Ryan and Don Roger 1

Ryan and Don Roger
1

Riding Buddies – Reading Buddies

            Don Quixote makes three sorties. The first is very brief, about five chapters. The second is much longer. And the third is 74 chapters in length. Each sortie is different. For now, I would like to take a brief glance the difference between Sortie 1 and Sortie 2.

            Sortie 1 – Don Quixote sets out on his own. He travels to an inn, has adventures there, gets knighted by the inn-keeper, albeit falsely, and after an unequal combat in which he is bruised and battered, he is brought back home by a neighbor.

            When the inn-keeper asks Don Quixote for payment, the knight replies that knights errant do not carry money with them, nor do they pay for their food and lodging. The inn-keeper recommends that Don Quixote find a squire to attend, one who can carry the money and the other things that a knight needs. Our knight takes this recommendation to heart.

            Sortie 2 – In this second sortie, Don Quixote has a companion. One of the main differences between the first and second sorties is that the knight now has a squire with whom he can talk. This dialog between knight and squire, master and servant, is key to the understanding of the novel.

            Their contrasting points of view, Don Quixote literate, a believer in reading, with a firm belief that all books of chivalry are true, contrasts immediately with the illiterate Sancho, his squire. Where Sancho sees reality – the windmills are windmills – Don Quixote sees illusion – the windmills are giants, waving their arms, and threatening to attack. This is a simplistic summary, but we will leave it there for now.

            Graham Green understood the nature of dialog when he penned his novel, Monsignor Quixote. In the film, available free of charge on YouTube, the Catholic Priest (now a Monsignor) and his friend, the Communist Mayor (now defeated in an election and unemployed) leave the little town in which they live, and set out on a journey of adventures, much in the same way that Monsignor Quixote’s namesake sets out in Cervantes’s novel.

They do not have a horse and a donkey. However, they do have Monsignor Quixote’s car, nicknamed, of course, Rocinante, in which to travel. The key to Green’s novel is the constant dialog between the mayor, knowledgeable in the ways of the world, and Monsignor Quixote, innocent of the world outside his church and full of illusions about the reality of that world. It is easy to think of them as riding buddies who converse.

            So, what is a reading buddy? Well, Don Quixote is a long book, over 1000 pages, with 127 chapters. Many readers set out in search of adventure, but do not keep reading. However, a wise reader will set out on that journey with a reading buddy, who will travel with him, step by step, chapter by chapter. Each will keep the other company, and one of the delights of the journey will be the constant conversation between the reading buddies.

            I am Don Roger. My reading buddy is Ryan. I am short and stout. Ryan is tall and thin. We have reversed the Sancho / Quixote image, but we are both equally insatiable in our search for knowledge. The curious thing is that I have read Don Quixote 28 items, mainly in Spanish, but also in English and French. Ryan is reading it for the first time, but he is an expert in AI access and is helping me to understand the wily ways of that electronic world of short cuts. Of course, it helps you to sort the chaff from the grain when you know what you are looking for and just use AI to refresh your fading memory!

            I am full of the illusions of the academy. Ryan reads with a sharp mind, a keen wit, and no illusions at all. He sees only the reality of what is there. Together we have embarked on a journey that is in the process of opening our eyes to two different realities his and mine – Ryan’s and Don Roger’s. The conversations that we are having along the way, will be the subject of this little discourse on Cervantes’s novel.

Rage, Rage 59

Rage, Rage
59

You cannot hide
when the black angel comes
and knocks on your door.

“Wait a minute,” you say,
“While I change my clothes
and comb my hair.”

But he is there before you,
in the clothes closet,
pulling your arm.
You move to the bathroom
to brush your teeth.

Now,” says the angel.

Your eyes mist over.
You know you are there,
but you can no longer see
your reflection in the mirror.

Comment:

The last poem in the series and Rage, Rage against the dying of the light is over and done. Many of you will recognize the title from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that dark night. I guess the theme itself has become part of the Welsh culture. And now we have exported it to New Brunswick, Canada, and perhaps beyond.

I bought The Black Angel, pictured above, in Avila, Spain. It is a plaster cast of one of the Angels in Roger Van der Leyden’s paintings, if I remember correctly. Here is the angel’s face in close up.

She or he brings a promise of rest and peace, a freedom from earthbound woes and sorrows. She stands on the shelf above the fireplace insert in our sitting room and brings blessings to the house. I look at her every time I light the fire. And she smiles down and blesses me. I think of her as a lady, but her peace and beauty outweigh any formal signs of sex.

As for that reflection in the mirror, well, I don’t have one of me. But her is a photo to reflect upon:

Raining in Avila and puddles in the street. Now you see me, now you don’t. But I am there, holding the camera, and looking down at the water where —- rain has stopped play. The bails have been removed. Old Father Time has gone back to the Pavilion at Lord’s, and the cricket game is over for the day.

Rage, Rage 58

Rage, Rage
58

“What is this sound?”
It is your own death sighing,
groaning, growing
while you wait for it
to devour you.

“What is this feeling”
It is the itch of your own skin
wrinkling and shrinking,
preparing to wrap you
in the last clothes you’ll wear.

“What is this taste?”
It is the taste of your life,
bottled like summer wine
once sweet tasting,
now turning to vinegar.

“What is this smell?”
It is waste and decay,
the loss of all you knew
and of all that knew you.

“That carriage outside?”
It is the dark hearse
come to carry you
to your everlasting home.

Comment:

Moo thinks that his portrait of me is perfectly good for this poem. He told me not to rage, rage against the accuracy of the portrait, but he did tell me to rage, rage against the lack of paper. Où est le papier, indeed. As for the rest of it, he said it’s the same for everyone, so stop making a fuss about it. “You’ve got one last bottle of mescal on the shelf,” he told me. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just swig it down, worm and all, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

Oh dear. The worm in the bottle. They used to sell the gusanos in Oaxaca’s mescal street at a price of five for ten pesos. I used to buy a two litre coke bottle, filled with mescal from a barrel, and drop ten worms in it. They made yellow streaks as they descended through the liquid. Sweet dreams when you chewed on that lot – and an end to your worries. El brujo, the witch doctor, told me to stick a marijuana plant in the bottle of mescal and when the leaves turned white to rub the liquid into my arthritic knees. “Which doctor was that?” one of the tourists in my apartment block asked me. But I didn’t tell her. Nor did I do it. A waste of good mescal. And to think I now have one last half bottle left. And one little squirmy, crunchy, chewy worm.

Speaking of chewy, crunchy – I had never eaten chapulines, fried grasshoppers, until I went to Oaxaca. I didn’t like the look of them. At the first party I attended was confronted by the host who demanded I eat some. I told him they were taboo, against my religion. He shrugged. When he, and the other guests lost interest in my presence, I tried a couple. They were delicious. A real delicacy. I loved their crunchy little legs.

I guess one is always afraid of the unknown – the gusano in the mescal, the chapulines on the plate, that first plate of calamares en su tinta – squid in its own ink. I love bara lawr – Welsh laver bread – or Welsh caviar, as Richard Burton used to call it. I also know that people who have never eaten bara lawr won’t go near it – it looks like cow pats – but luckily doesn’t taste like them. Don’t ask me how I know. Some people get over their fear of the unknown, others don’t. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Rage, Rage 57

Rage, Rage
57

Time’s oxen
have plowed their furrows
in my face.

A silvery thatch
bears witness
to the winter
of my withering.

My broken body
hangs from the coat hanger
of my shoulders,
its worn-out sack
knitted from skin,
bonded with blood.

I walk with two canes,
not just a sick man,
but a stick man.

When I fall asleep,
my enigmatic body
haunts me with
its death-rattle
of drying bones.

Comment

Sometimes no comments are needed. However, when it comes down to it, I guess it’s worth saying that I am raging, raging against the dying of the light.

The dying of the light – in the evening, when the sun goes down, the house grows silent and cools around me. Some nights, when the news is bad or depressing, I feel we are entering another dark age. Luckily, spring is on its way, with summer not far behind. But what will spring and summer bring?

I fear the heat, the gathering of muttering trees, the ambush nature is setting up for humanity. We live among trees. Trees, all around the house. Trees, climbing the hills into the distance. I loved them when I came here first. The maples, the paper birches, the mountain ashes with their spring finery and the light green fuzz of forming leaves. Winter – the firs and pines dressed in their winter coats.

Last summer, fires broke out all over the province. The closest was a mere 30 kms down the road from us. We could smell the fire, see the smoke, and sense the discomfort of the proximity of possible outbreaks closer to home.

As I grow older, I become more fearful. Walking downstairs in the morning – cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipico / each badly placed foot is a fall, each fall is down a precipice. Luis de Gongora. ( d. 1627). Alas, it’s that time of life, and it comes to anybody who, like me, has walked this far.

It’s the animals that I pity. The birds who move on and away and no longer stay with us. The deer who also have nowhere to go when their habitat is destroyed. The moose, the bears, the coyotes, the foxes, the jack rabbits and yes, they have all been visitors to our backyard.

Last summer, the local council circulated some ideas on how to prepare for immediate evacuation of our property- what to pack with a day’s notice, three hours’ warning, two hours’ warning, one hour’s warning. I hope it never comes to that. But now, I no longer know, and so I rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Rage, Rage 55

Rage, Rage
55

I walk on thin ice
at the frayed edge
of my life.

I search for the key
that will re-wind me,
but I fail to find it.

Who will winch up
the pendulums on
my grandfather clock,
resetting it
in spring and fall?

Who will watch
time’s sharp black arrows
as they point the path
of moon change
and the fleeting hours?

Each hour wounds,
or so they say.
Who will tend me
when that last one kills?

Comment:

Omnia vulnerant, ultima necat. / Each one wounds, the last one kills. That’s how the Romans thought about the collection of hours that make up a day. An interesting way of putting it. In lapidarian fashion. Four words that are worth a whole book of philosophical thought.

What is this thing called time? Good question, and one which is being asked more and more. Clearly time does not flow evenly within the human mind, though it is remarkably regular on the clocks we have invented to mark time for us. And remember, there are many types of time – seasonal time – spring time, summer time, autumn time, winter time. Strange that autumn – or fall as I have now learned to call it – is the only one that doesn’t have the word time attached to it.

And what about time changes – spring forward, fall back – when we change our clocks in order to make the most of daylight hours. A tedious process for many of us. I see some provinces are rejecting those changes and sticking to the same time, all the year round, from season to season. Personally, I would prefer life without those time changes, as would many of my friends.

Celestial time also known as sidereal time – the time as showed by the planets as they seem to march around the earth in the terra-centric universe. Rephrased, the positions of the planets as the earth turns slowly round the sun in the helio-centric universe.

Then there is the personal time of individual experience. An hour watching football or rugby on the tv set passes much more quickly than an hour passed in the doctor’s waiting room or the dentist’s chair. Of course, an hour watching a five day cricket test can also be a slow process, unless England are playing Australia in the Ashes. As one friend of mine commented, a long time ago, “I thought those English cricketers were unfit. But I’ve never seen anyone go out to bat and come back to the pavilion so quickly. They must be super-fit.” Alas, their cricketing problem, as usual, was centered on the three cants – can’t bowl, can’t bat, can’t catch.

En fuga irrevocable huye la hora.
La que el mejor cálculo cuenta
en lectura y lección nos mejora.

Irrevocable is the hour’s flight.
The one that counts the most
in learning or reading improves us.

Francisco de Quevedo
(1580-1645)

And remember – the hours fly by and your time is limited – spend it wisely and enjoy each and every day to the full limits of your abilities.

Rage, Rage 54

Rage, Rage
54

Terminal and terminus,
they both mean nec plus ultra:
the Pillars of Hercules,
the end of the known world,
and my own world’s end.

I throw my hands skywards
in desperation:
“Is anybody up there?”
There’s no reply,
and I see no ladder
for angels to descend
or ascend.

Only the crows,
those black-winged
monarchs
destined to wear
the survivor’s crown,
cry out their anguish
as they wait for the day
when they’ll pick clean
my unburied bones and
rule this sickening world,
an earthly paradise no more.

Comment:

When I said “I am looking for a picture of a crow,” Moo went wild. “Me,” he said. “I’ve got one.” And indeed he had. Here it is – two crows perched like vultures over the body of a fast melting snowman. Our current world in miniature – and don’t forget the yellow snow and the doggy doing a dump. “Moo,” I said, “That’s not nice.” “True to nature, though,” he replied. “You want reality – you got it.”

Reality – what a strange word. Who knows nowadays what is real? The barber’s basin in Don Quixote – is it a barber’s basin or is it Mambrino’s Helmet? Good question. Relativism – it depends on your point of view. U a barber’s basin – turn it upside down Ω and it’s a helmet. So how do we deal with an object that has two functions and can be seen both as one thing and then another?

Good question. Cervantes solves the problem in his own unique fashion – U – bacía / basin and Ω – yelmo / helmet. Put them together and you get the neologism [newly invented word] baciyelmo – a basin that serves as a helmet and a helmet that serves as a basin. Wonderful – if it weren’t for the snout, I’d swear that was the origin of the pig-faced bassinet.

Some days, I try to understand all this – but I throw my hands skywards in desperation: “Is anybody up there?” Another good question. I often ask myself that question but I despair of an answer.

My friend Francisco de Quevedo voiced the same question in a dream that came to me last night.

¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?

Life ahoy! Will nobody reply?
Is anybody up there?
Will someone reply?

Blas de Otero once made a similar utterance –

“I raise my hands in supplication
– you cut them off at the wrist.”

Tell me, if you know, – what is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. And look at those crows, standing there, staring, waiting … waiting for their turn to come. Patient, eternally patient. Just standing around. Waiting.

Bees

Bees

This year, we mark them by their absence.

There is a stillness in the bee’s balm,
a withering of early blossoms and still no bees:
will they ever come back? The bee-keepers
don’t seem to know as they scratch their heads
and search dry colonies only to find
dead and dusty hives, with cells devoid
of the lust and life of their former inmates.

Each day we watch over the flowers,
and hum as we wait for the bees to buzz:
“will ye no come back again …”

Rage, Rage 52 & 53

Rage, Rage
52

A terminus, this waiting
room in which I sit.

This is the hospital’s
forgetting place,
the left-luggage office
where, a human parcel
wrapped in a blue gown,
I wait to be claimed.

Tagged with a label
on my wrist, I find myself
alone with my fate.

53

All choice disappeared
when I came here
and surrendered myself
to the system.

Now I lack free will
and freedom of choice.

Yet I still dream of choosing
my destination, and the ways
and means of arriving there.

Comment:

A terminus – what an interesting word. Terminus a quo or terminus ad quem? Or just a railway terminus or a bus terminus where we sit and wait to change buses of trains? Or maybe just a terminus in terms of being terminal? Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first start to analyze our words in order to see exactly where we might go and where they might lead us.

And what a journey I was on when I first wrote that poem. Sitting in the waiting room, outside the radiation room, waiting for the lady who would wag her finger and point at the machine’s next victim. Would it be me? The man next to me? That woman over there? Many of us avoided each other’s eyes and just sat there stunned – and now you know the meaning, in context, of ojos de besugo – do you remember that from Rage, Rage, 48?. Others chatted. Some sat there quietly while their teeth chattered. Few of us knew each other, except from the hospice where we stayed if we weren’t day patients travelling in on a daily basis and rushing home afterwards.

Libre albedrío – free will. We can say so much about free will and determinism. But when we enter the system, it’s the system that rules. We have free will to enter – and they [the authorities] say we have free will to exit when we wish – but do we? Good question. A very good question. Once tagged, we are as free as the birds, as free as the salmon, as free as the whales – but within that freedom we are tracked, followed, taken in hand, advised, persuaded, manipulated … and whales have a whale of a time when they’re trapped up in fish netting …

Then there are the follow-ups. The appointments. The emails. The telephone calls. The check-ups. The blood tests. The MRIs. The X-rays. The Holter appointments. The various scans. Who is brave enough to get off the wagon or to open the aircraft’s door half way through its flight over the Atlantic and step out? Would you jump from the save-yourself-train – not at all like the gravy train – and think carefully – are you really saving yourself or are you getting yourself into hotter and deeper water? Come along then, let’s open the aircraft’s door and step out over the Atlantic. And tell me, what exactly are we stepping into?

Stop the world, I want to get off! Not so easy to do, my friends, not so easy to do. Not even when you think the terminus in which you are sitting is taking you to hell in a hand-basket. You start to stand up. And the little lady appears, smiles at you, crooks her finger, nods her head, and – as obedient as one of Pavlov’s well-trained puppy dogs – off you go, following in her footsteps.

Rage, Rage 49 & 50

Rage, Rage
49

Waiting in the doctor’s office,
I hear two old women
gossiping about friends
and family, the intimate
details all laid out
to fester in my fertile mind.

Never will I be able
to put faces to those girls
with breast cancer,
to the women
weighed down
with diabetes,
to the old men
with their strokes
and heart attacks.

50

“Just one of those things,”
one of them whispers,
“my husband gone
leaving me alone
with the grandkids.”

“Is it four years? Or five?
I remember his name,
but I forget his face.”

“And our fourteen-year-old,
her belly already swelling …”

“You’ll cope somehow …”

Silence wraps its scarf
around their flapping mouths.
I think of all my own lost loves,
buried before their proper time.

Lives and worlds end …
new ones begin.

Comments:

Lives and worlds end … new ones begin. How true it is. The olde order changeth lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Tennyson, I believe, from Idylls of the King. King Arthur and his knights of the round table. Each of them rode into that dark night, some quickly, some more slowly, but all were lost, as so many things are lost.

That was also the heading of the departures section of my old school magazine. At the end of the year, pupils left the school, many graduating, never to return, and the old order did indeed change. The fourth formers moved up to the fifth, the fifth to Transitus, then to the sixth, and finally, the scholarship students arrived in Ichabod. Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory that used to be. I look at old school photos and I wonder what became of so many of my childhood friends. The website for my old school also contains an obituary section. I consult it, every so often, to see who else has passed on. Fewer names than I would expect. Not everybody keeps in touch. I am in contact with few old boys from school, but nobody from my undergraduate university. Ships passing in the night, all of us. Our conversations lost in the mists of time.

The old order changes and the language changes with it too. When I was visiting Spain regularly, my first stop, every year, would be the local barber’s shop. I just sat there and listened while I waited to get my haircut, Spanish style. I listened for the new buzz words, the names that now floated around, the latest jokes, the ideas that were currently in fashion. Change is everywhere.

Covid changed the Spanish language, gave it a whole new set of terms that I do not recognize. The same thing happens with English, French, any language. French is not the same in Moncton, New Brunswick, as it is in Shediac. And the Acadian Peninsula is slightly different. As is the language of Grand Falls, and that of Little Falls, aka Edmundston, the capital of the Republic of Madawaska. The language also changes close to the border of Quebec where Joual can be heard. Same thing along the St. Lawrence river and out from Matane to Mont Albert and beyond. Small changes, sea changes, enormous varieties of change.

I often wonder what is happening in Wales both to Welsh itself and to the English language as it is spoken there. English in Swansea / Abertawe was never the English of Llanelli, nor was it the English of the Rhondda Valleys. How could it be? And Cardiff / Caer Dydd was always different. As was Newport / Cas Newydd. I haven’t been back there since 1988. 38 years of change – friends gone, family gone, nobody left. I couldn’t bear to stay in a hotel in a town where once I lived in my family’s homes.

How does one end a rant like this? In silence, of course. For silence wraps its silken around flapping mouths. I think of all my own lost friends and loves, buried so long ago, many before their proper time.