Donkey's Tongue

Last night I rode the bus back from Montreal and had with me Michael Ondaatje's There a Trick I'm Learning to do With a Knife, a title I sort of hate for it's silly unwieldiness. Because there is nothing unwieldy about the poetry, of course. But if the title means to suggest a subtle violence, then maybe it's not inappropriate.

I always hate leaving Montreal. I would like to believe that Montreal is only Mile End, even if my friends who live there do call it "Dirt Bag Mile End." Yes, there are a lot of "dirt bag hipsters", which are apparently a different breed than the polished and clean hipsters of Toronto. But there are also the beautiful old brownstone apartments, groups of Orthodox Jewish with men in huge furred hats, little organic grocery stores, and ethnic restuarants like the North African one where a charming (and clean) hipster boy went through an elaborate traditional Moroccan tea pouring ceremony for us after dinner.

But the bus ride home erases all this with miles of big box stores, strip malls, and concrete overpasses. And as the sun faded over bad graffiti on old cement walls along the highway, I read of Ondaatje's shark, drowned with gills forced full of sand by the person who also carves its skin with coral till "the blurred grey runs / red designs," the same person who knows that "To slow an animal / you break its foot with a stone."

In "Peter" he writes of a medeival man, guilty of a vague crime - poverty maybe - "snared...in the evening light, / his body a pendulum...his veins unpinned." Later held "in the depths of a castle," his howl "like a bell" until they cut out his tongue, the man is kept, until, "little more than a marred stone,/ a baited gargoyle," he is allowed escape. He becomes a sort of artisan, "formed violent beauty...forks stemmed from the tongues of reptiles". He is the "court monster," gives his gifts to one of the children, a girl, and when she grows to adolescence, he rapes her, pouring on her "the loathing of fifteen years" of torment at the hand of others.

It is not something I want to read while leaving Montreal and the beauty of women whose friendship grows daily more mythic, who circle the wagons bravely and glow in loss.

But the growing dark is appropriate and I read further, hating Ondaatje for forcing on me his horrors. Snakes die horrible deaths, eyes of starved and deformed dogs glow in the dark of poor countries, and boys break birds.

But then a gull in a photograph. "The stunning white bird / an unclear stir." And the realization: "that is all this writing should be then. / The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment / so they are shapeless, awkward / moving to the clear." He imagines his wife gets pregnant just to claim more space in the bed, and inside her, "there's another, / thrasing like a fish, / swinging, fighting / for its inch already." The "the moon slips off his shoulder / slides into her face." And even his father approaching death by alcoholism, "with the clarity of architects / would write of the row of blue flowers."

Then the poem "White Dwarfs". More tongues cut out, this time the tongues of mules, "so they were silent beasts of burden / in enemy territories" in Malay. And he asks, "after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway". But the mules move under "burned out stars / who implode into silence". And he asks, "after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway".

And it is between the poles of these two questions that Ondaatje writes, and we live.

Dream-work

Well maybe I like Freud afterall.

I recently had a dream that I decided to get married. I’m currently involved with someone – we’ve been dear “friends” for a very long time and we are now “something more.” But in this dream, I had a clear sense that he and I were not ready for marriage so I would have to pick someone else, and out of all the men in the world I rummaged up S.E., a man who once asked me to scratch “Jesus” into the sunscreen on his skin with my fingernail. He also dumped me out of a canoe, and did many other inappropriate and socially awkward things in my short (non-romantic) association with him.

Anyway, the morning of the wedding, I was running around the church in a state of disarray, wearing sweat pants – not one of my many sleek pairs of Lululemon yoga pants from my year of spandex-selling-purgatory before grad school, but shapeless and schluppy sweats. Definitely a bad sign. With sudden clarity I knew it could never happen, and that I would save myself from a life in the oil rigs, or the wedding singer circuit, or wherever that guy has ended up. I decided to make an announcement that there would not be a wedding, but there would be coffee.

And now Freud tells me that simple wish-fulfillment dreams are infantile: this dream may have been ridiculous, but at least it was not infantile. He also says there was a “latent dream” behind the manifest dream of marrying S.E., and the process of that latent dream becoming manifest is the dream-work. The work of interpretation will undo the dream-work.

And even more importantly, he informs me that having compared the interpretations of many dreams, he is prepared to elucidate what the dream-work does with latent dream-thoughts. You have to admire him for this, this shocking (and almost arrogant) claim to be able to wade into the world of dreams, like Beowulf diving endlessly through the black water to Grendel’s mother, where he will confront the question of whether having screwed up dreams means we are fundamentally screwed up (or maybe he won’t, but we would like him to).

He also says this:

“I beg you, however, not to try to understand too much of what I tell you. It will be a piece of description which should be listened to with quiet attention.”

I adore him for this. For leading us down the rabbit hole but not expecting us to fight with Grendel’s mother at the bottom. Derrida could learn a lot from him.

Loss

"It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard of people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours, and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

This is the opening of Carol Shields' novel, Unless, a book I adore, and return to again and again.

I recently gave it to someone very close to me who has suffered a great loss, not of a loved one, but of her self. The kind of loss that comes from encountering unexpected darkness, from having to discover firsthand what it is to be, as a woman, subject to violence, vulnerability, and a shattering of security.

In the wake of her loss, that I feel partly is my own, I care both more and less for my work. I was in a reading sharing group for my upcoming theory comp and I've opted out of that (with all ensuing guilt and fears that I am indeed a lousy PhD), deciding to just read summaries from the Norton Anthology.

But last night I stayed up reading Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. It is set in Sri Lanka in 1990 - at the time when my life was horses, figure skating, tree-lines streets in Saskatoon, the lives of the people in that country were filled with organized terror, the threat of disappearance and torture. Ondaatje writes,

"...in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection for the self."

My work is to walk in words like these, knowing real things and people are in them, behind them. That said, I hardly know what my work is, or will be, but it is enough for now to just read.

It starts...

I used to hate the show "Amazing Race" because all these crazy people were barging through all these beautiful places - hating the food, snarling at the locals, dragging eachother around in innertubes and falling out...

This is a bit what grad school is like, especially if you wonder all along if you'd rather be living in your parents' attic drawing nudes and painting bad landscapes, while working at your favorite coffee shop. These are things you tend to wonder when you start a PhD for lack of a better thing to do.

While I may still end up in the attic, for the time being (the next three months leading to epic comprehensive exams) I have to read "everything" that comprises Canadian literature. And as much feminist, queer, post-colonial, and psychoanalytic theory as possible. This maybe sounds like boring subject matter for a blog, but I may go crazy and that could be fun to watch.

I also suspect, after just having read Timothty Findley's Pilgrim, that a lot beautiful and complex things lie ahead. I'm afraid of falling out of the innertube and missing them, so I think maybe I'll write them here. And try to keep the snarling to a minimum.