Trapped in this fragile vessel with the pandemic a passenger waiting to board, I drift from port to port, looking for a haven, safe, to have and to hold me.
No harbour will let me dock. “No room at this inn,” they say. “No haven here.” They wave me away.
Now I have no destination. Aimless, I float and every where I go the message is: “No vacancy: no room at all.”
Unwanted, abandoned, I wander with wind and waves, my only friends seals, porpoises, and whales. I walk the whale road, leaving a frail, white wake behind.
This vessel has become a gulag now, a prison camp where I exist just to survive. Each hour of each day endless, boundless, like this shadowy, haunted sea.
Today there is no motion, no goal. What is there to achieve but survival? Each day’s journey is sufficient unto itself.
A strange, milk-cloud sky, skimpy, with the sun a pale, dimly-glowing disc and my pen scarce casting a shadow as the nib limps over the page.
Out on the west coast, fires still range free and this is the result, these high, thin clouds casting a spider web cloak over the sun face and darkening the day.
The west coast: five or six hours by plane and three whole days to get there by train, even longer by bus, all chop and change with multiple stops.
The wind blew and the clouds came widdershins, backwards across the continent. Today they reached across the ocean to claw the sun from European skies.
It is indeed a small world after all. Isostasy: you push the earth balloon in here, and it bulges out over there in the place you least expected.
Now we are all interconnected in an intricate network of a thousand ways and means. What does it all mean? Ripples ruffle the beaver pond’s dark mirror.
The forest mutters wind-words, devious and cruel, that I sense, but cannot understand. High in the sky clouds turn into horsemen on plunging steeds.
Fear, fire, flood, foe, poverty, unemployment, pandemic, crops destroyed and, waiting in the wings, threats of civil unrest, the apocalypse, and a war to end all wars.
Comment: A week in bed, unable to sit, to write, to use the computer, except standing on one leg and typing with one finger. Unable to concentrate, to create, and now, after four visits to my medical team, acupuncture, manipulation, massage, finally that pinched nerve has stopped pinching and I can get back to writing. However, my thoughts are as grey as these clouds that dim the skies. I no longer know who or what or where I am. The world around me has turned sinister and I suffer.
The result: black thoughts, black poetry, red, flaming skies, and the knowledge that all is not well, neither with me, nor with our sick little planet. There is no Planet B and this one, like me, is suffering.
Premonitions and dark thoughts. I lie awake in bed each night, sleepless, hugging my Teddy Bear and my hot water bottle, aching, suffering, waiting for the dawn.
Between Two Places Dianne Fitzpatrick Where’s Home?
Where’s Home (3) Part III of an open letter to Jan Hull
The Little Things
In 1898, Spain fought and lost a war with America over possession of Cuba. Cuba was the last of Spain’s overseas Empire and when it went, the all conquering fatherland, upon whose empire the sun never set, was reduced to its original territory in the Spanish Peninsula. That same year, the literary Generation of 1898 started a new movement, one that made Spain itself central to its imagery and thought. Theirs was not the Spain of Imperial History, with its wars and treaties, battles and conquests. Theirs was the eternal countryside of Spain, the Spain of Old Castille that was rooted to the soil, and that had remained virtually unchanged in the small towns, fishing ports, and villages, for hundreds of years. This was the Spain of Miguel de Unamuno’s Intra-historia: the history of small things.
St. David, Dewi Sant, the patron saint of Wales, a historical figure flourishing circa 600 CE, is famous within Wales for his many sayings. But for me, one stands out. “Byddwch lawen a chadwch eich ffyd a’ch credd, a gwnewch y petheu bychainmewn bwywd” / Be joyful and keep your faith and creed and do the little things in life. In these times of stress and strain, faced by enormous changes brought about by the pandemic, to these prophetic words I turn.
Poets, creators, artists, stoneists, craft-workers of all kinds … we are the antennae of the people. We sense the directions in which life flows and will flow and we are ahead of our times, not behind them. We are the ones who ‘do the little things’, often abandoning larger, more financially rewarding projects in favor of smaller ones that spiritually enrich both us and the people around us. And that is what I am now reading in Jan Hull’s Where’s Home? People, real, live, flesh-and-blood people, many of them artists at heart, abandoning the big city’s rush and rock and roll to enjoy the quietude of small communities which they help to build with their own hands.
Troglodytes, cavemen, people living in the past, I have heard ‘so-called saner citizens’ mutter about some of our contemporary artists. They live off hand-outs and charity and welfare, and they live in the past. Grey-suited, working in concrete boxes, these well-heeled critics are all made out of ticky-tacky, as the old song says, and they work in little boxes, and they come out all the same. Fine fr some, but you certainly cannot say that of the characters who inhabit the small towns, villages, and ports, as Where’s Home? demonstrates so clearly, with quote after quote from contented people, all resident in Nova Scotia, some CFA (Come From Away), others CBC (Come By Choice), and yet others native to the province.
Living in the past … when Hurricane Arthur struck, we went without power for twelve days. No water, no warm food, no cooking, no refrigeration, no flush toilets, no showers, no air conditioning, no television, no Wifi, no internet … In 1928, my grandfather and my father built a summer home, a bungalow, in Gower. I remember, even in the late fifties, living there during the summer with my grandparents: wood stove, rain water barrels, no running water, outhouse, no electricity, no refrigeration, oil lamps … Hurricane Arthur … and Clare and I went back to bungalow living. Several of our neighbors did not know how to cope with the ‘problems’. A couple moved into hotels or stayed with family elsewhere until the crisis was over. As for us, this was the life I was used to as a child. We went into bungalow mode and had more fun than anyone could imagine… living in the past? … or preparing for the future? … Think about it, and don’t jump too quickly to the wrong conclusion.
Above all, Jan Hull’s book, Where’s Home?, has made me think. It has made me think deeply about my own life, my own memories, my own restless, rootless existence, my own attempts to settle and resettle. More, in light of the pandemic with so many working from home, so much home schooling, and so much online back and forth, maybe we, the artists, the returnees, the WAH (Work At Homers), maybe we are not stranded, forgotten, on the back-burners of modern life. Maybe, just maybe, we are the fore-tellers, the front-runners, the pioneers of how a better, more meaningful existence may be created and kept. Thank you, Jan, and please thank all your contributors on my behalf.
Where’s Home (2) Part II of an open letter to Jan Hull
I ended yesterday’s letter with the words “There is a brighter side too, and I will get to that another day.” This is the day, and the brighter side is the sacredness of place. The Celtic Nations believe strongly in the sacredness of place. In the old religions we believed that places held spirits who dwelt in the rivers and streams, who lived in the trees and the orchards, who were a large part of the spirit of place and sacred space. You can still read some of this innate pantheism in The Chronicles of Narnia. Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French … we all have Celtic roots and, like the First Nations of Canada, we still believe in the sanctity of the land. This is an old tradition and a worthy one. Not all great ideas were born in Western Culture post the Industrial Revolution. Many pre-date our so called modern culture. Some should replace it.
I believe very strongly in the power of place. Sometimes, turning a corner one day, we know we are home. This is the feeling that comes so strongly through the second chapter of your book, Jan. Yes, the Maritimes (NB, NS, and PEI) are home for many people. It is indeed their One Small Corner. their querencia. What is a querencia, you ask? Well, it is the place that calls you, the place in which you want to live, the place in which you want to die. And yes, in this time of pandemic, death is on all our minds: those twin realities, sickness and death. Neither is easy. These times are not easy. But they become easier for those of us rooted in our time and our place and, like it or not, the human being, male, female, or other, must live in a dialog with their own time and place. This is the chrono- (time) -topos (place) of the Russian Philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin.
Life is so much easier when we are in our own beloved space. When we are out of it, away from home, down the road, that is when we suffer most, Sometimes we are still able to flourish. Oftentimes, we wither and perish, like leaves on the tree. You, in your book, Where’s Home?, have offered us a glimpse of what that one small corner, the province of Nova Scotia, means to your correspondents and the ones with whom you have held dialog. We are all of us richer for that experience. Thank you, Jan, and on all our behalves, mine particularly, please thank your contributors.
And this is the good thing, to find your one small corner and to have your one small candle, then to light it, and leave it burning its sharp bright hole in the night.
Around you, the walls you constructed; inside, the reduced space, the secret garden, the Holy of Holies where roses grow and no cold wind disturbs you.
“Is it over here?” you ask: “Or over here?”
If you do not know, I cannot tell you.
But I will say this: turning a corner one day you will suddenly know that you have found a perfection that you will seek again, in vain, for the rest of your life.
Right from the address on the envelope where you gifted me a knighthood, calling me Sir Roger, I was captivated by this package.
I opened it at the Beaver Pond in Mactaquac and started to read as Clare did her daily walk, widdershins round the pond. Alas, I missed the great blue heron flying. Ditto, the osprey and the kingfisher. I heard all about them later.
Only you, Jan, only you. You are truly unique. Your words jump off the page, lean across the table to me, and offer me bread and wine. I do hope that this book is the first of many. Your words brought tears to my eyes and hope to my heart.
So many themes that touched me deeply. The loss of language and culture: in this case, French and Gaelic, in my own case Welsh, a forbidden language when I was growing up. It is only now, at an advanced age, that I have started to learn it. What memories it brings back.
The sending of indigenous children to residential schools: in my own case, starting at age six, I was sent away to a series of boarding schools and never escaped until I was 18 years old. Good-bye family and culture: hello loneliness and solitude.
The enforcement of religion, top down, with the vicious punishments that accompanied doubt, unbelief, or non-acceptance. The brutal separation from family, with the whole experience of reintegration into a now-become-foreign world, relocation, loss of roots and culture, the difficulties of not belonging to the new communities.
There is a brighter side too, and I will get to that another day. Meanwhile, congratulations on this book, Jan. May it be the first of many and a delight and revelation to all.
In one room in my head my mother’s mother sits with me on her knee at the kitchen table playing patience.
Elsewhere, I stand on a stool beside my father’s mother helping her to mix the cake she will later bake in the coal-fired oven of the black, cast iron stove.
My mother’s father sits before the television. He leans back in the chair, raises his foot so he can’t see the adverts on the screen, and puts his fingers in his ears.
My father’s father lies in bed, downstairs, in the middle room. His dog lies beside him, licking his hand. We all wait for the death that has haunted him since he was gassed in World War One.
Clare sits at the computer, following the figures that track the pandemic. I sit here watching her, humming softly to myself: “¡Qué será, será!”
This isn’t Blueberry. It’s Purple Martyn the Purple Peril. Never mind. He looks sad. Perhaps he’s feeling blue.
Blueberry and the Night Bumps
Blueberry is a nocturnal teddy bear. At night he stands by the side of my bed and protects me all night long. Before I get into bed, I take Blueberry from the dresser and place him beside my bed. Only when he is there, on guard, do I get into bed tuck myself in.
“Goodnight, Blueberry,” I say to him, but he never replies. He has a job to do. As I drop off to sleep, he comes alive. Some nights I pretend to fall asleep. When I start to fake snore, Blueberry begins to walk around the bedroom.
He walks to the door and makes sure it is properly shut. Then he looks under the chairs and behind the dresser. Next, he opens the closet door, looks in, and checks that no Night-Bumps are hiding in there waiting to go BUMP in the night.
I am afraid of those Night-Bumps. One night, when Blueberry wasn’t there, a Night-Bump came and sat on my head and went bump-bump-bump all night long. I couldn’t get any sleep. Next morning, my head ached and I didn’t want to eat my breakfast. Nasty Night-Bumps.
The last thing Blueberry does is to check beneath the bed. Sometimes he crawls right underneath it. One night, I woke up to hear an awful noise, squeaking and screaming and a gnashing of teeth. Then silence fell.
Blueberry emerged from beneath the bed holding something that once had wriggled but that would never wriggle again. He walked to the waste-paper basket in the corner, took out and old sheet of paper, wrapped his little bundle in it, dropped it into the basket, then came over to see me.
“That’s the last Night-Bump,” he said. “It struggled wildly, but I got it before it could go bump. You can go back to sleep now. No Night-Bump will go bump in here again. They are all too afraid of me to come back. And don’t worry: if there’s anything else comes in, I’ll get it.”
“Oh Blueberry,” I said, and reached out to hug him.
“Can’t do it,” he sat down and showed me the soles of his feet, one by one. LOVE YOU: these words decorate Blueberry’s two back paws, with one word sewn into each. Usually, I can only read the message by day, when Blueberry sits down and rests.
LOVE YOU stood out as he sat down and raised his legs to show me his message. Then he got back up.
“No hugs. I’m on duty. No nightmares. No worries. Sweet Dreams. And back to sleep you go now.”
And I did.
Next morning, I picked Blueberry up, gave him a big hug, and set him down on the dresser, feet up. LOVE YOU, his feet said.
“Love you too, Blueberry,” I said. And then I added: “Everybody needs a Blueberry.”
rogermoorepoet 