Security. Lockdown.

If it rains enough you forget how it was before the rain.

You think it will never not rain.

It rains all day Wednesday, and then all night, the wind stacking waves, their tops curling, breaking white, throwing spray over every reef.  

Hard in this wind to hold the car door open: it slams on her cheek, leaves a cut, a blossoming bruise. The steps at school are slippery; the heel of my shoe keeps falling off. I press the nails back in place, but what I really need is glue.

What's it like out there? someone asks as I blow in on Thursday just before 11, rain in my hair.

Wet, I say, shaking my head. Windy. Not too cold.

No, I mean, she says, were the police out there? Someone said the square was full of police. 

I didn't see that. 

She tells me a story. Earlier this morning, just three blocks away, a man was spotted on the street carrying a gun wrapped in a blanket. The police have been searching for him. Then word came that they had caught him, right here, next door. But some people are claiming there were two people with guns, and the one they've caught isn't the one who was walking down the street earlier.

Here we go, we say, rolling our eyes. After the shootings on Parliament Hill yesterday, the whole country's gone crazy. Everyone turning paranoid. Turning American. One mentally ill too often homeless Libyan-Canadian kills a soldier, rushes Parliament with a long gun, and is killed, and all anyone wants to talk about is terrorism. International threats. Security. No one wants to discuss domestic problems, gun control, poverty, racism, or mental illness. These deaths are a warrant for war, not a mental health strategy.

We imagine what implement the guy sighted in Halifax might have been carrying: a pool cue, a roll of sketches, a bassoon.  Or perhaps he was a reenactor, headed for the latest costume drama on Citidel Hill, and stupid enough to carry his cardboard rifle on the street. Out of the rain, under a blanket.

I head to my office; a day full of meetings unspools.

Government offices are on lockdown. So are the banks. A nearby high school. No one may enter, even later, even long afterwards, after a young man who had run from a city bus and left behind his weapons was arrested and taken into custody.

In Halifax, no official says anything about terrorism. Nor do they mention mental illness. Instead, the doors remain locked, public offices closed to citizens, a gesture that speaks volumes. Today we are dangerous; today in our raincoats we might be a threat; today we cannot enter the archives to look at some photographs hanging there. Openness is risky.

Didn't you hear, another friend quips, today is International Long Gun Holiday? And then he apologizes: I'm sorry; that was in bad taste.

We drive home through the rain and the falling leaves. Once home, we remember to lock the doors. 

As if what is out there is sure to be more harmful than what lies within.

Notes

On the shootings in Ottawa: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-attack-5-questions-about-the-shootings-on-parliament-hill-1.2809703

On gunmen in Halifax: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-police-arrest-man-recover-firearm-on-city-bus-1.2810019

Pictures were taken in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on 23 October 2014.

Too Windy for the Birds

3 April 2013

Backlit clouds of morning blare.
Behind the huddled islands,
it's raining out to sea.

Silver spray flies
over dark and stunted trees--
too windy for the birds.

That rock in the bay looks like a boat again:
a fisherman bound home and

forever missing shore. 

Notes

I took these photos this morning, the view from inside looking out to sea, and then reflections of the clouds and water in the window, seen from the outside looking in.

I am enjoying the exercise of trying to write a (short!) poem each day.  It is a bit like labouring over a puzzle, although, for me--puzzles make me impatient--far more satisfying. For poetry is a habit of thinking, or perhaps of arranging, a way, like drawing, of resting here where I am for a time, and rendering what I see. Such rendering is never, in any medium, a simple act of description; it is always layered with memories and speculations, musing, fantasies, sorrow, bad jokes and snatches of dreams.

Find the poetry in every day: that could be an injunction to meditation or some sort of healing. For when I do this, the anxieties, the lists and preoccupations, the physical pains incurred in daily living drain away. And although I am touched by sorrow--today, meditating on several tales of ships lost at sea (the Miss Ally, for example, and the Bounty, as well as the man who drove off the ferry last week in Cape Breton; he and his car sank immediately, and then were inaccessible under the ice that drifted into the harbour)--I am also utterly joyful.  Here, in the act of making something while looking carefully at what is before me, is an acquaintance with rhythm, with precision, heart's pulse and peace.

Fata Morganas Studied, Seen and Found

FATA MORGANA STUDIED

Q: What is a fata morgana?

A: A fata morgana is an elevated, distorting mirage that usually appears over large bodies of water, grass or sand, though apparently it can be seen anywhere, even in the air from an airplane if the conditions are right. In a fata morgana mirage, islands or ships at sea appear to lift off of the water or to be stretched and stacked upon the water, typically in great layercakes alternating right-side up and upside-down forms.

Sometimes, fata morganas make objects appear where none are. One day off of the west coast of Greenland, for example, we saw, in the distance, what seemed to be a large modern city rising out of the sea. It looked as if Panama City had suddenly sprung up north of the arctic circle. No such thing was there of course; nothing at all was, although for a time, it looked as if numerous glass and steel towers clustered on some edge of land to our east.

This was not the first time sailors in the far north thought they saw things where there were none: in 1818, while hunting for the Northwest Passage, Sir John Ross arrived in Lancaster Sound and thought he saw a mountainous mass of land.  Several of his officers argued that he was seeing a mirage, but he would not heed them,  and because he thought he could not pass, turned around and sailed back to England. He named his vision Crocker Mountains, after a man who was then First Secretary of the Navy. A year later his first mate, William Edward Parry sailed through those mountains and further west, into the Northwest Passage, leaving the reputation of Sir John Ross in tatters.

Nearly a century later, in 1906, Robert Peary sighted what he believed was a land mass, which he placed at about 83 degrees north latitude and 100 degrees west longitude. Ironically enough, he called his vision "Crocker Land," though his Crocker was not the same Crocker, but a fellow in the Peary Arctic Club. Seven years later,  in 1913, at great expense, Donald Baxter MacMillan launched the "Crocker Land Expedition," to find and chart Peary's imaginary landmass. They thought they found it; according to MacMillan's notes they saw "hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter traveling with the expedition told the explorers that what they were seeing was "mist," an illusion, but, naturally, in typical arctic explorer fashion, they didn't believe him and pressed on for days through dangerous breaking sea ice. Finally they gave up, admitted Piugaattoq was right, and turned around.

Q: What causes a fata morgana?

A: Typically, warm air lies in a layer over the earth, while cooler air rises into the atmosphere.  But sometimes, in calm weather, this order is inverted, and a layer of warm air lies above a significantly cooler surface layer.  The sharp temperature gradient between these two layers may create conditions where what is called an atmospheric duct, a zone of refraction between the two layers, functions like a lens, bending light rays more strongly than the curvature of the earth.  When this happens, you get fata morgana effects, in which reflections from the water or ice or land or air are refracted upward, from denser cool air towards less dense warmer air and stacked on top of one another or otherwise distorted.  These can be photographed because they are not simply optical illusions, but real atmospheric effects.

Q: Where does that name, fata morgana, come from? What does it mean?

A: According to writer Morgen Jahnke, "Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Reputedly a sorceress and able to change shape at will, Morgan le Fay was sometimes said to live below the sea in a crystal palace that could also rise above the surface. The fata morgana effect was so named for the superstitious belief among sailors that she created illusory visions to lure men into a false port and to their death."  

The term was in usage in English in 1818, to describe a "peculiar mirage" that appeared in the Strait of Messina, a narrow body of water between Sicily and the southern Italian region of Calabria, and was locally ascribed to "a fay Morgana."  Soon however, the use of the term was more widespread.  Thus, for example, in 1873, in his poem, "Fata Morgana," a tiny fragment of a much longer work entitled Birds of Passage, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes:


The weary traveler sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees
That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh...

FATA MORGANA SEEN--Look, that island is standing on its head!

8 February 2012

Glittering sunshine, cold blue air.  An edge of Ship Island lifts up off of the water like the sole of a shoe coming unglued. Not yet a fata morgana, but when the water gets colder, it will be. Funny how light shimmers in the heat or mimics water, tossing illusory puddles in the road, but elevates in the cold and mimics air, building fantasy castles and other odd forms.

I wonder if we find ourselves fascinated by mirages because they fight against the notion that our senses impart truths to us about the world.  But when our senses show us things that aren't "really true," or "really just as they seem," it is perhaps not our senses that are out of order, but our interpretive capacities.

The positional information we receive from our senses rarely designates "true points," as any navigator knows. Everything is perspectival; everything lies in parallax. As you approach any object or island or land mass, shortening the angle of your view, the object's position seems to shift.

This is one of the pleasures and wonders and dangers of seeing. And drawing. What you see or what you sense is not as you think it should be, but as it is, elsewhere, according to some other logic, which is what you must then discover.  Such labour of discovery is ultimately the work of living. Truly. Deeply. And yes madly.  Who would want it any other way?



FATA MORGANA FOUND

Because it's shifting.  And enchanting.

Werner Herzog, Fata Morgana, 1970 (http://youtu.be/pZX45lVaGu8)

Notes

Photo: Beaver Harbour Light, Harbour Islands seen from Sober Island. January 2012

Andy Young, "An Introduction to Mirages," http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/mirages/mirintro.html

Morgen Jahnke, "The Fata Morgana Effect" Interesting Thing of the Day, July 24, 2006, http://itotd.com/articles/583/the-fata-morgana-effect/
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-mirage.htm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Fata Morgana," 1873, http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=147

Ravishing

We slide towards the end of the summer and the days and nights are ravishing.  Hot sun. blue sea, the sea heather and wild roses and fireweed are in bloom; we pick handfuls of wild raspberries and blueberries as we walk along, and every night eat fresh lettuce plucked from the garden.

Yesterday we spent all afternoon on the water in the kayaks.  We ghosted along the rocky island shores listening to the water suck at the bladderwrack and periwinkles clinging to steep shelves in the intertidal zone.

The arctic terns have arrived and they scrap and dive; the young ospreys are learning to fly and the young gulls to fish.  They follow their parents, whining, frantic, but their parents, after delivering them to prime feeding grounds, just ignore them and fly away.  We laugh at this, but we are sympathetic to such plaintive suffering too--it is hard to grow up, to learn independence.  Life is full of risks.

Dante, for example, has found nests of mice all around; each morning she brings eviscerated headless offerings, tender mouse morsels no longer than half a thumb-length.

Mornings, butterflies and hummingbirds hover around the house, sipping nectar from the purple knapweed blooms.  A kingfisher shrieks as it crosses the cove, and three blue herons wade in the shallows.

Afternoons, the boards of the house creak in the heat, the gulls scrap and cry out, and always, everywhere, the steady rattle of bees.  Clouds stack up in the sky and move on, to the east or north; the wind rises, but only a little--enough to cause sheets on the line to snap and ripple.

Then evening.  The wind drops, the sun sets--the terns wings flash in the dropping light. An orange glow suffuses the landscape and then it is night.  Venus rises, the stars emerge; the moon, full and nearly full these last days, has been so bright that objects--the chairs on the porch say--throw moon shadows.

It is impossible to sorrow in such a time and place and yet, there it is, I feel it, a tinge of melancholy.  Already the days are shorter by 30 or 40 minutes; in just a few weeks (the blink of an eye), I'll be firmly tethered to the fixed grids and temporal frameworks of classrooms and meetings and paper grading.  These are not unpleasant really--often, on the contrary, I enjoy this purposeful school-based part of my life. But for a few more days (I'll try to stretch it into weeks) I relish how little thinking I must do for others, how few the borders round my imagination, my freedom to lose myself, as the French say, in the landscape, to dream and to enter--with skin and muscles and vision and appetite--into the breath of things.

Images
Inland fresh water lake (Muskrat Lake)
Raspberries
Blown out Fireweed
Rock, driftwood, bladderwrack at island's edge, Bay of Isles
Bee sucking nectar from Tufted Vetch
Porch, chair, hot day
Sheets on the line
Sunset over the pond
Marike's brandied cherries

Lunar Landing: Where Memory and Fiction Coincide

It's July 20, 1969, the day (and night) of the first lunar landing. Here's what I think I remember: I am four years old. My parents have rented a small cabin in a state park. Everything enthralls me: the peeled wooden logs stacked one on top of another, the slightly musty smell, the strange beds, the tiny hotplate in the corner, the fish someone catches and fillets--my father cooks it on a small round barbecue just outside the cabin door. I'm forbidden to step too close--it's hot!

After my younger brother and sister have gone to sleep, my father takes me for a walk. We walk along a dirt path beneath enormous pines. It is dark. The cicadas sing. Pine needles cushion our steps. The air is aromatic with pine tar and earthy scents. The moon sails overhead, following us wherever we go like a balloon on a string. My father stops in a clearing and looks up at the moon. "Men are on the moon tonight," he tells me. He seems rather excited by this idea, so I am too. I squint as hard as I can, but I can't see those men.

"Lift me up, daddy. Higher. Higher. I want to see." He lifts me onto his shoulders and we stand, looking up at the moon.

I think I remember this--my father begins to tell me about the three astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, but perhaps I've heard the adults talking about the lunar mission while my father was grilling fish. Today, July 20, 1969, is the day that the Eagle, the lunar module with Armstrong and Aldrin inside, will split off from the spaceship, the Columbia, and land on the moon, in the lunar region dubbed "the Sea of Tranquility." If all goes well, Armstrong and Aldrin will debark their small craft and, ensconced in their life-supporting space suits, walk around, take pictures, and collect chunks of rock from the surface of the moon.

I'm not sure how my father knows that the lunar landing has already been successful out there in the woods. Maybe he heard the news on the car radio or from a cabin neighbour. Anyway, he seems to know. He keeps telling me that this is an historic day, a remarkable night. "There are men there, up there on the moon tonight!"

Until this moment, everyone, my father included, has always insisted that there aren't any people in or on the moon, that the moon is a rocky, barren sort of place, not on or of the earth, but something other, circling us. These are not easy notions for a child to grasp, and I do not really understand them. But I seize, readily, my father's excitement, and I desperately want to share it. I squint more and more at the moon and then there, I think I see, just on the rim, dark figures against the light.

"There they are! I see them!" I shout. "I see the men on the moon!"

My father laughs and laughs. He laughs so hard he has to swing me down to the ground. "No," he tries to explain, "you can't see them, not with your eyes." He may even have said "they cannot be seen with the naked eye"--this was a favourite expression of his for a time. But it was too late for this instruction; I knew that if I just peeled (my mother's expression) my naked eyes enough, I could see to and through anything.

This conviction, then and since, has caused me no end of trouble. I couldn't be an eye-witness to the lunar landing--proof positive may be found in the fact that my imaginary men on the moon looked a lot more like a moment from George Melies' 1902 film La Voyage dans la Lune than television footage of Armstrong's small step and large leap. But for me as a child--as perhaps for Melies and the astronauts--such "seeing" what, strictly speaking, could not be seen, was an act of will, an act of imagination that I wished might also be an act of truth-telling.


Alas, it was not.

But maybe to be a writer, particularly of fictions, is forever to dedicate yourself to the task of reconciling acts of imagination and truth-telling--one way or the other.

So, the story I have told above is true. And not. It is, as I'm sure my siblings and parents and friends will be all too happy to hear me admit, pretty well all made up. I remember the pines. And the woodsy scent. And the dark. And my father telling me, with great excitement, that there were men on the moon that night. I remember how bright the moon was, against the night sky. But everything else is cobbled in there, an unholy mixture of imagination, memory and fiction.

Until a few days ago, I didn't think of my "memory"--for I was very convinced at first that it was genuine--in such terms. In fact, in the week when newscasters started talking about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I went looking to see if I had any family photos from 1969. I did have a few--they are reproduced here--and I was shocked to find, as I looked at the dates, how acutely my memory had failed me. To begin with, I'd disregarded the facts that even an elementary grasp of mathematics can supply; the year of the lunar landing, I was not four, but five. If something so obvious had eluded me, how much more of my memory was built on slippery lunar sand?

The "truth" then?


On July 20, 1969, I am five years old. In a little more than a month I will start kindergarten, the first step in what has become a long apprenticeship to school. I've learned how to ride a two-wheeler, can count quickly and easily well past ten, but cannot yet write my name. I'll do that backwards and sometimes upside-down when the time comes--a bit dyslexic then, as now. I have a brother who is three and a sister who is almost two. I want to learn to hula hoop but find it pretty hard--I don't yet know how to send my knees and shoulders in different directions. And I'm utterly sure that when I cook meals on my stove you will want to eat them. Especially if they consist strictly of raisins. I read poetry with my grandfather and dress paperdolls with my grandmother and like to make up long songs and shaggy dog stories that no one believes. (Some things never change.) My favourite gambit when asked to play the mother in neighbourhood games of "house" is the counter-proposal: "No, let's say we're all orphans and we have to run away and hide because bad people are after us." And I cover dozens of pages with scribbles that I hope are writing--they look like writing to me-- but my father and mother tell me they aren't.


I fear--then and now--that I will be forever stuck in this moment, caught between the strength of my wish and its shortfall in reality. Forty years passing, in the blink of an eye. A peeled, naked eye, boosted by corrective lenses and, nevertheless, infinitely faulty. Like those lunar images beamed back and copied, degraded, even erased by NASA.* Beyond belief--and so, because of that, perfect candidates for extreme conviction.

There's a truth here somewhere, isn't there?



*See NPR's "Houston, We Erase the Apollo 11 Tapes" July 16, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106637066

Images
Reading with Grandpa Smith, December 30, 1969
Playing with Lisa (sister) at grandparents' house, August 31, 1969
Collage of images from Georges Melies' La Voyage dans la Lune (1902)--http://www.myspace.com/georges_melies
Riding my bike & playing with Leslie (brother), March 6, 1969
Cooking [raisin] soup, (?) probably November 1969
Playing paperdolls with Grandma Smith, November 1969
Apollo 11 mission, stepdown to the moon from the Eagle, http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/07/happy_moonday.php
and http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo11/
Hula hooping at grandparents' house, April 6, 1969