The Holes in the Church Floor

I can't imagine the actual shooting. Sure, we see people shooting each other constantly on one screen or another, but this was a church. The Ministers would have been sitting around, perhaps in the sanctuary, and discussing, what I don't know because I've never attended a bible study session, but it could have been Matthew 5:44…"You have heard that it was said, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.' "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

Maybe when they saw the hyped-up youth in the shirt that displayed symbols of racist regimes, they thought it an opportunity to practice this gospel. I imagine them sitting in the sanctuary and motioning him forward. Come on in, son. I don't know if anyone actually said this, but I imagine it so. The church itself is a sanctuary and a symbol, too, just like the First African Baptist in Savannah, where Preacher Little welcomed a few visitors, including me, to join the congregation and invited us to participate in the Sunday service.

I attended out of curiosity. Having been disappointed by the commercialism that seemed to accompany the performances of the Harlem Gospel Choir -- at least where I saw them, in Quebec City's towering St. Roch Church-- I was looking for authenticity in Savannah. Like Mother Emmanuel, First African Baptist is an historic African-American church. It too has holes in the floor that aided the breathing of runaway slaves who hid out there, a stop on the underground railway. And the music was fine. Those voices! Most impressive, though, was the pastoral spirit I sensed in the preacher. I doubt he knew personally all the members of the congregation, but he spoke to them as if he did, and when he called to the front anyone who knew of someone who needed help, I joined, on behalf of my niece. He looked at me directly and asked her name and the nature of her suffering. I was standing in a crowd of strangers, all African-Americans dressed in their Sunday best, and those nearest hugged me when Preacher Little asked everyone in the church to stand up for Brigid.

Old Slave Market, Charleston

That warmth, that welcome, that genuine concern for others is what got the twenty-one year old killer into the church where the late Reverend Pinckney was the pastor.

What the confederate flag stood for is more complicated than racism, and yet, no doubt incapable of seeing complexity, bigots have reduced its meaning to serve their own cruel purposes. I learned on my trip through the south a couple of years ago that what we call the Civil War is known there as The War of Northern Aggression. The industrial northern states wanted the federation to have more control. The southern states wanted to keep their rights to do what they wanted, including owning slaves. But slavery was also practiced in the north, by men as integral to the country as Thomas Jefferson. As a visitor to the south, I found it odd to see the flag still so prominent, hanging from porches, displayed on bumper stickers, used for advertising, and as a common symbol on tombstones in graceful old cemeteries like Bonaventure in Savannah. The history of the civil war is a major tourist draw. I visited Thomas Ryan's slave market in Charleston and a former indigo plantation outside of town, where slave cemeteries were located well beyond the sight of the main house.

People still re-enact civil war battles, like author Tony Horwitz describes in his book Confederates in the Attic. It's a little like those jousting contests other people stage, their hobby being to re-enact battles and battle styles of the past. A sort of living history, but still history. The past. Relegating the confederate flag to museums instead of flying it prominently over the state capitol building will declare that the nation-dividing battles of the 18th century are indeed long over. Instead of decorating tombstones, the flag itself must be buried so not to to goad the easily confused into thinking that times have not changed. Times have changed, even if not enough.

As Pastor Little taught me in Savannah, I stand up for those nine families who lost those wonderful individuals, and also -- in the spirit of compassion they represented -- for the family of that pathetic young man who gained power he thought was his right only because he could buy a gun.

After glom, gloom, gloaming?

It definitely isn't afterglow. Aftergloom might be overstating it. The few mornings since I submitted the revisions to my new novel have fallen instead like the twilight state known lyrically as gloaming. Or maybe the most appropriate gl word is glom, meaning to hang onto. Glom onto.

I can't say I wasn't ready to let it go. In my experience there comes a time when you have to stop. Despite having addressed some issues pointed out by a potential publisher--and done so with the exhilaration of having opened up the novel, learned or at least exposed things that had been waiting for me to discover them-- I was finding something every time my eyes scanned a page. Oh no, two consecutive sentences beginning with but? Are they justified? All the homilies sprang to mind: "If it's not broken, don't fix it. " On the other hand, there's this: "You just fix the brakes and find that the oil pan is leaking." Really, though, at some point you just have to stop.

The ripply blue space, like the image that shows up on monitors when there's something wrong with the feed? That's aftergloaming. I'm pretty sure it's that.

What did not really happen

She has told the story so many times that, when she is telling it, she believes it herself. About how she was getting up from her convertible futon chair -- the wood frame kind with a footrest that extends. How she usually gets up from the chair the very same way, by resting her weight on her right hand, then swinging her legs across and onto the floor at the side of the footrest, because this footrest is not one that responds to leg pressure, like the lay-z-boy footrest. In the story she has told again and again (but why does she feel she should tell it? Is she looking for sympathy, explaining why she is unable to help with the raking, sharing a bizarre mishap?) her hand slips and the weight of her body comes down on the six-inch wide wooden arm rest. Ouch! Bruised, possibly cracked ribs she can do nothing but endure (and complain about, and research on the internet, and become gymnastic about avoiding during sleep).

It's not what really happened. In fact, it would be physically impossible to injure ribs on the right side of the body from that position, i.e, leaning on her right hand, twisting right to swing her legs over the footrest. In this scenario it would more likely have been the ribs on her left side or her breastbone that took the impact. But she has repeated the made-up version often enough that she has almost forgotten the complicated truth, which began with an ant invasion. Just when she thought the invaders dead or at least discouraged, another bold one would appear on the carpet, purposefully moving through the study, heading to the bathroom for water. Sometimes, when she was sitting on her zafu on the floor to practice zazen, one of them would lose its way and crawl over her bare leg, startling her out of wherever she had been. Not horrifying her really, horror is too strong a word. Probably not disgusting her either, or at least not to the degree disgust can feel like food-poisoning. But distracting her at least. When would the next one squeeze through the crack between the moulding and the floor and invade territory that, despite knowing it a cliché (though clichés are true and sometimes unavoidable), she does jealously guard.

She had to get off the floor, so she put her zafu on the square of futon that makes the footrest of the convertible chair, and climbed on top, and immediately toppled sideways towards the floor. Outstretched fingers kept her from wholly catapulting into the wall beneath the window. She didn't hit her head (and she's grateful for that), but the side of her body came down hard on the six-inch arm of the futon chair, just as it did in the fictional version.

The result was the same in both. Bruised, possibly cracked ribs that kept her from sleeping well. While she lay awake she considered why she had not just told it like it really happened. To avoid the charge of stupidity? (Who puts a cushion on the chair and doesn't test its stability before climbing on?) To save herself explaining the ant invasion (which, shortly after that, abated)? To dodge questions concerning the zafu and where had she bought it, concerning the correct posture, concerning her teachers and experience as a practitioner, concerning other methods from other schools? To minimize the distraction that became larger than any ant?

One day after the chair incident, she met a woman she had not seen for a couple of months. "It's because I had an accident," the woman explained. "I was running water in the sink when I looked out to the balcony and saw a bird on my plant. I ran out to chase him away and slipped on the plastic boot tray so that my legs went in opposite directions. I couldn't move... I had to crawl to the phone...." Then, shaking her head, "Isn't it funny how quickly things can happen? How quickly life can change?"

The woman with the injured ribs nodded. Yes it certainly is, she thought. "I'll tell you what happened to me..."

Trash as Literary Treasure

What is literature going to do with the no garbage movement? In his My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgard leaves indelible images of the dump where he and his childhood friends found stacks of dirty - in all senses of the word -  magazines that they snuck away and hid in the woods. Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, features a refuse collector as one of the principal characters, the unforgettable Christie.

"By their garbage shall ye know them," Christie yells like a preacher, a clowny preacher. "I swear, by the ridge of tears and by the valour of my ancestors, I say unto you, Morag Gunn, lass, that by their bloody goddamn fucking garbage shall ye christly well know them. The ones who eat only out of tins. The ones who have to wrap the rye bottles in old newspapers to try to hide the fact that there are so goddamn many of them. The ones who have fourteen thousand pills bottles the week, now. The ones who will be chucking out the family albums the moment the grandmother goes to her ancestors."

Having just returned from our local dump, I can tell you there's little to spark a writer's imagination. The impassive guy in the trailer who is responsible for the before and after weighing of vehicles and giving directions? He is the face - the main character - of the garbage dump. If he came out from behind the window where he operates the electronic scales, he might prove to have as much potential as Christie.  Actually it isn't called a garbage dump anymore, but the landfill site, as if land needed filling. Who has ever heard of hollow land, unless is honeycombed with tunnels or mined, which creates a similar effect. A long drive uphill through forest led to this bald place at the top. No smoke evoking The Inferno, but the smell of something burnt coming from somewhere. Open sand-clay ground dug out in places for "bins" that are actually big craters below grade, easy to throw into. One for scrap iron, one for building materials, others I was discouraged from investigating, because people are not supposed to wander around. A separate turn off leads to discarded-appliances-ville, where naked white fridges blandly shoulder over stoves and washing machines as if in some apocalyptic Best Buy franchise.

With a small load of scrap metal, the remains of a rusted out barb-b-que, I got nowhere near anything like what Christie saw. There has to be a place for ordinary garbage from the one-can-per-household our garbage trucks are allowed to pick up, but it was nowhere in sight. Perhaps beyond a slope where there was a sign, NO ENTRANCE. At bin number four, a kid of about eighteen -- tall, hard-hatted, high-voiced-- helped unload my trunk. "Nope, no bears," he said, "not since the electric fence was put up.  We can't keep out anything with wings, though." We looked to the sky where a handful of large crows swept towards what sounded like an eagle. Eagles are not as profuse in summer as in winter when there can be.... did he say thousands?  His words got lost in the grind of a truck motor, or in my distraction. There'd been a small job to do yes, to justify the trip; but I'd had expectations for this dump. Fantasy exceeded reality again. My camera remained on the passenger seat.

A civilization is defined by what it throws away, reminds a review of Don De Lillo's Underworld . But how it's thrown away says quite a bit, too. The recycling movement has transformed town dumps. What is thrown away is dissembled, washed, flattened, and divided into pieces that may be barely recognizable for what they were once part of. A challenge to piece together a novel from this disparateness, but maybe free verse, as in this by A.R. Ammons. (From Garbage)

"much can become of the clear-through plastic
lid: it finds security in the legit

museums of our desecrations--the mounds, the
heights of discard . . ."

.

Period. Full Stop.

The teachers who drilled the rules of punctuation into students -- commas mean a pause, period a full stop -- were not fiction writers. It's not that black and white. The music of the writing comes from words in varying combinations and also punctuation. A particular narrative voice has its own rhythm. Stacatto sometimes.

Short sentences. Simple declarative sentences without embellishing clauses. Sometimes one word sentences (but shouldn't it be a good, useful, even powerful word?) alongside which a pedant might be inclined to scrawl in red, "inc.!" for incomplete sentence.

If it takes too long to establish a voice, the reader will be confused. Will struggle to catch it. Broken punctuation rules will look like mistakes. Readers won't be able to trust their "guide" - as Alistair MacLeod once called the narrative voice - through the story.

Ali Smith is an unconventional punctuator. Lots of semi-colons, colons, irregular line spacing, at least in the first few pages of her How to be Both. For example,

                                                                                    "eyes  :
                                                                                        hello  :
                                                                                          what's this?
                                                                                                A boy in front of a painting.
Good  : I like a good back  :"

I have been resisting, but maybe I will try again. Maybe the resistance has come with an unconscious desire to cleave to the voice that speaks in my head every time I sit down to work on revisions to my own novel.

Long sentences make another kind of narrative voice and require very careful punctuation. The work of some writers - Faulkner, MacLeod - fall into this category. Faulkner created a parade of description and action and reflection all in one sentence, often with a minimum of punctuation. MacLeod's sentences roll like the sea, and the commas he includes serve as troughs between the waves, a sort of rocking rhythm. From The Boat (1968). "He sang all the sea chanteys that had come across from the old world and by which men like him had pulled ropes for generations, and he sang the East Coast sea songs that celebrated the sealing vessels of Northumberland Strait and the long liners of the Grand Banks, and of Anticosti, Sable Island, Grand Manan, Boston Harbor, Nantucket and Block Island. Gradually he shifted to the seemingly unending Gaelic drinking songs with their twenty or more verses and inevitable refrains, and the men in the shanties smiled at the coarseness of some of the verses and at the thought that the singer's immediate audience did not know what they were applauding nor recording to take back to staid old Boston."

A thought occurs in time. Em dashes, hyphens, commas, semi colons, colons and even periods all qualify as pauses. Some long, sometimes glancingly brief, some representing afterthoughts.  Parentheses are good at this last job. Exclamation points are noisy. Question marks? A response not always necessary. Backwards apostrophes can help create a dialect, and right-ways apostrophes, too, at the other end of the word. Most readers won't notice how deliberately some writers work to achieve a distinct voice.  To other writers it comes as a gift and expresses itself almost as if impossible to do so in any other manner. It doesn't matter as long as the voice becomes sufficiently fixed in the writer's head that s/he can transpose it into the reader's imagination, individual, fully realized, irresistible.

Wouldn't you just rather forget?

Memory books. The popularity of "journal-ing". It's all about wanting to hang on to the lives we have created. But when we record or recall, are we honest with ourselves about the past? Searching through some papers I have kept here, I found two large envelopes containing typed notes from my early years as a fiction writer. Other things were happening too. Father dying, daughter testing me, trying relationships with friends, lovers. There it all is on yellow paper, typed with surprising accuracy. Berating myself for having wasted time, revisiting goals (finish novel, send out short stories), marking progress. Expressing emotional insecurity. Admiring the advent of another spring.

Reading those pages returns me to the house where I sat at my big desk, the metal typing table my dad gave me alongside. He always had an oak desk, too, and a typing table and used white newsprint, if not the yellow pulp paper I rolled in and stared at every day. Cigarette smoke and typewriters. Sitting for a long time, thinking, wanting to be brilliant. So Hellman-ish. The books that inspired me, including those of Walker Percy, a long time favourite. It's clear I was trying to find the right model, teacher, aid, while stuttering out the stories that became my first collection. The partial record of an apprenticeship. But the personal stuff, oh. Do I really want to recall relationship difficulties, especially with people who are part of my present life?

It's time for a clean out, and I can't decide what to do. Burning everything would be easiest. I'd never be able to risk stirring up deep emotions by opening that particular file. Of course I'd lose those notes on my apprenticeship, but do I really need faded ink on faded yellow to remind me of my striving, my determination?  I stopped questioning my commitment years ago. I'm a lifer. Working on something -- a novel, a story, a blog -- each day is a habit I would feel lonely without.

The people who were in my life then, well some of them are still in my life and they have changed as I have. Time has filled the cracks that divided us, so why not just destroy the evidence of struggle? For while those pages remind that there is always difficulty at the beginning, and beginnings can include a good portion of people's lives, it might be best to bury the documenting of them in the cavern where memories doze. There they would moulder and begin to disintegrate. If something should wake them, they would be fuzzy and harmless and easily dismissed. Shh, go back to sleep. As for truth, it may not be all it's cracked up to be. There's a reason for selective memory.

Navigating the Long Reach of Antiquity

Adam Nicholson's book about Homer, The Mighty Dead, is like a telescope trained on the very distant past. Using clues from ancient languages, from burial mounds, from unearthed treasure and other evidence, he dates Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Oddyssey from 2000 BC, or thereabouts, give or take a few centuries. Most scholars have assumed the epic poems were created in about 1200 BC, but Nicholson has had a passionate time of discovering evidence for why Homer -- who might have been might have been the blind poet of legend, but was more probably the name for what has been handed down over the centuries--is older.

"First, abandon any idea of the classic poet. The poems are not objects conceived by a single, gifted person, but profoundly inherited, shaped and reshaped by a preceding culture, stretching far back in time, something as much formed by tradition as the making of pots or the decorations of their surfaces....Homer is the world of tradition-shaped poetry.... and the governing fact in that epic world is the music of the poetry."

The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters is a very good book. I read a few chapters, in ebook form, immediately knew it was a book I wanted to hold and refer back to, so bought a second, paper, copy now personalized with many underlined sentences and exclamation marks alongside paragraphs that seemed particularly apt and well written. Nicholson is a relentless researcher. To imagine the days when the epics were recited or sung, he visits the rocky island of Chios, where he finds "a rare and extraordinary ghost of the Homeric world" in the limestone landscape and the building ruins of Emporio. He travels to a river in southern Spain that fits Homer's vision of Hades. He studies bards from other cultures- Gaelic, Serbian- to get an idea of how the poems could have survived for so long, that their essence and even most of the words hardly changed.

"Grief and triumph; a sense of irony and even tragedy; an overwhelming and dominant masculinity, thick with competitive violence; a small but hierarchical society, strung between a semi-nomadic way of life and one that was settled in small wooden houses... in love with horses; no understanding of the city or any relationship to the sea: all of that is very like the background to the world of the Greeks in their camp on the Trojan shore."

Research feeds his imagination as he tries to picture the world from which the epics sprang. Having just gone through a similar exercise with my first historical novel--which concerns a much more recent point in history, only 100 years ago-- I appreciate the exuberance of his efforts to identify with the characters.

"'For seventeen days..sleep never fell on his (Odysseus's) eyelids as he watched the stars above him'....You have only to steer once by the stars for that connection to remain with you for the rest of your life...This exposure of Odysseus to the stars is the closest I ever feel to him... for the sky arrayed above you and the sea and its dark threats half hidden is materially the same for me as it was for him."

If Nicholson's suppositions are correct and the poems have been around for more than four thousand years, it means they have endured through 800 generations (assuming five generations per hundred years.) Even serious genealogists would be hard pressed to successfully trace someone's roots back that far. What's wonderful is that knowledge abides, is gained, lost, added to, reconsidered, expanded on the basis of new discoveries. Certain artists and writers are able to advance it, as Nicholson does, while seining the past-- as when a steady swell rises in the wake of a ship and churns the layers of wine-dark sea beneath, sweeping into sunlight all the ocean holds, that might have been forgotten.

What are YOU doing here?

Nature should stay outside. I mean the crawly, lively part of nature, the ants, the mice. Spiders come with their own mythology and their webs are such things of beauty. I've always been a sucker for beauty. Not that I couldn't admire those same webs from my side of the glass. Because that's really all that separates us from nature. Maybe it's double-paned glass set into a slab of wood that is covered with sheet rock. Maybe it's brick or stone, But really, such a modest barrier between us and them.

Now these, a group of fifteen to twenty big ants, black ones, gathered right near the crack in the rafter supporting the roof of this old wood house. Lining up as if for free lunch, or checking into some Holiday Ant Inn for an ant convention. Ants! Carpenter ants. They nest in wood and chew it into sawdust. They chew on insulation material and make multiple nests within it. While not as serious as termites, they don't belong there in the wall, just above my head when I sleep. No wonder I've had a few nuits blanches recently.  They have to go.


Buddha counselled respect for all living creatures. But shouldn't that work both ways?  My local pest control guy suggested a relatively benign dust to exterminate them, mostly diatomaceous earth. Less toxic than Raid. He crawled into the narrow entrance with his headlamp, wearing normal clothes. Nothing like Walter White and his Vamanos crew. But the outfit didn't seem to matter.  He felt good about the result of the dusting he did. He thought he got them all. We stood outside the back door watching a wobbly-legged refugee trying to make it across the treated perimeter. Anything else, I'd feel bad watching it suffer, but ants, in the house? Big ones? Chewing it?

"You might see one or two in the house for a few days. Those would be escapees looking for a new home," the pest controller advised when he handed me the bill.

But it's more than one or two. At least three crawled out from under a bathroom rug, another half dozen scouted the terrain around my desk, one by one, teasing me into thinking the problem is solved and they were just part of the doomed survivor contingent. But he'd said one or two. How many now? I should have written it down. I imagine tiny bites and feel a crawling sensation on my calves The vacuum cleaner sucks over a patch of carpet where something black seemed to move. They are just ants, and yet, they are ants and it's my house.

For not the first and not the worst time small wild critters have challenged my borders.

I used to love to open my eyes just as light was breaking near a wild and scenic river in southwest Washington State. On the bank up from the river, fir trees grew trunks thick enough for two, even three people to bracelet. The wide, mullioned window in the bedroom broke the view of the forest into little squares. A single thickness of glass and a window sill level with the mattress. Such a flimsy barrier, really. Almost like being outside. It felt luxurious to lie on flannel sheets, beneath a thick down comforter and listen to small things, birds and chattery little chipmunks, until a logging truck passed and dominated every sound for a minute or two. Always tempting to lie in longer than usual, watch, listen, daydream. One morning when the time came to roll up, I threw back the duvet and the top sheet and there on the other side of the bed lay a small furry grey mouse. Dead but not desiccated. A recently dead mouse in the bed where I had lazed daydreaming for at least half an hour. Had I actually slept with the bloody thing? Yah!

The pest controller called last night. He'll get back here as soon as he can. Could be there's a satellite nest in another part of the attic. Meantime, I am considering or reconsidering my relationship with my natural environment. To zap the house invaders again feels draconian, yet it wouldn't have to happen if those critters just knew their place.

The Business of Art

A weekend guest was talking about how one of her relatives acquired so much of Norval Morrisseau's work. The creator of such strikingly original images also had a drinking problem for part of his life and would sell his work to support it. The same pieces are now worth many times what Mr. Morrisseau sold them for.

Raven, by Richard Shorty

I pointed out the raven on my wall, and told the story of how I had one morning been walking down Commercial Drive in east Vancouver and passed an art supplies store. A guy stood outside offering prints for ten bucks. He needed to buy some ink, he said.  Richard Shorty was young then. Engaging. As a free-lance writer with an uncertain income, I appreciated the deal, too. When I googled him yesterday, I found that Richard Shorty put that ink to very good use. His work is now a staple of aboriginal and northern art galleries, and his limited edition prints sell for ten times what I bought my raven for. At the time, I didn't know he had come from Whitehorse, in the Yukon, but the story of another work that hangs in my house involved the Yukon as well.

Matthew Watson's Store. Jim Robb

The years when I worked as a newspaper editor in Whitehorse there was no shortage of material for feature stories. The place was then, and probably still is, crawling with characters. Some had formed a community of sorts along the Yukon River, where they would be displaced by a new bridge and a park, and eventually the Territorial Government Building. Northern-style gentrification. But while the squatters/campers were still resident in what was called Whiskey Flats, a toothless Wigwam Harry, in his seventies, lived among them.  Jim Robb - who was every bit the character as the cast that made up his "Colourful Five Percent" series  of photographs -  Jim offered to introduce me to Harry so that I could get some of his stories on tape. Oh yes, tape. The olden days. I think I offered to buy him coffee at the Regina Hotel coffee shop. We had to meet somewhere, and the Regina was quiet in the afternoons. So I got Harry's story, including how, when he worked as an excavator, he had filled a basement right back up with old mattresses and anything he could find, when the man who'd hired him wouldn't pay. When sober he was no rambler, but he would talk if you asked the right question. Jim Robb wanted that recorded interview for his collection and offered to trade me a print for it.  An easy deal to agree to, which is why "Matthew Watson's Store" has been hanging on my wall ever since.

This month being income tax time, those transactions got me thinking about the line on the form concerning revenue from "business" activities and how the "business" of art sometimes gets done.

"A Pickpocket Looks at a Saint...

..and all he sees are his pockets." Something I read years ago, which has stuck with me. I took a look at Vancouver recently, trying to see it as my visitor might, and what struck me was the abundance of aboriginal art imagery. Travellers arriving at the international terminal at Vancouver Airport immediately encounter totems standing near pools of water that then cascade over stones. Among the major works by First Nations artists are the Musqueam Welcome Figures and Bill Reid's fabulous piece, Spirit of Haida Gwai, The Jade Canoe.

Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwai, The Jade Canoe, at YVR

In the great hall of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia totems stand almost as tall as the old growth trees from which they were carved, some them well over a century ago. There's a hushed quality about those who walk among them. It feels like a sacred place. Stanley Park too has a totem pole site, the most visited tourist attraction in Vancouver, apparently. Nine totems there, all replacements for originals from the northwest and lower coast villages where they originated in the 1920's.

Museum of Anthropology, U.B.C.

Characteristic northwest coast aboriginal designs show up in store windows, on banners, on brochures, on posters. Granville Island - with its huge public market, several theatres and the Emily Carr College of Art - has more than one shop featuring First Nations art. Most of the general, usually higher-end gift stores do too. In one wall-sized glass case I admired the sculptures worked by Inuit carvers. The elegant beak of a long-necked bird emerged from the tusk of a sea lion, visible transformation. Then there's the opposite end, i.e. familiar depictions of ravens and whales printed on mass produced t-shirts, and totem poles made of plastic in Gastown souvenir shops.

While First Nations people struggle back from a colonial mentality that tried to destroy them, we rely on their culture to help form our regional identity and their support to protect the west coast environment. As one advocate for an environmental organization told me, "We can't go ahead with anything unless the First Nations are on our side." Although he wasn't talking about the pipelines threatening to bring oil to the pristine northern coastline, without First Nations support, those pipelines aren't going to happen.

So ironic. We may appreciate the cultural distinctiveness and the environmental values of the First Nations, but there's still such a long way to go before the brutal effects of colonialism are reversed. This was reaffirmed earlier in the year when the RCMP reported that 1,017 women and girls identified as Indigenous were murdered between 1980 and 2012—a homicide rate roughly 4.5 times higher than that of all other women in Canada. What's more, as of November 2013, at least 105 Indigenous women and girls remained missing under suspicious circumstances or for undetermined reasons.

Despite the beauty I saw in Vancouver, we have not yet moved past the time when a predator looks at an aboriginal woman and sees prey.

Toujours la langue

Since my first visit in 2010, Quebec City has become a kind of second home for me. Motivated by a desire to learn more and--especially--practice speaking French, I have returned at least once, sometimes twice a year and stayed for as long as six months at a time. Maintenant, la chassure est sur l'autre pied, the shoe is on the other foot. A Quebec friend has come west to British Columbia to visit me. We met during my first visit to la ville de Québec, when I was searching for a conversation exchange partner, and for more than four years I have been her main anglophone contact. She can understand English much of the time, and read it with the aid of a dictionary, but without regular practice chez elle, she rarely speaks it.

A Québecoise photographs the Terry Fox Memorial at B.C. Place

What's more, she is a die-hard separatist. A lifetime supporter of the Parti Québecois, whose main goal is the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. An independent Quebec. This has been a long-standing Canadian issue, always at least on the back burner, and one that sometimes boils over as raucous referendum campaigns in which Quebeckers are exhorted by les oui and no sides. In 1970, the separatist movement turned violent when the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and murdered a Quebec politician, Pierre LaPorte. The Prime Minister of that époque, Pierre Trudeau, imposed martial law and made lifetime enemies of many Quebeckers, including mon ami Québecoise.

So I was interested to see how my friend's first trip to western Canada would unfold, particularly what evidence she would find of the fact that Canada is officially un pays bilingue, a bilingual country, from coast to coast. Of course it isn't really. In the province of Quebec, almost 7 and a half million people either have French as their mother tongue or can conduct a conversation in French. Outside that province, the number drops to 2.5 million, and most of those speakers live east of Alberta. At our first lunch, however, my friend discovered that the waiter could communicate in French, at least enough to carry on a short exchange about how he learned the language as a semi-pro volleyball player training at a facility in Gatineau, Quebec. She heard her mother tongue spoken at the Museum of Anthropology, the hotel where she stayed, and the Vancouver aquarium. Most of these speakers were young, and at least one had attended a French immersion school. Much as my visitor and other Quebec residents detested the late prime minister Trudeau for having imposed martial law and for other actions too complex to describe here, his government supported the establishment of French immersion schools across the country. They are now so popular in most provinces that parents must line up for hours, even days, to enroll their children.

It's good to see that mon ami feels comfortable in British Columbia, one of only two or three forays she has made outside her province. On a hike through the woods, she freely sang out "bonjour" to those we passed, and the other hikers, while perhaps surprised, answered in kind--some awkwardly, some with confidence. Nothing like seeing how the other half lives to reconsider one's views. With more and more young people in Quebec learning English for practical reasons (and because of the influence of pop culture), and more students outside Quebec demanding French immersion, the idea of creating a sovereign Quebec for the sake of preserving the French language may have lingered past its "best before" date.

Snowballing toward the moon

Around and around. Trying to think of a way of integrating some of the themes that have hummed through my thoughts this week--the dusky sphere of the eclipsed moon, the circles Allan Ludwig photographs, the process of revising my novel. I mean integrate the way Alice Munro often does in her short stories, by developing relationships from fragment to fragment.

Photo by Richard Culbert

If there is any potential for integration it might start with an image from the weekend, when the snow-bright gleam of the crescent at the top lingered minutes before the earth's shadow totally covered the full moon. What was revealed, what hidden.

Allan Ludwig's circle photographs, found through his Flickr id of Elisha Cook, Jr, feature objects he discovered while roaming the streets of lower Manhattan. The page displaying the street art that is his subject includes circles of all kinds. Interesting to see what has attracted his eye. A tire that appears to have been vertically sliced in half, making a perfect black lifesaver; a gleaming frame that may have been moulded from some shiny material and into which someone has layered a bright pink blob that looks vaguely marine. Covers over the round mouths of pipes, where oil enters the labyrinth beneath Manhattan. There are a couple of flattened silver cans whose present outlines recall and also defy the original cylinder. The top of a fire hydrant; a round poster advertising a dj's turntable services. All images that provoke curiosity. What's the story, of the objects themselves and also what the photographer sees in them?

In midwest winters, if the snow was just the right texture, we used to pack it into a lumpy little sphere and roll it across what had freshly fallen until the ball gathered enough snow to become the base or the fat middle or head of a snowman. A matter of accretion. As I go through my novel with the idea of adding to it, I find that it is a matter of accretion there too. An image clarified with more detail, a relationship complicated, a plot point more consciously foreshadowed. On a given page there may be a single word I have added to this draft, or a paragraph. I have taken some words away too. Seldom as much as a page added or deleted as the novel gradually rolls towards the mass I envision, an end result I hope will reveal and suggest what is not explicitly revealed at the same time.

You Don't Know Me

A New York Times article on the recent Germanwings crash described the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz as someone who had "identified as a flier" since at least the age of 14. In trying to make sense of the tragedy in the Alps, we look for clues about the motives of this man who took 149 people (who did not wish to die) on his final flight. That he had "identified as a flier" for half his life suggests how devastated he must have been to learn about medical conditions which would prevent him from fully inhabiting that identity.

Deer in the headlights, or headlights in the deer?

The same day I read the Times story I read an article in the often interesting Aeon Magazine about the loss of identity in people with dementia. The difference between the people described in this article and the late Mr. Lubitz is that beyond a certain point people with dementia are not aware of what they have lost. There has to be a stage, though, as there was for the Alice character in Still Alice, when one recognizes that s/he is about to lose that which s/he has thought of as herself.  A bleak, lonely and unsettling moment, surely.

Yet we get these experiences in small doses all the time. Even something as mundane as the flu can inspire a comment like, "I haven't been feeling like myself all week." Serious illness wreaks deeper, more lasting changes. The formerly capable and energetic must accept a view of themselves as dependent, sick, handicapped. A hard bridge to cross. "I didn't used to be this way." Grief, too, provokes deep questions about identity. The death of a parent at any age means the definite end of childhood. I've heard fifty year olds say they feel like orphans after an aged parent dies. But most people move through this transition and consciously or unconsciously incorporate their experiences into a new sense of self, like another layer of paint. Nostalgically or not, they refer to a time when they were different, before I was sick or before so and so died, or when I was young. When I played professional sports. When I was a dancer, before my knees went. Personal identity is not static despite birth certificates on which are printed names we probably keep for a lifetime, and that we can't change where we were born or who are parents were. Of course if we really wanted to, we could change our names, even our genders.

Assuming the theories about the motives of the Germanwing co-pilot are valid, it must be that Lubitz could not see the potential of a new identity. If he couldn't be all he imagined himself to be, he didn't want to be at all. Nobody knew that about him. Sympathies to all those who loved the victims.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words ...

As a Caucasian woman of a certain age, I have seldom been called a name that hurt. The one incident I remember occurred when I was a girl walking to Catholic school in my neat blue uniform on a day when the public school kids had a holiday.

Some older boys were up a tree I had to walk beneath, and as I did they taunted me. I forget what words they used. Mackerel snapper?  Maybe it was only, "Oh, little Catholic school girl, has to go to school." But it was the first time I saw myself as part of a group that was vulnerable to attack. Names like "saucer eyes" and "Mary Ann the garbage can," these were laughable and cause for a better comeback or the toss of a snowball in the right direction. But Catholic school girl? Why would I be taunted for something like that? I was one of the lucky ones who was sure to get to heaven after a nice safe life on the west (good) side of my town. So my parents had taught me.

I can only imagine the feelings of individuals who have regularly suffered racial, ethnic or cultural slurs. Homo, wop, spic, wog, nigger, kike, hunky.

Now I'm working on a novel set in the days when these words were commonly used, and a potential publisher has asked me to consider how to soften their effect on contemporary readers without losing historical accuracy. Like the term nigger, or nigga, which rap groups and sports players and stand-up comics use jokingly, which began which as a shortened form of negro, the words were not always meant to slur. In fact, in the early 1900's it was so common among working class people in particular to refer to someone as a hunky or a dago, it would be dishonest to make a young woman of the same class particularly sensitive to the potential harm of those words. There is no reason she should have been sensitive. Immigrants from Europe and the American South were crowding into northern cities and, like now, people felt threatened. It was easier to define oneself by drawing ethnic and racial boundaries. But it didn't always mean a lack of respect for the person you were, technically, slurring. Putting myself in her place, as writers do to imagine a character's life, I hear my young woman saying, the little wop newsboy with affection. Perhaps it is different for those of Italian background, but wop has never seemed as menacing to me as nigger, the very sound of which seems to be accompanied by the spit of some white supremacist tobacco farmer. But am I slurring tobacco farmers, particularly white ones, with that remark? In my novel, the only people who say nigger are the two most bigoted. I didn't realize this until I combed through the manuscript looking for such references and wondering what to do with them, but it works that the limited use of that word is confined to men who represented, even caused, the worst of the racial tension at that time. As for colored and Negro, well those were considered polite at the time and even the NAACP still uses the word colored. One other thing I noticed in my review, though, was that in referring to her own kind, my character didn't use what we know now as the ethnic slurs she used for other groups. That showed something about her that I didn't want in her character. If she's looking for a hunky delicatessen, or buying a paper from a little wop newsboy, she should also be going to church with the other Mick's or Paddy's or bog trotters in the neighbourhood, I've decided.

When I was researching my play "Imperfect," about the institutionalization of the developmentally disabled, I found that words like idiot, moron and such had been actual definitions of intellectual capacity. Someone with a iq of below 70 was defined as a moron, an imbecile, or - the lowest - an idiot. Of course the words are not used that way today, but when an angry driver rolls down his window to yell at another driver, "You moron!" does he know that he's assigning a certain iq level and in doing so impugning the driving abilities of a whole class of people he doesn't even know?

The way we speak changes with the times, but politically correct or not, neutralizing language doesn't work in literature because it has to be true. By leaving the slurs in my book, a choice that other serious writers have also made, I am being true to the times and to the sorts of people on whom my characters are based. The language provides context for the situation that erupts towards the end. I am hoping that a disclaimer at the beginning of the book will encourage contemporary readers to see the sense of my choice and not to take any name-calling personally.  Because I understand that while it's true that sticks and stones may break your bones, words can hurt just as much.

On slurs

Childhood Ends

Would you want to personally meet someone  - some artist, writer, musician - you really admire? In the old days I was a bit of a groupie, though circumstances prevented me from going all out, such as becoming part of the tribe that followed the Grateful Dead around the country, the Deadheads. Anyway, it was literary heros I worshipped. On my first trip to the British Isles I visited Joyce's martello tower in Dun Laoghaire near Dublin and imagined the artist as a young Joyce. I took my notebook to the Burns museum in Edinburgh to copy out bits from the Scots bard's diary. On this continent, I stood at the graves of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts and Félix Leclerc on Île d'Orléans outside Quebec City. It was easier when the object of my admiration wasn't there, even though I have wondered what I got out of it; wondered if, for example, I expected the spirits to fly up and imbue me with a drop of their genius. I even wrote letters the odd time or two, such as to the writer Margaret Laurence and revered the answers I received. John Irving. Could it be him at the old zoo in Vancouver? He liked bears. He titled his first book Setting Free the Bears. Should I just go up and say welcome to Vancouver or something? Of course I didn't.

Friends mentioned seeing movie stars on the street, but I never recognized their ordinary off-screen selves. I did see Joni Mitchell at a café near the ferry terminal, sitting alone, smoking. She might have liked company, but what would I say to her? I so respected genius I didn't know if I could stop myself from gushing if an opportunity came to confront it. I was sufficiently stunned by Margaret Laurences's four-page reply to the beginning writer I was at the time that I did not even write back. Not even a thanks. So, John Lennon? If we should have met somehow? What would I have said to him? I could never be cool enough.

Now that I have finished the third volume, Boyhood Island, of his My Struggle opus, I am pretty sure I wouldn't want to meet Karl Ove Knausgaard either, certainly not as a kid. He reveals himself to have been both vain and oversensitive, crying all the time he wasn't reading or playing football, or, as the book tails off and childhood ends, thinking more and more about girls. Well, he had good reason to cry, his father was a bully.  It's awful to be in the presence of someone whose moods are so unpredictable. Still, should I have met the tall skinny boy with protruding teeth and a protruding arse, who blubbered (as he puts it himself) whenever he was disappointed, I would have probably reacted like his childhood friends did, which might have produced more tears. The mothery side of me thought, aw, when I read those parts. I also thought: man, you are not prettying this picture, are you?

I remember when my students would complain that they had nothing to write about, that their lives were not interesting. If only they had had the gift to see that it's the way one looks at a life that is unique. K.O. is still entrancing me with his way, despite the unpleasant image he presents of himself whimpering, his vanity, his self-described long eyelashes and penchant for talking about clothes. I liked the comparison with David Bowie, though. As for the book as a whole, I continue to be gob-smacked by the detail he remembers or invents, by the forward movement of his prose. Boyhood Island lacks some of the back/forth in time that lent perspective to the earlier volumes. He seems to have made the choice to stick to the boyhood he experienced. It is the same but different and it held me just as the first two volumes did. Maybe it's because of the sense of anticipation he is able to create when he introduces a scene and the narrative arc begins to rise. Where will he go with this, I wonder. The answer is, often nowhere, then a new climb begins.

As for hero-worship, I have realized, even if it took awhile, that when I really admire, even love a piece of art or music, a book, it's the creation I'm infatuated with, not the creator. Any creator who thinks otherwise is heading for an inevitable fall.

"The shadows that descended over the ground outside were so long and distorted that they no longer bore any resemblance to the forms that created them. As though they had sprung forth in their own right, as though there existed a parallel reality of darkness, with dark-fences, dark-trees, dark-houses populated by dark-people, somehow stranded here in the light, where they seemed so misshapen and helpless, as far from their own element as a reef with seaweed and crabs is from the receding water..."
Boyhood Island, K.O.K.

In from the cold there was language

Sunday evening, twilight. Feet tramped on the wooden stairs that lead up to the wooden porch where a fibre map prevented slipping. Smiles spread rosy cheeks that carried the cold inside. Kiss the right cheek first, then the left. That's how it is done in Quebec. Brrr. The warmth began with the greetings while the guests removed gloves, coats, extra sweaters, scarves, fur hats, toques, and the host found room for it all in the armoire. Boots lined up on rubber trays covered with newspaper to absorb the melting snow. The smell of chicken baking with olives and prunes drifted out from the kitchen. Light from a lamp hanging over the table twinkled on the wine glasses.

Comme toujours in Quebec, maybe everywhere in Canada, we were a mixed group, with two native Quebecois, three long term residents, one visitor and one part time resident. One born in Chicago, one in British Columbia, one in Nova Scotia, one in Michoacan, one in Ontario, one in Havana and two right here in la belle ville de Quebéc. Most were at least bilingue, a few spoke three languages fluently, and - as earlier in the day when I visited with a Lebanese friend who is now studying German, having already become fluent in French, English and Italian - more than one language was the means and the subject of the conversation. It flowed in French, for the most part, but also in English, and most charmingly in my view, sometimes a mixture in the same sentence, i.e. "Yo pienso que l'hiver est the worst season to visit Quebec." The natives and long term residents, and this enthusiastic visitor disagreed. Winter is an endangered season and here people know how to appreciate its beauty. The blue shadows on the snow, the frozen waves on le fleuve St. Laurent. A family Penthalon that took place on a minus twenty degree (celsius) Sunday.

With the exception of a doctor and the metallurgist from Mexico, we were language-focussed people: a writer, four English- or French- as a second language professors and a linguist who has spent his life studying why English functions the way that it does; why, for example, one says "it is snowing" instead of "it snows". Simple, progressive. En français, the verb works both ways. To say, "Je cherche" means I am looking for as well as I look for. Context reveals whether the looking is general or is happening right now. This group appreciates (in general) the nuances of such questions.

At one end of the table,  people discussed the translation of the phrase, "manger de la vache enragée, literally to eat mad cow, but meaning poor or fallen on hard times. Such an image-rich language. At the other end of the table the talk was of the cinema, a universal topic, and one of the speakers used the French verb "pirater," to describe how his son showed him how to download films.

In The Mighty Dead, his wonderful book about Homer, Adam Nicholson writes: "Of about three thousand languages spoken today, seventy-eight have a written literature. The rest exist in the mind and the mouth. Language - man - is essentially oral."

We ate, we talked. The coldest February since at least 1889 was almost over.

Cold enough for you?

Morning began with a weather report on the radio: "Cold records warnings have already been broken in southern Ontario, including at Toronto Pearson, as yet another day of extremely frigid temperatures looms."

Crazy to have left clumps of daffodils and bursts of forsythia on the west coast for blades of wind that slice down from the north to scrape my face as I wait to cross the intersection of Bathurst and St. Clair West. Ah Toronto with all its charms and eccentricities. Its cold! "Jesus Christ on a bicycle," said the woman in the ladies room of the pub we ducked into when streetcar movement stopped on account of an accident. No one knew how long we would have to wait. A whiskey will warm you up, my companion advised and he was right, but two whiskies, just past noon would have drenched ambition and there were places to go, things to see.  Against the backdrop of a glass wall above the sunny frigid corner of Queen and University, two young opera singers waltzed around the foyer of the Canadian Opera Company building to the music of Franz Leher's "Merry Widow".  Next, MOCCA, where fellow west coaster Douglas Coupland's humorous updates on Canadian identity included a back to back lounge chair entitled "Two Solitudes," referring to author Hugh McLennans's term for the French/English divide; and a couch, two-thirds of which was covered in plaid while a narrower portion of the same piece of furniture was upholstered with an aboriginal knit design, another kind of historical divide, between the anglophone settlers and the First Nations groups that they marginalized soon after arriving in this big country.

On a slow day at Global Cheese in Kensington Market, the man who rang up my choices lingered to tell stories of his native Azores. Good coffee at Moonbean, perfect crusts on the baguettes at the Blackbird Bakery. Back out to the streetcar island where a man with a crowbar was digging ice and dirt out of the track grooves.

Among the vendors at Wychwood Farmer's Market on Saturday was the mushroom man from whom we bought a basket of fresh shitake, and a lady who makes chocolate from the milk of her goats. Fresh root vegetables even in winter, and the cold makes you hungry,  but a huge Loblaws store is nearest the subway station and there is never a shortage of entertainment there: a man behind me at the register, whose order included pizza fixings, as did mine, described the four different versions he intended to concoct for his wife and two sons. One of the two men working on a vending machine near where I bent down to smell the leftover valentine bouquets delivered a thought for the day:"If you never fall down, you never learn how to get up."

And on the street in front of Loblaws, the ever present busker whose song repeats as if on a loop. Summer, winter it's always "The Last Farewell". No relief from the weather in the forecast. If he stays out there much longer, it might really be farewell.

Mr. Magoo Land

Liminal, interstices. I love those two words. Liminal for the way it plays on my lips and tongue and for the images it brings of edges, borders, lake shores, horizons, beaches. You can think of words for years, letting them play back there in consciousness, and then one day, out of curiosity, you bring them to the fore and check out dictionary entries.

Liminal relates to a transitional or initial stage of a process. Marginal. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. So says the dictionary, though I don't know how at and on both sides of can mean the same thing.

In anthropology, liminality is the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous, shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct and dress.

Limnology is the scientific study of bodies of lakes and ponds.

An interstice is a small gap between things. One on-line definition gives as an example, "the sunlight fell through the interstices of the arching trees."

But it could be the gap between childhood and adulthood, the long liminal period of adolescence. Or the space where understanding happens, between true comprehension - the literal - and the commonly assumed. I call it Mr Magoo land and it happens when people nod and say "I know," when what they mean is that they get the gist, which remains indefinite; could be this, could be that. Or when two people do not speak the same language but communicate by gestures and pidgin English, French, Chinese, what have you, and in this way more or less come to mutual acknowledgement of a situation. Watch this in foreign countries. I once got in trouble by thinking I "got" it, when the person who was proposing something to me was operating according to a completely different definition of the phrase we were using.

The same vagueness arises from people who forget words. Could be an especially busy and distracted person, an older person, a person whose language centre does not operate normally for any number of reasons. "Oh, yeah, I know," you might respond to a term they are trying to communicate, and most of the time you will be right or close enough. At least you will have satisfied their need to be understood and so allow the speaker to settle back and gently rock in the cradle where all knowledge sleeps; it's just a matter of waking up the right word or fact, the right memory in time for the job.

Mr. Magoo land is also where people's lives are fluid to the extent that any plan, even so-called firm plans, can and do change at any time. I know a few people like that and I never count on their dinner invitations, for example, because they will more often than not remember another engagement or have to be working late or need to do something else. This has gone on so long it isn't even irritating. Some of these same people, and others, have explanations or histories that change with each telling. It is as if the interstices in their memory shift and they find their way to another, just as plausible a story. Truth, reality, isn't it all relative anyway? Mr. Magoo was a cartoon character whose nearsightedness offered a different and often comic view of the world, but things usually turned out just fine for him regardless. Mr Magoo land is a liminal place not a destination. This interstice between the definite is best regarded with that other definition of understanding: tolerance, sensitivity, forgiveness, humanity.

A Modern Wailing Wall

One of my nephews created a closed Facebook group for our large extended family and I joined, despite having had a FB phobia for years, finally opening an account, reluctantly accepting friend requests, never posting, being bullied by people to accept them. Didn't you get my friend request?

I hate all the advertising and find it spooky that the site knows what subjects have flit through my online presence. My artist friends resent that anything they post theoretically belongs to FB. Some people overpost, there is too much silly time wasting stuff otherwise intelligent folks put up to waste time. Occasional gems, of course, but I do a lot of rapid scrolling to avoid doing things I should otherwise be doing. My bad, of course.

Yet, despite all that and talk of FB's imminent demise I have begun to open it more often and occasionally write something. This is primarily because of its social role in our family. One of my nieces posted pretty much her whole journey with breast cancer; there are wedding albums, always new babies from we prolific Burns's, and there are memorials. When it is a deceased relative's birthday, their son, daughter, widow, grandchild puts up a picture of them and reminds them that we are all thinking of them. Notices of recent deaths are responded to with sentiments concerning heaven and how people will be reunited. We all like that idea whether or not we believe that it's true. It is comforting to imagine siblings, husband and wife, child and parent meeting again in the afterlife. At least they won't be alone in some dark place, we think, or may think. Homer, who told of the ghost of Patroclus visiting his mournful companion Achilles in a dream, acknowledged that "something does remain of a man, even in the house of Hades." It feels cruel not to give a thumbs up, a FB like, to these posts because, God, how mean spirited not to. FB has become a wailing wall for the sad and an outlet through which to express condolences, sorrow, loss; to share memories. It is like the guest book at a funeral home.

The thing I don't like about FB  is how easy it makes things. A "like" takes no more than a key tap and counts as recognizing someone's birthday or someone's grief, now matter how well you knew the person being feted or grieved. It's like the "friend" concept. The reason I haven't accepted all my friend requests is because some of the people who wanted to "friend" me are people I have nothing in common with in the actual as opposed to the virtual world.  Genuine friendship is not that easy.  FB was cynical to employ that term in the first place. Friendship takes time and so do the complications of mourning and the development of a vision of afterlife. Have we been fooled into thinking that they don't ? Do speed and ease devalue emotion, making FB a sort of drive thru, the McDonalds for traditional human rituals? Or are the virtual and physical worlds interchangeable, the like's, emoticons, and one-liners being simply the modern equivalent of greeting cards, almost as good as an embrace or a handwritten note or a conversation. My "oh well" side says, FB gestures are better than nothing, and since it has become a part of our lives, an event that's not mentioned on FB seems neglected. Nevertheless I wonder if something that is here and gone so quickly can make a meaningful impact on anything.

Birdman and the Idiot President

Part of the charm of the movie "Birdman" is its suggestion that humans can be magic. You might be arguing with your teenage daughter one minute and flying above Manhattan the next, or levitating or causing cars to explode at the snap of your fingers. Of course the magic is fickle. Birdman had to walk around in his underwear when he couldn't get inside the theatre he inadvertently locked himself out of. Still...

Imagination set him free at his darkest moment.

Daniel Alarcon, in At Night We Walk in Circles, also uses theatre and the magic of transformation onstage and off. His novel follows the actors in The Idiot President, a show that is touring far flung communities in the Andes, who often fall into the roles that were written for the characters they play, the idiot president, his idiot son, and the servant. Patalarga plays the servant and when Diciembre, the theatre company, arrives in his home village his mother asks him, "if you're putting most of the money into this, why are you playing the servant?"

The boss, playwright and idiot president himself, Henry Nunoz, says "The role comes so naturally to him. It would be a shame to use his talents any other way."

Nelson, who plays the idiot son, ends up acting the part of an "actual" old woman's lost son just because she perceives him to be her boy. The mother's other son pays Nelson to do it to keep her happy in her final days.

Magic realism plays with possibility. If you're playing Birdman, can't you be Birdman? If a woman happens to think you're her son, isn't it possible to become her son? Magic is the power of the imagination. People turn to magic when they are most desperate, about to jump off a building in Birdman's case, and trying to avoid the knowledge that her youngest son is dead in the other.

In another novel, Joy of Man's Desiring a character called Bobi wanders into a silent valley where the residents are afflicted with the leprous malaise experienced by wintry souls in a wintry land. Bobi asks a farmer about his grain. Winter is nearly over and the farmer still has a third of his crop. He has used a third to feed his family, saved a third to sow for the next year. He is thinking of selling the rest. The Ouvèze Valley has been still, no birds at all until Bobi convinces the farmer to spread his remaining grain on the threshing floor. Then, do they ever come! The way Jean Giono describes the various species and their hues and the movement of their wings it's as if someone has scattered a basket of multicoloured sequins on the bleached grain. Such beauty and the awe it inspires in people who thought they would never feel such awe again is a sort of magic realism in itself. Imagine.