water from stone: August 2006

"All manner of things"

Sometimes I marvel at the closeness the human heart can find to a geographical location, to place. For some people, this closeness is deeply connected to a childhood home, even a certain interstate (or dirt road), a mountain, a town, a wooded path. For me, it is a granite rock rising from a lake in the Canadian Shield, a relic from the times when ice used to scrape and prod the landscape, an ancient, a survivor.

It is quiet there because of its height and distance from the water. The positioning of the peak, on a peninsula facing the setting sun, sets it apart from the surrounding cottages, and all you can really hear is the wind. There is nothing much special about the rock itself. There are some spindly, heroic trees that grow on the windy side, their roots diving deeply into cracks in the rock and reaching somehow to water. And there is a large patch of vividly green moss on top of the rock, sheltered in a little water-collecting dip, that remains exactly the same year-in, year-out. When my father was a boy he came to the rock and pulled up a patch of it, and the dark, dark shadow still lingers on the rock, scolding him right to the next generation. When we were children we came to the rock and explored it until its mysteries disappeared: intrepid, laughing, we found every niche, and the secret route down the dangerously steep face of the rock to the water. But the rock itself is just a rock: grey and still, a massive elephant sleeping at the lake's edge.

I go there to look outwards, at the lake lying in silver-blue splendour, at the sun's glittering trail clear across its restive surface, and at the sky stretching above and away and up, up, up, a blazing ceiling of blue, alive with clouds and colour. I go to watch fishermen float around the bay, chuckling and swilling beer and twitching their poles, seeming never to catch anything. Sometimes I go there to watch the sunset turn the west into a roaring furnace, capturing the purple and gold light above the horizon with my lens. But mostly I go there to write.

How can a physical place give perspective?

Walden pond gave Thoreau perspective, I suppose. Annie Dillard found an intimate connection to Tinker Creek. Barry Lopez sees the world through the icy lens of the Arctic. It's been done, and done again. These and many others wrote, and write, the most important works of their lives in the solitude, and solace, of the physical world. Something about nature restores creativity in periods of dryness, lends passion--or compassion--to people who are thirsty for inspiration.

The rock is my own muse. On the rock I feel a weight lift from my shoulders. Somehow, it is there, more than any other place, where everything feels as though all will be well, "and all manner of things shall be well." Light and water blend and dazzle my eyes, and in rare moments, it's as if God Himself sends His pen flying across the tablet of my mind. Sometimes there is no noise at all, only wind, sending gentle ripples over the lake, moving through the trees, and making my heart stir, sigh, and rest.

Summon the will

It takes an effort of will to open it. It sits there, mockingly, its bright orange cover flashing in the morning light, its strong black lettering curving into laughter, at me, at my holiday-induced laziness. I'm a classic. Everyone's read me but you. I glare at it. So? What's your point?

It doesn't move, on purpose, I know; its benign cover eyes me impassively. You might as well read me now, so that you understand the references people make to me, oh, every twenty seconds for the rest of your life. The pages flutter in the breeze from the open window.

Fine.

It has me interested by the end of the first paragraph, and by the end of the first chapter I am totally engrossed. Light fades. I read on.

The power of it steals my breath. The world swirls around me, but it is comparatively uninteresting. Life is, for now, contained in the book I am reading. And when I put it down, tears washing my face, I am glad, glad, that I read it, even if despite the beautiful writing it crushed me and messed up some of my ideas and shook me up through and through.

I am impressed again by the enormous power of words. How can words do this to you? How can words be so alive? Writers long turned to dust still speak, shout, from the pages of their tomes, still make history, conversation. Words as old as the hills still impress themselves deeply on society, on the human spirit. It is words that shape and change the world. Nothing else--nothing more, nothing less.

The ability to read and write changes us from monkeys to men, from statues to communicating beings. It is in books that we find the past, arrayed in all its glory and horror and triumphs and mistakes. It is in books that we see the present, working itself out word by word, in newspapers, novels, in the rapidly-firing texts of technology. And in books we attempt to feel around the edges of what we know to see what we don't, if not with our eyes, with our imaginations. In books we glimpse the future.

Words give us hope.

As always, it is up to us to summon the will to read them.

Plant karma

Auuuugust.

The beginning is a sigh of relief, and the end whips the summer out from under your feet like a magic carpet on a windy gale.

It is the end of August, and outside the window the waving leaves are very slightly tinged with copper-green. They appear to be exhausted from non-stop efforts to stay so cursedly green all summer long. Green is a difficult colour to be. Any leaf would tell you that. And dryness in earth and air, this year, made this even harder.

One wonders if leaves find it easier to just die, after a while, because "what goes around comes around," with plant matter at least, and life as leaves will return to them eventually. I always eye leaves suspiciously in the Autumn when they appear to be purposefully wrenching their stems from sturdy branches and taking kamikaze leaps to the ground, seemingly desperate to end summer's ordeal, clutching between browning veins the security of plant karma.

What goes around comes around. In every sense this phrase seems important, in the Autumn, even if one does not really believe in karma. The way we treat the environment now will partially determine the way the environment treats our children later--but the grand old "circle of life" will, I am certain, keep on trucking no matter what the heck we do to it.

The leaves are taking suicide leaps off the trees, but we can be sure that they'll pop out again when spring rolls around.

Auuuugust.

Dear reader,

You may not believe me, but I know who you are. Yes, I do.

I know you are there, lurking behind your white screen, feeling safe behind your silent anonymity, flipping through pages with breathtaking speed, reading what interests you, leaving the rest. You are slouching over your computer, expression registering interest at varying degrees--sometimes you peer into the screen like Indiana Jones into the Holy Grail--sometimes you frown at it with hazy boredom worthy of the Paper Bag Princess.

You are wearing a pink boa and lime-green dinosaur pajamas, and aviator glasses. Or not. This is where my imagination breaks down.

Who are you, really?

Who are any of us?

I am a relative newcomer to the mysterious subculture of blogging. Who knew that blogging was so huge? Certainly not I, at least until I stumbled into it. People don't talk about it, much. They just read others' blogs, read silently at their own computers, and write their own. After a while networks or societies form, of people who read roughly the same blogs every day, and become familiar with each other, learn to "know" each other. Or sometimes we "lurk," travelling from blog to blog, never commenting or leaving any trace at all.

Within the framework of blogging there are great differences. Some appreciate total invisibility. Some virtually volunteer their street addresses. There are codes of conduct, too. Everyone appreciates comments; no-one appreciates commentary in poor taste. We all obsessively check webpage stats. We love and we hate the "next blog" button. Sometimes the possibility of being "discovered" by an agent for a massive publishing group fills you with panic to write more and write better so that your ship will finally finally come when they read your blog; sometimes you simply do not care what anyone thinks--you just need to communicate.

How many of us are sitting in front of our "blogging machines," as one blogger calls them, right now, this minute? Thousands...

The truth is, I do not know who you are, or what exactly we are creating corporately by blogging, and reading each other's blogs. Are we learning who we are under the surface, under what is readily apparent? Or are we hiding here underneath our words? We are an invisible society, and we depend on each other, if not to comment on each others' blogs, at least to be reading what is written. Somehow, this way, we keep in touch. We are less alone. That is the power of words.

Don't you think?

A Grand Mistake

When I was small I read a book about an enchanted prince and enchanted princess, a very funny book by Patricia Wrede, and I was deeply impressed by one thing in particular: the prince's power to rearrange the Enchanted Forest by tweaking and twisting magic threads that webbed the Forest, threads only he was supposed to be able to see. But as he stretched out his hands into air that pulsated with potential, I could see the threads too. I could see the whole picture, clear as day, in my mind.

I identified with the prince on an unusual level. Since I was even smaller than novel-reading age, I'd felt within my whole person a very specific awareness of my own power with words. I knew, with frustrated clairvoyancy, that I would be a writer one day, and I hated the very idea. I cannot explain what I hated about it: perhaps it was the strength of my conviction that a certain type of life was inevitable for me. Who wants an inevitable life? I'd scowl at the suggestion, scowl at my own imagination, scowl for the fun of screwing up my face, and push it away with both hands, with all my strength.

What is the drive to write made of? Where does it come from? I see the world as a kaleidescope, light and colour and event and personality and emotion twisting up into odd shapes and bizarre combinations; the world is irresistably describable and irrepressably interesting. Writing, for me, has always been about ordering some of colours in this confused palette into lines and rows of text. I feel like a giant with the world in my hands when I write, throwing it wherever I choose, or like an enchanted prince with the power to tweak and pull things just so to bring out the right results. But writing gives not simply a sense of power. It gives joy. Something just seems so right about it. My hands seem made to write. My mind works best through words.

Somehow something painfully inevitable has become something made of pure joy. Fredrich Buechner said, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep joy and the world's deep hunger meet." And if I am wrong, if my calling is not here in the middle of this deep joy, I will carry on as if it were, and perpetrate the grand mistake.

The threads just feel so good in my hands.

Rhythm and Blues

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words--not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

Anne Lamott

Peter, or Life Above it All

He begs for biography. Not that he's ever begged for anything in his life, I am certain; but his life itself is a constant marvel, surprise, and annoyance to everyone he knows. And he is too interesting to pass up as subject matter. Hence:

When we first encountered him at the shelter he was the size of my palm. He had a small insistent voice and an arrogant stare, ironic and amusing in one so young, and still endearing; and he had confidence positively bursting out of every tooth and claw.

But the minute he sauntered into the house, already independent of his rescuers, he put my father out of business as head of the household. Though my father towered fully six feet above his tiny rat-like grey and white person, he couldn't hold a candle to the newcomer's confidence. I am here, lucky for you, said Peter, and we cowered.

In a manner both devilish and mysterious he learned early to play the piano. Many a night we jolted awake to bizarre, Phantom-esque melodies emitting from the living room; first on the scene [bleary-eyed, wild-haired, shocked] would inevitably find the lean and fabulous Peter standing poised on the keys, green eyes alight with eery glory, telling us in no uncertain terms when he leaped in one sinewy jump to the floor and streaked to the door that he wanted to go outside right now not later but now now now. These freakish displays revealed to us anew his inappropriate sense of humour every time the cover was left off the keys.

Smoothly indeed did his Feline Radiance make the transition from relatively-rural to entirely urban; after a week, nay--a day, he'd mastered the art of living gracefully in the land of concrete. Traffic, streetlights, pretentious city kitties--what are they to me? He knew without a quiver in his exquisite whiskers that he was above them all.

Now, we live in awe of his beauty as he stalks fences. We shudder when the moonlight catches his glinting eyes. We shower him with affection and are grateful for his. He has taught us by the very vivacity of his personality the nature of unconditional love [ours for him, certainly not his for us].

Only my father, for years Peter's principle competition for dibs on the plush wing-backed chair, has the courage to boot him out the door when he is being particularly hellish. The rest of us bow to his whims.

[Note: if he rebukes me for the brevity of his biography I will lengthen it as per his wishes.]

Marching Backwards

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

Marshall McLuhan

Goose-Bane

When the cars leave the garage and the mechanical door shuts on them for the twentieth time this summer, we feel abandoned. We sit and stare at each other for a few minutes and don't even try to pretend that we're not lonely in this big house without them.

And then we decide that pretending is more fun. "Let's celebrate aloneness, babe," I say, and she smiles at me and wags. "Should we go for a walk?"

We go, leaving the cool stale air of the house gratefully, locking the door behind us. Outside, the cold morning air has dissipated under a hot sun; the sky is clear. We breathe deeply. Fall is not so far away. But summer is still ours.

We gravitate towards the pond, where Canada geese have congregated on the sloped shore and are apparently absorbed in mid-morning toiletries. We look at each other. She smiles at me and wags. I unclip her leash and whisper the hoped-for words: "Go get them!" And she is off like a rocket, ears pinned to the back of her sleek yellow head, her tongue flapping out the side of her mouth; I cheer wildly from the sidelines as she sends a hundred startled geese up into the air, honking madly.

We pass the stand of trees and come to the other side of the pond, seeing with delight that yet more geese are scattered on the shore, peacefully ruffling feathers and nosing in the grass. This time we both rush them, roaring like whacked-out psychos. They backflip and cartwheel into the pond to escape us, swearing as only Canada geese can swear, and staring from the safety of the water, enfuriated, at our thrilled faces.

We walk on, mightily pleased with ourselves. "We are," I tell her proudly, "Goose-Bane." She smiles at me and wags.

Today I am patient with her desire to pee on every tree she sees. "You know," I remark, as she carefully examines a boulevard tree and prepares to leave her signature, "If marking trees is a sign of ownership, then we own half the neighbourhood." She takes this as a sign of approval, and I decide that indeed, I do approve. Surely this is the easiest way to gain property.

We find the park empty, save for a fresh gathering of geese to disturb. When we are finished disturbing them, joyfully, exuberantly, we find a tree to rest under for a while. Today, she is patient with my desire to use her downy yellow fur as a pillow. Fall is almost here, but summer is still ours.

Suddenly we are not pretending anymore.

Vertical roads

"It looks amazingly easy. Just look at how easy this is going to be! Man, that guy is flying up the wall. He looks like Spiderman. Clearly it's easy."

Ropes. Harness. Chalk. Discomfort. We glance upwards, glance back, glance unsurely at those standing around, smile with ludicrous false bravado. And the climbing begins.

I grip a knob on the vertical face and pull myself up by the arms, scraping the wall with my shoes in a weak attempt to find something solid to hold me up. "No, no, don't pull yourself up by the arms. Push yourself up with your legs. Your strength is in your legs."

Idiot. "Clearly my strength is in my arms." I continue to pull myself up, hold by hold, until my arm muscles scream bloody murder and I lose my tenuous grip entirely. I swing away from the wall with a gasp, putting my feet out quickly to delay death by collision. Idiot.

Try, try again. Chalk up. I feel the wall begin to move down and away like a road under me, as though I were running against wind, pressure, gravity, pushing my feet with extravagant care into the hard pavement, to get where I am going.

Where am I going? To the ceiling, to the place where I can grip the very top of the wall with both hands and holler victory. I look down, between my legs, and see that the mats, the floor, the earth, have fallen away from me; I've escaped them. Joy! If I could climb higher I would.

Using my legs, of course. And never without ropes, harness, chalk...

Listening

Reading, recently, about writing [which can be a cop-out from writing, incidentally], I encountered a straightforward discussion of how writers should approach the creation of characters. Literary characters, it seems, should not be transparent, or papery [pardon the pun]. They must breathe. We, as writers, should not be creating wee puppets with our pens and equipping them with words to speak. "Speak, character, for I am your Creator God and this is what I would have you say."

We must be listening to them.

This is something I have always known, somewhere deep inside my talkative brain. The characters you love are not the ones who are tools of a writer, who say and do what they are told. They are rebels. They follow their own, true natures and carve their own intrepid paths. They are independent beings, and at some elusive point they stop being yours, as their writer, and they start being themselves.

Having digested this I returned mentally to my own characters. "Who are you?" I asked them, and they laughed at me, and ran to hide behind the Victorian house and the perennial garden. "No, really. How can I write you properly if you won't tell me who you are?" And then one of them [I won't tell you who] came up behind me and smacked me in the skull with a rolled-up newspaper. "Stupid, you can't know us unless you spend time with us. And unless you stop listening to your own narration you'll never hear us speak."

It was then I realized I'd almost closed the book on them, had nearly lost my courage and left them to survive somehow in the labyrinthine confines of my personal computer, equipt only with the insufficient characters I'd given them. And what could I have learned from them, all this time, if only I'd been paying attention? They may know more than I've always believed; in fact, I'm sure of it.

So--speak, characters. I'm listening this time.

Water, water, water

They shock me with their poor attitudes when I step outside and come upon them: they are miserable, drooping and lackluster, faded and withered and sad. They need water. I pull out the snaking green hose and rid it of a useless shower-head, instead letting the water spill out of the narrow mouth freely and soak into each pot's dark soil. They peep at me gratefully.

But the job is not done. There are dead leaves to be cleared, swept away, picked up, plucked; deadheads, dripping with syrup and sticky to the touch, to be pulled. A wealth of brown 0rnamental grass unsuccessfully attempts to hide behind the green; I pull it out in great handfulls and stuff them gloatingly in the black plastic bag. Alien perennials are creeping under the fence from the neighbour's yard, and I chop them off at the root.

When the sun comes out from behind its transient cloud I realize the reason for the flowers' despondency. Merciless midday heat makes water thrice as necessary, makes me see the world in sharp relief rather than soft colour. I wilt, finish the job swiftly, and flee inside into air conditioning, and water, water, water.

In India

When we enter the dim restaurant we can already smell the tantalizing aromas, drifting from the abundancy of the buffet several yards away. We walk past the long row of spicy fragrances, each one different, subtly unique, all intoxicating, and I realize a fantastic thing: we are no longer in the city we call home: we are in India. Blazingly hot India, India of elephants and sand and many-armed gods, India of incense and mystery.

Food is a passport to foreign lands. This is a wonderful thing.

I breathe deeply and rise from the table with one intent: to fill and consume as many plates as possible, to justify the price of the buffet, and to taste as much of India as I can.

I savour samosas, beautiful steaming triangles packed with spicy peas, and pakoras baked to a dreadful dark brown, stiff barklike crust hiding sultry spinach good enough, I imagine, that I might trade half my kingdom for a wheelbarrow-full were I a hungry Sultan. And papadams: can words describe papadams like these? They are a one-dimensional bread with a four-dimensional taste, and I cannot get enough.

We find our table and begin. Conversation is quickly lost, and I look outside the window, where glinting leaves in the city park sway in the evening breeze, and the passport has worked its magic indeed. These are the trees of Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai. The spices have brought us out of the familiarity of home and into the glories of a foreign land.

water from stone