In The Bleak Midwinter -- Dogservations

I. The frigid blue of seawater lures her. She can sit shorebound and watch gulls as if on a tropical vacation. Our walks are lessons in surefootedness: her small paws, no missteps. I clunk along behind, booted, bundled, eyes streaming, glad for the crackle of sunlight opening the snow. The glitter of light through twigs glorifies the brightness of a little black dog, shiny-coated, alert. Absorbing everything she investigates a break in the pond's ice, a dazzling thicket of bushes ornamented with cedar waxwings keeping warm. II. "Is your dog friendly?" asks the boy on the corner, worming from a snowbank. She barks. "Is it a female?" His green lizard hat slants over one eye. She barks, would dearly love to herd him. "She doesn't know what to make of children," I apologize. "I'm nine years old," he says. Her leash is taut. She barks. "So that's why the b-word applies to female dogs." The wisdom of kids and dogs.

Part of the writing life means going underground, gathering energy like a root. Methinks the blogosphere is cluttered enough with unnecessary babble; hence my silence these past months. But with the new year has come a quiet book that makes such a joyful noise it demands proclaiming: Threading Light by Prairie-born and Halifax-based poet & essayist Lorri Neilsen Glenn. A series of interconnected essays, poems and meditations on the subject of loss, Glenn's work is a gem that's impossible to put down. The writer's wisdom is personal and scholarly, and founded on an awe-inspiring range of experiences and literary and spiritually-based sources. Threading Light is a compelling distillation that moves from the heart-wrenching minutiae of her first loss as a very young woman--the loss of a fiance--through the losses of both parents and the other accumulated sorrows that life brings. In lesser hands, such material might leave a reader feeling in a rut of sadness. But Glenn is never, ever sentimental, nor is she bookish; rather, she gathers the far corners of heart, mind and soul to explore the inner strength that guides the human spirit through grief. Hers is a dynamic, ever-broadening journey fueled by courage and stamina. The movement of the pieces themselves mimics the very process of recovery, carrying us just swiftly enough from the particular to the universal with the expansiveness and candour that only arise from a generous spirit. Through her humble, courageous willingness to share her journey, Glenn's search for some measure of peace in this world of suffering becomes the reader's. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry, by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Hagios Press, 144 pages, ISBN 978-1-926710-11-2

Poetry and perfection

Had the pleasure of hearing Colm Toibin lecture last night on the work of Elizabeth Bishop vis a vis Robert Lowell and Thom Gunn. His talk, hosted by University of Kings College as part of the Bishop Symposium, focused on their precision of language and shared contempt for the confessional. Brilliance parsing brilliance, Toibin quoted Bishop often and astutely. One line that lingers is how poetry must be absolutely honest in order to be good. All depends on the words'total precision and accuracy in reflecting observation and emotion--emotion that must transcend the personal, always. Yes, yes--who can argue with this? It's what we all aspire to.

But it got us thinking, my novelist friend and I, about how language is used and honesty arrived at via slightly different means and approaches in fiction. Yes, of course precision is necessary and what we all aspire to; but to express substance as exactly and as simply and in as stripped-down a fashion as poetry tries to would likely short-circuit and drain fictional narrative of the textures it relies on. Such a very different art, which conveys and reflects meaning obliquely and ironically as well as directly.

Which brings me back to the conundrum of balancing plot and language. Aiming too fanatically for stripped-down precision in a novel kills the form itself, reducing it to synopsis and being of the Richard Skerry school (no offence to Richard Skerry, he of the Little Golden Books: "I am a bunny. My name is Nicholas. I live in a hollow tree...")

Fiction's "truth" and magic are arrived at by narrative posturing, the characters' posturing, indeed, the whole practice of pretending and faking and creative lying; otherwise, what's left but the dull and deadly "confessional", whether the author's or the characters'? How deflating it can be for a reader to read dialogue, for instance, that's unremittingly literal, unremittingly literally precise and direct.

And there, my friends, is that other conundrum: how to balance showing and telling, how to keep all the balls in the air in order to keep engaging, entrancing and gently persuading readers that a "lie" is true, not only true but significant in all its veritable darks and lights and shades of grey. Significant in ways that are so much more than personal or a simple gratification of ego.

In all of this poetry, good poetry, is certainly more terrifying, more naked, more "honest" than fiction.

But this is a circular argument, yes, since both revolve around metaphor--it's just the size and relative proximity or distance of the metaphors at the core of our texts that dictate. Like looking through a zoom lens as opposed to a wide angle. Not that we fiction writers are or would appear to be any less honest; but our form requires us to go about it in such a broader, more padded way--obviously. Probably it's because we're required to be longer-haul tricksters?

To check out Toibin's talk see http://livestream.com/ukings

Houseball

Lest my Ozzie/Kollwitz post leave you with the impression that Berlin is all grimness and gloom, I should expand on the fact that its public art works hard to mitigate this. I'll try to leave Ozzie out of it. Though, as we know, the appreciation of art is a grossly subjective thing that happily overdubs its creators' lines. (Sorry, but think of a classic Black Sabbath bass line, the kind that reminds you of a cave man in leaden clogs wielding a club...) But I digress. Anyway, one of the most colourful memorial pieces I saw in my all-too-short time there was Houseball, a gigantic fibreglass globe reminiscent of a balled-up blanket studded with topsy-turvy chairs and ladders like in the aftermath of the kind of cyclone that blew Dorothy to Oz. A collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cooseje van Bruggen, according to their online statement the work references the displacement of refugees and what it is to have one's earthly life literally rolled up and cast to the wind. The sculpture has had an interesting migratory life of its own, installed first in Bonn then re-located--transported by helicopter, suspended from a cable--to its present site on Mauerstrasse not far from the Wall's Checkpoint Charlie. I for one fell in love with the whimsy and willy-nilly playfulness of the work, which is in sharp contrast to the slick, efficient architecture around it. It's as if some giant errant kid has dropped a massive toy in the middle of a place dominated by suits. Just Like Ozzie, it's instant comic relief to serious stoic greyness, drawing for effect on the dark side but sending it up. Like Ozzie, it has its detractors, those who object to such a spoof: a playful memorial to grief. I am not gonna begin to try and analyze what makes Ozzie tick. Not that Houseball is more cut and dried. But I like to think that it reminds us exactly what will always be at stake: the playful innocent whimsical and always surprising open-eyed optimism that pulls us up short, digs us out of the dungeon, the bomb shelter, the pit, whatever, however fragile even delusional that spirit might be at times. But it lives, that spirit, and it rolls, and there it is, as embedded in human memory as the darkest stuff: a small but infinite capacity for wonder.

Ozzie Osborne and Kathe Kollwitz's Pieta

Back from Berlin, a city filled with Pietas, most notably Kollwitz's in a shrine-like memorial on Unter den Linden strasse--one of the most moving pieces of art I've seen given its context. It still brings tears when I think about it, it and the other Pieta-themed sculptures we saw scattered around the city during our five days there. Figures of grieving mothers cradling sons killed in war, commemorating those who have suffered in ways I can hardly get my head around. Such a city of memorials to so many victims, so many sad reminders of devastating events and heartbreak of such magnitude we can barely imagine. And so many sites from which the perpetrators carried out their crimes against humanity. The Gestapo, the Stasi. Train stations from which Jews were shipped to their deaths. Pieces of the infamous Wall--and most moving of all, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which commemorates the victims and is a chilling reminder of how evil is and was insidious, promulgated by blinkered acceptance, a mad and monstrous banality of its own making. So this and the other memorials commemorate the lost, while silently pointing out the murderous capacity of humans and warning how easily civility, peace, compassion can be crushed. A city of grieving parents--a city where, I noticed, there were few old people, startlingly few; my guess being that anyone old enough to have survived the horrors of the Nazis and the gulag policing of the Wall are gone now. What a place. Yet it is filled with light, and trees, and flowers, fabulous edgy new architecture--and young people. Creative, dynamic young people. My musician son and his friends are among them. Imagine, a Maritime boy going off to seek his fortune in a city that headquartered the madmen my dad--his grandpa--and so many other young Canadians, Americans and Brits went overseas to fight. There's a poetic justice, somehow: at last, a peace-filled Berlin stormed by creative foreigners, Canadians included. Better late than never: my son's grandpa never made it to Berlin, stationed near Oldenburg when the Germans surrendered there in 1945. But what, you ask, has any of this to do with Ozzie Osborne, that metal-head shipwreck of a hall-of-fame rocker? Sorry, but here it gets personal. After five days seeing the sights of Berlin it was time to say goodbye; after all those figures of grieving mothers holding lifeless sons I was just about done in, dreading our parting. Only one English channel on TV in our hotel room, as the three of us--my husband, our boy and I--hung out for what will likely be the last time for a long while. That night the only thing on was a continuous show of every golden-oldie hall-of-famer you can imagine performing. I've never been an Ozzie fan, ever; hated Black Sabbath even when out of youthful lack of taste it might've been forgiveable to like them. But there he was: Ozzie. Looking for all the world like a middle-aged woman in his bad eyeliner and dyed hair. Singing. Rocking the stage, the audience. For all the world the spitting image of women (no offence) often seen buying groceries at our local No Frills. Well I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed, till the tears poured. I'm still laughing, everytime I think about it: Ozzie, you babe you, you helped so much to ease my sorrow that night, Ozzie, patron saint of comic relief.



owningbanalityHolocaust Memorial, also known as the piece of art that still brings tears when I think of it,

Exile in cyberland

"For those whose business is language, it is only in language that the unhappiness of exile can be overcome," writes W.G. Sebald in On The Natural History of Destruction. He's talking about writers grappling with the horrors in Germany during WW2, and how many were silenced by what they saw,unable to find words or form to construct meaning from the rubble.
It strikes me that everyone who relies on words, whether in times of peace or war, is exiled somehow, somewhere--and it's only the comfort of threading words together that mediates/medicates the isolation of living inside one's head. What is it about words? Their sounds, their morphing etymologies, or simply their accumulation on a page that plugs us in, gives us hope, moors us? This effect they have on us, even as they stand us in the corner.
What is your exile?

Nuremburg Revisted...

On trial for Nazi war crimes, Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer said: "Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership also--men who could think and act independently. The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men. The means of communication alone enable it to mechanize the work of the lower leadership. Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.`
Speer made this remark in keeping with his self-effacing stance while accepting responsibility for his role in Nazi atrocities. I wonder what he would`ve thought of social media, and how he might respond to what`s happened in Egypt and is now underway in Libya. From a present vantage point maybe we can be optimistic that his observation has been turned on its head, contrary to how easy it is, at least in the comfy cosy west, to view the masses as sheep.
Meanwhile, a reminder once again that while actions speak louder than any words, words have a lasting power all their own.