Where we go from here

It may look like the clock has run out on the Visible Poetry blog, that I've lost interest or given up on it.  But appearances do deceive! 

I've moved newer entries (and a few old favourites) over to an easier to use and better supported wordpress site here: https://visiblepoetry.wordpress.com/

But the complete pre-2018 blog archive remains here on blogspot, along with a valuable record of reader responses.  

Since April 2009, when I began to this blog as an experiment in in verbal and visual poetry, and in logging environmental and literary observations from both land and sea, I've published more than 250 entries, logged more than 75,000 hits, published two books and developed a number of exhibitions, lectures and art-based practices from work initiated on this site.

Thanks to you and your encouragement, Visible Poetry is alive and well continues!  

Please do visit the wordpress site, especially if you're craving new images, insights and entries. See you there!

Yes, that's https://visiblepoetry.wordpress.com/

A Winter in the Baja

A sudden drift of

fish startles up from the sea,

their silver backs flash. 

Nightfall. The Little

Dipper pours starlight over

darkened mountain tops.

Walking a desert

track we turn and stumble on

piles of pipefish bones.

Break a branch of the

torote tree—sharp scent of

bitter orange lingers.

Palo Adan, grey

branch, half-moon: one scarlet bud

streaks the evening sky.

A Pacific wind

freshens. Hungry clouds nibble

The fattening moon.

Empty shells of a

conch graveyard glisten: so much

broken crockery.

 

Almost spring but the

sharp scent of beach fires burning

intimates autumn.

Walking on the beach

we startle a cricket; it

leaps into the sea.

A buzzard sits on

an abandoned power pole,

lines cut and dangling.

A beached sea lion

skull slowly submerges: sand

fills the eye sockets.

                                    

 
-->

First published in January 2018 in "Fresh Voices," an online publication of the Canadian League of Poets:
http://poets.ca/2018/01/19/fresh-voices-karin-cope-nan-williamson-barbara-black/

All photos were taken during the course of shore walks while sailing in the Sea of Cortez in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Somebody's watching you

Don't look now: someone is almost certainly watching you.

This year alone, according to estimates published by Business Insider, we humans--at least those of us able to afford some kind of camera--will take some 1.2 trillion photos, the majority of them with smartphones. That's an average of 500 photos for every one of the nearly 2.3 billion smartphone owners in the world, or approximately 133 images for each person on the planet. We add this number of digital records to the 1.1 trillion photos we took in 2016, the 1 trillion we took in 2015, the 800 billion we took in 2014 and so on. 

I've written about trillions before on this blog--see "Counting Trillions"--and 1,000,000,000,000 remains an almost unimaginably large number, whether we're talking about debt, stars, digital images or intestinal flora, all notions that we currently measure in the trillions.  For example, 1 trillion seconds ago was 31,546 years ago, which is to say well before the end of the last ice age, and possibly before humans lived on or in the Americas, although new evidence suggests that humans or humanoids just might have been cracking mastodon bones along the Pacific coast around 1 billion hours or 115,000 years ago. But 1 trillion hours, which is to say nearly 115 million years ago, dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and some 43 trillion hours ago, the earth was a spinning, gaseous lump.

I am, of course, doing my part to contribute to the global glut of digital data: I estimate that in the last six or seven years, I am personally responsible, for some 10,000s of photos, most not taken with a smart phone, but with that now apparently obsolescing instrument, a stand-alone camera.  The majority of these thousands of photos reside on my (various) hard-drives, and will never be seen by anyone.  Why keep them then? Because they are? Because I think I can? Because they might matter? Because I haven't had time to look at them yet long enough to decide if I will keep them--and I think that someday I will?!

Time may do its work and corrupt these drives, or make the file systems in which the photos are recorded unreadable if I don't do something else to fix or translate them. This has already happened to videos I shot less than a decade ago.  I feel a pang of loss all out of proportion to the content of those files; memories of dozens of 8mm home movies of my mother, as a baby, being bathed, fill my head, valuable proxies for the sort of content that might be lost when such files disappear.  If I am being honest, however,  I must note that I only once watched a few minutes of that apparently endless maternal footage, much to my mother's relief; I suspect that no one has any idea where those reels are now. My own files recorded walks along the Nova Scotia coast and up to the summit of Coronados Island in the Sea of Cortes. I remember these walks well; why isn't that enough?


Why do we need to capture ghosts of ourselves and our experiences everywhere we go? What are we preserving thus? What losses do we imagine we might forestall with our clicking and posting or filing? Do we really think we're so evanescent that all traces of us will disappear when we die, leaving behind our mountains of stuff, our digital data, our gyres of plastic and debris? Perhaps it's simply a fear that we will (or do) disappear when others don't see us--that certainly seems to be what facebook and the other organs of social media would like us to believe. And so we continue to log our lives, at greater and greater pace, arriving at the point where the logging very nearly coincides with, or even sometimes replaces the living.

But think about this: we now live in such a ubiquitously recorded world that surely, often, many of us regularly show up, ghosts in a host of records we know nothing about.  Not only are we billions snapping anything and everything and everyone, but cities, shops and work places are full of closed circuit cameras; certain professionals now regularly wear bodycams; many people set up web surveillance of their houses and yards;  and of course there are ever more versions of Google Street View.  Sometimes we know we are being captured by these cameras; often we do not.  Often we live our lives utterly unaware of the cameras all around us.

Would we live it differently if we noticed them? I wave sometimes to the surveillance cameras on neighbours' houses, or jump out of the way of a tourist's lens along the Halifax waterfront, but most of the time I remain blissfully ignorant of any record of my passing. I think I prefer it that way, although perhaps I ought to smarten up.

I always feel like somebody's watching me.
And I have no privacy.
Rockwell, Somebody's Watching Me 1984


For a time in the late 1980s, in Baltimore, not long after a friend had been found bludgeoned to death in her own apartment, I was subjected to some sort of watching. Often, as I entered my apartment, after a run or a day at school, the phone would ring.  If I answered,  someone who clearly knew I'd just come in would say something to me about my arrival. My watcher never explicitly threatened me, but they clearly meant to be menacing.  I found them very terrifying, particularly in the wake of my friend's unsolved murder.  I contacted the police; they put a trace on the line, but never discovered who was stalking me.  I ultimately paid to have an unlisted phone number, although I worried sometimes that this meant that whoever had been watching might have to confront me then to reach me. Within a year or two I'd moved away, and I forgot the whole incident. Until yesterday, when I was thinking about just how many cameras are clicking and clacking and recording all around us.

My friend Martha, from whom I'd rented a room in Halifax in the fall, wrote to tell me that she'd seen something peculiar on Google Street View:

Eventually I got around to taking a look. Yes, there it was, my car in Martha's drive.  But I didn't think that's what she meant, so I zoomed in for a closer inspection. Yes, there I was, at the door, bag in hand, coming or going.  It was a warm day; September; I'm wearing a crumpled white blouse, open at the neck. Google has blurred my eyes, just as they'd blurred my license plate, still I recognize myself, or a version of myself: faded, blurry, unselfconscious, but recorded. How many millions and billions of these sorts of photos exist of we billions as we wander about in our daily lives? 

In 2015, Rose Eveleth set out to try to figure out the answer to that question for the Atlantic magazine; what she found is that no one knows. No one even knows how to estimate how many such "accidental" portraits exist. Apparently many. As I began to talk about my image with others, the stories began to pour back about this or that friend, snapped while walking the dog, or mowing the lawn. Weird, because when I've seen Google Street View, it's almost always been like Daguerre's early images, streetscapes devoid of humans. And yet here, in the photographic shadows, we are...

Notes

Caroline Cakebread, "People will take 1.2 trillion digital photos this year--thanks to smartphones" http://www.businessinsider.com/12-trillion-photos-to-be-taken-in-2017-thanks-to-smartphones-chart-2017-8

Number of smartphone users world wide from 2014-2020: https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/

Karin Cope, "Counting Trillions," http://visiblepoetry.blogspot.ca/2009/07/counting-to-trillions.html 

Jessica Schladebeck, "Humans may have arrived in America 100,000 years earlier than thought,"
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/humans-america-115-000-years-previously-thought-article-1.3104096 

Carrie Sylvester, "2017 Camera wrap-up: where have all the cameras gone?" http://blog.infotrends.com/ 

Rose Eveleth, "How Many Photographs of You are Out There In the World?" The Atlantic 2 November 2015: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/how-many-photographs-of-you-are-out-there-in-the-world/413389/
 

Unusually warm again: on the peculiarly temporary sensation of enjoying climate change

I wrote this on October 28, but it is still true in November, this humid unseasonable weather that clings to the days and makes our nights sweaty and confusing.

A band of clouds gathers over the outermost islands, but here, closer inland, the sky is blue and the sun warm, the air sweet and gentle, hot even, if you're in the lee of the breeze. Dragonflies fall into the sea; you notice them because they spin in the water in their death throes, their wings still revolving. The great blue herons still fish from the pond and at the backs of the coves, and the loons still gather and linger, floating silently some distance offshore.

It's still so warm that some of the lupines have burst into bloom again; likewise the thistles, and at night, here and there, we can hear a few frogs creaking and singing from the mud, as if we might skip winter and it were spring all over again. Mosquitoes still gather and slow moving flies bumble into our hair as we walk at the forest edge. Meanwhile, the apples ripen and drop from the trees, the cranberries redden and sweeten,  and the ferns have turned brown and begun to crumble.  Wild rosebushes gleam yellow and scarlet; rose hips jewel along the path by the shore. The tamaracks (or larches, as they are called in the US,) yellow and begin to drop their needles. These are all sure signs of autumn; nevertheless, no one can be sure that it has arrived.

We walk and stretch and snooze in the afternoon sun, eat carrot salad for lunch, sip green tea. Golden light halos the yellowing leaves still clinging to the trees, and porcupines mumble in the underbrush.  The dog flushes pheasants and young grouse; deer droppings pebble the yard. The grass is still green. We sit on the porch and read, stare out over the water, and puzzle over when the cold will come. A spate of warmest, record-breaking days unfolds week over week. Every denies it, but we all love it. I think Canadians like climate change, says Elisabeth, who at nearly 83 is our household elder.

And so do we, even as the dwindling numbers of returning ducks and strange and sudden appearance of exotic fish in the water and razor clams along the beach alarm us. We all catch what feel like summer colds, but enjoy walking barefoot through the house and wearing t-shirts and shorts at the end of October. Where will it all end?

We don't want it to end, but this ongoing spate of warm weather makes us nervous.  It is as if we are holding our collective breath: the world has gone unpredictable, and we do not know what will come next. 

Meanwhile, the usual rapaciousness of superextractive industries continues and everything we touch turns to waste.  Every day brings idiot pronouncements from Washington, along with increasing rollbacks of environmental protections. The poor are ever poorer, the rich richer.  Insects are dying in unprecedented numbers; new wars break out nearly every day, and the number of global refugees tops 65 million. Nothing we have thoughts immutable is going to stay the same and we here, we privileged denizens of the global north, are largely to blame: this is the truth from which we frantically turn, as we thumb through our facebook feeds, liking, liking, loving, weeping, again and again.  (Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.)

Poem trying to get in out of the rain

Autumn rattles at the windows of the night, rips
leaves from looping trees, punches
gustily against the wall.
I waken to creaking roofbeams, peer
sightless into blacklit night. Nothing
to see, but everything that is is sounding:
such a rush and crash of waves on rocks;
the clothesline sings a one-note samba,
the chimney turns to didgeridoo.
Only the dog sleeps, silent, beside me.
If I open the door to let the poem in,
it can sleep all night on the bench by the fire and
I'll return to bed then to wake you, slipping
frigid feet behind your knees.

Photos are of Usnea, or "Old man's beard" lichens in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Journey's End, or Reflections As One Thing Passes Into Another

Sky passes into sea, Rose Harbour, Kunghit Island, Gwaii Hanaas

4:30 am Atlantic Daylight Savings Time Sunday 27 August, 2017  West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Just a week ago we were in British Columbia, preparing for our last day on the boat for the year.  We'd moved into the launch slip, for the boat was to be hauled for some repairs, and eaten a quiet meal in the cockpit as darkness dropped over the Fraser River.  Overhead, dozens of airplanes streamed in on the same route: a sharp turn over the towers of the Alex Fraser Bridge, and then the lock onto a final approach over the river; they rumbled overhead to the airport, lights like a searching beam coming right at us. Our bags were half packed; the next morning I'd strip the bed, wash the sheets, defrost the freezer and scrub down the remainder of the living spaces on the boat, while Marike stowed lines and investigated the persistent and worrying flow of water over the top of the rudder, among dozens of other vital details. Cushions were clean and stacked in the salon, bedding and blankets bagged, charts rolled up, guidebooks put away. And just like that, the journey, which had unfolded gradually across time and space, embedding landscapes and experiences in our flesh and memories for months, rumpled closed; its urgencies began to dissipate.

Rising tide. Hakai Luxvabalis Recreation Area, Queen Charlotte Sound

Did it happen? Of course it did--finally, we'd made it to Haida Gwaii and back--but the marks the voyage left on our bodies, the habits of vigilance and care that it instilled in the rhythm of our days, had begun to disperse.  Before long we would be embedded in the life of the land again, unconscious of each fluctuation in barometric pressure, unconcerned about the exact times of the tides or the force and direction of the wind. Before long we'd be in another geography, on another coast, in our house. Then the question in the middle of the night would no longer be 'how strong is the wind? or 'does the anchor hold?' but something more diffuse and existential: 'who am I; where am I; and what must I do that matters next?' 

A lengthy and demanding voyage relieves us of such questions in many ways by giving us a trajectory and many clear parameters: the goal each day is to make good enough judgments about when, where and how to go a certain distance, that we may arrive safely. The consequences of failing to do this are fairly immediate and significant. Why one goes is not at issue: the meaning of life is to be alive and to stay alive, to become a resonating body, attuned to the wind and waves, other creatures, the landscape, the tides, and to the sounds of the boat. You ask, 'did we make the right call there?' 'is the raw water pump working?' not 'who am I and why do I exist?' You move from chart to chart, asking how best to get from here to there; such efforts, for the time one makes them, seem to preclude the feeling that one has gone astray--above all these days, for thanks to the extreme precision of Global Positioning Systems, it is almost never necessary, while underway, to puzzle out painstakingly where you are. 

Fog lifts and smoke remains. Entering Johnstone Sound from Blackney Passage.

But back on land, reinserted (however fitfully) into the news cycle and various pressing human concerns as we attend to the circuitry--the communications, the appliances, the vehicles, the yard work and habits of cleanliness and order--that sustains our carbon-rich lives, the absence of charts, of an evident trajectory across the repetitions that structure each day, makes existence itself feel heavy, tenuous, puzzling.  Without a map to mark the way, questions about the meaning of life surface: "why am I doing what I am doing? Is it worth it? What am I building as we move from day to day?" Bare existence seems never enough.

And it isn't--not for anyone, and certainly not as a meaningful narrative about living. Elaboration is crucial. So too, a sense of direction. Somehow, always, we want the sense and unfolding self-evidence of the journey, even if that can only be played, on the one hand, as risk, and on the other, as retrospection.

Stars spangle the night sky and a thick dew settles over every surface. Sometime in the day to come, it will rain and we will sit indoors at our computers, writing, searching, replying, seeking contact, affirmation, revelation. But for now, to look out at the Milky Way just might be enough. The dog curls at my feet. I drink a glass of water and go back to bed.  

Grey light of early morning rises, blotting out the stars. I know that another night soon, I'll be up again to weigh the anchor of my soul, and find it wanting.

Carved cedar mortuary pole returns to the earth, K'uuna Llnagaay (Skedans), Haida Gwaii.

Notes

All photographs were taken in British Columbia during the course of a voyage to Haida Gwaii aboard Quoddy's Run (June 3-20 August 2017).

Today I will different

You wake, you say
today will be different, today
I will do what I do what I must what I will
today I will          efficient        today
tasks completed      today       organized    today
my desk in order.
Today I will          different.
Do today as if some other un-waylaid by wind

or whim or want.  Someone of will, not wanton

wondering. What song will you sing then when

samba flings you circumsolar when

lightslant leaps across your foot when
urgency, like sucking sand, slips seaward and

beckons you to swim?

 Notes
This poem was written for my friend, Gary Markle; I've rewritten it for Poem in Your Pocket day.
The photo is of a cardon cactus blooming near Salinas Bay, on Isla Carmen, Baja California Sud, Mexico in early April 2017. 

How beautiful the snow blasted world

Snow falls quietly at twilight
gathering flakes whisper as they hit the window

How beautiful the snow blasted world. 

After dinner the snow stops falling and the dog and I go out to walk the territory. The moon glows faintly behind a scrim of clouds; clumps of snow cling to every branch and bush and the tops of the flattened grasses.  The apple trees thrust their branches at the sky like so many gnarled and knobby fists; there's a gaping hole where the barn door has blown off--better call for help to fix that one. 

We circle the gardens, step through the weeds to the pond's edge, where a fallen tree covered in snow casts strange shadows on the ice.  No footprints but ours anywhere to be seen. 

We walk along the dyke at the sea edge, each rose hip a huge ball of snow on a spindly branch. There's just enough wind that we can hear the water ripping and rushing into the shore and out again.

The wind is biting. It nips my cheek, hurries the dog to the door, slips through the stitching in my gloves to freeze my fingers. But I'm not ready to go in yet.

Clouds scud across the sky.  I look out over the grey water towards the islands, invisible in the darkness, then turn to scrape off the cars and clear the drive in front of the garage, savouring the sharpness of the air, stamping my feet to keep them warm.  Why must every pair of boots leak? Time to goop them up again.

I am remembering one night when I was about nine. The snow had been falling all evening. The streets were quiet and huge drifts covered the yard.  My siblings and I were sure that when our mother came into the room, she was going to tell us to get ready for bed. It's time, she said, pausing as we started to moan, then all in a rush--to get your coats on and go play in the snow! Shrieking with delight, we tumbled out into the darkness and the drifts, the world magical and thick with surprise and permission. 

It wasn't until I moved to Montreal and learned to cross-country ski twenty years after that--and more than twenty years ago--setting out across the fields of the Chateauguay Valley beneath a full moon, that falling snow occasioned such delight and anticipation again. But now it does.  

I watch the snow mount up higher and higher and hope the thermometer drops, rather than rises, so that I can ski across the bog, over top of the little lakes and streams, the sheepskill and the insect-eating pitcher plants onto the bushy ledges where the coyotes circle and sing.  There, I'll clamber up to a point where I can stand and look out at the sea rolling unimpeded over the horizon; from there, it rolls all the way to Spain. 

I can only ever get to that place on skis, when the bog is frozen and overlaid with deep snow.  How glorious it will be if that's what tomorrow brings.

Notes
Photos taken 3 January 2017 in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

The wheels of the overturned wreck still spinning

(On negative capability)

The wheels of the overturned wreck
still spinning--

I am having trouble seeing how--
some lines trip, now they blare

my head my eye
an old tv, giving up the ghost.

Before horror,  everything.
Beyond horror, nothing.

O scow or barge loose--
should safely be moored. But people, those
people who have power in them?

I don't mean to despair, I mean if we do not--
at least to hear
in the manner of poetry.

Working notes

The second and third stanzas of this poem are taken from a journal entry trying to account for my experience of these last two days, as the reality of a Trump presidency in the US begins to sink in; the rest are citations and modifications of some writings of American poet George Oppen, who fled, with his wife and daughter to Mexico during the early 1950s after being repeatedly harassed by the FBI for his radical politics. Oppen is celebrated as a poet of "negative capability"--Keats' term for a poet who builds work from the capacity to ask questions and to reside in "uncertainty, mystery and doubt," rather than foreclosure or a drive to a preconceived end. For Oppen, and perhaps for all of us, ethics emerges from such confrontations with what seem to us to be situations of crisis.  How do we describe and respond fulsomely to our histories, and to the events that unfold around, before, because of and despite us? Such activities take time, and often, in a crisis, that's exactly what we're sure we do not have. Nevertheless, to take the time to try to think, to hear and to see, in and despite our various states of blindness, deafness and panic, is our truest calling, and something like prayer.

Those lines that begin "the wheels of the overturned wreck..." are taken from Oppen's poem "Route," which recounts his experience, in 1925, of being responsible for a fatal crash. Drunk, and at the wheel, he lost control of his vehicle. I don't mean to despair, I mean if we do not--" also reworks a portion of that poem, which is found in New Collected Poems (2002). (I write: "I don't mean to despair, I mean if we do not--/at least to hear/ in the manner of poetry;" Oppen wrote: "I don't mean he despairs, I mean if he does not/ He sees in the manner of poetry.")

"Before horror..." and "O scow or barge loose..." are lifted from Oppen's "Daybook 1," working notes that seem to have been written between 1963 and 1964, after the Oppens had returned to the US. (Stephen Cope, ed., George Open: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007): 58. In this section, Oppen muses on the latent potential of those who approach situations as bystanders, rather than actors.

Incidents in a Life (Book I--Abridged Version)

 The shadow play, through dirty windows, of morning light on a basement wall

Book I Things Do Happen

(Abridged Version)

--Chapter 0--

(opens in shadows)

What went on before I was or did.

--Chapter 1--

(something flickering)

And then I was born.

--Chapter 2--

(there might be light)

What went on that I can hardly remember.

--Chapter 3--

(certain shapes appear)

I might have learned to read.

--Chapter 4--

(lines, delineations)

Writing doesn't come easily; I'd rather draw a tree.

--Chapter 5--

(a trajectory perhaps)

Things go on happening that I'd like to report; things go on that I'd rather forget.

--Chapter 6--

(the road runs on)

Sometimes, memory fails me, and this, too, becomes something I fear.

--Chapter 7--

(the cliff edge)

Things neglected; things left to happen.

--Chapter 8--

(pebbles scrabble over the edge)

I know I'll die but I'm not dead yet.

Supper or wisdom (spring poem)

The days warm in minor increments now
rain hisses on the pavement, spatters darkened windows,
runs through the gutters at night.

By day I dream I walk through the park,
sit for a moment, my face turned
toward the sun.

In my dream I remember how
last autumn I sat there,
in that red chair

(said as if I were pointing)
rereading Plato's Symposium, city
buses coughing exhaust on my feet.

Were the birds singing?
I don't recall.
Just the clamour of voices

arguing supper or wisdom, and really
who cares? We go on forever
searching for both.


Notes:

Another "found" draft poem, scribbled out and hidden in my journal, this one dated 2 May 2016.

The photograph of the armchair was not taken in any park, of course, but in the Shelter Island Boat Yard in Richmond, BC in July 2014. Where had it come from? Who knows? But there it was, incongruous, settled in the shade of an old wooden trawler.

On saying goodbye (when does death arrive?)

The morning arrives still, grey, humid.  Offshore the sea blusters with a coming storm, but here the water is a claude glass, the air full of black flies.  We swat them away as we walk out past the woodpile, up the slight incline to the barn, then along what used to be a fence line to the apple orchard.  The apples aren't any sweeter, but they are redder, and some have begun to fall on the ground.

Past the weedy patch and the mound where the rhubarb grows, past the gangling burr oak with its few clinging brown leaves and then we are there beneath a birch and some spruces: our own private pet cemetery. We stop there briefly to speak to all our gone ones: in 17 years, the litany of names has become very long.  Four dogs and now three cats and the ghost of a fourth haunt this grove, this section of stony earth. Enya, the new dog, who is almost two, sniffs the spot worriedly and then moves on, quickly, down the path to the pond. It is not a good place for living dogs to linger.

We buried our cat Dante there last week, after taking her to the vet for an overdose of sedative. In seconds, her poor stricken body, her paralyzed bent paws and stiff legs, the blind eyes and nictitating membranes that would not close relaxed. She bowed her head as if in sleep and all of the tension drained from her body. Her heart stopped and she was dead.

Sad as we were, as we watched her unfurl into death, we were also relieved, for her pain had become unbearable; despite her paralysis, she had tried again and again to run from what ailed her, only to fall, and her misery to worsen.

We'd had 17 years with her, our "big cat" as I called her, although she had always been small. Still, in the last year, as her kidneys failed, she had become tiny; two weeks ago, her legs weakened and began to stiffen. When I said goodbye to her on my way out the door to work that week, I thought it might be the last time I saw her.

She stopped drinking and eating that day, and because she kept falling, Marike took to carrying her around on a blanket or in her basket. She held Dante all night the Tuesday that I was in Halifax, and then when I came home Wednesday I did the same. We thought she died quite a bit that night, but was clearly still in pain.  Mostly blind, mostly paralyzed, organs failing, her extremities--paws and ears--cold, only her tail still lively, impatient, expressive, switching and twitching, we bundled her in a blanket and took her to the vet, where a needle full of sedative slowly stilled her heart.

But is that when death arrives, when the heart stops or the autonomic nervous system ceases? Or does it settle in by degrees,  as we who are living also let go, and the beloved body cools and stiffens?

I held Dante in my arms and petted her all the way home, speaking softly into that near space where it seemed her spirit, her particular character and being still hovered, touchable, keeping us company. We had not yet released our hold on her singular life, but what had been so lively and so alive without us now remained and shifted inward, circulating as memory and sensation and drifts of kitty fur, sewn through the cushions and corners of our lives.

In this way, she is not yet gone, but nestled into the forms of our gestures and habits. At night, in the dark, I still step carefully, as if she might be nearby, unseen, underfoot--as, in a way, she is. When I wake, I listen for her, sure I'll hear the drop of her paws on the floorboards, her soft purr as she climbs up on the bed, glad to have conscious company in the middle of the night. I put out my hand, curl my fingers around empty space.  Likewise the dog curls on the bench by the fire, nuzzling a stuffed toy, sniffing at it as she did Dante, clearly missing her animal companion.

How does Rilke put it, the character of such missing and the way it shapes our lives? In the Eighth Duino Elegy he writes:

                         Here all is distance;
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty...

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops lingers------,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

So we live here, forever taking leave of our loves--until the days that we, too, will die.

Unlike Rilke, I do not think that we live or die differently from other animals, although he might be right that we tend to busy ourselves with preoccupations, with objects, as he puts it, rather than "that pure space into which flowers endlessly open." But now and then, as death creases us, we too may turn or wake and look, not at life, but at something like being, as its wings beat by our heads. These too are gifts, as if from the dead to the living: look here; see; and hasten not your mourning.

Notes
Dante cat died on Thursday 13 October 2016.  She had come to live with us when just a kitten sometime in the fall of 1999, a gift of Nicole Moser, who had heard we needed a mouser. We had two large black dogs at the time, Negrita, a black lab, and Binky, our three-legged wolfdog stray. Dante spent her first three days in the house on top of the kitchen cupboards; on the fourth day she descended, having somehow mesmerized the dogs, and despite her tiny size, whipped them into respect and obedience without ever extending a claw. In fact, that's how she got her name, for as Marike said, she was little, and needed a big name that was easy to hear and to call. Who better than after an exiled poet, who mapped heaven and hell and all of the regions between?

She was wise, scrappy, playful and clever--gave birth to five kittens, instructed Binky how to care for them rather than to eat them, and survived a neighbour's hate and traps, as well as an attack by roaming huskies that killed her daughter and wounded Elisabeth. Until a year ago, she kept the house free of mice and other small critters; she trained all of our dogs to be good to cats, and figured out that if she came and rubbed herself on our computers as we worked, she could be sure of nearly endless petting. She could play good jokes, sticking her paw in our water glasses, or dropping pellets of food in our shoes, and then watching to see how we'd react. And sometimes, when we played ball with a dog, she'd run interference, as if she could catch, but really to interrupt the dog's concentration, and make the ball drop. We'll not soon see her like again.

The Rilke I cite here is from Stephen Mitchell's translation and bilingual edition, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Random House, 1982): 195, 197.

Public Stories: On Doubt and Debt

These days we write public stories not private ones.

What is the difference?
I say, what is the difference?

A public story is not a private one.
A private story is not a public one.

A public story is when someone wishes to believe--but you withhold, withal, some doubts.
You do not share them.

In other words,
a public story is when debts make doubts unutterable.

A private story is when when doubts are spoken softly,
as if inside a closed book.

Eyes shut, like in a dream.
Perhaps you believe wishes, but will not share them.

In other words,
a private story is when doubts make debts unutterable.

Doubts, debts, what is the difference?

These days we write private stories in public
and bury the public in private, tamping down its grave.

Notes:

In searching my old journals for some ships' log notes, I came across a short dialogue written in southern Mexico in February of 2006 that began "these days we write public stories not private ones." I'm not sure to what I was referring (how quickly memory fails us!), but I can tell from other nearby entries that all the ship's company were very ill then with salmonella poisoning, and we had not in fact communicated the extent of that to our friends and relatives, so perhaps that's what I was writing about. In any case, I felt a sudden urge, once I had stumbled across these words, to seize and remotivate them, to do something with them.  It seemed as if my 2006 lament was a prefiguration of the crazy mixed-up media and political landscape of the present, in which, at once, both privacy and the commons have become radically eroded, facts a matter of opinion,  public debt irrelevant (and private debt increasingly crippling).

Public, private, what is the difference? So many of us no longer clearly know, and yet this boundary feels crucial, even sustaining, particularly in private, if not in public. Although perhaps it should be.

I reflect that a personal blog, like this one, sits sometimes oddly on the boundary between public and private; it represents a space of limited publication, but within a potentially unlimited public,  like so much of whatever we who post do post on the internet. How limited? How unlimited? How can we know? No wonder we're confused, and cannot keep our accounts straight, our debts and doubts either separated or aligned.

Why have I stopped writing so frequently here? In part because I am publishing in other venues more and they do not like to be scooped by my own blog; in part because I have been working in other media and on other projects; in part because I keep several teaching blogs when I am teaching and just cannot bear to spend too much more time on the computer. Everything seems to flow through these narrow portals, and some days I spend far too many hours sitting at a desk and staring at a screen. In fact I must ask what are you doing here now, peering into that the odd doorway/ mirror of your computer screen? Hurry, get up, push back your chair, step outside and go for a walk! Get your your private in the public, where no one can see you!

Images from a walk at Taylor Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia, October 15, 2016.

Where we tread

Fog. We are immersed in an unending fog that drifts in and out with the tides. Sometimes the air is warm and still and the water like glass, beaming back reflections of trees and stone with greater clarity and definition than the atmosphere. But then the wind blows, rifling and darkening the surface of the water.  

Dried grasses and lichens loom up out of the mist as if aglow; fiddleheads unfurl, swallows swoop in graceful arcs over the yard, Sometimes, when we're out walking, they bomb by so near and so quick, I feel the air around my face stir. 

The loon calls from an invisible space, and all around songbirds trill. A yellow finch gleams from the upper branches of an apple tree, then flutters away into the mist. Now you see it; now you don't, but the dip of its looping flight resounds in the air.

Water beads tender greens unfurling on every tree, drips from the pines, puddles in the centers of lupin leaves, illuminates spidery filaments webbing the grass. Everywhere the long view is obscured, but whatever is close, tiny, near to the ground, is magnified.

Here the sweet scent of spruce bud, flowering maple, smashed violets smeared where we tread.

Rereading or Practicing Surrealism? Method: short poems from novels. First trial: Andre Breton

If you block out most of the words on the famous first page of Breton's Nadja, you get a question transposed into a statement:

"I am who(m) I haunt."

All of Nadja could be summed up in this phrase, Breton's ode to himself, or to the power to drive an ill woman mad. --At least, that's one possible reading of the story.

One is not inclined to imagine that such a reading is incorrect when face to face with the last image in the book, or rather, its revision:

In the caption to this self-portrait, Breton writes as one who envies himself--and in this way becomes, at once, himself and himself-as-someone else, Nadja, a man of record, a public figure, a writer.

No wonder it also always feels like a trick. "I must admit this last word is misleading." And so, too, those that precede it.

The Fine Print 

I should explain what has occasioned this short excursus on Breton, yet another one, for I've written about him--and Nadja--here before, although arguably stopped just short of the insight that the exercise of literally blocking out bits of his text finally offered me--that when Breton writes, he writes for and of himself; he haunts himself; every other is just a foil. You can judge for yourself: see http://visiblepoetry.blogspot.ca/2012/03/something-wrong-notes-on-bretons-nadja.html. 

This time, which is to say, yesterday, I was thinking about a course that I will teach again in the fall, something I've called Strategic Fictions.  The course is designed to expose visual artists who want to make use of fiction in their work to the techniques of fiction as writers think about them, as well as to a number of contemporary artists and artworks (sometimes called "Superfictions") that make use of various aspects of fiction: for example, Sophie Calle, Joan Fontcuberta, Iris Haeussler, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, and so on. 

I have previously, with many misgivings, made use of Nadja as precursor text in this course, as a way of visibly linking the strategies of the artists we consider back to various modernist exercises, including (auto)biography-as-illustrated-novel (Calle, Haeussler, Fontcuberta, Cardiff and Miller and Duke and Battersby all enact variations on this theme). In fact, my previous piece on Breton and Nadja, "'Something Wrong': Women Who Crash," began as an effort to engage the image-using and citational strategies of Nadja to new ends, and was first drafted as a lecture for the Strategic Fictions class.  

Yesterday, however, I was wondering if I could engage my students in a more direct project of handling Breton's text.  I'd been looking at and thinking about poet Mary Ruefle's "erasure" books--works where she takes an earlier text and blocks out sections of it to make a new text.  See for example, a page from the poem/book, A Little White Shadow, itself constructed from a novella published by Emily Malbone Morgan in 1889 also entitled A Little White Shadow:

Such works-by-erasure are common in poetry, especially contemporary poetry, and repeatedly and knowingly give the lie to various claims to "originality." Poets are constantly writing in the style of, or "after" various others by borrowing from and reworking earlier poetry, often tongue-in-cheek, or building poems from excision, concision and mistranslation.  A cento is, for example, a poem entirely composed from fragments found elsewhere, heretical verse, taking one sort of text and making it say something else. This form, named and exercised by Roman poets of the second or third century, is all about the generative power of mistakes or, more particularly, the capacity of heretics to re-author the Gospels simply by citing select bits of them.  The Latin word harks back to the Greek verb kentron, "to plant slips of trees," as well as, or so the dictionary and various commentators claim, to a later Greek formation, kentrone, or "patchwork garment."  We are all born from someone and somewhere else; little or nothing is new. 

Likewise, Canadian poet Gregory Betts has made much of what he calls "plunderverse"; as with Ruefle's work, he takes a source text and, preserving the order of the words and letters, strikes out until the old text speaks differently, anew.  "We are born into language but a language not our own," Betts writes.  "We can only speak a language not our own." (See Betts' Plunderverse Manifesto here: http://www.ottawater.com/poetics/poetics05/05betts.html and a review of his aptly named The Others Raisd in Me, a work of plunderverse here: http://aarontucker.ca/reviews/the-others-raisd-in-me-a-plunderverse-project-gregory-betts/).   

Similarly, artist Tom Phillips makes use of such dadaist-become-surrealist technique in his 1987 A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, one page of which is reproduced here:

Such contemporary poetic or painterly projects are, for the most part, descendants of techniques like those spelled out in Tristan Tzara's 1920 "Dada Manifesto on Feeble and Bitter Love," where he instructs readers to cut words from the newspaper, put them in a bag, shake, and pull them out, one by one, writing them down in the order in which they appear. The resulting "poem will resemble you," Tzara promises.  Still another example may be found in the recyclings of Max Ernst's "collage-novels" of the 1930s, for example La femme 100 tetes or Une semaine de bonte, where Ernst combines drawings on Victorian illustrations into long wordless and surreal tales--as in this weird and textured plate from Une semaine de bonte/ A week of kindness:

 

 With such examples on my mind then, and wondering about possible exercises I might assign to students grappling with Nadja for the first time (or, as also happens, falling in or out of love with it--what is it about the power of the surrealists to command us with their mad loves and hates?), I opened my copy of Nadja, trans., Richard Howard  ***with this phrase, "trans. Richard Howard," I have been echoing or writing "after" Frank O'Hara's wonderful and breathless poem "The Day Lady Died"*** and began mentally blocking out text, rewriting the first page, and thereby writing a short poem from a novel--if this little exercise can be called a poem. Or perhaps all of these words and every one of these citations is the poem, which can only invite further plunder.

But wait; there is more.

One final note. As I am finishing this text, I open my copy of Breton's L'Amour fou, a(nother) book in his trilogy of novels dedicated to the unfolding of unexpected encounters and coincidences. A ticket falls out on which is printed the following command: "Please read carefully." I do. Or rather, I read that line several times, since I don't have my reading glasses with me, and what follows it is printed in type so painfully small that it devolves into wavering black squiggles, a drawing perhaps, another block of excised text. Definitely not words.  

Everything repeats itself; nothing is new; what is the difference between altering and misreading, and simply not reading? This is not a minor question in an era when Donald Trump is touted as a viable US presidential candidate.

Oddly enough, I have been reading this morning the text of lecture by Mary Ruefle entitled "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World." There she recounts one day when she was in her forties, "an ordinary day, neither sunny nor overcast," when she could no longer read; the words would simply no longer compose themselves in any sort of sensible order. Ruefle writes:

[T]he words that existed so I might read them sailed away, and I was stranded on a quay while everything I loved was leaving. And then it was I who was leaving: a terror seized me and took me so high up in its talons that I was looking helplessly down on a tiny, unrecognizable city, a city I had loved and lived in but would never see again."

She explains that really, she needed reading glasses, but "before I knew that, I was far far away." The train had left the station. Everything was fraudulent; the landscape had shifted; her sense of reading as some sort of orderly practice in the world had come completely undone. 

But in fact, although we usually don't recognize it, this is where we are when we are reading--on edge, overtaken, helplessly hopelessly behind. We've missed the train; we're on the wrong train, or simply find that where we thought we were is elsewhere. Or nowhere. There is no there there (says Gertrude Stein in the 1930s as she is touring the United States).

Please read carefully. 

We do. And we cannot.

Ever.

And so we begin again.

We sit and we read and then we set out...reaching town as evening [begins] to fall.*

*These are last words of the English translation of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, a book about reading, lost memory, extirpation, transportation and death. 

Reading. Writing.

We think these activities will save us, but really they carry us ever closer to death--even as they put off--still another hour!-- the arrival of that day. 

Maybe this piece should have been called "Someone reading a book is a sign of disorder in the world."