Thanks Be To Writers

I am aware that I have been neglecting this blog. Not that I expect anyone but you, Pat, to actually read it but still, the blog arose out of a desire to simply write, just for the love of it, or to offer some piece of writing that inspired me--to somehow acknowledge once a month that writing is a beautiful act, often one of healing, often one of outcry, sometimes (though I try to avoid this sort) of revenge.

I spent a number of days last week on Bowen Island, resting in the bosom of a quiet room, windows that looked out on mountains, trees, a small stretch of ocean, and even occasionally on deer. A bathtub beckoned me after walks in the woods or on the labyrinth. (One of those days--no, two--my labyrinth walks involved children bouncing along peering up to see how I'd react. It is amazing how grounded one can be in walking meditation even with all that ululation and dashing about, but even so I permitted them a small smile if they got right inside my tiny circle of attention. There is a line between focus and foolishness.)

I wrote no poems while there, though I did write a simple hymn, and worked easily on its melody a few times over the days. If having it become a brainworm is success, then, well--success!

I was very anxious when I got there. Somehow this housing thing is really eating away at me. Having the island to go to to bargain a few days of respite from my despairing brain is a real godsend. By day four I could feel actual calm beginning to surface. By day five, well, it was time to prepare to go home, and the calm evaporated in a cloud of tears. But.

Writing prevailed. Not mine, but that of others. I read a novel while I was there, but also spent time with a number of other books--Thich Nhat Hanh's How To Relax, via Overdrive (ebook through the library system), Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (beautiful and ugly; audiobook via Overdrive), the Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (this one really got me missing my gramma), and most particularly In Age Reborn, by Grace Sustained: One Woman's Journey Through Aging and Chronic Illness by Sister Thelma-Anne McLeod.

This book reached me on a number of levels, in part because the illness she suffered was Parkinson's, which killed my grandfather in the 1980s and which at the time I was too scared to learn much about. (Instead, I put my courage into getting myself to visit him when I was so afraid of losing him I was inclined to bury my head in the sand instead.) Her thoughtful examination of her physical, emotional, and spiritual struggles in response to the illness was gripping and illuminating. (Her sense of humour, humility, and pride were a delight, as well.)

I was surprised, though, by how much of her experience of chronic illness and the emotional turmoil that comes with it reflected my own. I tend to discount my illnesses and blame myself for the limitations in my life. Seeing her grapple so courageously and publicly with things I have endured for so long was a shock but also an inspiration. And some of the deeper lessons she drew from her grapplings struck me resoundingly, as well. So, the gift of grace, borrowed from others, helped me through another week.

Many thanks to the authors whose joy, sorrow, and wisdom touched me over these days.

Review: “Cathedral of the August Heat” by Pierre Clitandre

I have read more than sixty books about Haiti over the years—or rather, nonfiction books about, novels set in, and so on. Cathedral of the August Heat * by Pierre Clitandre is the most perplexing.

I must first say that I know little of magical realism, which I believe is the genre this book most clearly fits into. Women become pools, men cathedrals (well, each of those happens only once, but there is lots else besides). This doesn't happen on every page and when it does it is generally effective. But I can't measure its effectiveness against, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude and its ilk, which I haven't read.

I am spending so many keystrokes on the style because this book is much held by style, so much so that the content and indeed the story are sometimes obscured by it. Recall that this is written in translation—as far as I can tell, a very literate and often beautiful translation, by Bridget Jones.

The sense I have is that some of, perhaps much of the gist of the novel is, like the Kreyol language itself, not in the words so much as what images and stories they remind the reader of, and in this the English translation can't much help us. I have had times in the past when a person would speak to me in Kreyol and I understood every word that was said and had no idea of the meaning. English, at its most colourful, can do the same. All of this is to explain that although I read with care, there were often times when I had only the foggiest idea what was going on, and I don't know how much of this was the language and how much was due to the author's tendency to switch points of view without necessarily saying who we were switching into, and drifting back and forth between minor characters over much of the book—occasionally lending confusion as to whether a character was the same as another or a different one entirely.

This may have been deliberate. We do learn names, and there is one character in particular, strangely called John, rather than Jean, who is more or less the main POV character. But we miss him for ages at a time and we never really do get into his skin. Much, much is said of the collective experience of the poor, and how they are herded back and forth and brutalized by the elements and the soldier class. So it may be that Clitandre's vagueness in POV change and his distance from the heart of his characters is because they are all, to him, metaphors, folk images, elements of Vodou, reminders of history, reminders of suffering and the only way to elude it—maybe. A wiser (or more foolish) writer than myself might spend a lot of time trying to understand the position of women within the narrative, and children, and men, each separately, and a thousand other ingredients that combine in this ever-moving, elemental piece.

One last word on words. Despite her gorgeous rendering of Clitandre’s most brutal and sublime reveries, I can't thank Jones for choosing “a lively West Indian English” as the jargon for the people. I have spoken in English with many Haitians and they do not speak that way. It felt weirdly superimposed and hard to get used to—no less beautiful but foreign. A minor point.

So what of the story? Read it? Don't read it?

Read it. Let it wash over you just as it is, without struggling in the ways I have struggled to make it fit into the confines of a regular novel. Don't expect all the plot lines, or metaphors, more accurately, to be tied up. Don't expect to know how it ends. (Remember that Duvalier was still in power when this novel broke. Clitandre's father, by the way, was one of the many disappeared.)

Let it be a long, long poem, expressing the endless ebb and flow of suffering and beauty and brutality and hope. It is coarse, it is sometimes disgusting, it is transporting, it is tragic, it refuses to be any of the above.

* In French: Cathédrale du Mois d'Août

Image: Credit is not given. A Haitian mural. No idea where, but Jacmel on the bus does give us a hint!

So, Amos Barton...Thoughts on a Short Novel by George Eliot

So, Amos Barton

A number of years ago an unknown neighbour left a massive copy of Middlemarch by George Eliot on the table in the lobby. (Strictly against the rules, I might add.)

Against my better judgement, knowing I would never read it, yet with a flicker of wishfulness that I wasn’t so intimidated by old and difficult books, so sure that I would find them dull or “beyond me”, and thus confirm my doubt that I had anything but the most pedestrian intelligence, I picked it up.

And put it down.

It remained on my shelf, amongst unread Hardy and untouched Austen, for a period of time. I don’t remember how long or how short. I do remember hefting it off the shelf one brave day and taking my usual reading position and starting in on the first page.

The language was enormous. Never mind that it was nearly a hundred and fifty years old. It was the tongue of an energetic master, a whip-strong language with a mind behind it bursting with energy and observation and thought. At first I was astonished, and thrilled, and moved, but then, wandering into chapter one, I was soon well lost. There was too much I couldn’t understand, too much I had to fight to put any meaning to at all.

I put the book away.

Sometime later, I picked it up again. And then again, always getting at most thirty pages in. I knew that if only I could get over the hump, I would love this book. Or at least, I hoped so. Finally I did the only thing left to me.

I took it to my mother’s in Manitoba, with only nonfiction besides, and stretches of time when there would be nothing else to do. It came alive.

I stopped worrying about the odd bit I didn’t get. I got into the music of her way of expressing herself. I allowed myself to be swept into poor Miss Brooke’s life. I thrilled at the way the author was able not only to collect together all the elements of a world but to make true sense of them, and to do it with words and phrases that seemed plucked out of heaven itself. It was an epiphany.

Fast forward ten years or so. In my cupboard wait two more Eliot books, Silas Marner and The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. Both much shorter books than Middlemarch, though in an omnibus edition the three do fill the hand and weary the arm. Nevertheless! I had been holding onto these as after dinner mints—the kind long forgotten in pocket lint—and the time had finally come.

I got through Silas Marner unscathed and happy, though it had been a near thing. Poor old Silas. A good man, and I’m glad things worked out. But Amos Barton, now, that was another kettle of fish.

I finished it last night. I am going to tell you, sort of, how it ends, but I am also going to tell you how it begins and how it middles.

This is a very short tale, the earliest of the three, and perhaps Eliot was just learning her craft. Maybe no one had told her that you don’t write books like this. Her betters would surely not let her get away with it now.

We float into a thought-line, that of an opinionated and powerful narrator, identitiy never disclosed, the author herself, of course, who muses on the place and people, takes us into and out of their conversations as the subject matter pertains or fails to pertain to Amos Barton himself. She shows his strengths and his foibles equally, shows the people around him—those who love, those who mock, and those whose loyalties wobble when times are tough. She shows his wonderful wife and their thoughtless friend and the slow diminution of his wife’s health. And then the wife dies.

At this terrible moment, all of these (or many of these) ordinary gossiping not helpful people are touched by his grief and pitch in to buoy him through his poverty and sorrow. At last he is redeemed in their eyes, and his future, though bleached with loss, seems sure.

And then he loses his position as curate, and goes away. We see him once more and he seems at ease with his lot, but his daughter, his eldest daughter, has devoted her life to his care since she was ten years old. She has traded her own life for her mother’s, and though at least she is spared the whole health-whittling thing of childbirth ... it is not a happy end.

It is not so much a story as a wandering character study, though of course it is a story, too, and as with the others, Eliot’s voice is sublime. But for Amos Barton you must not skip the annoying characters or just find the plotline and ignore the descriptions (as of course I would never do) because this book is just life, unfolding in all its meaness and all its happiness and all its regrets, and the author pulls no punches, and no great lesson is learned, and we all just get older in the end.

So I can’t get it out of my head. She didn’t fix things. Not at all. She just laid them out.

Brava, Madame George.

“The Danger of Books”

Some while ago I read the 1949 SF classic Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. (Click here for full text in pdf format.) I very much enjoyed this dreamy exploration of life for one man in a post-apocalyptic USA.

Ish is a scientist, and he approaches the overturning of civilization and near extinction of humankind with an observer's detachment at the same time as experiencing it in all its personal shock and upheaval. It is a pleasure to see through his eyes the slow recovery of his urban landscape by natural forces, and the even slower resurrection of some sort of kinship unit as people gradually come together around him. It is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but an even-handed depiction of what might come to be.

There is a lovely scene where Ish takes his child to a long-disused public library, a place of sanctuary for him but a totally new sensation for the boy.

“He was actually glad to get Joey away. The stimulation of seeing so many books seemed almost more than was good for the frail little boy. Ish was glad that he had not taken him to the university library.”

I know the feeling Ish. Get his feet wet slowly. It's the only way.