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| lying down with tigers |
| 02.11.05 (10:44 pm) [edit] |
So, what do you do when you’ve been in an inexplicable funk for what feels like more than a week, and frustrated beyond all saneness with the entire situation, and you’re coming down with an acute case of cabin fever brought on by the sudden return of winter in Montreal? Well, if it’s a Friday night, and Neko Case happens to be in town, you get your butt down to that show, take a few beers, and let her sweet sweet voice just wring all those blues out of you until you’re standing in a puddle of your former emotions that you quietly step away from, tapping your feet a bit first, and leave traces of that liquid melting in the snow as you make your way home—a saner, sadder, more human human being.
Neko Case, there are few voices that can affect me like yours. Live, you’re a force of catharsis. No one leaves goosebumps on my skin the way you do. (Except maybe Beth Orton—ah Lily, I wish you could have been there tonight…)
And the space that it helps me open up in my mind: a wash of bittersweet memories tinted the colours of blue and red that painted your stage tonight. Girls laying down by the river. Rivers that wind deep into the heart of deepest, sultriest, most fecund wilds where alligators still troll the waters... The word “lugubrious” spells itself out in my mind. And “constellation”. And “palimpsest.”
And Neko’s singing of starry night skies and I picture a lake in Northwest Ontario, lined with dark pine trees. Overhead is the silhouette of an eagle. I’m lying on a dock gazing up at the stars. Waves lap at my feet. The mosquitoes are crazy, but it’s worth putting up with them to gaze on these stars. With the milky way so clear, and even, if I stay out there long enough, the ghosting of a northern light coming through, faintly…
Stars…Constellations, to be sure, but constellations…their names and situations always eluded me. I can point out the ones everyone knows, but beyond that? Not much, I’m afraid. I always wanted to be able to see them, you understand, but somehow the books on astronomy that I took out as a child appealed to me more with their stories of the myths behind the constellations, and I lost myself in discovering the wonders of Greek mythology. But I can feel them, constellations.
I used to imagine—no, it was more than that; I used to feel—that my body retained every touch, every fingerprint from my lovers on its surface. At night, these points of contact would glow beneath my sheets, burning brightly in the dark, and I was alight with constellations—clusters of stars whose names only I knew, a mythos entirely my own: memories, stories, encounters to be mythologized in my mind, the act of recall at once also a fictioning of what once was mere occurrence…Well, tonight Neko’s voice mined up all those old tales in my mind and I was a galaxy, so many stars did I contain.
Or maybe it wasn’t that, a new voice softly suggested, entering in from the side. Maybe it was more like a palimpsest scraped off and reused, re-written upon again and again, with all those older traces still left behind a little somewhere. And even though most of them is lost, what remains of those traces is valuable, becomes more valuable the longer it is left behind, but also less recognizable, less decipherable. But they’re still there, those traces, and you wouldn’t want to lose them for anything, even if the full record of them disappears over time, is erased and written over by new words, new stories, new memories.
What to do with those, but keep them near, keep them on your body, a full narration that only you can tell. And sometimes it screams out to be heard—it wants the world to know its story, to bear witness to the memories—but for that they must be arranged like stars in the sky, surrounded by a cloud of myth that gives them name and meaning. Yes, sometimes it screams out to be heard. And sometimes it learns how to listen to other screams, is able to simply hear the tales of others—really hear them. And so it was tonight. A voice that broke through thick billows of smoke in the heart of downtown Montreal and trembled and broke and lifted and soared the way my own heart desperately needed to—a voice that did this for me. And I was close to tears almost from it, but it was good. And I looked out over the crowd packed in to that club all sweaty and overheated and drunk and dancing and always always smoking and I thought that this is good. This is right. This is just so.
Just so the dancing and the revelry. Just so the hooting and whistles. Just so the spilt beer bottles. (And just so one man’s swift picking up of said spilt bottle, raising it once more to dry lips) Just so the madness and the celebration. As Neko kept reminding everyone, “hey it’s a Friday night!” And just so this Friday night. I stand apart from all of this tonight, but it does not mean that I will always do so. I stand apart naming my constellations and lying down on the banks of imaginary rivers, dabbling my toes in long-ago lakes. And just so that this should be my role tonight. I will feel this way so that you don’t have to for this evening. So that you can be merry as you please. Because I too can be merry, and will be again someday, perhaps someday soon; perhaps even tomorrow. Yes, I will feel this way for you now because someday each of you will be here too, and I understand that as I gaze out on the carpet of bodies below me; I understand that this feeling comes to everyone at sometime, and all you can do is live through it.
And sometimes there’s a voice that sings from a stage or a book or a memory or even a tree, sometimes there’s a voice there to help you along, to say what you couldn't even say for yourself. It sings and reminds you that you're not alone.
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| dream 57 |
| 01.12.05 (11:32 am) [edit] |
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I had a dream. The had a dream about the end of the world. The world was ending fires with burning in the cities. And I went on research to find someone who lived on the other side of the earth. And somehow, before it was too late, I found him and suddenly we were lying on a grassy ill overlooking the fires blazing in London City. We embraced and and case Greenwich of the had a green and convenient than that was the end of the war with had eight to reading on hand aid to mean I had eight to mean had intervened has been that it was the end of the were old fires communal cities who Manning and people were running nowhere could find shelter the unwanted streets. Unwanted empty streets and their lived buildings once homes no ruthless ruins concert of the someone committed to the undersigned of the air. The one person who my new, if I could find him, that everything would be all right: the world to could end in five-year inflamed and the crowd of combustion or in the impersonal, in electrical progression of clay sheer sheet's of ice, so long as I was in his arms. Then in the end suddenly I was in your lying together on a grassy overlooking the city of London. And it was an night in the stars were out of the sky, only look to them as we held each other undeveloped so made to be in his embrace. The looked we look in each other skies and then weak hiss. And a cystic if the five close my eyes and looked at SunSoft stars blinking out one by one that callback for his my heart pounding because if enough of time to say what I wanted to say, I pulled back focus my cast-love you because I needed to, a new smile semi and surprisingly said, "yes, I do a few." [And that everything can and we healthy to the even high-tech] And everything contends we held each other even tighter looked up once smaller at the sky and then wakes, anti-close my eyes. If this was definite I was ready to die, developed in the most profound sense of attendance and peace the I've ever felt or imagined of the could possibly could.
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| First Ice |
| 12.21.04 (9:26 pm) [edit] |
So, in between moving apartments and coming home for the holidays I haven't been "connected" for a while. which means that I wasn't able to post this little piece when the first night of ice descended upon chilly Montreal. You know, the kind of ice born of frozen rain that sends a thick shield over everything. The kind of ice that comes before any snow—JUST before—and works a certain magic on a place:
Tonight there is everywhere ice. It coats over all. It encases. It seals. It gilds. It melts. It melds. It slicks. It shines. It glitters immobile. It glistens labial and winks wet. It tongues. It sheens. It crackles and crisps. It encloses, closes off, closes up and I wish that I had a camera to record its eerie ice images, its resin-like sculptures of one part hydrogen to two parts oxygen: water frozen, captured mid-drip, mid-motion, hanging from trees, suspended from signs, caking door steps, frosting stones, clotting plants, glossing windows and gelling the streets.
And the sound of it...it sounds, it sounds...like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Like the glittering tinkle of something small and sharp-pointed and sparkling; like tiny twinkling chimes heard from very far off. It sounds like splintered shards of stars falling softly-swiftly down to earth; like something crystal and fissuring and perfect (the icy frisson of dry cracks compressed under the pressure, the exquisite utterness of such perfection). A million bells ring from the trees! A thousand tiny stars dance and sing from each branch and clink against one another until they sound like tiny tumbles of silver!
It’s as if the world, for a moment, were made of glass.
On my way home I stopped by a patch of grass that looked like something delicate and lattice-like and fragile—like some Caithness creation blown of many fine stems—and I had the sudden urge to tramp through it, to mar it, to hear the crunch of its stems under my feet and feel that gorgeous moment between breakage and yielding. It reminded me of an old teenage fantasy. No, it’s not what you think...
It goes something like this: I am standing in a field. It’s the field behind the running track where my school’s football team practices, and which I have to walk through each day on my way to work after school. It’s a sunny day. Summer. Mid-morning. Old men are playing cricket in white sweaters and slacks on the pitch just across the way, obliquely distant. I stand alone on the green green grass. Beside me is a pail. A bucket. Old and mottled and metal. It has variegated splotches across its surface (but this is only its colour; to the touch it is perfectly even and smooth). Inside it is half full and in its water bob spheres of ice. Globes. Fist-sized. They are not perfectly frozen. Solid. No. Instead they are only a surface, a skin, a crust. They are half-frozen, and inside, in their centres, you can see loose liquid sloshing around. My fantasy is this. In front of me there is a red fire hydrant and a thin strip of asphalt leading to it (I didn’t make any of this up, this place really exists, just as I have described it) and I proceed to take up each of these fist-sized sloshing spheres of ice and throw them on the asphalt. Hard. Smash them. Derive great pleasure, intense satisfaction from the heft of them in my hand: their weight, the sense of liquid inside, its feel, its seething turbulence weighting the ball, heaving weight and force and heft behind its momentum, propulsing it forward as it is thrown and arcs and glitters and glistens and then drops, falls, smashes, splinters, spreads star-like in a spray pattern of supernova.
Just that, my fantasy. Something very visceral yet strangely (if violently,) innocent. It came to me as a perfect image, intact and complete already: the bucket the ice the water inside the heave the heft the release the smash and the star of wetness left behind. And even as I thought it, I could feel those globes in my hands, waiting to be thrown; and the imagined satisfaction of their toss rivals the satisfaction I felt as I stomped over those delicate stalks of icy grass tonight...
The only other time I was so singularly possessed to crush something fragile and living was when I stomped through a bed of flowers in early spring after my best friend in second-year university confessed that he loved me and I couldn’t think of anything else to do: I couldn’t reciprocate, and squashing those gentle flowers seemed a small crime in comparison with the beautiful, fragile, timidly quaking thing that I’d already been forced to smash...but that’s another story...a story of westcoast mist and averted eyes and trembling blooms. No, not for tonight, such a story—tonight is a time of ice!
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| riding with che... |
| 11.14.04 (12:43 pm) [edit] |
*Warning:* if you haven’t already seen this film, there may be some spoilers in what follows…
So I went to see “The Motorcycle Diaries” last week with my friend, and I have to say that I’ve got some issues with it. I’ve been thinking about the film a lot these past days, and about my own reaction to it. “Motorcyle Diaries” is the type of film which, had I watched it even a few years ago, I probably would have been totally enamoured with.
But that’s just it, something seems to have changed in me so that, where before I would have met this film with romantic idealism, I now confront it with a certain distance that toes the line with cynicism…I found that there were many points in the course of the story where I got annoyed, not with Che/Ernesto, but with his portrayal as someone so pure and true that he is already virtually on his way to sainthood. Now it is precisely this depiction of Che Guevara, not only in this film, but within our popular culture at large that I find my self recoiling from, and then, like a viper, wishing to lash out at. All the T-shirts with that famous photo of him staring out at me from just about any store window along a certain stretch of St. Catherine Street near my apartment in downtown Montreal, the way this same image is used in stencil-graffitti or posters, on the cover of books and postcards, the way it has been picked up and, yes, consumed by our culture can really turn my stomach…and exactly what does pinning up a giant poster of Che in your university-ghetto digs signify these days? Do half the people who buy paraphernalia graced with his image even know?
Of course, this movie is an opportunity to flesh out the high-contrast black on red tones of his familiar image. To restore a human dimension to this iconic figure who is as recognizable as Clint Eastwood or Marilyn Monroe. But, for me, that was part of the problem that I had with this film—Guevara still came off for me as not really human. He starts out so bourgeoisie and idealistic, immersed in his puppy love (quite literally, in one sense, as those of you who have seen the movie will know), with a chivalric attitude that sustains him for a large portion of the trip. And then, as he encounters people and events that will help to bring about his eventual transformation from the young Ernesto into the famous Che (the full change never depicted here), I simply found that the film became too heroizing, too fawning in its portrayal of this young protagonist. There is one scene in particular near the end that perfectly illustrates this. It’s the scene where Ernesto jumps into the river during his birthday party and swims across to the other side to spend it with the residents of a leper colony. Now, since this is all based on true, actual events, it’s not so much the nature of this scene that incenses me, so much as it is the way it is depicted in the film. The director chooses to extend this scene: we keep coming back to these shots of Ernesto battling the dark waters while his friends call out for him to come back and the lepers cheer him on while the music heroically wells in a worn-out cliché of a device. The parallels with Christ are undeniable, the whole immersion in the waters and Ernesto’s reemergence signaling a sort of baptism—a rebirth into the figure who will soon become “Che”. There are other ways that this scene could have been handled, and it is the director’s decision to treat it in the most obvious manner that really got my hackles up.
That said, I did find that the final ending somewhat redeemed the film. At the end, we find out that Che’s travel partner throughout this journey, one earthy Alberto (who would be almost Falstaffian if only his girth were larger), does in fact see Che once more at a later date. This reunion occurs after the Cuban Revolution when Che, remembering his old friend, invites Alberto to come to Cuba. Alberto takes his friend up on this offer and, a biochemist by profession, sets up a medical clinic in Havana. Alberto never left Cuba, we learn, and lives there still with his wife and family. This is all conveyed by a passage written on the screen. The film then cuts to a close-up shot of the real Alberto, in profile looking up at the sky as we hear a plane taking off (or is it landing?) in the distance. Somehow, I liked this final touch to the film. Here, finally, was the truly human dimension that I had been hoping for throughout, and it got me to thinking about the character of Alberto.
As I said, he is almost a Falstaff: a clown or a buffoon; the lusty, earthy, hungry foil to Ernesto’s idealistic young knight. When Ernesto’s girlfriend gives him fifteen American dollars to buy her a swimming suit if he reaches Miami, Alberto immediately falls upon Ernesto, begging him to use the money to buy them a real meal, to repair the motorcycle, or, more seriously, to bring Che into the hospital for treatment when he becomes sick. Ernesto constantly refuses. Finally, at the end, on a boat taking them to the medical clinic in the Amazon where they will be volunteering, Alberto, desperate for a night with the on-ship hooker (pimped out by the captain, no less!), begs Ernesto for the money, at which point he learns that Ernesto already gave the money away to a poor communist couple whom they met in the desert…
Alberto is made out to be a character ruled solely by his appetites throughout the film, but I think that this is unfortunate and far too one-dimensional. He has already lived a fair bit before the story begins--he was 29 to Ernesto’s 23 when they started out on their journey--and thus his range of experience is broader than Ernesto's. Alberto also clearly has a genuine compassion for people that equal's Che's: As they are crossing over to Chile in a boat, Ernesto suggests that they return to this place when they are older and set up a clinic where they will treat whoever passes there and needs their help. Alberto gazes out to the spot ernesto has indicated and says "I'm there" as he pats his young friend on the back.
Clearly Alberto is not simply a foil to Ernesto, and I personally find it more interesting to learn about how such an appetitive character could also be able to just drop everything, leave his whole life, and then travel to a new country with just one letter from an old friend. And then to stay there, to start a life, to build a clinic, help the people, become one of them—for me this is just as much a part of the revolutionary project, if not more so. Without such people, the revolution would fade away into obscurity; its success is not just measured in campaigns won and lands seized, but in the years that it is able to sustain itself afterwards and in the quality of life of its people. For all these reasons, the more I think about it, the more I find Alberto to be the more compelling character of this buddy-pair, and I can't help but feel that in elevating Ernesto/Che in such a predictable way, “Motorcycle Diaries” does a disservice to the figure of Alberto.
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| november, november |
| 11.13.04 (10:34 pm) [edit] |
Well, here I am, up and caffeinated more than i should be for 2.45 in the morning...really I should be doing some reading or working on a thesis proposal, but over this past week, I've found myself constantly lagging behind the things that I should be doing. Almost like a mild depression--a lack of motivation. There are lots of things to be happy about at the moment, which makes this current mood rather perplexing, but then it hit me, this afternoon as I was reading the weekend paper (some editorial piece about how Arafat doesn't deserve the praise which he's being given--that's the Globe and Mail for you...): of course--it's mid-November...
...November is an abyssmal month. It's sad and grey--a time when darkness and clouds duke it out for dominion in the great lift of the sky, though really it's the icy coldness that comes out triumphant.
T.S. Eliot got it wrong: November is truly the cruelest month.
For me, at least.
For these past three years, at least.
Three years from November 23 that my younger sister suddenly died while scuba-diving in the waters around B.C.
It shocks me to write that, just as it shocked me to think about that this afternoon. Not that the memory ever disappears, but as time passes things change, take on new forms, become more manageable--perhaps because more integrated: I now feel like this reality--my sister's death--has sunken so deep into my body that it is fused with my bones. A hard thing for me to come to terms with since there is still this part of me convinced that I am living in an impossibility, a universe that shouldn't exist--the logical conclusion to a hypothesis that was untenable from the very first...and yet here I am. And I've been here for almost three years...
When I say that Susanne's death has become a part of my bones, my body, I mean that in a very literal way...particularly as the days of November steadily roll by, I find that my body actually casts a somatic spell around itself, some magical protective buffer between me and the outside world. Days begin to feel as if everything I do and see is mediated through something thick and viscous that slightly distorts sight, dampens sound, and impedes movement; leaving ghosting traces in the air, trails that describe the movement of bodies: the sweeping gestures of hands, the swing of legs, or the vector-like trajectories of arms--like the centrifugal trails left in a jar of glycerin... this is what it first felt like in the immediate wake of Susanne's death: a shock that took on a physical reality. And I find that each new year that passes, I revist this experience as the date of her death draws near.
Which is what I realised this afternoon (which helps me to understand why my body is dragging it's heels, while the rest of me has a list, pages deep, of things that need to get done).
It made me think about just how long, and yet how short three years can seem to be. Earlier this evening, I began to go through old writings, and I came across a copy of a letter I sent out once, a few months after it happened. It brought everything back with an immediacy I hadn't expected, and I am grateful now to have a document of my feelings at that time (of course, there are others...).
So I want to post that here, to try and get this stuff out of my head, and hopefully that will help me to get on with doing what I need to get done over this next while. One of the things that can still do my head in is thinking about how important this person was to me, and yet realising how many people now will never know Susanne, never know how beautiful she was in so many ways...I moved to Montreal from Vancouver a little over a year ago, and this thought caused me so much anguish the first few months after my arrival. Here I was in a city where no one else even knew of her existence! It was too much. It still can be.
So, I'm now going to post a bit of that letter I found and then put this whole entry up. I promise that my future entries won't always be so heavy and morose....
****
I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time, but it’s been very difficult. I don’t know where to start, I often feel so overwhelmed, and it hurts even putting the words together—this letter will be filled with sentences that shouldn’t be, that simply are not right and should never exist, except that now they do and I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. So here it goes:
I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, or if you would have remembered, but I am the oldest of three children. I have a sister, Susanne, and brother, Jonathan. We are all very close—in age, yes, but also as very good friends. We get along together. Susanne was only seventeen months younger than me, and we were treated as equals growing up together: I would talk to her and read to her all the time, and in turn she began talking much earlier than most children her age. Often, because we were both blond and roughly the same height, we were mistaken for twins when we were younger. When Jonathan came along, we both looked after him, and the three of us were inseparable as young children in the summers at my grandparents’ cottage in Ontario.
On 23 November last year, almost two months ago now, my sister Susanne died.
She was only 21.
She was diving, doing her open water certification for dry suit diving, out at Porteau Cove, a popular diving locale halfway up the sea to sky highway between Vancouver and Whistler.
The coroner states that the official cause of death was an embolism, a bubble of air in the carotid that goes directly to the brain: instantaneous, irreversible and painless. Susanne would simply have felt as if she was passing out.
According to the autopsy report, the blood in her heart was “frothy”.
Susanne was in a rapid ascent as she and her diving buddy, Andrea, and their instructor, Monique, made their way to the surface. Andrea says that Susanne grabbed on to her to try and slow herself down, but when that didn’t work, she put herself into the tuck position, gave Andrea the OK signal and moved her hand to the valve on her suit that lets air out so that she could try and slow herself down. After that Andrea couldn’t see Susanne because visibility in the water was less than a metre, so Andrea signaled to the instructor and they headed to the surface to meet Susanne. When they got there Susanne had not surfaced. There were also no bubbles in the water, to indicate that she was underwater and still breathing. About four hours later a rescue diving team found Susanne lying on the bottom, nine metres down, in almost the exact spot where Andrea had last seen her.
About the time I was finishing off the letter I had been writing to you, I got a phone call from my mom. Her voice shaking, she described to me what had happened, that Susanne had been diving and that she hadn’t surface for 2 1/2 hours. Fifteen minutes later I was in a car with my parents, racing out to Porteau Cove, my mother grasping my hand, my father’s knuckles white against the steering wheel, me looking out the window because it was such a spectacularly beautiful day and I could not believe that any of this was happening. I was probably being over-dramatic; they would find Susanne and maybe she would be unconscious, but surely she would survive. You never give up hope until there’s no other option.
When we got there, there were TV crews, which got me very angry and upset, and police trucks, and a coast guard truck. The truck’s back was open, and we could see an empty diving suit and some diving equipment, but there was no ambulance and no Susanne. The R.C.M.P. liason officer told us that they had found Susanne and that she was at Squamish. But even then the officer didn’t say that she was dead, and I naively asked if she was in the hospital, at which point my father said, “no Heather, she’s dead.” I lost it. I’ve been sad or depressed before and cried, but I don’t think I’ve ever had my body literally wracked with sobs before, or have almost been short of breath for crying so that you have to gasp for air. It was as if with those words I entered into another reality, as if the lattice of atoms that holds our world together somehow subtly shifted its pattern into a new and sinister configuration: a hazy heat-shimmer for a split second and there you are in this brave new world, familiar and yet so very strange.
Stranger still the drive up to Squamish.
Strangest and saddest (and hardest) going into the funeral home to see her. My sister laid out on a dolly with a sheet pulled up to her chin. Walking in and seeing her from far away was the worst: you couldn’t tell that anything had changed, she just looked as if she was sleeping, a half smile on her face indicating pleasant dreams, except she didn’t wake when she heard our cries. She didn’t move a muscle. I had to touch. I had to feel. She was so cold, so very cold. I held my cheek close above her mouth, to feel the absence of breath, to try and believe. I kissed her brow. I talked to her. I cradled her head in my two hands, the way she and I had once done long ago when my brother was born and we first got to see him. I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t, because I knew there were very few times that I would ever be able to see her again, or touch her, and I wanted to as long as I could, because I couldn’t imagine a world without Susanne in it and I still can’t.
She had wanted us to have children together. To have the cousins grow up with one another. For all three of us to get together with our families at least once a year in the summer. This was so important to Susanne.
I can remember the night before I first flew over to Glasgow to live there for the year. Susanne was so upset because she had thought I was leaving a day later than I was, that because I arrived on the 27th, I was leaving on the 27th and not the 26th. On this assumption she had worked the 25th, and was upset to find that she wouldn’t have a full day with me before I left. That night, we lay in her bed together, her arms around me, and we stayed up all night talking, planning our futures. She was afraid I would end up living some place far away, married to some pretentious intellectual with glasses who she wouldn’t like, and she made me promise that we would always get together, that our families would not grow apart, that we would always be close. I was almost certain that she would have kids before me (if I ever did...).
This is getting hard to write. I think I’ll have to end soon. I just wanted you to know what’s been going on in my life recently, because this is pretty major. I haven’t felt like writing to people for the past little while. I’ve wanted to, but I just haven’t felt up to it.
*****
'kay that's it. It's almost 3.45am now, and I either need to get myself to bed or get down to some work....
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