what’s on my heart these days…

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

- Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green, 1965

more from my commonplace book

I will probably return to say more about this poem later. Let it suffice for now to say that last summer was, for me, a liminal space of both the most pleasurable and probably the most difficult kind. At the end of it, when I was trying to relate to both myself and to some of my closest friends something of what had happened to me in those four transitional months and what I had learned in the midst of that time of neither here nor there, I found this poem so helpful. Love unknown by George Herbert:

Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad:
And in my faintings I presume your love
Will more comply then help. A Lord I had,
And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
And in the middle plac’d my heart, But he
(I sigh to say)
Lookt on a servant, who did know his eye
Better then you know me, or (which is one)
Then I my self. The servant instantly
Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone,
And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
A stream of blood, which issu’d from the side
Of a great rock: I well remember all,
And have good cause: there it was dipt and dy’d,
And washt, and wrung: the very wringing yet
Enforceth tears. Your heart was foul, I fear.
Indeed ‘tis true. I did and do commit
Many a fault more then my lease will bear;
Yet still askt pardon, and was not deni’d.
But you shall hear. After my heart was well,
And clean and fair, as I one even-tide
(I sigh to tell)
Walkt by my self abroad, I saw a large
And spacious fornace flaming, and thereon
A boyling caldron, round about those verge
Was in great letters set A F F L I C T I O N.
The greatnesse shew’d the owner. So I went
To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold,
Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
To warm his love, which I did fear grew cold.
But as my heart did tender it, the man,
Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,
And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
My heart, that brought it (do you understand?)
The offerer’s heart. Your heart was hard, I fear.
Indeed ’tis true. I found a callous matter
Began to spread and to expatiate there:
But with a richer drug then scalding water
I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy blood,
Which at a board, while many drunk bare wine,
A friend did steal into my cup for good,
Ev’n taken inwardly, and most divine
To supple hardnesses. But at the length
Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled
Unto my house, where to repair the strength
Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed.
But when I thought to sleep out all these faults
(I sigh to speak)
I found that some had stuff’d the bed with thoughts,
I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
When with my pleasures ev’n my rest was gone?
Full well I understood, who had been there:
For I had giv’n the key to none, but one:
It must be he. Your heart was dull, I fear.
Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
Did oft possess me, so that when I pray’d,
Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
But all my scores were by another paid,
Who took the debt upon him. Truly, Friend,
For ought I hear, our Master shows to you
More favour then you wot of. Mark the end.
The Font did only, what was old, renew:
The Caldron suppled, what was grown too hard:
The Thorns did quicken, what was grown too dull:
All did but strive to mend, what you had marr’d.
Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full
Each day, each hour, each moment of the week,
Who fain would have you be new, tender, quick.

The Haunted Palace

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace -
Radiant palace – reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion -
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow -
(This – all this – was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.

Wanders in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically,
To a lute’s well-tuned law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene,
In state his glory well befitting
The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn! – for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old-time entombed.

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the encrimsoned windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh – but smile no more.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

writing bannatyne

people who have visited the bannatyne house where i live will know how wonderfully atypical it is. the tangible details of this place are only the beginning: six young women, five guitars, four-years of tenancy, three lived floors, two separate staircases leading to the second floor, one bathroom, a million shoes. but as we have layered year upon year of experience in this place something else has been steadily growing in each of us: a sensation of something unquantifiable about our experience here, of something terribly profound that has been moving each of us. but that “something” consistently eludes our best efforts at articulation or understanding.
i wonder sometimes, if we had known at the beginning what this experience would become for each of us, would we have lived differently or made better efforts to record this time spent at the crossroads of bannatyne and juno? perhaps we would have been more deliberate about self-consciously trying to understand what this experience was meaning to us over the course of our time here.

but these thoughts have only really begun to emerge as we consciously and deliberately approach the end of our time here, as we approach the moment when bannatyne will crossover completely into history and cease to be quotidien, when we will no longer experience it as present.

there is a line in the first poem of dionne brand’s thirsty (i included it in the first post on this blog) that captures something about the way i feel about this:

how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

we have often said that one of us should write a book about this place, about what we’ve experienced here. i think i have often felt this imperative stronger than my roommates, perhaps for the same reason that this question of brand’s resonates so strongly with me.
i am anticipating the experience of this place as history. often i forget that we always have and always will exist in the space where history is created. but i also often forget that the intimacy we experience with history is not our life. i fear that the recognition of that distinction is at times what distinguishes art from mere reflection.

a couple of weeks ago, on a pleasant friday afternoon, i went to a performance at the university of winnipeg entitled “A Taste of Montreal”. it was here that i was introduced to the poet robyn sarah. the poetry she read was written in a deliberate attempt to reflect on and artistically reconstruct an experience that she had had in her youth, an experience that was grounded in both a particular space and a particular time, not unlike my experience here at bannatyne. the kind of dialectic that i observed in her poetry between representation and creativity was made possible, i think, only by the distance that had been gained between the moment of performance and the moment of the youthful experience. she suggested at the beginning that the artistic endeavour she was about to engage in would look something like “dragging the past kicking and screaming into the present to make something new.” i guess she meant for there to be a kind of synergy between the representation of the past and its re-creation in the present, although whether it was intentional or unavoidable or both i’m not entirely certain. nonetheless, the representation of the past in the creative work of the present necessarily interacted to produce something greater than either would have been on its own.

i spoke to her briefly afterwards about some of her poetry and some of my own ideas and she was as inspirational to me as her poetry had been. what follows is one of the poems that she read at u of w – a poem which, when i heard it, i thought could almost have been written about our house. i guess i’m posting it now in place of the poems that i will not be writing about this place for quite some time.

Into the Nineties

Thin is the veneer
of newness on this renovated house
built early in the century. The floors
are sanded to the quick.
They will not take
another sanding. Now that the
glossy finish, rolled on slick,
has flaked away in spots,
and winter dryness cracks the weaker boards
so that they catch the foot and splinter off,
we see: it is an old floor.
No help for it.

And in the night
the banging in the pipes,
and the slow seep
of dust, out from between
the mortared bricks
of one old wall laid bare
for elegance…

So snows the old,
spreading its sediment
on all our furnishings, a
fine grime.

the foreword

although i’ve been contemplating the creation of a blog for quite a long time, in part just because i really like the idea of blogs, i was convinced that the perfectionist in me would make it impossible to write in a space like this.
and while it is true that i am an eternal revisionist, i read something today that taught me that there may be a point where revision borders on immorality.

from Huxley’s forward to brave new world :

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one’s middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth – all this is surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book – and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

I begin this blog with hope that people might be able to find some trace of merit admidst the many faults this blog will possess (and although i acknowledge my long sentences, grevious faults though they may be, i suspect they are also unavoidable and i will show no remorse for them).

what inspired this project

Dionne Brand’s Thirsty

I

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed