick of beauty
would be lost to us when we grow old;
we’d have no memory of it and how
it made us tremble. But the petals are picked,
and even if they’re brushed on an old
man’s cheek, they’ve only lost their colour;
their scent goes straight through me still.

But imagine! God purified to a taste! What would make you want to stop?

The Archangel Michael Demonstrating the Correct Procedure
for Making Schnapps,

or is that the correct procedure for drinking schnapps, or the correct procedure for shucking a crab, or...to heck with it. To your health!

When the monks got tired of making spirits, although who could grew tired of that, eh, with a cider press with a twenty-five foot long handle to get lots of juice out of those hard little wild apples, and the little copper still in the back barn, with its long spout like something out of an alchemist’s workshop, they made spirits out of the flowers, too, and you can buy it down at the B.C. Liquor Store, those flower liqueurs, those little bottles of God, for sale, special this week, free samples, don’t drink and drive, and at Christmas you can buy a Teddy Bear to help the kids.

Like the Catholic church, the B.C. Liquor Stores run on guilt.

Got Gas? Get Guilt!
The shocking scene that greeted Adam and Eve
when they left the Garden of Eden
God shops for his gas price signs at thispdf brochure (160K).

But, you know what? It’s the checkout girls I feel sorry for. Men haul the food of the world into the supermarkets with trucks and palettes and forklifts, yet it all goes out again, one block of cheese, one box of Ritz Crackers, one turkey at a time, lifted by a 16-year-old high school clerk with a nervous smile and talking to her friends on the late shift about what a drag it is to break a fingernail, yeah I just broke one last week.

Early 21st Century Supermarket Checkout Clerk, Idealized View
as the Archangel Gabriel, wearing enough cloth for an entire bridal party.

Hubert and Jan van Eyck painted this image in 1432 for the altar of the cathedral in Ghent. Gabriel shared responsibility with Michael for guarding the Garden of Eden

And you’re a forty-seven-year-old father of two daughters, and you think, "My God, they’re dressed up like goddesses of hearth and home, but they’re just girls. What are they doing here in a place like this?"

Early 21st Century Supermarket Checkout Clerk, Actual View
Sigourney Weaver in her Forklift Suit, ready to battle the Alien out of the Cargo Hold

And then I think, shouldn’t you girls be running from there, too?

I mean, the most popular torture device in the middle ages, next to the rack, of course, which was a lovely piece of work which could add twelve inches to your height by separating all your joints, so they could be reset by a physician, so they could be pulled apart again, so they could be pulled apart again, so that... oh, stop it. The next most popular was the pear.

Here I am, on the Rack,

trying to add a little height to my 5’7" frame, and, by the looks of it, waiting for a mouse to come and take the bait.

Makes me look like Gulliver in Lilliput, doesn’t it.

Ah, not just any pear: the oral pear, the anal pear, the vaginal pear. It had a handle with the head of a devil, like a pear fruiting spur, and it had a stem, which was a corkscrew, and it had a pear, which opened in four leaves, and each leaf had a spike on the end, just like one of the petals of the pear blossom on the bottom of each pear, and it opened up inside your mouth and ripped your mouth apart, or opened up inside your anus or your vagina and tore you to shreds, and this was how you got a confession of guilt out of someone when you were bound to the holy law that you should not kill. People were bound to confess, and then the killing was justified.

Early Plastic Surgery Instrument: the Oral Pear

And the supermarkets don’t sell that stuff, not in the least. They just sell food, that’s all, yet even for that we sell our communities down the river: the tomato fields and peach orchards of the Okanagan, poof, the lettuce fields of Beaverdell, poof, the tomato fields of Ashcroft, poof, all sold for Mexican peppers and California lettuce and those plastic strawberries from California, and this year, for the first time, from New Zealand, brought in by air freight and ozone burn. As for the strawberry plants we used to grow under our young apple trees, who does that anymore? The wooden boxes we had for those. Who does that anymore? The girls shove it through, one piece at a time: how many tons a day? This isn’t the wholesome feeding us. This isn’t a fertility ritual. This isn’t youth renewing our civilization.

Nazi-era Girls Pledging Their Allegiance to Wholesome Motherhood
Looks like the girl on the left was a little ahead of her time.

But, it’s a job, you know. God knows, that’s important. And then some of the girls, well, stay. God knows, that’s important. After a decade of that, though, they get allergies in the floral department, but, that’s ok: the guy at the pharmacy department helps them out. They get traded to the deli department, and by this time they’re 28, with two kids, and a husband driving a logging truck, which ain’t no way to earn a living, that’s for sure, but lots of men do it, because, well, you get to drive around in a big truck, right. Your wife just slices meat. Then the woman in the deli department, who’s 35, gets traded to the bakery, while the head cashier is 58 and looks forward to going out once a year for a week with the husband and the dogs to go hunting. They all spend the nights together in the camper, cuz, well, you know, there are bears.

A Polar Bear With a Dose of Healthy Sarcasm

For ten unknown and maybe unknowable factoids about Polar Bears, go here.

It ain’t easy getting back into the Garden of Eden, once you’ve left it, is it.

So, Tim Treadwell goes into the Alaska Peninsula to track bears, to film bears, to live with bears, to be with bears, to go wild, and the bears finally kill him. He comes home in a bag. He is cut out of the stomach of a particularly hungry and desperate forty-one year old bear. He gets way too close. There’s a line between people and bears, and the people of Kodiak island never cross it, and the bears never cross it, and it has been that way for six thousand years, and everyone is alright. Tim Treadwell crossed it.

What happens when you cross that line with pears?

A Man Who Has Crossed the Line with a Pear
From Improbable.Com.

Bears of the world, I think there’s a way. A simple way involving levers and inclined planes:

Approved Tool for Reentering Paradise
If it worked for the monks, who’s arguing.

State of the World Report, 2005:

Pears in overabundance so we dip them in anti-fungal agents and stack them up forty feet high in concrete warehouses, in controlled atmosphere storages, and they bleed their volatiles, and we vent it out into the sky, because, we tell ourselves, it’s the best we can manage. No it’s not. The monks used to capture that stuff and let all the rest of the pear go. Closer to our time, men used to build cold storages into the sides of hills. The earth would keep the storage from freezing, and you could let in cold air at night from the top. A pear that came out of there tasted like a pear. It tasted like the earth.

Now the book industry I gave up a pear orchard for ain’t worth shit. It’s gone, has vanished, that old volatile. Now the pear orchards are gone as well, and the pears we bred to save them?

They weren’t pretty enough for the grocery stores.

Sierra,
daughter of the pear breeding program at the Summerland Research Station.

Sierras are long and thin like gourds, and with 25% sugar, but they aren’t grown because they have thin skins and mark up when the wind knocks them against a branch.

Here’s what Thoreau had to say about the matter, in his essay Wild Apples:

I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out today in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees today in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plot by their houses, and fence them in, — and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.

Either that, or the Archangel Gabriel can show us the way.

Gabriel as An Early Twentieth Century Checkout Clerk
Guiding Mohammed to Allah
while the rest of the world sleeps
and throwing in a little advertisement for beef bouillon powder on the side.

In contrast to the great institutionalization of society represented by supermarkets, when the ship workers in Gdansk, Poland, formed an independent trade union, that’s to say one unaligned with the Communist Party, they were not agitating for shorter work weeks, improved orthodontics provisions and better pensions, nor did they have political intentions, as unions do in British Columbia today. In fact, when two Trotskyites from Mexico came to the shipyards and volunteered their services to help the riveters and welders achieve their goals, the union leader, Lech Walesa, had his men gently and cooperatively show them the door, and then informed them that they would never have entry to the plant again. The uprising, said Kapuscinski, was not politically motivated. It was, instead, a demand for "human dignity."

Lech Walesa Calling for Human Dignity
But, wait? Doesn’t he look photoshopped in?

The first quasi-democratic parliamentary elections in Poland were held on June 4, 1989. With a nod to Ronald Reagan, the Solidarity Union printed posters of Gary Cooper playing the sheriff in High Noon, emblazoned with the red banner of the Solidarity Party and the date. The Communists ridiculed the poster as an American, Wild West gimmick, something that would not appeal to Polish patriotism. The Poles, however, saw a Cowboy, dressed in a white shirt, fighting for justice in a lawless desert, while everyone else sat around in complacency.

Gary Cooper On His Way to The Ballot to Vote for Lech Walesa
It is fitting that the genre of the Western was invented by Jews from Poland and Russia, who translated their stories of the Cossack Pogroms into stories of truth and justice in the American West, helped free Poland from its institutionalization under Communism.

High Noon in Front of a German Clothing Shop
A Cossack Captured by the Germans During World War I
Note the German with the Gary Cooper hat in the background
Note as well the Archangel Michael’s sword hanging from the cossack’s belt.

Who knew?

When Communism finally collapsed in Poland, the country was thrown into a capitalist economy overnight. People sank or swam. When East Germany reunited with West Germany, the experience was different. Having had to pay for garrisoning the occupying Russian Army for forty years, East Germany was a complete ruin. Every house in the country was falling down. Not a single can of paint had been applied since the end of the Second World War. This is scarcely an exaggeration. Check it out here and weep. East Germany now has new freeways through old wheat fields, American fast food restaurants in small towns in the valleys below, West German supermarkets, and immediately upon reunification suffered the closure of the small, "Auntie Emma" corner groceries, run by single old women — independent enterprises smelling of pickles and low-quality mustard which had survived all the years of communist rule. The pear trees behind the houses are untended. The pears fall into the grass.

It’s no wonder. Most shopping in East Germany was done in supermarkets. There you had to order the whipped cream for your Sunday cake at the beginning of the previous week. Sometimes you were allowed to place an order for any amount of cream — as much as you could carry away. It didn’t matter, though: there wasn’t any cream, and there hadn’t been any for a long time. For a tin of pineapple (available only for holidays) you had to stand in line for hours, and then pay eleven Marks for a single tin. You could even stand in line for a Mon Cheri chocolate bar from Italy, which was worth it because you’d never get to Italy yourself. No wonder supermarkets were such a hit when the wall fell down.

On the other hand, before the Tante Emma shops wallowed in their mustard, Germany was graced with Tante Anna shops.

An Advertising Postcard for a Tante Anna Shop in Germany

Tante Anna shops were also known as Colonial Wares shops — what, looking back the other way, we might call delicatessens. This is what those East Germans lining up for Mon Cheris were hankering for, as sinful as it might be: a little bit of the taste of the spirit of the world. Back in the 1920’s, they ranged from prosperous stores and bakeries to little kiosks from which a single owner could sell a few specialized goods, to try and make ends meet — kind of like the little belt and sunglass and jewelry shops that have sprouted up like stepping stones in malls across North America in the last few years. Beats selling beaded bracelets on a black cloth spread out on the street in the rain, doesn’t it. Here’s Woolworths' nod to Tante Anna.

There’s more than one way to lead a revolution. The East Germans did it through the gauntlet of supermarket lineups for non-present goods. Talk about manipulating guilt. Comrade Gabriel had nothing over those guys! The Soviets, on the other hand, did it by erasing people who had fallen out of favour. Literally. Here Lenin and Trotsky celebrate the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution in Red Square.

Trotsky Salutes the Revolution...

And here is the version that was distributed once Trotsky had fallen out of favour:

...But the Revolution Does not Salute Trotsky
Trotsky, after He Became a Ghost.

When communism fell in British Columbia, first in 1973 when my father successfully — and I may say somewhat sadly — lobbied for the destruction of the centralized fruit selling system, and then finally in 2000, when the new Liberal revolution was given power and used it to dismantle all social agendas, Poland-style, there were very few pear trees left.

The pears fall into the grass.

Here’s a transcript from the afternoon sitting of the British Columbia Legislature on Thursday, October 11, 1973:

MR. PHILLIPS:I have been informed that members of the United Fruit Growers in the Okanagan Valley are talking of violence, are talking of militancy, and I have further been informed that some of them are starting to pack firearms. The members of this group feel they are justified in protecting their rights, their produce, their assets and their way of life. They know that a market exists in the lower mainland and are continuing to service that market.

The reason for the militancy is that they will no longer stand for the continued harassment they are receiving in moving their produce to market.

To which the premier replied:

HON. MR. BARRETT: Mr. Speaker, there are laws in this land that govern all people. If people make a conscious decision to break the law, it is their responsibility for making that decision - not on this House. Laws are made for people to obey.

The law under discussion prevented a farmer from selling his own fruit. It also protected the British Columbia fruit industry for 35 years.

Like, when you leave the garden of Eden, which way you gonna run?

Thisaway...

Two uniformed BC Fruit Board Inspectors Seize Cherries
at the Allied Growers' Warehouse

These guys used to stop traffic at the boundaries of the fruit growing areas, and before their final effective collapse as an organization they asked the government to grant them the right to search every vehicle they stopped. The government said no.

or thataway?

East German Guards Helping A Citizen Come Back Home at Checkpoint Charlie
Their government said yes.

When did communism really fall in British Columbia?

Not yet. 94% of our land is still owned by the state, and the state still wants to torture it. Here’s a primer on the approved British Colombian torture methods.

In British Columbia This is Called a Rain Forest
Maybe it was always like that. People just like to cut trees down. Source.

So, here’s a question. Suppose a bunch of aliens come down to earth. They land behind your house and they ask you:

Alien: Have you seen any humans?

What are you going to say?

Harold: Hmmmmm. Not lately. But I think there are some hanging out at the sawmill across the valley. (Point. Wave as they fly off.)

It used to be you could be proud about a little thing like that.

A Proud Cossack Sword Swallower
See what I mean? (Check him and his friends out!)

Before aliens started to trouble our dreams, the descendants of Galen’s Celts grew to love their pears over the centuries, and told their children stories about it like this:

"In the old days, pears in these parts were called 'Southerners'. When one of these beauties fell off a tree, three big strapping men had to be called to roll it down into a farmhouse cellar. To get the juice from it, you just had to tap it, like you wood a barrel, and the juice would flow freely out. You needed two other men with a crosscut saw to cut off the stem of the pear. After it was hauled by oxcart down to the lumber mill, wainscoting panels were cut out of it."

Now, that’s a pear tree!

I think we’re just going to have to get used to a different kind of pear, though. Actually, I think we already have.

Fat Boy, the Pear-shaped Bomb that Leveled Hiroshima.>

Notice the wing-like clamps and the chunk of the grizzly bear suit near the top.

Thing is, in Uitikon, a little town behind the celtic hill fort above Zurich, Switzerland, the view is down over old pastures, in which are planted pear trees that billow up like clouds, seventy feet high. You don’t pick the pears off those things. You let them fall like rain. I was there once on August 1, National independence day in Switzerland. The Swiss gave all foreigners a $50 break on their plane tickets, to get them out of town. There was a fire lit on every hilltop, all night. They glowed through the branches of those pear trees. This was the secret night of the Swiss. In Uitikon I learned that every small town has a high-tech factory. It keeps people on the land. That’s why the country industrialized in the first place: because of overpopulation of the land and a desire to keep people on the land.

An American Pear Explodes Over Hiroshima

In Canada, though, my father doesn’t grow pears any more. Neither do I. And this is the new Archangel Gabriel.

The Archangel Gabriel With an Updated Sword

You can’t see him in the flesh, of course. He’s an angel, after all. But you can see him on DVD. This is called progress.

My daughters will not even own land, which is the one thing my father came to this country for.

The pears hang on the trees and glow. You pick them and feel their weight. The wasps crawl over them and suck their juice. They build moons among the branches.

And then it snows.

If you’re going to stick up a tree this Christmas, stick up a pear tree. There are no others.

And just remember: Gabriel is watching you.

Gabriel Can Take any Shape
(as long as he gets his bouillon)

Next week: Dr. Faustus in Salzburg. Ezra Pound’s big gamble.

A Welsh Gate

2005-12-09T12:35:00.001-08:00

The Author Wrestles with His Double or
Who’s Going to Win?
The one with the beer or the one with the schnapps?

Note that flies don’t appear to be attracted to schnapps. Good to know, for when you run out of fly strips.

Oh yeah. Authors do this all the time. Don’t worry.

Used to be I was a boy and we grew our pears ourselves. Used to be that I was a young man and I logged those pear trees for firewood, some of them, and grafted others over to red pears, some of them, and pruned the rest. Used to be I was a young father in my first house, and discovered that pear wood burns with a blue flame. Stick a lump of pear wood in a fire and it’s still flaring away like a natural gas fireplace twenty-four hours later. Damn stuff doesn’t go out. Baby laid in the heat on the flame-red carpet, two-inch pile, ‘cuz the house had been redone in the 1960s, you know, why else was it the bargain of the week, $31,000 for two bedrooms, one in deep purple pile, and the baby went to sleep so easy and so fine, in the blue light.

Flemish Beauty: The Pear I Cut Down or
My Greatest Shame

Imagine, the sweetest pear grown in British Columbia, the only one suitable for making fresh juice that did not turn bitter, the only one suitable for drying, and we cut them all down because Safeway and Supervalu could not sell them from an unrefrigerated shelf. Duh. If you want a hint as to what this beauty was like, pick up an Australian or Chilean Packham. There’s some Flemish in there. It’s like riding a bike.

Once you taste a pear, you don’t forget, not ever. Not ever.
Well time ticks. The baby’s gone off to study linguistics now. She wants to write a dictionary. I used to load up the wheelbarrow with a load of rocks and wheel it around to the front of the house, with her on top, or load it up with a load of pear firewood (Flemish Beauty; you got that right), and set her on top, and wheel her around to the side of the shed. When she slept I’d paint that red house blue, to match the sky, and the sagebrush, and the gravel. They were all blue or grey or grey-blue or blue-grey. The rocks and the gravel came from a hole in the back, where I dug my own septic tank, made a crib inside it with old cedar vineyard posts, because you could do that in that valley. A lot of people used Volkswagens. Volkswagens make a lovely septic tank.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Heinrich Goebels and his Son
Do Not Approve of Canadian Backyard Sanitation Methods
Crossed arms, crossed leg, crossed fingers, cross looks, cufflinks, ouch.

Used to be that the baby would sit up on the wheelbarrow as I hauled stones around and balance like an acrobat and laugh. Used to be we did everything together.

I’m left with pears.

Beurre Gellert, Ogereau, Painted Lady, Norton Butt.

An Ogereau Pear Before and After the Guillotine Look how the blade conveniently missed the stem. How do they do that?

Listen to the names!

Pierre Cornell, Winter Nelis, Sugar.

Pears are pure poetry. Stick them near a cold storage, though, and they start to taste like a fridge. It’s the volatiles, you see. The volatile gasses. The esters and hormones and all the things about a pear that smell so good. The wind that blows out of a pear orchard one month after harvest. You bite into a pear and it explodes in your mouth and all these angelic scents, these perfumes and alcohols, go up through your sinusses and say God is Here!, and you think, man does this pear taste good. But it’s not taste. It’s smell. That’s the smell that evaporates. Oh, you can keep the flesh nice and crisp, by chilling the things, by replacing the oxygen with carbon dioxide, so they breathe so very, very slowly, so that two months of winter storage becomes six, or eight, or ten. You can replace the carbon dioxide with gas, and extend that even further. You can do whatever you want, but you can’t keep those volatiles in. They’re gone. You want to taste a pear, you gotta go into one of those cold storages and bite the air. The smell of those pears is so thick in the air it stings your eyes. You feel like a bee. Big concrete bunkers like military hangers. That’s where our pears go to die.

Pear Morgue

Vicar of Winkfield, Teddington Green, Winter Butter.

People used to know what it was about their pears that they loved. People used to have some fun with words. Enough to make you want to study linguistics. Enough to make you want to get out a dictionary and just read the thing.

The First Pear Pickers Today:
Adam and Eve After Making The Switch to Artificial Intelligence
(but still nibbling)That’s nice. Want to learn more? Learn more!

Now, the darn things hit the supermarket art installations tasting nice and crisp and juicy and like, well, like the inside of a fridge.

As more and more of the biological engines of Adam and Eve’s world are translated into their technological surrogates, here’s some pear instrumentation you might like to avoid:

Pear Speedometers
Maximum Speed: Walk Away

Used to be that you could dream about pears.

Josephine de Malines, Stinking Bishop, Onward, Doyenne du Comice Pitmaston.

Stinking Bishop!

Used to be that Rob Dawson would phone me up in Hedley, B.C., the old mining town so down on its luck it had managed to survive the whole twentieth century pretty much intact, and ask could I grow him some pear rootstocks, so he could graft some Asian pears onto the things, so the next day I went up to the Agricultural Experimental Station in Summerland and picked them up off the ground, for free, because even then it was 1982 and the whole game was over, we just didn’t know it yet. That was before it became the Agribusiness and Food Experimental Station. Back then in 1982, I picked up those rootstock pears, and set up a bank of lights in my living room, and left it on day and night. In that old mining town, in that old unpainted clapboard house that smelled of cats, that’s how you used to be able to do things.

Hedley’s Gold is Gone Just Like the Pears on Eve’s Tree
but Adam has a Nifty Jeep Cherokee

Here’s what the folks at 4X4 B.C. did on Victoria Day Weekend in 2001. And to think it was all hauled out with that wheelbarrow behind the jeep.

Blacksmith, Rumblers, Worcester Black, Dead Boy, Ducksbarn.

The year I lived in Hedley was the year I bought my first computer. It was an Apple IIe, with a green monitor, disk drive, and a shocking 128k of RAM, for which I paid, for computer, printer, monitor and keyboard, a whopping $2000: a bargain. I had a brother-in-law, see, who got me a special deal. Thank God for that! These little babies are now going for about $50 on eBay, which is pretty great, cuz mine’s still in the garage, right, and last time I checked, a couple years ago, the price was down to, oh, about $5. This is better than Nortel, folks. This stuff is actually rebounding from the fall.

Eat your heart out, Nortel!

1000% increase in 3 years. Wait ‘til these suckers hit the Toronto Stock Exchange!

That first year with the Apple IIe was the year the baby pear trees in my porch got brown rot and damped off. I was left with little black threads poking up above the soil, like the wicks of Christmas candles that had burned out. Just as well: those asian pears can’t stand the Similkameen wind.

Late Treacle, Lumber, Merrylegs.

Merrylegs!

Used to be that they grew pears in the Benvoulin area of Kelowna. The best pear land in the world. Well, that’s what we all said. Apples, you see, like to keep their roots dry. Apples are light and full of the sun. Pears, though, they don’t mind the wet. Give a pear tree clay and it nuzzles right on in. Pears and apples and quince, they are all just swelling of the stems, but pears, well, if apples are a leaf, full of water and sugar like a lump of cotton candy at a fair, pears are wood. Each pear is a piece of carved wood. Each pear is a piece of furniture, lovingly waxed and oil and shellacked, with an old cloth, by hand, over and over and over again, each one, and hung up on a tree by wind and light and bees, and each pear tree just keeps producing better and better pears the older and older it gets. Get a knobbled over, blackened pear tree, all bent and hanging down like a sprung umbrella, with the fruiting spurs are gnarled like the spikes of fighting cocks, and broken off, and ending in tiny black buds, and so brittle you brush off against them and they snap off, and the pears from that tree, the pears from that tree will teach you about life. You will taste the snow in those pears, when you pick them. You will know something about living on this earth.

Eve Hiding Inside An Austrian Barseck Pear and Winking At Us
Used to be that apples were valued just as much as pears. Used to be that apples were wood, too. Used to be that people grew russets and cider apples. Used to be that Henry David Thoreau wrote the essay Wild Apples, which he first published in the November 1862 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, to make the claim that only wild apples could contribute to the formation of a country, that grafted, domesticated apples were the ruin of democracy, and, besides, only the wild ones, only the surprising, unkown ones growing behind barns, or in ditches, taste any damn good. Here’s what Thoreau had to say about that.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite (ooooh) unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.

Crunch!

That was in a time when it was wilderness, and a man’s orientation to wilderness, that defined a man.

Now it’s just Red Delicious.

Suburbanization as a Pear Sees It

Orally, Anally, Vaginally, this little baby was used in the heydays of torture to extract confessions from reticent confessors. The petals on the bottom of the fruit ensured death by tearing and bleeding.

Christ.

Civilization ain’t always pretty. Now the Benvoulin has been paved over and the Orchard Park Shopping Mall anchors the northern corner of the plot. Now you get to come and shop. You can go there and buy a Christmas tree. You can go there and, gosh sakes, buy a pear.

But don’t look for one of these:

Coppy, Arlingham Squash, Early Griffin, Brown Bess, Gin.

You also won’t find this:

Pear Sex

You will find exactly this: Asian pears, each one in a foam balloon; Bartlett pears, from Washington, just the thing that used to grow behind Orchard Park, with the purple leaves in the fall and the pheasants walking underneath the trees, and the wind howling through smelling of the lake; Anjou pears, that’s to say Beurre d’Anjou, but not so buttery, thanks; some Boscs, thin-stemmed like wine glasses, some red pears, either Red Bartletts or, like I grafted in Cawston when I still had a baby and painted my house to match the sky, Red Anjous, with little black knobs of bitterpit under their skins from calcium deficiency; some Forelles, which is to say, Winter Forelles, which is to translate, trout, which are speckled as a trout’s belly and small, tiny — I mean, if a pear is a woman’s pendulous breast, a Forelle is leaning to the young side, to say the least, with its sonnensprossen, it’s freckles brought out by the sun, and its red blush. Just pop the things into your mouth all at once, and they taste like, they taste like Fridge.

A Pear Once a Fridge Has Been Through With It

Used to be I could walk down the cliff in Naramata, B.C. and pick the Clapp’s Favourites and the Bosc’s and the Comices right off the trees before swimming out from the willows into the sunset, and back, before climbing back up the cliff in the dark, before sitting down with Ezra Pound’s Cantos and reading, "The apricot leaves fall from the east to the west, and I have tried to keep them from falling," and I knew the world, but I didn’t know shit, and I drove away from there, and went to university, instead of buying an orchard and planting pear trees. Now Naramata, one of the series of paradisal planned villages that led the European settlement of western North America, from San Diego and Los Angeles, and north to the Similkameen in 1898 and to Naramata just before the Great War. Now it’s gone digital. Check out the latest apples in the Naramata Parade, complete with police escort. As they say themselves, they needed it.

Oh, it’s all used-to-bes. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the world is coming back. One pear at a time.

A Forelle Pear Leaving the CA Storage in Disgust and Swimming Back up the Rhine to the Holy Island of the Reichenau.

Green Horse, Turner’s Barn, Thorn, Parsonage, Knapper, Pine.

So, when the baby graduated from High School, Harold took her all around Germany and Switzerland, took her to Salzburg, took her to England, and took her to Wales, and on the way to rocky and windy Wales, they drove past little orchards in the Cotswolds, little scrubby plantings of none-too-healthy looking trees planted out on an acre or two on the side of a pasture, and there were signs there, advertising Perry, and so we went into a store and I asked, do you sell Perry. You see, all my life, I’ve wanted to drink some Perry, some pear cider, see, so I asked.

It’s not just me who asked. The folks at the (get ready, it’s a mouthful) London Drinker Beer and Cider Festival of the Campaign for Real Ale, are in full agreement. Here’s Mick, a volunteer, offering the stuff in four pint takeaway size. Thanks, Mick. Cheers to you. How, exactly, did you get that job, anyway? Or check out this link. Man, there’s a guy who loves his pears.

Yeah, they sell pear cider in British Columbia. They sell Okanagan Pear Cider and Growers Pear Cider, which is nice and sweet, made out of Bartletts, and bubbles, and has those esters, eh, those perfumes and aromatics, and is nice and sweet, eh, and bubbly. No, I didn’t mean that.

I meant something rough. Something like wood.

There’s apple cider, for instance, which they make in British Columbia out of Red Delicious, mostly, out of windfalls and culls, shipped north through the whole Okanagan Valley to Kelowna where they are used in a mad flurry of wasps and your feet sticking to the concrete, big truckloads of fruit, no money in it, a silly waste of water, really, and it tastes nice and sweet eh, and then there’s Calvados.

American Soldiers Wading Onto the Beach in Calvados, 1944
God let them rest in peace.

So, it’s 1981. We’re in East Kelowna. It’s Christmas. I’ve gone through all the side roads for a week, picking apples off of wild trees. I’ve found an old field down in the Benvoulin, which contains: one horse, three old apple trees, a few old wooden props for holding the branches up, a barbed wire fence, and a mess of wasps. Oh, yeah, and a ditch, and in that ditch a tree, and on that tree an apple that looks like a green tomato, and which tastes like ripe, fresh pineapple, and I take it home, and on Friday night we have an apple tasting, and to set the mood, Hugh brings out the bottle of Calvados.

"Generations of attention went into that bottle," says Hugh’s father, a retired librarian. "To get it so it went glug just like that when you pour it out."

Okanagan Women Picking Apples: 1914

Their husbands were off to the Great War.
They did not come home.
At least Eve got to keep her Adam.

Apple brandy. Burns when it goes down. In German they call it Geist. They make pear geist, too. Ghost. As in: Holy Ghost. The God in the apple. The God in the pear.

The spirit of creation stripped of the world. Eternity.

Living Next to a Church of God

Ezra Pound did that. When he was in London, he lived right next to the church in Kensington. He used to go out for long walks when the vicar started ringing the bells. Drove him nuts.

Right there in your glass. You can drink it down. Right there. In your glass.

I asked for that in the Cotswolds, for something like that, not Williams Christ Birne Geist. Not at all. Just for Perry.

Flakey Bark, Harley Gum, Nailer, Bastard Sack.

Perry! Well, here’s what I got: one tall green bottle, like a riesling bottle from Alsace, with a long thin neck and a cork, and the proprietress’s favourite, a bit more expensive, mind, 6 pounds instead of the 3,50 for the others, but worth it, she said, not a sparkling Perry, you can have a sparkling Perry, she told me, but a still one.

"What do you recommend?" I asked. "I want the best," I said.

"Take the still," she said, "although it’s a bit more expensive, mind, but worth it."

That night we drank that Perry in Wales.

Winter Butterbirne, Harvest Queen, Early Treacle.

The next morning, my daughter slept late, and I went walking up in the hills, between the stone fences, up onto the heath. A cold wind blew down the valley, off of Snowdon. To the east, the Irish Sea shivered on the shore in a white line of cold. The land was barren, and stark, stripped down, stripped to the bone. Nothing grew there except grass, and rock, and rock and rock and rock, and gates in the rock, which were rocks piled up in a gap in the fence, and if you wanted through, you lifted down the rocks, went through, and lifted them back up again, because you had time for that, obviously, and sheep. Lots of sheep. And heather. And wind.

Welsh Morning After Drinking English Perry

And then I stepped out of the wind, into a little hollow in the lee of the wind, and it was the land of poetry. It was Robert Graves’ land of poetry. It was wild apple trees, and hawthorns, and rowans and hazelnuts and wild rose, and a stone farmhouse down below with a red door, and the red furze on the hills, and I went back into the house, cold, but I went back knowing it is not all used-to-bes.

It’s not.

The earth is not an art installation. The corollary must, logically, also be true: art is not a fabrication. It is how you live on the earth.

Welsh Fence above Garndolbenmaen

Note the stairs, and, especially, the gate itself: two stones. You lift them up, you step through, you put them back.

Sweet Huffcap, Clapp’s Favourite, Improved Fertility.

Next week: Sneaking Back into the Garden.

Walled Garden, Barrington Hall
Is That Harold In a Cider Apple Tree?

All About Eve

2005-12-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

How God Got Adam’s Left Rib Out to Make Eve in the Garden of Eden
(and what Adam should have used later to find the worm in the apple)

To demonstrate how powerful these little babies are, here’s a red Klapper apple from a German gardening magazine published in Weimar in 1809:

How Not to Pick an Apple

As Adam might have said to Eve:

Adam: Evi, if you pick it with the fruit spur still attached to the stem, you’ve killed our crop for the year after next.

Eve: Just bite it, Adam. Just shut up for once and bite it.

In the interest of furthering the cause of scientific accuracy in a web universe otherwise sometimes inaccurately perceived as inaccurate (even though it’s the first accurate universe we’ve ever really had) here’s an example of what that same apple looked like once the physicists of Stanford university had got at it with their X-Ray gogs:

A Bullet of Light Having its way with an Apple
after escaping from the clutches of a subatomic physicist,
as seen through XRay Gogs

Hot news from the testing labs of the garden of Eden!

A daily, genetically modified apple could one day put dentists out of a job!

Scientists in Kent are planning to convert apples and strawberries into antibacterial treatments that would protect against tooth decay!

Now, there’s a plan.

The following is a free prime-time political announcement provided free to members of all political parties:

Pablo Picasso said: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

Submitted by The Committee to Reelect Eve

Harold: "Thanks, Eve."

Eve: "People have short memories, Harold."

Harold: "I know. I tell ya, I know."

Eve: "And I know you know. Say, can I just send along a little brochure from my people to your people? Can I?"

Harold: "Sure, Eve. Shoot."

Eve’s election brochure:

Cover of Eve’s Election Brochure

Model of Noble Borsdorfer apples, carved out of linden wood and painted in Northern Czechoslovakia somewhere between 1920 and 1930.

Eve: Well, you can see, Harold, why I picked a pear in the garden instead.

Harold: Sure can, Eve.

Eve: Liable to break your teeth. If you open it, you’ll see what I wrote on the inside:

So, I opened Eve's election brochure and read its core, its heart, its kernel, its seed, its little nut:

A little history of memory down through the ages:

For Plato, memory was a wax tablet.

For St. Augustine, it was a storehouse.

For Sigmund Freud, it was a "mystic writing pad"

For the anti-modernist American poet, Amy Lowell, it went like this: "Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in."

For modern psychologists, it was first a photograph, then a phonograph, then the cinema, then a telephone exchange.

For Palbo Picasso, it was what you did when you did what you did, like this: "We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

For post-modern psychologits, it is a computer.

For at least one Mexican poet and diplomat, it is like so: Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. Octavio Paz

Oh dear.

Ah, folks, just to give you a little background, as Canada slides into a holiday election, here’s a little promotional material leftover from an earlier election:

Mary Feeding the Baby Jesus a Persian Pear Under The Tree in 1511

Always the innovator, Albrecht Dürer took this photograph with the camera of his mind. I tell ya, Dale Carnegie said that the essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure, but the baby Jesus does not look amused here, at all. Well, actually, he looks like a pope. Is that the Boy Cub salute he’s giving there?

Adam: Look at the pear. It’s the pear that’s important.

Harold: You mean, in this honourable tradition, in this titillating view of art, in this art as Casanova with a pomade, in this remember-when-we-were-young-and-made-whoopee-all-night view of art, these are our art galleries now, our museums of memory: Super Valu, IGA, Thrifty’s, Save On Foods, Save On More, Safeway, Loblaws? You mean, back in the days of Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire, back in the daze of Darth Vador and Rambo, we used to hear how the supermarket system, with its ability to provide endless amounts of food, was the supreme achievement of the capitalist system, cuz those Russkies couldn’t even manage to get the harvest in?

Adam: Uh. I dunno.

Damn!
A Pear Seen Through X-Ray Gogs.
Notice the particle of light exploding from the pear at the far left, like the bullet from a gun, or Adam’s good luck coming to an abrupt end. Ouch.

Adam should have thought about that before he took a bite. As Alexander Chase said: "Memory is the thing you forget with."

He got that right.

Still, I remember well when the Iron Curtain fell in Eastern Europe. What everyone in the Western media was talking about then was stereos, about people in the East wanting access to stereos, and I remember thinking, Stereos? Stereos?

Alright then, here’s a link to the live in-store web cams of Super Stereo Warehouse. Their salespeople are trained in product knowledge and system design. Just so you know: they do not stock or sell Factory Refurbished or used equipment.

As Willa Cather said: Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

She got that right.

As Eve once said, primly setting down a cup of tea in her living room, "It was tough in the earlier days, trying to decide whether to become a particle or a wave."

"Or just to stay as both," piped in Adam from his Lazyboy.

"So what did you decide?" I asked, holding out my panasonic portable voice recorder.

Whrrrrrrrrr.

"Particle," said Adam.

"Wave," said Eve, at the same time.

They both burst out into laughter.

Well, at least they could still laugh about it.

Stalin and Lenin Talking About New Stereos.

Bizarro.

But that’s the way it goes when the world is poetry, isn’t it.

(Don’t mind me. Just think of me as Franz Kafka scurrying around in the basement, unscrewing fuses from the circuit box, screwing in new ones, sticking pennies behind some others so they don’t blow again, while waiting for permission to enter The Castle.)

A note from the Castle Administration:

Dear Franz,

we have received your entrance for admission, blah blah blah, duly processed, blah, blah, ...let you know when your application has been reviewed...et cet era.

Signed,

Adam.

p.s. If you’re going to blame anyone, maybe you should blame the futurists.

okee dokee!

Adam in his Days as a Futurist Poet
in disguise as an Einstein Action Figure
trying to break into Kafka’s Castle.
For the full text of the script for the movie, go here . Yes, a script!

OK, take Pound, if you like.

Adam(Interjecting): "Not a futurist, really."

Eve: "Oh, he’s close enough, dear. Leave the boy alone. Don’t tease him so."

Harold: "Yeah."

Adam: "For instance, in the company of such other amateur philosophers as T.E. Hulme, Pound devised a theory that poetry was an art best made through the principles of the assembly line."

Eve: "And your point, dear?"

Harold (Helpfully, and forgetting my own advice not to get involved in domestic disputes.): "Well, in Pound’s way of thinking, a poem consisted of words set side by side, without links between them."

Eve: "Well, sure. He was an American, after all. The poem wasn’t in the words, but in the thought that was generated by a person, a living person, who observed those objects." Eve looks at me pointedly. "So to speak. It was a way of using mechanization to free people from mechanization."

Adam: "So to speak."

Ah. Kind of like playing cards, really.

Ezra Pound Playing Cards With Eve
from Canto XLIX

When Adam saw that, that’s when he typed up a cease and desist court order and had it nailed to my door:

By 1939, Pound’s card game had been going on for years. Way too many years. He had bet the shirt off his back. Everyone had bet the shirts off their backs. On the eve of war, Pound interrupted the game to make a last trip back to the States from Italy, to convince Henry A. Wallace, then American Secretary of Agriculture, and his longtime correspondent, Senator William Borah, to convince the Franklin d. Roosevelt, the President of those United States, that war was not in the interests of American society, or the President, or the Secretary of Agriculture, because going to war would violate, and maybe even negate, the principles of the American constitution.

If Pound was my lawyer in my case for admission to the castle, the case might have gone like this:

Transcript of the Trial of Ezra Pound or
when a plea of insanity is the same as the admission of the writing of poetry.

Pound figured that as a poet, and, what’s more, a poet writing propaganda tracts about economics and submitting letters to the editor, under pseudonyms, in newspapers around the world, literally, that he was the man who knew, that everyone else was groping in the dark.

Transcript of a Radio Broadcast made by Ezra Pound from Radio Rome or
imagine if he had been broadcasting this from Hanoi in 1968.

Sounds like he hadn’t quite given up on the caviar by then, doesn’t it.

So, they don’t have caviar in my local supermarket, but, I tell you, what they do have is the next best thing: pears. You bet. Think of them as the poker chips in Ezra’s card game with Adam and Mussolini. Really. You know that tree in the Garden of Eden, the one that caused all the trouble by hiding a ssssssnake, and some juicccccccy fruit, and Eve picked it and all, and said, Adam, bite me, I mean, blush, bite this. Well, darn thing was a pear tree, actually. Yeah, yeah, I know, that little sapling, that weed, that sprout, actually, that wee slip of a thing nudging aside the lips of the grass to show itself usually comes up at Sunday dinner table conversation as an apple tree, but it doesn’t say apple tree anywhere in the Bible, actually. Not really. Here’s what it does say, really:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. Genesis 1:11

A Day’s Take from Safeway’s Eden, or
I don’t do no catch and release.
Bosc, Beurre D’Anjou, Yellow Williams, Concorde, and a Shy Little Japanese Number with a Clipped Stem so She Doesn’t Poke her Sisters
Now, ain’t that nice.

So, some artists, like Dürer, thought they would clarify the issue. You gotta remember that in those days apples were for making cider. Darn things tasted like wood. You gnawed on them. It was like eating the knob off the end of a stair banister that had been soaked in honey. It was like, oh, eating the snake’s head off of your walking stick, grrrrrrrrr. No, if you wanted to actually eat something, if you wanted to get your teeth into a little tenderness, like a love poem from old Provence, strummed by a troubadour blowing kisses to his master’s mistress, you bit into a pear, hands down. Or at least a woman did. No gnawing on banisters for them. Besides, the things grew in every meadow. Wasps crawled over the fruit. You went out amidst the cows and picked them up.

Bzzzzzzzzz.

Orchard Scattered Across a Meadow like Stars Across a Night Sky.

Adam’s cows used to graze under these trees. As you can see, the trees — like the church steeple in the background — had to be extra tall, so that the cows couldn’t nibble off all the fruit before it got ripe. In the fall, my father told me, those trees roared with wasps.

The German word for a fruit planting like this is Streuobstwiese. Just so you know.

Try saying that ten times real fast with oatmeal in your mouth!

When my father (Well, he was only 12 years old then, but you get the idea.) got really hungry during the last year of the Second World War, he used to sneak down to the Siegfried Line, Germany’s so-called Western Wall of defence, and in those abandoned farming fields along the Eastern side of the river and facing the big bad American Army in Alsace, he used to sneak amongst the pillboxes, out past the concentration camp where the French Resistance was sawing wood, and pick the pears off of the trees like that, which had been completely abandoned to the Yankee guns, and God.

God.

A Particle of Light that has Divided Itself into Two, Two, Two Conference Pears in One
(one coming, one going)
This picture was taken using now historical Copperplate technology

Besides, the darn things looked like breasts.

And it didn’t stop there. In the early twenty-first century, women’s magazines advertised different weight loss and fashion strategies for women with apple-shaped bodies and women with pear-shaped bodies. Who knew!

Eve the Pear Picking a Pippin in the Neighbourhood Streuobstwiese,

as Hugo Van der Goes saw it (some time before 1470), sandwiched between Adam of the big feet and the handshake, just back from the NBA finals by the looks of him, and, what’s that on the right, his agent?

Oh, it’s a dance! I got it. It’s a square dance in a country hall. The guy on the right wants to butt in. Maybe it’s me!

Adam: "Harold, you’re going to need a bolo tie. Honey, do I have a tie Harold could borrow?"

Eve: "Allemand and Do-se-do, Follow-your-neighbor and Explode the line!" She takes me by the hand and around we go.

Adam: "Remake (the Column) and Scoot & Weave!" It’s getting dizzying.

Eve: "Slip, Slide, Swing, Slither!"

Adam: "Chase Your Neighbor"

Eve: "Cross Your Neighbor."

Harold: "Whoa!"

Adam: "I’m going to chase you, that’s what I’m going to do!"

Eve: "Do your best! (Squeal.)"

Ahem. Blush. Well. Let’s leave them now, shall we, flounced skirts and petticoats and bolos flying.

To set the scene: on one side of the dance hall there is reason. On the other? Why, counter-reason. These black-suited boys are lined up like missile silos in Siberia and Nebraska. They are lined up like particles of light trying to decide between candidates in a Canadian election.

In this card game gone wrong, in this trading of jokes between Heisenberg and Dürer, in this Siegfried Line and this We’re Going to Hang our Washing on the Siegfried Line, in the American version by Jimmy Kennedy & Michael Carr:

We'll just rub along without a care.
We're going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

Four American Soldiers Crossed the Rhine, Taboo, Taboo,
(showing how stiff their clothes can get
in the good old fashioned German snow on the Siegfried Line).
Either that, or those doughboys used too much starch.

and the German version, which my father sang when he visited the pillboxes with his youth group:

When the big German washday is finally here, man,
you won’t need to ever wash your clothes again.

Oh, please do.

Early Set for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: Germany, 1945.
American soldier inside a pillbox on the Siegfried Line.

After the American takeover of the film, and a few months after my father came with his youth group, and the soldiers there, deep underground, stuck their fingers in their mouths and sucked and made bad sexual jokes. I think the sign above the telephone pretty well says it all: "Don’t talk secrets. The enemy is listening."

It’s enough to make a guy want to just abandon words altogether. Here goes:

Albrecht Dürer
after eating too many apples on the Streuobstwiese outside Nüremberg.
poem by Harold Rhenisch

Adam: "You know, people have blamed the ruin of the world on Eve and me for a long time. It’s getting a bit tiring, actually."

Eve: "They’re just jealous of the things we do in bed."

Adam: (Smiles.) "In our modern world of destruction and environmental decay, poetry and physics are not innocent bystanders, either. Why do people always look to us, then?"

Eve: "They’re the ones that started all this. They replaced the world, not us."

Physicist About to Look at Adam Through X-Ray Gogs
from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

Right. So, I asked Adam and Eve about the snake in Goes’ picture of the Streuobstwiese. It was indecorous, I know, but I just had to ask.

Eve: "Does he look like a snake to you?"

Adam: (Putting his arm around Eve and giving a squeeze.) "Actually, he looks like a poet, don’t you think?"

Well, let’s look, shall we? Here’s our poet, viewed across the span of history:

Adam’s Poet (left) and Chagall’s, too (right)
Harold: Psssst! It looks like Chagall ate too many little green apples, actually.
Adam: To tell you the truth, Chagall’s looks a lot like Isaac Newton,
after taking a bite out of Einstein’s physics. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Eve: "Oh, you boys. Would you stop it. All you’re doing here together in our virtual selves in this virtual space you like to call Canada is fussing with the leftover pieces of God’s smashed creation on the wall of my refrigerator.

The Last Shards of God’s Creation
scattered across the front of a nuclear winter.

Harold: "Our lives depend on it, Eve. Our souls depend on it."

Eve: "Souls! Oh, don’t get me started. If I think of all the trouble in the world that has been started because of these souls!"

Next week: The varied positions of a love affair with pears.

How Nice it is to Have Central Heating

2005-11-27T15:33:00.000-08:00

You know this story. You know this one by heart.

You just gotta look up at the night stars, and it all comes back to you.

The Cone Nebula
Jesus on his Crown of Glory

Only lightly photoshopped in. For the real thing, though, you gotta go here. Only US$6. Postpaid. With Paypal! I was visitor number 428. You?

No, not that picture!

The Eye of Jesus in the Eagle Nebula

"And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." (Matthew 24:30)

No, not that picture! Sheesh.

Look, as Andre Gide said, Art is a collaboration between God and the Artist, and the less the artist does the better.

No, I mean the stars that arch over my house like pebbles on Agate Beach on Haida Gwaii, a hundred different colours, or like flowers in a spring meadow. A love for physical measurement maintains that by looking at those stars we are looking back to the beginning of time: 14.5 billion years, give or take a weekend. In fact, certain members of those slide-rule and abacus crowd are arguing that some of the stars they are viewing in their telescopes are older than the universe itself. That kind of thing is enough to piss a 14-year-old science student right off, I tell you.

Default View through the Hubble Telescope

Notice Adam and Eve Slinking Away After Stealing Fruit from their Own Orchard. Like, what’s that all about?

Eve: “Me, I’m waiting for the electronic version of a slide-rule.”

Adam: “Yeah, we got electronic calculators, we got graphing calculators, but, well, so what, you know. And where’s the electronic abacus!!”

Eve: “How's a girl supposed to feel romantic?”

I tell ya. Physicists didn’t invent the idea of an older universe surviving in the cracks of this newer one. Listen:

Eve: “Knit 3, pearl 2.” (Eve’s been making baby booties from a Redbook pattern I faxed her down the evolutionary wormhole.) “Pshaw. The gnostics were talking about it 2000 years ago, for one.”

Adam: (Poking his head out from underneath his Volkswagen.) (Hey, look, the guy was sitting around choking on dust and wormwood, with nothing to do.) “You know. The idea that we’ve been stranded on this planet, this zone of matter and death, and only through our minds are we going to get back to God.”

Eve: “Oh, gosh golly, there you’ve made me lose count again.”

Eve Knitting (previously confused with a Roman Abacus).

Adam: (Warming up to the subject and wiping his greasy hands on his overalls -- Thanks to my advice, Adam shops at Workwear World now). “In fact...Pass me that wrench there. Yes, that one. Thanks! (Clang! Clang! Clang!) It is through using those minds that we are going to make it there, (umph) back to Mr. G. himself, off of this frozen floor, on which, umppphh (beads of sweat), God’s beautiful crystal stars lie smashed, under this...night...sky...which is just a re...flec...tion of the fragments...There, done!”

Following this logic, every child that is born divides the little bit of God within us into smaller and smaller pieces.

Adam: “Now you’re talking.”

Kind of like the poetry of Ezra Pound, or the minimalist poetry of Aram Saroyan.

Adam: “Now you got it.”

Eve: “What do you think? What about pink? Pink’s nice, isn’t it?”

The Stars of the Night Sky in the Cariboo, and the End of Philosophy.

When I moved to the plateau in 1992, this night sky was masquerading as a lawn of Kentucky Blue Grass. Once it relaxed in my presence, though, it took off its mask. Et voilà.

Adam (peering over my shoulder and chewing on a grass stalk): “That was God’s first operating system, OS1, slowly grinding through its tasks.”

Eve (from the kitchen, stirring a pot of potato and leek soup): “Meanwhile, it seems, while it chugs through its bites, everyone is alone on a huge and uncaring earth, aren’t they.”

Adam: “Uh-huh. Where a grizzly stares at you and stares at you and stares at you and stares at you.”

Harold (tentatively): “Where if you hang around long enough you become dinner?”

Eve: “What a beastly world!” (She sets a bowl of steaming soup in front of me.) “Don’t you think?”

Adam cocks an eyebrow and passes me some bread.

I, of course, try not to get involved in domestic arguments.

I change the subject.

(Here’s the poem I told them instead -- kind of like putting your fingers in your ears and saying ahhhh!)

A Lighter than Air Poem by Aram Saroyan

In the American Senate, this poem was used as an example in an argument for discontinuing all arts funding in the United States of America. Whoever said that poetry had no power?

Everybody’s a philosopher. For instance, a grizzly stalked my wife and the kids and me once, for two and a half miles in Wells Grey Park in October.

"Grizzly Warning!"

The Oregon Department of Fish and Game recently issued the following bulletin: In light of the rising frequency of mountain biker/hiker/grizzly bear conflicts, the Oregon Department of Fish and Game is advising mountain bikers, as well as hikers, fishermen and hunters to take extra precautions and keep alert for bears while in the field. We advise bikers to wear noisy little bells on their clothing so as not to startle bears that are not expecting them. We also advise mountain bikers to carry pepper spray with them in the event of an encounter with a bear.

It is also a good idea to watch for fresh signs of bear activity. Mountain bikers should recognize the difference between Black Bear and Grizzly Bear droppings: Black Bear droppings are smaller and contain lots of berries and squirrel fur; Grizzly Bear droppings have little bells and smell like pepper.

Well, I guess, sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, that’s all.

Up here on the plateau, for instance. In between the philosophers, we got trees and we got snow. They don’t stare, not like a grizzly stares, but the snow does fall. In fact, the snow falls wherever whenever. Sometimes it falls in October. A lot of it falls in December and January. The worst snowstorms are often in March. Sometimes it falls in the middle of July. You get meltdown in February and hail in December. You get black ice pretty well every month between September and May. And you got trees. The trees, well, you just can’t stop the trees, can you.

Philosopher Contemplating Eating a Poet
before hibernating under a tree stump.
Now a movie by Werner Herzog.

For a little animated preview of a bear making his move, go here. Awww. The real bears are almost anti-climactic, aren’t they.

The little trees seed themselves in my driveway, if I don’t rake it for a couple weeks. They peak up between the grains of gravel like sequoias in the Jurassic. They grow like weeds along the natural gas pipeline, and along highway rights of way, and in the ditches of logging roads that cross-stitch the plateau like one of Eve’s dropped knitting projects, and on the clearings of old logging shows, and pretty much every place in between. They grow like that for two hundred miles in any direction.

Hot Tip! For a picture of Eve’s sewing machine, go here.

Well, Christmas, right. It's coming quick. What's a guy to do? Thing is:

either you cut one of those wild and woolly trees down for a Christmas tree and set it up in your living room with gingerbread, or in a decade a crew is going to come along with saws and cut it down themselves. Leave the trees lying there by the tens of thousands. Let them turn brown and drop their needles. Trip over the damn things. In a world like this, what the point is of getting a Christmas tree from a box under the stairs, I dunno.

It’s like eating caviar, I think.

Caviar for the Masses!

Not if these guys smiling out of the cover of Orion magazine can help it! Here’s a quote to whet your whistle (I tell ya, it looks like a film set of Gooooood Morning Afghanistan!):

In less than seventy years, Soviet communism turned the breadbasket of Eurasia into a nation dependent on American wheat and grateful for foreign aid in the form of frozen chicken legs (which Russians affectionately called nogi Busha -- Bush's legs -- for George Sr., who sent them).

Nope. It’s just best to set the tree up in the corner and break out the cards and the rum and cokes. Shuffle the deck, see what comes up, see what game we are going to play this time. Put your environmental attention elsewhere. Why cards? Simple:

God Does Not Play Dice,
but Eve sure does play cards (and bingo too).
Casino advertising sign. Sugarcane, B.C., November 24, 2005.
Eve’s cool. She doesn’t let it bother her that Einstein said that any physics that maintained that a beam of light was both a wave and a particle at the same time was an incomplete physics, does she! Her knowledge is, shall we say, more elemental than that. By the way, that’s $100 she’s flashing. As was said in the days when Soviet Socialist Realism was official policy in Russia: Art is memory; propaganda is prophecy.

Or, as Andy Warhol said in the days when Soviet Socialist Realism was still the official policy in Russia: An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he -- for some reason -- thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Yeah, kind of like that tree that God planted in the Garden of Eden. Kind of like that. Kind of. Like that.

Eve on the Problem of Being a Particle and a Wave
in a Vast Universe of Eligible Men with Money
“My horoscope says I should expect an exciting time with my partner today...
if I only knew which one!”

Bild Lilli (from West Germany’s Bild magazine, the Life of the Wirtschaftswunder) was Barbie Doll before she crossed the Atlantic, and after she danced in the cabarets as Marlene Dietrich, and after she ate pears with Adam under The Tree.

So, we’re playing cards. Ok.

OK, these were the rules for the card game that was Germany in 1941; this is how we got into the position of being in a nuclear winter: in Germany in 1941 there wasn’t enough heavy water to cool a nuclear reactor, but there was enough methane, really cold liquid methane, 162 degrees below zero Celsius liquid methane, actually, cold as Jupiter methane, cold as Saturn methane, cold as the beginning of the world methane. There was enough of that natural gas cold as a comet’s breath methane to get a reactor running very slowly, enough of that cold as the bent space around the burbling sun methane, enough of that pay no royalties to the government of British Columbia methane (like one of those gas-powered heaters they used to put in Volkswagen Beetles), enough of that don’t-you-pump-that-methane-from-our-ocean-floor-methane, enough of that Lethbridge feedlot methane, to end the Second World War before it had hardly begun.

The Wirtschaftswunder was Heated by Carbon Monoxide.
Wirtschaftswunder: wave version, particle version.
Those heaters did not keep the cars warm.

I remember driving around with my friend Nancy in her little blue VW Bug, and reaching my hand out the window to pull the wipers back and forth in the rain. That was back in 1977. The slightly older picture above is of the launch of one of the first models by the German army on its invasion of Poland. Here is an excerpt from Hitler’s speeches about the launch of the VW line, on February 15, 1936.

...the intensive development of our most modern sector of the transport industry depends on the complete freedom of a People to make use of it, and I mean by this the absence of legal and psychological restrictions. It is no more asocial to buy a car than it once was to use a sheet of glass in a window instead of the traditional piece of oilskin. In the beginning only a few people use an invention of this kind; then it attracts more and more people until it gradually includes everyone...

In the latter part of the 1930s, German factory workers had a fee deducted monthly from their pay to pay for the purchase of their very own people’s car.

Adam: “Yeah. Joke at the time among the boys was...”

Eve (Rolling her eyes): “Funny thing about these cars we’re making: they look more like anti-aircraft guns.”

Adam: “Yeah.”

Eve: “To hell with Henry Ford.”

Adam: “Yeah.”

Eve’s right, though: with the dirty radioactive byproducts of such a reactor, kind of like the soot you get out of a wood stove when you have it damped down too tightly and the wood hardly flickers in there, you could, you know, poison London, or New York, even, but at least you wouldn’t blow up your lab in Heidelberg or Berlin. When the German Post Office asked for permission to go through with its cold reactor experiment, Werner von Heisenberg, who was a clever subatomic physicist and official head of the German Atomic Program, said, pshaw, it wouldn’t work. Just in case it did work, though, he requisitioned all the available uranium from the mines in Czechoslovakia’s St. Joachimstal, just, coincidentally, at the time that the post office trial had lined up all the available dry ice. By the time the dry ice had all evaporated, there wasn’t any more available for a long time. It was, after all, war. Things were rationed, you know. That was that.

Ah, but I tell ya, after the war, my uncle Joe got TB in the Russian camp in the Joachimstal, mining that stuff. Before that, he had been the town engineer in the resort town of Reinerz (think palm trees in tubs on the streets and skiers in the winter) just over the German frontier.

Heisenberg’s and Stalin’s Uranium Came from this Valley in Czechoslovakia.

Joe Schreiber got out by swimming a river in the night. His last words in Canada were about how nice it was to have central heating. Then his heart gave out.

Sometimes, though, I wonder who did win the Second World War. I think Heisenberg’s missing methane gets pumped right into my house. I think I use it every day to keep the place warm. I think it cooks my Christmas goose every year, complete with stuffing and all the trimmings.

Is this The German Post Office’s Missing Nuclear Reactor?
Well, yeah. This is Canada, folks. We, um, allow for certain practicalities here. We know how to turn, like, a blind eye, you know. Here on the northern lung of the world, this is a culture of cold: pressurized gas (cold) to heat our (cold) houses when the weather (normally cold) gets, normally, colder; refrigerators (cold, colder, coldest), inside those (over)heated houses to keep our beer cold; air conditioners to cool our houses when they are no longer cold; meat lockers; frozen pizzas; tins of compressed air -- for cleaning off computers that you bought cheap on eBay cuz some dude left a cigarette burning in an ashtray beside the fan for five years -- that can give you frostbite, that kids sniff, sometimes, and their lungs seize up and they turn blue. It’s bloody tragic, that’s what it is.

I think those gnostics were onto something.

There’s a bunch of that liquid methane pouring through the valley just two kilometres from my house, and there’s a whole bunch of cows pouring out the warm stuff, and Timothy Treadwell filmed himself cupping his hands around a pile of grizzly scat, and cried out gleefully that he felt her heat, that this was her life, man, and the Government of British Columbia is swimming in cash from the stuff, and the Government of Alberta has got so many royalties from the stuff that they are just giving the money away, because they’ve come to think that’s what government is for, and the Americans are burning the stuff up to provide electricity, because they’ve come to think that’s what government is for, and the Post-Carbon Institute is pointing out that if we are drilling twice as many wells to get the same amount of gas out, that, in effect, we’ve almost used all of the stuff up, and our whole cold earth, spinning in space like a pear, is getting just a little bit warmer, and we all know what happens when a pear sits out too long on the counter without being eaten: turns to mush, that’s what it does.

NASA Picture of the Gnostic Earth in the Throes of Global Warming.
That’s my house in 150 Mile House, right in the blemish on the upper left.
But wait! The methane is not all gone! There’s still, tada!, super-cooled stuff frozen at the bottom of the sea, left over from the creation of the solar system, like the black chunk of concentrated evil at the end of Time Bandits, just waiting for a sequel.

Chills your hands, it does.

As Samuel Johnson said: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Do Not Enter Sign God Nailed to the Gates of the Garden of Eden
After He Booted the Freeloaders Out
Next week: Everything you wanted to know about Eve but were afraid to ask.