I cry out for the love of art that warms my heart and makes me a part of the universe
how I yearn to earn the name of poet or painter though my way of approaching both is quainter and therefore fainter than any other poet or painter
some days I feel the world spirit stepping its cautious way through my fingers without ever reaching heart or soul without which no artist is whole
I long for some creative wind to blow deep crevasses in my heart to make it an open wound with blood that flows like ink or paint and stains page or painted panel then lodges in other people’s minds and hopefully their hearts
Comment
An old friend dropped in today, quite unexpectedly. Six years ago he left. So much has happened since then. I needn’t tell you about everything from Covid onwards. You will be well aware of the state that the world is in. He lives in Alberta now and assured me that Albertans had no desire to separate from Canada. That is good news. But we stayed away from politics.
We talked about the joys of ageing. Heart conditions – stents on the one side, A Fibs on the other, blood thinners for both. The gradual loss of mobility and flexibility. The gradual loss of strength. Our kitchen sounded like the consultation room of a third rate doctor who didn’t understand exactly what was the nature of the patients’ complaints.
We shared green Matcha tea, laced with honey, and he discovered the mystical magic of KTJ’s PNBs. We talked about setting up a supply line, from east to west, to bind Canada with PNB appreciation.
As old friends do, we changed the world, rebuilding it in much less time than the biblical seven days in which it was created. Not only that, we changed the laws of rugby – we are both former players – lamenting the size and weight of the current playing generation. Then we changed the rules of soccer, rued the latest version of the world cup, with its extent, fake gamesmanship, and some blatant corruption.
Then we went into sports injuries, especially the exploitation of the Head Injury Assessment laws in rugby. And then we were back to our own war wounds, like two old soldiers, returning from a campaign.
It was all such fun. Then, alas, it was “Time, gentlemen, please.” The bell rang, the kitchen emptied. I saw him to the garage door, which he kindly shut for me, and peace returned to the house. Now I rejoice in the joys of a friendship restored, and lament the loss of a former team member soon to be absent once more.
I knew you the first day I saw you. I knew your heart before you could open it up and let me in. I knew your soul before you allowed me to touch its beauty’s depth.
Did I know you from another life? I just don’t know. I only know that I knew who you were and what you meant to me.
Once I saw you, how could I let you go? I reached across the bridge that spans the ages and saw you as you always were, clad in white, shining like the Milky Way across a universe of falling stars and you the only one I wanted to put in my pocket, hold, and keep safe in my heart.
Comment
I was talking to Moo this morning about how, once in a while, you meet someone, talk to them, and, within minutes, feel such a compatibility with them that it seems you have known them all your life. Or from another life, another planet, another star, another galaxy, perhaps.
Moo said that yes, he had himself undergone such experiences. He couldn’t explain them. But he knew how they felt, those special moments, when two minds click, and are suddenly at one. In fact, he told me, I have just painted my version of such a moment. I call it Blue Magic, as distinct from Black Magic.
What’s the difference,” I asked him
“Blue Magic is peaceful and positive,” he said, “Black Magic can be distorted and used to evil ends. And I want nothing to do with that.”
“Me, neither.”
“You know what amazes me. That you haven’t posted for 22 days, not since August 28. And yet, people are still visiting your page. You had 294 hits on the 16th, 217 on the 18th, and 263 hits yesterday. Yet you haven’t posted a thing. I have been worrying about you. You haven’t asked for any paintings from me. In fact, we’ve hardly talked for three weeks or more.”
“I know. It’s been a funny time. But I have written and published two books of poetry in that time. And I have started a couple of other projects. And I have borrowed some of your earlier paintings for the covers.”
“Without even asking me?”
“Well, you always said I could use your paintings any time. ‘Treat them as if they were your own,’ you told me.”
“Well, that’s true. So pax it is.”
“Pax amorque.”
“And remember, you will have to apologize to all those lonely visitors who kept logging on in hopes of seeing something new.”
Who threw the frog that blocked the word stream flowing through my throat?
The full moon whispered her secret as she drifted past my window.
I tried to repeat her words but I couldn’t move my lips and my dry mouth tied my tongue into little knots.
No sounds rose through the airways of my lungs, even though I am able to speak in several different tongues.
The languages I love were all backed up in the narrow straits of my throbbing throat, never to be untied by this sad season’s tide.
Comment:
So many allusions, so many illusions, so many elusions – where should I begin? Possibly with the loss of speech and then of language. How does one lose one’s speech? So many ways. A cough, a cold, laryngitis, a frog in the throat, a cake crumb caught half way down that makes one choke and splutter and rendered speechless. Stage fright can do it too. Standing there, in the spotlight, mouth open, no sound emerging.
Fear can act the same way – the word once said, can never be recalled – and so, one day, suddenly, we are afraid to open our mouths, afraid to share our thoughts aloud, afraid to speak out, afraid to stand out from the crowd. Hush. Keep quiet. Don’t say it aloud. Disobedience and doubt are no longer allowed.
Oh look, there’s Moo, peering over my shoulder. “Sky Blues,” he says. “My paintings speak for themselves. They don’t need words and they know no fear. That’s why I am here. To let color and line (and the proper spelling of colour) disperse your fear. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ And one day I will paint you a rose, and you can see that it is a rose and you can call it what you want, but it will still be a rose and smell as sweet.” “You mean you put perfumes in your paints,” I asked him, “so that a painted rose smells like a real rose?” “Do you mean you stick frogs in other people’s throats,” he replied, “and create word dams so that language doesn’t flow?” “I don’t do that,” I replied. “Other people do it to me.”
“Now, now,” said Moo. “Remember Juan Ramón Jiménez – “No la toques más. Así es la rosa.” “Don’t retouch it any more. Roses are just like that.” “And word dams,” I asked him. “You can always remove them with a paint brush, and a little touch of the imagination,” Moo replied. “Well,” I said. “Can you now? Imagine that!”
How quietly she moves, the old one, scarcely disturbing the floorboards way above my head.
Such a light touch as she tip-toes from room to room, her floor my ceiling.
Not at all like the young one with her two left feet, both flat, and her elephantine shaking the floor overhead.
We often wondered if the earth was quaking, the house shaking, with the ceiling about to come tumbling down upon our waiting heads.
Comment:
How silent, the house, with the visitors gone and me and my beloved back together, alone, as we have been for so many years. The silence is broken only by the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, an occasional creak from a floorboard expanding in the sun, or creaking in the shade, the hiss of the kettle … a silence so deep that sometimes we gesture to each other or whisper low.
Don Ryan came over to visit and joy and noise returned. I made him coffee and he brought us a fudge delight. My beloved took refuge in the silence of the front porch and Don Ryan and Don Roger planned their future adventures. We will be working again together soon. Our first task – to finish reading Don Quixote and to complete our notes on our readings, suspended, alas, during the summer work season, but soon to return when university goes through its September Rebirth.
After Don Quixote, we will probably explore two picaresque novels, Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler. That will be great fun for both of us, and I look forward to preparing the readings and their annotations.
When Don Ryan left, our table top noise melted away, silence returned, and Clare with it. Other friends will be visiting soon. They will break the silence with a soft tap on the door and a gentle voice calling “Hello!” We look forward to that. Meanwhile all is quiet and silence is golden.
Until the arrival of Moo. “Hello,” he bellows. “Writing again? Have I got a painting for you. You thought the little ones were noisy… well, speak for your self. Here’s your painting, Et Tu, Mu. It comes from Julius Caesar, the play. And remember, when you and Don Ryan get together you’re just as noisy as the little ones. And I am too, when I’m with you. That’s why the painting’s called Et tu, Mu. Time to go.”
Out he went, thumping and clumping, and left me to the tap of the computer keys and the ticking of the grandfather clock.
For Yolande whose children left the same day as mine
the house’s silence speaks a dream language full of touch and tone and shared emotions that still reach out
floorboards creaking mimic the tip-toe dance of visitors now departed
the chair beside me at the breakfast table stands empty this morning
the armchair cushions in the tv room where they sat now sink beneath the weight of my hollow heart
Comment:
When Moo read this poem, he thought very carefully and, brow puckered, said “It’s not all bad. It’s not the dark night of the soul and I see Glimpses of blue sky. Here – this is the painting for that poem.” He gave me the one you see above, unsigned and unnamed. “I call it Glimpses of Blue Sky,” he told me.
Sometimes Moo can be very nice and sometimes he can be a pain in the you-know-what. I guess you’ve got one or two of those in your family too. Moody Blues, they are, who turn into Moody Moos, and act like sea-cows up at Skinner’s Pond, or else where on the Island. And no, that’s not the Island in Island View, not my Island View anyway, because here there are no Islands to be seen. We live on the far side from the river. The river – if this drought continues much longer, we end up with no river at all.
We used to get nine feet (three meters) of snow every winter. Two winters ago, I used my magic snow blower on three occasions. Last winter, I didn’t use it once. Jackie, my jovial black lab loved water. In the spring she could dive in the ditch and swim all the way around the block. Now the ditches run dry, the grass is gray rather than green, and the crab apples are about the size of raisins.
Global warming > climate change > climate crisis > climate disaster ….. you choose your own terminology, I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but don’t tell me that everything is business as usual and that there’s nothing to worry about.
A couple of our neighbors are worried about the aquifer we all share. They get dirty tap water. Wells are of varying depths. Several of the less deep drillings are showing sign of strain. And yes, the St. John River, the river that the local indigenous call the River of Plenty, is plenty empty right now and flowing very slow. The salmon disappeared a long time ago and now the waters are following them into oblivion.
Well, I suppose that is also a departure of sorts, a very worrying one for some of us. Moo can paint Glimpses of Blue Sky, but hard as I try, when I look at storm clouds building and the rain never falling, I find it difficult to see them.
My creativity lay crippled. I picked up two fountain pens, held one in each hand, a pair of walking sticks or crutches, but nothing happened.
My mind did not pick up its bed and walk. My tongue tripped between my teeth and refused to move, let alone to talk the talk.
Reason and rhyme fled from my head, and walked a cross between a plank and a frost crossed midnight road of petty, lisping syllables that struggled and limped and lost themselves as they wandered the labyrinth that wrapped and mapped my empty head.
Comment:
Moo and I have both been on walkabout, absent without leave, wandering a deserted desert road filled with rocks and sand and not a glimpse of grass or a flower. Hour after hour, day after day, not a singe inspiring thought or brush stroke coming our way. We sat at the table, looking at an empty page of snow, with not a footprint upon it.
Why do these things happen? I don’t know. I have never worried about writer’s block, and Moo has never worried, to my knowledge, about painter’s block. The shock of the shadow of nothingness lay upon us both and even the coffee tasted differently.
Then, suddenly the dam broke. Moo painted five paintings in two days. I wrote four poems in that same time period. Suddenly, the silence lay broken, the plank had been walked, and we found ourselves safe on the other side of whatever it was that had come between us and our respective joys.
A dark night of the creative soul, perhaps. Luckily it was followed by a creative dawn. Light broke where no sun shone and suddenly those minds of our sparkled with creative gems once again. I reached out to Moo and we hugged each other. “It’s over,” we said. Then we changed ends and life and the grass was so much greener on the other side.
May it never happen again, we sighed. But I am sure it will. And I hope it never happens to one of you. If it does, just breathe deep, believe, examine the joys of that silent midnight, and wait for the dawn.
A weathered canister releases galaxies, gears, symbols, and handwritten notes into a star-filled universe.
Original Question –
Roger I have a question for you. Recently I purchased a book by Forrester- The African Queen. I enjoyed the movie years ago and thought I would like to read the story. The main actors were great. The book highlighted that it showed what it was like being a female during the war, (1) which when I look back on now is one of its main points.
My question or thought on this book is tied around the library system. When I lived in Fredericton I wanted to give a bunch of books to the library, their first question to me was, “How old are the books? I told her and she said anything over five years in not being accepted. (2)
I wondered about this and the fact that many books in school are being removed, (3) how can we tell how much we have progressed? (4)
I don’t like predjudice but it seems we are throwing out too much. (5) Any thoughts on this. I don’t mind some of the history being trashed (6) because for Canada the consentation is for Quebec and Ontario.
Roger’s Response
(1) It’s also about the role of the nun in society. How do ‘holy women’ function in a male society? It sets the questions but doesn’t really give the answers. It’s a long time since I saw the film. I don’t think I ever read the book – the themes might well change in print. They are present (some of them) in The Handmaid’s Tale.
(2) The library system seems to have rules and an etiquette all its own. When I donated books to the library, they accepted some for their collections, but set others up for sale on the book tables by the door. My guess is that certain books are ‘best sellers’ and will be read, others are ‘dust gatherers’ and won’t be. They want the former, not the latter. They also have specialized collections. If the books fit the specialized collections, great. If they don’t, then they hit the unwanted category and are moved on. This is particularly true of the UNB Library System.
(3) This is an entirely different question, and one with very deep roots. It deals, in part, with the question of control – quis custodiet ipsos custodies – who shall guard the guards, who shall program the programmers? By controlling what people read, you control their thoughts. One of the worst signs of this was the book burnings of the Spanish Inquisition (16th – 17th centuries). The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. (And the Arabs / Moors, in 1609). Prior to that, they were ‘processed’ by the Inquisition. The original Inquisition was Papal, and was aimed at instructing the priesthood in Rome. It was corrupted in Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, a sort of secret police, which worked rather like the Gestapo in WWII. One of their jobs was to ensure that people who had converted, stayed converted and didn’t revert to their old religion, even in secret. Another was to ensure that reading material, religious material, and cultural material, particularly after 1527 (Martin Luther and his 97 theses) when the Reformation started, were all in line with the accepted thoughts of the time. All books were sent to the Censor who vetted them and either approved them or asked for changes, if he (they were all men) saw the slightest sign of dissent or heresy. Don Quixote, Book One, Chapter Six (DQ,I,6), deals with the book burnings of DQ’s personal library. In certain of the States (down south) books are already being banned. One that touches us closely is the banning of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
(4) “There is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place and that nonetheless I perceive these things and they seem good to me. And this is the most harrowing possibility of all, that our world is commanded by a deity who deceives humanity and we cannot avoid being misled for there may be systematic deception and then all is lost. And even the most reliable information is dubious, for we may be faced with an evil genius who is deceiving us and then there can be no reassurance in the foundations of our knowledge.” René Descartes (1635)
Descartes expresses this much better than I can. It is one of the major dangers of the age in which we live. How do we distinguish between reality and alternate realities? Which reality is the real reality? What is or isn’t fake news? How do we tell? Who do we believe, and why?
(5) Part of the problem is that ‘certain people’ – who don’t believe in science and who exploit people’s ignorance to their own advantage – are willing to destroy the foundations of our knowledge. Burn everything down. And start again. And the new starting point is to impose what they believe upon everybody around them. This is a huge and crucial question that threatens us, as individuals. It also threatens the foundations of our knowledge, as well as the very world in which we live – climate change vs denial of climate change – profits over people. Once one starts looking at the AI systems with their immense persuasive powers and their seemingly uncontrollable spread of Mis-information and Dis-information, then we start to realize how serious the problem is.
(6) Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it – Santana (I think). However, we must, in certain circumstances, adjust our current beliefs to current realities. Immigration is a major issue – as is how we deal with people, like me, of different cultures and beliefs? Not everything written in the past suits our current world view. I have been looking at old Westerns – “The only good injun is a dead one” (John Wayne). Really? I know some wonderful people in our first nations communities and I have taught them and worked with them and been taught by them. “Shoot first and ask questions afterwards.” Really? I won’t comment further on that one… and there are so many others.
All of this comes down to the big question – freedom of information or the release of just enough information to persuade other people of what we believe and what we want them to believe. Power and Control. Knowledge is Power – Michael Foucault. Control that knowledge and you have power over the people. Noam Chomsky has written widely on this – and his books have been banned in the USA. Bertrand Russell too – The Meaning of Meaning, for example, and his establishing – along with A. J. Ayer – of the doctrine of logical positivism – the removal by means of mathematics of all the emotional content of words.
My friend, you have opened a can of worms.
Long may they wriggle.
Comment:
A series of questions that have recurred throughout the centuries. Well worth re-asking them and rethinking them. Times change and the answers often change with them. The image, incidentally, is AI generated, based on an examination of my written words.
My way or the high way – but by which route, the four-leaf clover, the new roundabout, or the old flyover?
Who cares when there’s only one bridge open to cross the river and that one with two lanes closed and the traffic flow now reduced to single file and an endless nose to tail.
Amazing how often our modern roads need repairing and how seldom local motorists are open to sharing and caring.
Comment:
Summer, holiday season, tourists in from all parts – add them together, and what do you get? Road works, of course. Construction. Old roads being newly tarmacked. Detours. And not a clue as to how to get from a – z without following a million arrows, none of which fly straight to your target.
As the crow flies. But no crow I know flies like this. Unless he’s discovered a supply of Newfoundland Super Screech with the power to lift an aircraft off the ground, not to mention to loop-the-loop with all the passengers safely wearing their seat-belts. Australia – here we come. The Antipodes, remember!
Earlier, of course, it was pothole season. And we all remember that. Now it is summer caravan and trailer time. This morning, as I was driving past the RV park, three half-tons pulling caravans pulled out ahead of me and three more tucked in behind. Now I know what it’s like being a thin slice of ham or cheese between six crusty loaves of bread.
Ah well, one-stop shopping. Get out – one stop – pick it all up – and get back home safe. That’s the way to do it, as we have done before!
his hands would not stay still fingers intertwined then fanned open
he tapped the tabletop a frantic piano pounding S-O-S
… ___ …
the black dog above the ivory keys gnawed on memory’s bones
his fingers picked at ancient scabs until they bled red
so many things unsaid so many tales untold
Comment:
A long time ago my grandfather taught me the basics of morse code. He told me he could recognize the ‘tapped signature’ of each of the operators with whom he worked. I sat at the table with him and he tapped away dit dit dit dot dot dot dit dit dit – it was all so long ago and I have forgotten so much of it now.
After my father suffered his second stroke, he sat at the table and endlessly tapped dit dit dit dot dot dot dit dit dit – SOS, May Day, May Day, Save Our Souls.
Older than either of them, I too sit at the table and endlessly tap with my fingers. For now, I play the piano, one handed, two handed, well-remembered scales with the middle fingers automatically overlapping the thumbs.
I guess I am waiting for the rhythms to change, for the black dog to kick in, for my own fingers to play, not the piano, but morse code. I wonder – will anyone answer when I call out? Will anybody come?
A meaningless collection of notes swarms into my empty head swimming round and round like clustering tadpoles.
The ebb and flow of that mysterious music clumps on and on, tight in my mind and will not let me go.
Earwigs, some call them, those senseless repetitions, day after day, night after night, awake and asleep, old tv adverts, short clips of classical music or popular songs.
They are wheelbarrow songs, hedge clippings, dead flowers, crass grass, broken branches, weeds, repetitive memes of meaning, a syndrome of stuck songs destined for the garbage dump and ritual burning in the hell of an eternal turntable turning.
Comment:
Word magic from the Mikado – “My object all sublime I shall achieve in time, to make the punishment fit the crime” … And in this case I would tie the criminals who invented these ‘ballads, songs, and snatches’ to the stake, with earphones that endlessly repeated all the nonsense we hear day and night, so much of which sticks in the turntables of our brains turning round and round as we toss and turn in our beds at night. Just a case, I suppose, of hearing music while there’s no one there.
And how many earworms did you pluck out of that first paragraph? I can count six, maybe seven. Then, my mind may be very different from yours. Perhaps your mind isn’t in the outrageous Wilfred that mine is. Don’t get that joke, do you? And why should you? I guess you don’t remember Ray’s a Laugh, Round the Horne, Mr. Dimwitty, or Wilfred Pickles – and why should you.
Passent les jours et passent les semaines / ni temps passés ni les amours reviennent / sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine– click on the link for the English version (my translation) and click on this linkfor a slightly improved revised version.
Yes, as Apollinaire says time flows on and by – or, after Heraclitus – you can never step in the same river twice. More important, perhaps, for those who worry about their past thoughts, words, and deeds – you can throw the stone into the pond, but you can’t control the ripples.
rogermoorepoet 