We Have Nothing to Fear but Optimism

As a pessimist and a coward, I do what the doctors tell me to do. In consequence, my weight is down, my blood sugar levels are down, and if these trends continue, I might have to bring my medication down. Gosh!

All of these changes were motivated by fear, which has gained a bad reputation despite its benefits. Yes, fear can make us hate people who are almost but not quite like us; fear can make us retreat from the often wonderful chaos of life. In that sense, fear is harmful, but a reasonable fear, balanced with a sense of perspective and proportion, can guide us to places where we need to go.

So toss away that blinding optimism! Fear can be a patient's friend.

Something Dead That Struggled Into Life

I left early the next morning, walked up the road that climbed the hillside, and followed the winding route below the mountain. The day was milder, but the oblique sunlight, the woodsmoke tang of rotten leaves, brought hints of winter's approach, and the wind stung my healing face.

When I came to the spot where I had found myself the day before, I was tempted to return home. The wind in the pines hissed like a tide retreating on a hidden shore, and the scuttling of the leaves on the dirt road made me think of something dead that struggled into life. A lingering, indefinable dread had seeped through my mind and it darkened everything around me.

The few farmhouses along the route were boarded up and empty. Staghorn sumac and hawthorns had spread across the fields; grey stalks of burdock and milkweed bristled on ragged lawns. I remembered how, as a child, I could see the sparse lights from distant farms at nightfall, or hear the faint barking of a neighbour's dog; these nights, the fields and hills were black, and the silence gave way only to the baying of the wolves.

On the far side of the mountain, the driveway to the Rexdales weaved through a forest of gaunt maples and cedars until it reached the house, a white, one-storey building with a broad bay window that faced a long and narrow clearing. The surrounding woods were bleak: the scarlets and the orange-reds had faded to a dull copper, and the shimmering yellows of the aspen trees were spectral in the slanting light. Yet thanks to my maintenance work, the house felt unabandoned -- an illusion that died as I peered through the bay window at the empty living room.

I studied the house, hoping to spur recollection, but nothing came to me. The western sky, pale blue with a streak of cirrus, brought nothing to mind, even as I waited at the exact spot where I had seen my shadow leap upon the wall the night before. There was nothing here to frighten anyone.

As a child, I had played here many times with the Rexdale children. I remembered hide and seek, with the sheds and the encroaching woods as perfect spots to watch pursuers without being seen. But our favorite hiding place was the cubbyhole below the bay window, with a sliding panel built into the living room wall. If you lay down you could slide right in and close the panel until only your eyes were visible.

And then the shadows on the wall --

What?

As the shadow of a driven cloud darkens the fields and then fades away, something had loomed within my memory and passed me by.

I closed my eyes to the pale sunlight and tried to see the darkness of the night before.

Shadows.

Shadows on a wall.

I felt a sudden chill, the physiological memory of fear. I touched my face and, prompted by a vague impulse, ran my fingers over the irritable skin. They brought to mind the fronds of a plant brushing against me, the sliding touch of wet rope.

Yes... wet rope.

From "Shadows In The Sunrise."

But Doctor, It Only Hurts When I Type

WRITING (Not to be mistaken for WRITHING):



The process by which you fork your guts and heart into a tiny box, then hold out this dripping mess for the painfully-needed approval of people you will never meet or know.



See also: HEROIN ADDICTION.

From the Distant Iridescence

For N. P.


From the distant iridescence of my memory,
Faces glow, then fade as lives are lost;
Asters with a hue of dusk return to me,
The cedared Wakefield hillsides gleam with frost.
In the distant iridescence of my memory,
Two falling stars burned pathways that we crossed.

Ice & Autumn Glass

Reviews have been creeping in for my latest book, and I could not have asked for better praise. Thank you, everyone!

Not Always Inward, And Not Often Secret

"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love and to be wise. Neither doth this weakness appear to others only, and not to the party loved; but to the loved most of all, except the love be reciproque. For it is a true rule, that love is ever rewarded either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt."

-- From "Of Love," in Selected Writings of Francis Bacon. The Modern Library, New York, 1955.

By A Dark Light

"It hath been an opinion, that the French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are. But howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and man. For as the Apostle saith of godliness, Having a shew of godliness, but denying the power thereof; so certainly there are in point of wisdom and sufficiency, that do nothing or little very solemnly: magno conatu nugas [trifles achieved by great effort]. It is a ridiculous thing and fit for a satire to persons of judgment, to see what shifts these formalists have, and what prospectives to make superficies to seem body that hath depth and bulk. Some are so close and reserved, as they will not shew their wares but by a dark light; and seem always to keep back somewhat; and when they know within themselves they speak of that they do not well know, would nevertheless seem to others to know of that which they may not well speak. Some help themselves with countenance and gesture, and are wise by signs; as Cicero saith of Piso, that when he answered him, he fetched one of his brows up to his forehead, and bent the other down to his chin; Respondes, altero ad frontem sublato, altero ad mentum depresso supercilio, crudelitatem tibi non placere [You answer, with one brow raised to your forehead and the other dropped to your chin, that cruelty does not please you]. Some think to bear it by speaking a great word, and being peremptory; and go on, and take by admittance that which they cannot make good. Some, whatsoever is beyond their reach, will seem to despise or make light of it as impertinent or curious; and so would have their ignorance seem judgment."

-- From "Of Seeming Wise," in Selected Writings Of Francis Bacon. The Modern Library, New York, 1955.

A Torch Borne in the Wind

George Chapman reveals, once again, that magnificent speeches alone cannot make a magnificent play.

After my second reading of his most famous work, The Tragedy of Bussy d'Ambois, I would never deny that he could write brilliantly:

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance;
And as great seamen, using all their powers
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world;
When they have done it, coming near their haven,
Are glad to give a warning-piece, and call
A poor staid fisherman, that never passed
His country's sight, to waft and guide them in;
So when we wander furthest through the waves
Of glassy Glory and the gulfs of State,
Topt with all titles, spreading all our reaches,
As if each private arm would sphere the world,
We must to Virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwrack in our safest port.

Yet Chapman, for all of his verbal energy, seemed unable to bring his people to life.

In Specimens Of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time Of Shakespeare, Charles Lamb wrote of Chapman, "Dramatic imitation was not his talent. He could not go out of himself, as Shakespeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences."

I can see this at work in the play, where every character sounds exactly the same, where people step onstage to speak one line in one scene, and are then killed offstage in the next, and where the motivations that become clear in the characters of Shakespeare, Webster, and Ford, can be difficult to find in the disembodied voices here. These characters are not even the colourful puppets of The Revenger's Tragedy; they are words on a page that burst off in unison like one authorial storm.

The storm can be lively and vivid:

HENRY:
This desperate quarrel sprung out of their envies
To D'Ambois' sudden bravery, and great spirit.

GUISE:
Neither is worth their envy.

HENRY:
Less than either
Will make the gall of Envy overflow;
She feeds on outcast entrails like a kite;
In which foul heap, if any ill lies hid,
She sticks her beak into it, shakes it up,
And hurls it all abroad, that all may view it.
Corruption is her nutriment; but touch her
With any precious ointment, and you kill her:
When she finds any filth in men, she feasts,
And with her black throat bruits it through the world
Being sound and healthful; but if she but taste
The slenderest pittance of commended virtue,
She surfeits of it, and is like a fly
That passes all the body’s soundest parts,
And dwells upon the sores; or if her squint eye
Have power to find none there, she forges some.
She makes that crooked ever which is strait;
Calls valour giddiness, justice tyranny;
A wise man may shun her, she not herself:
Whithersoever she flies from her harms,
She bears her foe still clasped in her own arms;
And therefore, Cousin Guise, let us avoid her.

These passages of lightning are often followed by a rain of mud, in lines uttered by characters whose shifts in personality and purpose make no sense to me. As a result, I wobble between staring-eyed respect and baffled frustration. I want to enjoy this play, but the mud is thick.

[The lines of the play are from Bussy d'Ambois, A Mermaid Dramabook, Hill and Wang, New York, 1966.]

Jason E. Rolfe Clocks In

From 2014, Jason E. Rolfe's An Inconvenient Corpse was the funniest book I had read in years. Now, in Clocks, it has a rival.

I passed a younger version of myself on the way to work this morning. I was eleven years old.

"Wow," I said.

"I wish I was more self-confident back then," I replied.

"I wish I turned out differently."

"I had such low self-esteem."

"And I had such high hopes."

I went to work feeling absolutely miserable, but I went to school feeling even worse.

Sometimes, a good book that I recommend thoroughly can be hard to review; this one, for example. In the same way that a joke or a poem cannot be summarized, the stories in Clocks can only be experienced. As tempted as I might be to post entire stories in this review, I can only quote from sections.

I wouldn’t say I was a nihilist; it’s just that I thought the world was meaningless and our lives were utterly pointless.

Jason E. Rolfe has a passion for absurdist fiction, an encyclopedic knowledge of its writers. Without such a compass, I can only compare his work to John Sladek's, to R. A. Lafferty's, to the fables of Ambrose Bierce or Robert Louis Stevenson. If Stevenson's "The Sinking Ship" makes you laugh, then Clocks will do the same.

"Who the hell are you?" Jules Verne demanded.

We all turned toward the Frenchman, who’d somehow appeared in the tunnel beside us.

"Zhang Heng," Zhang Heng said.

"Edmund Halley," Edmund Halley said.

"Jason Rolfe," I said.

"Two of you are famous enough to be familiar to me," Jules Verne said. "But you sir," he said to Edmund Halley. "I’ve never heard of you before in all my life."

Among the many joys of the book are the tributes paid to Rolfe's favourite people, from Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett to Daniil Kharms and Kurt Russell in The Thing. They show up and perform along with condescending couches, blue whales, Flat Earthers and Hollow Earthers (who cannot get along), Russian writers lost in America, Canadian writers lost in Canada, Mexican pinatas and kidney stones that seriously get in the way of things.

I lost my mind this morning. I’m frustrated because I always leave it in the old wooden bowl by the door. The second I step in the house I drop my wallet, my car keys, my watch and my mind in that bowl. I always do, because if I don’t I’m bound to lose them. It’s become such a habit that on those rare occasions when I do forget, I assume that’s where they are, which makes it even harder to remember where I’ve actually left them. Once, for example, I found my car keys in the freezer, my watch in the clothes hamper, my wallet in the lint trap on our dryer and my mind beneath the cushions of our comfy basement couch. It should go without saying that I haven’t searched any of those places today. Having lost my mind I’m not exactly thinking straight.

There are moments of melancholy, observations of life's regrets, hopes eroded, but looming over the entire book is the humour that made An Inconvenient Corpse a constant pleasure.

The corpse is gone; the clocks are here. Grab this book, and uncover one of Canada's best kept secrets: the bleakly joyous, laughing world of Jason E. Rolfe.

My Repellent Book

"A repellent book."

That was the assessment of kindly Dr. Joynt, the dentist of my childhood, who appeared at a crowded party in one of last night's dreams to let me know, with a reluctant sneer, exactly what he thought of Ice & Autumn Glass. His opinion is echoed in the silence of other people, as you can see from the reviews on this Goodreads page.

But dream-dentists and silent people offer less feedback than living readers; their opinions are the ones that count for me. Does the book repel dentists only, and only in dreams? I have one way to find out. Let me know!

Now spit, please.

The Outer Limits of Joseph Stefano

One of the many fascinations of The Outer Limits is the writing of Joseph Stefano, which coiled and twisted into darker forms as the series progressed.

"A Feasibility Study," an early script, celebrates the power of human solidarity and self-sacrifice in a way that never fails to make me cry, yet it remains, at heart, conventional science fiction, in which people with clear motives confront aliens with motives equally clear, in a universe that can be understood. For all of its emotional power, it could (with a bit of squinting) be taken for one of the murkier episodes of The Twilight Zone, where it would have fit in badly, but still might have been able to pass for normal.

As he continued to write for The Outer Limits, Joseph Stefano began to shift beyond conventional science fiction into something more troubled and troubling.

In "The Zanti Misfits," "Fun and Games," "The Bellero Shield," "The Invisibles," and "Nightmare," the universe, no matter how bizarre, remains knowable: it can be studied and its aliens can be understood. The difference now is that human beings themselves are mysterious. Paralyzed by existential doubts, crippled by psychological deformations, unable to meet the challenges of life and growth, of love and solidarity, many of the characters here seem a universe unto themselves. They try their best to explain their mental twists and turns, but their explanations are often as opaque as their motives.

Finally, we have episodes that seem to be less about troubled people than about a troubled writer.

"Don't Open Till Doomsday," "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," and "The Forms of Things Unknown" are no longer conventional science fiction; I would go further, and say that these are no longer conventional drama. In a universe that now cannot be understood, peopled with aliens and humans whose motives are obscured by psychological shadows, the stories themselves make very little sense; they seem, instead, like fever dreams, like undeciphered signals from the subconscious mind.

This is not a complaint. I respect these episodes even as they baffle me, in the way that I respect the films of Lynch and Bergman, and I can only marvel that dreams as bizarre and as personal as Joseph Stefano's could squeeze their way onto American TV sets, even at the risk of network interference -- an interference that came to pass, that killed the show as it had been up to that point, and that removed any further risk of undeciphered signals.

Remembered Peace

This evening I took a nap, and dreamt that I was alone in a sprawling, modern mansion. It was night, the place was dark, and I thought that I might watch a horror TV show on Blu ray (it could have been the X-FILES), when I heard a loud noise outside.

Looking out the window, I saw a truck passing by on an elevated road. Then I realized -- "Oh! I'm in Montréal, in a house owned by the family of my last girlfriend. She'll be here in just a few minutes; I wonder if seeing me again, unexpectedly, might be awkward for her?"

I began to run down a long flight of pitch-black stairs, to meet her at the front door, and on the way I felt a surge of pure love.

Then I woke up to find myself in late evening sunlight. There might as well have been a sun within me, because I felt a sense of well-being, of wholeness, that I had not felt in a long, long time. It was a memory of my inner peace whenever I was going to see her: I was complete, unbroken, at ease within myself.

I lay in the sunlight and held onto that remembered peace for as long as I could.

A Patient Search for Meaning

The danger with any obsessive reading of poetry is that close attention can tighten your focus to individual words or, in moments of relaxation, to phrases: a narrow perspective well-suited to poetry but not one that works with longer forms, where many writers tend to rely on paragraphs, or even (pity the reader!) a full page as the fundamental unit of meaning. The result can be a lack of patience for loose and bloated wordage.

Even with poetry, this narrow focus can lead to a neglect of meaning. As I read the first of the Duino Elegies by Rilke, my narrow grasp of German allows me to linger over words and phrases ("Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich," or "wenn der Wind voller Weltraum / uns am Angesicht zehrt"), but of the bigger picture, of the Elegy itself, I have only the vaguest idea of what's going on. I have no excuse of language incompetence to read this way when I pick up an English poem, but is my sense of the whole any better?

And so, for example, as I read Keats, I pause at Ruth, "when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn." When I think of Herrick, I recall "that liquefaction" of Julia's clothes. Words and phrases like these can become live wires under the fingertips, but patience and the search for meaning are skills that must be exercised, or lost.

I seem to be losing them.

A Life Without

One of the most terrible things about life is that so many of the people we outlive and outlast, we still need.

Our Own Obsessions, Our Own Fascinations

Form is not content, and technique is not voice.

I thought about this yesterday after I had biked to Ontario, to deliver my latest book to a poet I had never met before. He had agreed by email to consider the book for a possible review, and biking saved me three dollars in postage. (My last girlfriend once told me that I was the type of man who could walk fifty miles to save fifty cents; she knew me all too well.)

Michael turned out to be a short middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows and a small triangular beard. In his early years, he had been a basketball player, and in overcompensating for his height, had broken his ankles many times. (His long list of fractures and sprains would make a physiotherapist wince. My father had told me that a broken nose was painful beyond belief; Michael told me that it only hurt when broken the first time, then, to show me the result of repeated fractures, he pressed his nose, as if it were putty, sideways against his face.)

He asked what sort of verse I loved to read and write. When I told him that I was influenced by Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, that I wrote iambic pentameter blank verse and sonnets, he warned me that few people still did this, and that I risked losing readers because of it.

He compared the use of traditional forms to a concert that advertised modern music, but then played baroque. "How would people respond to that?"

(Oddly enough, Prokofiev pulled a stunt like this with his first symphony, which sounded more like something by Haydn than like anything by one of the bad boys of Russian music. To this day, people love it.)

Michael elaborated on this. "Imagine a concert of modern music that ended up playing polkas." For him, this was how modern readers would see traditional forms, as quaint or even ridiculous.

(And yet, I wondered, if the polkas were screamingly dissonant, distorted and sardonic like something from a scherzo by Shostakovich, I would have nothing to complain about.)

The truth is that many modern composers have turned to the past for instruction. Sibelius forged a modern sound by studying the counterpoint of Palestrina. Vaughan Williams and Bartok studied the folk music of their countries. Neoclassicism has been a force in modern music since the earliest years of the 20th Century, and remains a force in the concert halls of today.

I told Michael of my belief that writers of the past have something to teach us. John Ciardi's advice to work beyond cliches was well illustrated, for me, in the work of George Sterling, whose adjectives and images (sun-sincere, star-souled geode, unkempt fact, auroral mind) went far beyond anything that I could dream up. I mentioned Louise Bogan, Elinor Wylie, the story poems of Robert Frost. Perhaps too often, I mentioned Mervyn Peake. When I told him that I had learned a thing or two from John Keats, he laughed in a good-natured way and changed the subject.

From beginning to end of our long discussion, Michael was a friendly, welcoming man, never dismissive, yet clearly thinking by different assumptions and standards. We had a great conversation, but we agreed on almost nothing. He loved the work of Charles Bukowski and David Lee, of countless contemporary poets I had never heard of; he saw my exemplars (many unfamiliar to him) as outmoded.

What do we dismiss, when we call something outmoded?

Consider Beddoes. Many of the terms and conventions of his plays were out of date in his own time, but the zest, the energy, the imagery, the wit, the force of his language are timeless. If we turn our backs on such work because we consider it "old," what do we lose, and how much the less are we for losing it?

ISBRAND:
Siegfried, Siegfried;
Why hast thou no more genius in thy villany?
Wilt thou catch kings in cobwebs? Lead him hence:
Chain him to-night in prison, and to-morrow
Put a cord round his neck and hang him up,
In the society of the old dog
That killed my neighbour's sheep.

SIEGFRIED:
I do thank thee.
In faith, I hoped to have seen grass grow o'er you,
And should have much rejoiced. But, as it is,
I'll willingly die upright in the sun:
And I can better spare my life than you.
Good-night then, Fool and Duke: you have my curse;
And Hell will have you some day down for hers:
So let us part like friends. My lords, good sleep
This night, the next I hope you'll be as well
As I shall. Should there be a lack of rope,
I recommend my bowstring as a strong one.
Once more, farewell: I wish you all, believe me,
Happily old, mad, sick, and dead, and cursed.
[Exit guarded.]

ISBRAND:
That gentleman should have applied his talent
To writing new-year's wishes.

[From "Death's Jest-Book," in The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Vol II. J. M. Dent and Co. London, 1890.]

As I see it, a sonnet is nothing but a form, and iambic pentameter blank verse is nothing but a technique. Any modern poet who writes with sincerity about personal experience and current events will create modern work in a modern voice, inescapably, because we live in modern times with modern assumptions. We are the products of history, and so the products of our minds will reflect this. What we can learn from the past is how to express our own ideas, our own metaphors and images, with energy, economy, conviction, and the full range of musicality in verse.

The more I think about this, the more I have to wonder: why should modern verse be a break with the past, and not a culmination?

Writers today have access to every technique and form devised since the age of Gilgamesh. With our modern freedom, why not follow threads of yesterday to new conclusions? Nothing is old fashioned, nothing is outmoded, if it can still energize, and still fascinate. Given the richness and variety of this heritage, anything lively should be acceptable, not as pastiche, but as a medium for obsessions and creations of our own.

As I said to Michael, "People of our century could write odes in ancient Greek, and the odes would still be modern, because the writers are modern."

Still, I have to wonder about our conversation. What if our differences had less to do with old fashioned methods versus modern, and more to do with differences of temperament and taste? Metrical regularity, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, the clash and harmony of vowels and consonants, all of these are sources of pleasure for me, and (I would like to hope) for many others.

Yes, we should be aware of what others are writing, and we should try to see such work (if we can) through the lens of their aesthetic preferences; variety in life is not only inevitable and necessary, but invigorating. At the same time, we should focus on the work that feels to us like the touch of a live wire, like fireworks within the skull; we should love and study the poems that bring us to life, and we should write according to our own obsessions, our own fascinations. We have to be ourselves.

Inevitable Silence

So much of life involves explaining why you love the music, the stories, the films, the plays, the essays, the poems, the art that you love, and receiving only silence in reply. Perhaps the cure would be to never write about your love, but then you, too, would add to the silence.


Silence leads to forgetting. Forgetting leads to loss.

Twisting and Turning

Still the most troubling final passage I've read from any book by Lewis Thomas.

"The man on television, Sunday midday, middle-aged and solid, nice-looking chap, all the facts at his fingertips, more dependable looking than most high-school principals, is talking about civilian defense, his responsibility in Washington. It can make an enormous difference, he is saying. Instead of the outright death of eighty million American citizens in twenty minutes, he says, we can, by careful planning and practice, get that number down to only forty million, maybe even twenty. The thing to do, he says, is to evacuate the cities quickly and have everyone get under shelter in the countryside. That way we can recover, and meanwhile we will have retaliated, incinerating all of Soviet society, he says. What about radioactive fallout? he is asked. Well, he says. Anyway, he says, if the Russians know they can only destroy forty million of us instead of eighty million, this will deter them. Of course, he adds, they have the capacity to kill all two hundred and twenty million of us if they try real hard, but they know we can do the same to them. If the figure is only forty million this will deter them, not worth the trouble, not worth the risk. Eighty million would be another matter, we should guard ourselves against losing that many all at once, he says.


"If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language."

From Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, by Lewis Thomas. Bantam Books, 1984.