Giving Thanks

Self-Isolation Day 22 / Ducks

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Self-Isolation Day 22
22 =Ducks, Patos in Spanish.

Ducks, because the 2 and the 2 seem to float together like a pair of ducks or a pair of Swans. How did Swansea get it’s name? Some say it was because handsome white swans used to swim on the salt waters of the bay: Swan+sea. Other’s say that  was on account of a battle where a man called Swain lost his eye: Swain’s Eye = Swansea. Oh dear, it’s so much easier in Welsh: Abertawe, the mouth of the river Tawe.

Speaking of Welsh, this is the 290th consecutive day that I have done my Welsh lessons. I guess the pandemic has helped over the last few weeks. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and all those Welsh memories bringing a fresh light to enlighten the darkness that is Corona Virus aka Covidis-19.

Language Teaching: never easy. And I should know after 43 years of teaching Spanish in Canadian universities (1966-2009). Relevance and irrelevance: how do we teach meaningful things? Good question. Dw i eisiau prynu’r crwban ddu fach / I want to buy the little black tortoise. Very useful. I bet they use that phrase on the streets of Llanelli and Abertawe every day of the week. How about Mae’r ddraig coch yn callu smwddio bob wythnos / The red dragon is able to do the ironing every week. Well, well: I suppose I did remember these two wonderful phrases. I am sure I will use them the next time I go to Cardiff.

I much prefer the Welsh of St. David: Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd / Do ye the little things in life or Byddwch lawen a chadwch eich ffyd a’ch credd / Be joyful and keep your faith and creed. These two quotes from the patron saint of Wales are full of meaning, especially at this oh-so-difficult juncture in all our lives. Funny really: I laugh at the first two, the dragon and the tortoise, but without them, I would probably never have arrived at the Original Welsh of St. David / Dewi Sant.

Languages: they say that to learn another language is to gain another soul and another set of eyes through which to view the world. We view the world through our languages. Limit the language and we limit the world. Reduce the language, any language, to its lowest common denominator, and we reduce and diminish the world around us. Sparrows, juncos, chickadees, Cedar Waxwings, robins, mourning doves, crows, hawks (Cooper’s Hawk, Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Marsh Hawk) are all reduced to birds. Mountain Ash (Russian or European), Birch, Hackmatack, Tamarack, Spruce … all these are reduced to trees, nothing more and nothing less than trees.

Think about language. Savor language. Roll it round your mouth. Taste it on your tongue. Use the correct names for things. Expand your vocabulary. Do not be satisfied with Grade 9 English. Learn. Advance. Develop. Carry a dictionary (Y geiriadur Gymraeg newydd) and look up words, learn their meanings, learn how to spell them. Never give up. Do not be satisfied, ever, with the lowest level of existence. Flower, flourish, rise up and fight for your own self-education, for your own language, for your own destiny, for your own rights!

Self-Isolation Day 19

 

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Self-Isolation Day 19
Platero yo yo
Meniscus: Crossing the Churn

I am eking out my reading of Platero y yo much as I eke out the food supply: small portions, and a chapter at a time. In the same ay that I am enjoying my food so much more, savouring each mouthful, cutting down on the accompanying wine, tasting life to the full, so I am slowing down my reading. I am learning to enjoy the journey, the perusal of each word, each phrase, the long-drawn out aftertaste of every image, the lingering bouquet of each metaphor. Yes, Platero y yo is a fine wine drawn slowly over the palate to be tasted and tested, not swigged and swallowed.

Not for the first time in my life, I am jealous, jealous of this writer with his Nobel Prize for Literature and his wonderful way of choosing le mot juste, the exact word, with which to illustrate his tales. It is not the Nobel Prize of which I am jealous, but the talent, the skill, the patience, the taste of each word. I wish I could write like that. I wish I could take the world outside in my garden and imprison it on the page.  Imprison: that’s what I do. Juan Ramón Jiménez imprisons nothing. His birds and butterflies fly free. His donkey roams free. His village women, young and old, wander freely across the pages as do the gypsy children and the children of the poor, with their dreams of gold watches that will not tell the time, their shot-guns that will not kill hunger, their donkeys that will carry them to a pauper’s death. Reading at this level, I rediscover my inevitable inability to write the way I want, to capture what I see, to give life and liberty to my words, enchained all, and lavishing in their captivity.

There is, of course, an alternative, one of which I am also incapable: to create a new world. I know of few people who are capable of doing that. Tolkien, of course, created Middle-Earth, the Shire, Mordor, Gandalf, and the Lord of the Rings. Rowland created Hogwart’s and the world of magic that surrounds Harry Potter. Closer to home, Alexandra Tims created Meniscus, a planet that travels around twinned suns and is in turn circled by two moons. Here water effervesces and flows uphill or generates dramatic water-climbs and lake-like churns.Erosion occurs by wind-scour and frost-heave. It holds predators (slear-snakes and kotildi) and humans have been brought her, as slaves, from earth itself, to eke out a miserable existence amidst the dystopia created by Dock-winders, Gel-heads, Argenops, and the Slain.

What I love about this series includes the invented language, the flora and the fauna, the wonderful drawings and maps that occur regularly throughout the books. This is no Middle-Earth, a recognizable world inhabited by humans and figures of magic drawn from our own legends and mythologies. It is a flesh-and-blood creation of something new and startlingly different.

Wolfgang Kayser suggested, a long time ago, that there were three types of novels: novels of action (the easiest to write, if you have that calling), novels of character (the development of an individual or a series of individuals), and novels of place (where the world, or a small part of it, is captured in detail). Occasionally, a great novelist, and Miguel de Cervantes was one of those, manages to write a book (Don Quixote) that contains all three of these features. Mikhail Bakhtin talks about ‘man’s dialog with his time and place’. Well, Ms. Tims has created ‘a woman’s dialog with her created time and space’ and I, personally, am so very happy that she did so.

Comment: [added 27 March, 2020]
Meniscus: Crossing the Churn can be found at
Here are the other books in the series.
Book One – Meniscus: Crossing The Churn

Book 1.5 – Meniscus: Forty Missing Days
Book Two – Meniscus: South from Sinta
Book Three – Meniscus: Winter by the Water-climb
Book Four – Meniscus: The Village at Themble Hill
Book Five – Meniscus: Karst Topography
Book Six – Meniscus: Oral Traditions
Book Seven – Meniscus: Encounter with the Emenpod

 

Self-Isolation Day 18

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Self-Isolation Day 18

So we are in the eighteenth day of our Self-Isolation. Yesterday I added a fifth book to my group around the table: The Art of the Middle Game by Paul Keres and Alexander Kotov, translated by Harry Golombek. I have had this book since 1964 when it was first published in Penguin Books. Once upon a time, I played serious chess, was president of a chess club, and read widely about the game. But I have not played any serious, face to face chess since I came to Canada and the last games I played were in 1994, when I visited the Dominican Republic, although I did pay a couple of games in Oaxaca on my first visits there.

I dipped in and out of this book yesterday, playing sample games here and there. It was a joy to rediscover the movement of the pieces and to see how great minds viewed the chess board. Sharpe’s Riflemen are wonderful to watch on YouTube, but they cannot rival the two sixteen piece armies that wage battle on the sixty-four squares of the chess-board!

The Art of the Middle Game uses descriptional notation. This means that when the King Pawn takes two steps forwards, it moves from King two to King four. In descriptional notation, this becomes P-K4. If it is the first move of the game, by white, then it becomes 1. P-K4. If the opposition follows suit, then his move is also transcribed as P-K4. This gives us 1. P-K4   P-K4. And this is where the confusion arises: each side has a K-4, and a Q-4 and every other square is doubled up as well in a mirror image of army facing army. After such a long time away from the game, I found my concentration wavering in places and thus I had pieces on the wrong squares and had to start all over again. Very frustrating.

When I played chess in Spain, also back in the sixties, I was faced with algebraic notation, long in use on the continent of Europe. The eight ranks are lettered a-h, from left to right, and the eight files are numbered 1-8 from bottom to top, with ‘white on the right’ i.e. h-1 always white. This means that each square has a single, plotted designation and it is much easier to follow the game as there is no mirror imaging. In this fashion, 1. P-K4 would become e2 – e4 followed by e7 – e5. None of this changes the nature of the game, but it does change the speed and ease with which it is transcribed and followed.

I remember buying my first pocket chess set, in Boots the Chemist (!) when I was 9 or 10 years old. It is an old cardboard set with red and white squares and pieces. I still have it and I am using it now. The scrawl that I call my handwriting is still unmistakable, after all these years. That same day I bought Harry Golombek’s The Game of Chess, and I taught myself how to play, based on that book. I remember looking at the descriptional notation and not understanding how the system worked, even after days of memorization. Then, one morning, as Dylan Thomas, another Swansea Boy once wrote, ‘light broke where no light shone’ and as all the squares fell miraculously into place, the system of descriptional notation suddenly made sense to me. “Threshold knowledge is a term in the study of higher education used to describe core concepts — or threshold concepts — which, once understood, transform perception of a given subject, phenomenon, or experience” (Wikipedia). The discovery of the key to descriptional notation was indeed a threshold experience, as was the transition to algebraic notation. What a wonderful world we live in.

CV-19 Week 3 Day 3

 

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CV-19 Week 3 Day 3
A Change of Scene

Nothing serious happening with this change of scene, but this morning I put Phillip Larkin on one side and turned to a new book, Neil Sampson’s Apples on the Nashwaak (2019). This may be just the read you need in times like these. An excellent foreword locates the text of Neil’s narrative poem(s) in the long line of European narrative poetry. Neil’s introduction places his text in his own life on the land where he lives and wanders in Upper Durham, above the Nashwaak River. The text itself places us, as readers, in the long successions of repeated lives and deaths that mark the early settlements in New Brunswick, Canada. And yes, we have passed this way before, for better or for worse.

This is not a re-statement of ‘mal de todos, consuelo de tontos‘ / shared ill’s are a fool’s consolation. The colored apples on the stark tree that adorns the cover are a statement of hope, long term hope, even among the bleakness of difficulties, tragedies, and deaths. Like it or not, these things happen, and yes, there are survivors. Hopefully, there will always be survivors. And thus we must always live in hope. It is one of the threads that come through Neil’s poetry.

Only four trees are still alive.
The last of that first
generation
ponder existence and being
unable to walk
— no chance of pilgrimage —
have seeded their hope of redemption,
in Self.

Sounds like us, tucked away at home for three weeks and three days now ‘unable to walk’ outside and with no immediate ‘pilgrimage’ in sight or ‘hope of redemption’. Yet we sit here, un-suffering, following the news on television and radio, talking with friends on the telephone, reaching out to loved ones, near and far, on Skype, e-mailing and encouraging fellow un-sufferers, house bound, like us, ‘Children / hugging the chimney, // warm long after / the embers had died’.

Wait! In the orchard!
There’s One who’s come to call.
Those four pioneers
cankered with rot;
bark-skinned, limbs,
thin, draped in swags
of moss —

they know
who He is.

Enough for now, Neil. I shall read your book today and perhaps tomorrow, and then I will move on with head held high and hope in my heart. Thank you for your words. They are doubly meaningful at times like these reaching out to us with comfort, love, and understanding, and warming our hearts.

 

 

CV-19 Week 3 Day 2

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CV-19 Week 3 Day 2
Reading in Multiples

Legend tells us that Francisco de Quevedo possessed a revolving book stand-cum-lectern. He placed this on his table at meal times and he would have four books open at the same time, moving rapidly in his reading from one to another. I have always liked this idea. As a result, I am now doing something similar.

I began by taking out Don Quixote, which I am once again reading in Spanish. The adventures of our Ingenious Gentleman are a delight and this time, the slowness of my 28th reading of the 1605 text allows me to taste every word, to roll the syllables round the tongue, and to savor every word. With CV-19 on the loose, there are no deadlines, no use by dates, and nothing to prevent me from delaying the full enjoyment of each word of the text. Equally important, there is no class preparation, no waiting audience, just me, an old man now, following the thoughts and adventures of an old man as written by an old man, Miguel de Cervantes, way back when.

I have the Collected Poems of Phillip Larkin on the table beside me. What a different world. What depth of insight and observation. What a bearing of witness to the follies and foibles of an England that I left behind so long ago, much of it vanished now, along with the old choir stalls and the hedgerows, the cuckoos and the skylarks. I read and re-read The Old Fools and realize just how close I am to that cliff edge, that precipice, that Alpine peak, beneath which I shelter and seek succour. Then I turn to This be the Verse and I start to laugh at this portrayal of middle-class parental pretensions. This is Larkin’s open wit, but his sly wit, like that of Cervantes, but more bitter, creeps up on you and catches you unawares, unless you know how and where to look for it.

At my left elbow, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y yo awaits my attention. No children’s book this, but a wonderfully poetic recounting of a poet’s observations of Moguer, a small seaside town in Andalusia. This too is a book to read slowly, to savour, to taste each word, each story. This too is prose poetry at its best. Cervantes wrote that ‘epic poetry can be written in prose’ / la épica también puede escribirse en prosa‘. JRJ might equally well have written that ‘poetry can also be written in prose’ … an edict that I have tried to follow in my own writing.

For my more serious reading, I am dipping into the late Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy (from Descartes to Wittgenstein). This is heavier reading, in some senses, yet the parallels between Descartes philosophical observations and Cervantes’s literary ones are well worth considering, for Cervantes often offers the practical where Descartes puts forward the theoretical.

I will be adding more titles to my reading as I progress. Needless to say, I am also wandering through the labyrinth of my own earlier writings, and they are so much fun to revisit too. I will add more on this topic, as our enforced enclosure progresses.

Comment: These visitors came to my garden last summer. It is a delight to offer my photographs of them as a counter to CV-19 for these butterflies symbolize the brevity and the beauty of our lives. Butterflies on a rock: poetry and literature in Canada, and even more fragile in these times of utmost fragility. Keep well, keep safe, and keep in touch with your loved ones by telephone, Skype, Messenger, e-mail, and keep everything safe.

Wannabe a Creator

 

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Wannabe a Creator?

            Not everyone can be a creator, not because they cannot create, but because they do not believe in the powers of creation, the strength of the tsunami, of that tidal wave that sweeps us creators away and drives us into the blackened spaces of our inner minds where a dark sun shines its coal black light and shadows dance their will o’the wisp dance and lead us on and on until we have caught our dreams, squeezed them dry of their nothingness, and turned them into the stuff of an actuality filled with new life, a new reality, a new creation, something that is really ours, yet that will only truly live outside ourselves.
We gaze at each new creation for a moment, in astonishment, then position it in its cradle of reeds, place it in the running river, push it out into midstream and eyes, filled with tears, we wish it ‘god speed’ and send it spinning on its way to who knows where? Our hearts fill with hope as we watch it float away to make its own life, sink or swim, on this sea of sorrows, where someone, downstream, may bend to the waters and speak the magic words and tell a tale, our tale, their tale, or whatever they then deem the new tale to be.
Now, in our time of trouble, is the opportunity to dig deep, to mine our unconscious, to discover and re-discover our innate creativity. Take out that note-book, that pencil. Find that old sketch-book. Bring tat camera back to life. Above all, take the time to be yourself, to remember who and what you are, to re-discover your self and, wherever possible, take this opportunity, for it is an opportunity, to build the new self, the one you still wish to be. There are no greater mortal creators than those people who can create themselves anew. Now is the time to dream ourselves a new and better reality. Now is the time to drop the wannabe and to become a true creator.

Comment: I am taking the time now to multi-task my reading. This means starting and restarting several books at once and then shuffling the readings and pausing a while as I contemplate the pages. More on this tomorrow. Join me then.

Creativity

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Creativity

When creative artists get together they talk and walk and hug and hold and discuss so many things, like how the creative spirit can inflate the body and send it soaring like a trial balloon, how listeners can be swept away by a magic vortex of voice, and how time and space can be suspended in the glories of creation that spin a web of forgetfulness around us and makes us disregard who and what we are as we forge new worlds.
Dark earth-spirits of love, want, and creation, hold us captive and drive us onward and inward until we give birth to that which was waiting patiently to be born, even though we never knew that the seed had been planted. “What is this?” we ask as we survey the new-born entity fresh on the page, held in the hands, suddenly full of life and breathing on its own, a thing of beauty, an essential being. It makes complete sense as we struggle to hold it as it grows and transforms from internally ours to eternally theirs, a product of our mind and body now belonging no longer to us but to the world beyond us.
We long to know its fate, to watch it as it walks along its path, its destiny now in its own hands. “What is it?” people ask as we stand still and know not what to tell them. Some sigh, some mutter ‘nice’, others just turn and walk away, lost in a self-created labyrinth of cul-de-sacs, dead end streets, and black, blind walls. Many go back to their two-thumbed clicking and surf the networks, bereft of the imagination to see and explore that which has been thrust fresh before them, this new-born babe beautiful in its swaddling clothes, a new creation.

Comment: The photograph … a geranium against the snow. Truth and beauty can survive even the hardest winters. As true creative artists we must be prepared to fight for our creative ideals. When the skies seem to be at their darkest (see my recent posts Poem from the Cree, Co-[vidi]-s and Outrageous Fortune) that is when we must strive to re-create the light, not just for ourselves, but for others as well.