Philosophy

Recalcitrant Flash Fiction

Recalcitrant
Bistro 19

The annual Old Boys Reunion took place in the sixteenth-century cellar of a world famous winery that also ran a restaurant and banquet service for pecunious customers. A man in a penguin suit, with a foreign accent, and a suspicious looking bulge under his left armpit, ushered the recalcitrant towards a set of well-worn of steps.
“You are arriving slightly on the late side, sir,” the penguin whispered, staring mockingly at the checkered, American-style sports jacket worn by the man he escorted. “And not dressed like the others. But not to be troubled, I myself will escort you down to the place of the guests.”
As he descended the steps that led down to the former wine cellars, the recalcitrant heard the well-remembered, high nasal bray as his former headmaster’s brass voice pierced the ruminations of the penguin-suited herd that, having sniffed the glorious nature of the gregarious watering-hole, was intent on reminiscing, drinking, and feeding.
“Wonderful place … so fortunate … to be here … thank you … ” the old man neighed.
It was indeed a wondrous place, a semi-whitewashed room, warm in the center where bees wax candles in gold candlesticks blazed on antique tables and cool by the one wall left untouched since that same sixteenth century. Here the damp gathered in great grey clots and the spider webs, also untouched, sparkled and glistened, like “the mythical lights of fairyland” as the winery brochure announced to the limited circle of the wealthy to whom it was circulated.
Empty kettle … the recalcitrant thought as he remembered his old headmaster and then they were, face to face, the head and his obstinately defiant and anti-authoritarian pupil, staring each other down.
“You!” It was an authoritarian call to battle. “I remember you. The boy who denied all authority.”
“Yes, me,” the recalcitrant, eyeball to eyeball with the old enemy rejoiced in his newfound glory. And here he was, back in the old country on a lecture tour of six major universities, one of them being in this city, a full professor now, with international honors, multiple publications, department chair in a well-known university, a household name in his subject, and all of this at forty-two years old. “Yes, me,” he repeated.
“You have done well for yourself,” the ageing donkey brayed.
The gunman in the penguin suit, sensing the tension, placed himself in the gunslinger’s position from which he could survey the whole room. He lovingly stroked the armpit bulge, eyes gleaming with hope.
“Tell me,” the head drew a handkerchief from his pocket and honked his nose into it like a storm-bound goose. “How did your career take off?”
“Well, in two stages,” the recalcitrant paused, partly for effect, partly to gather his thoughts. “Just like a rocket: stage one was when I left your school and stage two was when I left your country.”
The old donkey, blinked, threw back his head, trumpeted down his nose with intense nasal wrath, and turned away with a wave of his hand towards another latecomer who had just descended the stairs. “Ah, there you are Smithers,”the fog horn blared. “At last. Saved me you have. This man was just about to …”
The rest of the sentence was lost in the rush and a hubbub as a new series of delights arrived, tapas, hors d’oeuvres, little sticky creations on fiddly little sticks, they all circulated from hand to hand along with the exquisitely chilled champagne, the single malt whiskies, and the ultimate in estate wines.
Not a penguin spoke to the sports-coated recalcitrant. Nobody offered him a hand. Nobody shared a memory with him. As he arrived at each little group, the penguins gathered in a tight circle, turned their black backs to him, and shut him out. Throughout the feasting, he sensed the gimlet eyes of the gunman glued to a spot mid-way between his shoulder blades.
The recalcitrant didn’t partake of the food or the drink, he just watched. Then, after an hour or so, he turned and climbed the sixteenth-century stairs, the gunman in the penguin suit right behind him, and walked away into the freedom of starlight and the cool night air.
He never returned for another reunion.
He never received another invitation.

Old Man Flash Fiction

Old Man
Bistro

Old Man

I’m an old man now, discontent with the rumbles of incontinence that surge like an express train through my guts. They told me the after effects would last a year to eighteen months after the cancer treatment, and it’s nearly a year, and it should be over, but it isn’t, so I sit here, in my car, outside the washroom in the local park, waiting for that urgent call that will send me limping to my destiny and soon now, I know it will be soon now, as the cold shiver grips me, and then I start to sweat, great pearls of salt water, trickling down forehead to nose, and I open the car window, and there she is again, in a green and yellow string bikini, the twelve year old who has haunted me for the last ten minutes, ghosting round, staring at me, looking at the car, and behind her, her parents, her grand-parents, her family, muttering in some strange and ancient tongue, about this old man sitting in his car by the public washroom, being stared at by the girls, the boys, the young people as they enter and leave, bees around the honey-pot, and they gather by my car, and mutter and grumble, raising their voices and pointing their fingers at me, at the car, and always that surging wave of grumbled accusations, rising like this tide, this hot, red tide that now rushes through my guts and rumbles me towards my destiny, a plastic seat in a tin shack at the edge of the woods in a public place, this park, where I have every right to be, and the girl’s long blonde hair whisks again and again past my window, and she points and the old ones mutter, and there’s the boy again, squeezing himself, and looking cute, and I can guess what they’re thinking and saying, even though I don’t understand a word of their language, yet their grumbles are loud and their fingers are sharp and pointed in my direction, and I can see a cell phone, now, with a man taking pictures of me and the car and the number plate, and someone else is dialing, I can see their fingers punching the keys and I know they would rather be punching me, my face, anything they can get their fists into and why not, because it’s a free world and if I am what they seem to think I am, a predator after their children, not an old man, incontinent, in urgent need of the washroom yet afraid to brave the crowd and leave the safety of his car, then they would indeed have every right to be pointing at me in this way …. but hey, everybody is innocent until they are found guilty by twelve honest men, and twelve of them now gather out there pointing at me as I sit, glassy-eyed, sweating, afraid to move in case I make it worse, just hoping that they and this terrible pain will go away, this pain, this train, this express train, rumbling through my guts to its inevitable conclusion … and too late, I’ve left it too late, dammit … and so, rooted to the earth and this spot, I soil myself again.

Decisions

Decisions

We make them all the time: what shirt to wear, jeans or dress pants, black of brown shoes, loafers or lace ups, sandals … socks or not … and then there’s breakfast … tea or coffee, cereal or toast, sugar or honey … most days, we don’t even realize we are making decisions. We certainly don’t need to write out a page of pros and cons in order to choose between coffee or tea …

Then there are the big decisions, like where to go next on this blog. I have been weighing up the pros and cons and I am finally getting close to a decision. My blogging possibilities include Literary Theory … Writing about Writing … How to Read … Revising Older Texts … Reading Don Quixote Online … Writing New Texts … Preparing Books for Publication Offline … These are much more difficult decisions but I must think about them and make them.

Literary Theory sounds good. But what do I know about it? Nothing but the dry academic literary theory of an abandoned academia that wasn’t really very interesting anyway. An occasional question arises in the blog world, one on which I feel competent to comment, and that for me, is the way I go with my literary theory: a quick response. All that academic literary theory is money in the savings bank that I can draw on if I, or anyone else, needs to access it. But to access it on a daily basis and pontificate my way to the limbo of a blogger’s boredom? I don’t think so!

Writing about Writing also sounds good, but in many ways it is a poor person’s literary theory, rather like literary theory without the long, obfuscating technical terms. Again, if the need is there, I can contribute; but it’s not the way I want to go, not here, not on this blog, not on this particular watch.

How to Read is a subject on which many books have been written and I recommend that all people not just read, but learn to read deeply and properly. In some cases, depending upon the quantity of material that crosses the computer screen (it used to be the desk), speed reading is essential and I recommend speed reading for everybody except poets and those who love poetry. To speed read a sonnet is not the way to go. I would love to sell the film rights to some of my sonnets, but apparently, that’s not the way to go either. Ah well, we can’t have everything …

Revising Older Texts is another excellent way to run a blog. The material is always there in one form (old) and the reworking of it into another form (new) is regular, instructive, and creative. I have done that on this blog with At the Edge of Obsidian > Obsidian’s Edge and loved both the process and the result. However, at least three of my commentators, Al Lane, Chuck Bowie and Kevin Stephens, suggested that the past is in the past and should remain there, while the future lies ahead of us and needs to be created. After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that Al and Chuck and Kevin are right. I will put older material up on the blog, but I will no longer review it for future re-publication, except in exceptional circumstances, and these are yet to be determined.

Reading Don Quixote Online has been in my wish bucket for a very long time. It is something that I would love to do one more time. I have already done online readings on several occasions. I have twice taught DQ in an online hybrid environment: hybrid — an online portion and an in-class face to face portion –. To return to DQ is, for me, to return to academia, an academia that I rejected several years ago. No: much as I would like to re-formulate this project and to lay out online my definitive This Is How To Read Don Quixote, I feel in so many ways, that this is not yet the time to do so. I want so much to turn back that particular clock, but I know how much work, reading, and commitment is needed and I am not yet ready. Perhaps, like the Flowers of Scotland, those days are past now and in the past they must remain. We’ll see. I checked my DQ notes last night … they are all there, ready and waiting … and I can set out on that adventure anytime … alas, through the mists of time, I can hear those bagpipes playing Will ye no come back again? I will, my friends, but not just yet.

Writing New Texts is fun. This is a new text and it is helping me to focus on what I want and do not want to do. There is always room here for new texts. But new texts need revisiting and revising. Maybe some of my creative texts just aren’t ready for publication yet and yes, online writing is a form of publication. Thankfully I can revise these texts, and I may yet revise this one; indeed, I will probably come back both to this text and to these decisions. And maybe I won’t and that’s another decision for another day.

Preparing Books for Publication is where I am right now in my offline life and I think this is where I want to be online as well. I have two texts in preparation: Bistro (Flash Fiction) and Echoes of an Impromptu Metaphysics (poetry). I have thus far shared 17 pieces from Bistro on this blog. There are another 17 to go. Each time I prepare a piece of Flash Fiction for publication here, I re-read it, re-think, re-frame it, re-structure it, and re-write it. Those of you who know me offline are well aware of the nature of that re-processing. Sometimes the pieces are merely sharpened and polished; often they are totally re-written. And yes, when flaws are pointed out or doubts expressed, the texts are changed. I deeply value the comments of my below the line commentators. Echoes is the other text I need to re-write. I will share that online as well. The sharing will be difficult … Echoes is a difficult and very personal text … but it will be done.

Decisions have been taken and my thought process has been shared. There will be no turning back of the clock even though I am always looking over my shoulder. Here, then, are my decisions, but remember, they are always open to revision.

I will re-publish on this blog Though Lovers Be Lost, one of my favorite poetry books. I will do this as and when necessary if I need more time between blogs with my re-writing.
I will finish publishing the other stories from Bistro online on this blog as I prepare it for offline publication.
I will start the re-write of Echoes online. I have been away from this book for about eight months now and re-reading it earlier today I saw how and where it could be improved.
I will add in literary and philosophical commentaries when and where I see the need to do so. I consider this particular article to be a literary commentary with philosophical connotations, or is it the other way round? As an academic, I could prepare a treatise on the question; as a blogger, I can leave that question in the capable minds of those who read and follow this blog.
Vale!
Et vade mecum!

Obsidian’s Edge 29

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

5:00 AM

… bright flowers of penance purchased for a pittance finger knitted spider webs of silence spun into wrinkles between stars and evensong while an old film shadow boxes black and white photographs and a rowing boat lurches over the waves as if a soggy brown cardboard box had dropped down on a moonbeam to pluck the mote from a one-eyed jack-in-the-truck who surveyed his road map for the dead days lying in ambush next to the sudden bonfire that flared on Guy Fawkes night and ignited the world like a Jacky-jumper vaulting a Roman Candle as Catherine spun on her wheel and a sky full of stars wheeled round the North Pole and slid down the Big Dipper’s handle to launch a long white scar of lightning that scared night’s velvet mask and plucked a diamond feather from the peacock’s tail as it strutted through the garden of bifurcating paths where Borges left his summer footprints at low tide in the sandy grief of the autumn leaf that the red fox dripped and dropped as he fled in vain like blood sizzles drizzling from an open vein and observe I say the play of light as it glistens on the voices of young children reaching to pluck the church bells as if they were ripe fruit dangling before us in our dreams and the world is a handkerchief so small it is and now not so clean and so we dream these dreams and pluck this unripe apple from the eternal branch where it lay hidden kicking and struggling up like the float that bobbled then sank through deep water and memory bent itself into two like that fragile reed dead in the water lying as straight as a bowing string at a crazy angle at the pillows edge where mouths flap open as shadows walk and talk and we slide back into sleep’s dark waters where there are no dreams and nothing from those dark depths is ever recalled …

6:00 AM

a clicking of claws
needles knitting outwards
towards dawn’s guillotine

the alarm clock shuffles
its pack of sleeping hours

the church bell
lurches into action

IMG_0140 2.JPG

We have come full circle and the sequence of rewrites that I have dedicated to At the Edge of Obsidian / Obsidian’s Edge ends here, with the start of a new day in Oaxaca that will be very similar to the old day that has just passed us by. For those of you who wish to read the full sequence, in its correct order, it will appear (some time soon) under Obsidian’s Edge at the top of this page.

I would like to thank all those readers who have accompanied me on this journey. In addition, I would like to thank all of you who lent your voices to this sequence either below the line with your comments or, and I refer specifically to those who are close enough to know me in the flesh and blood of real life, with your verbal comments and telephone conversations.

I hope this will be the first of many journeys that we make together. My best wishes go out to you. I trust you will consider joining me in my next verbal adventure on this blog.

Obsidian’s Edge 27

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.
Francisco de Goya.

3:00 AM

… often the imprisoned heart pinned like a butterfly and chloroformed into silence like a resurgent Guy Fawkes sitting on his bonfire and waiting for the universe to roll its coloured dice a captive and that heart singing as the dark rum of freedom bites into its jackdaw dreams of bright silver rings married to a bird’s leg and the round open eye of a cat staring at a Queen of Hearts as champagne bubbles burst in the mouth and dash on the tongue as they wash against the tooth’s white rock as it waltzes with the white caps that crest into broken ghosts who shuffle in and out like a pack of cards filled with knaves and the joker is belled with a red fool’s cap and a bladder on a stick as a tom cat’s tom fool grin melts in the mirror when the moon’s face skids and bounces off a snow bank where tranquil midnight mysteries trap trembling worlds in hand-blown glass bubble dreams that distort all distances clasped beneath clutching fingers while the crystal raindrops serve as an eye to behold the crimson glory of the hibiscus with its blood red stains where the baby fell from the rocking horse and confessed to a crime it never committed though speckled like a fresh trout it was drawn from deep water and blamed for the rainbow fire that flickered flames to the harsh crisp sound of the candle licking at its waxen jail where flower faces float framed against the white-washed wall as the wide-open staring eyes of the snowy owl speckle a yellow madness and its feathers are nails to be fired into a pottery tree in this harsh somniferous light that breathes fear and fire into shavings of dry bark and a beaver gnaws at the roots of the world as an accusatory beak points at the funneling snow and puffed up feathers plump out a body so thin it is unfit to fight these flames of ice or withstand these snow stones cast by blameless flint-eyed innocents who have never themselves done anything wrong though they spark at the trough with one eye clouded by a spider web of hate and the other a sharp sun peering through clouds condemned like a donkey to walk round and round crushing the heart out of the maguey in an interior world of dust and stone where the mote in another person’s eye is larger than the beam in one’s own and slant-eyed dogs eat dust and shadows of dust as they prowl through the courtyard and bark at the full moon blazing above this world that is sacrificed to a madwoman’s madness and an ancient flesh-devouring god who lives in a nearby volcano and is stoned all day on tequila and mescal …

Peace: Flash Fiction

Peace
Bistro 17

His cold hand squeezes a broken razor blade between index finger and thumb. His fingers remember how the blade slips along the grain of the balsa wood to carve the ligament and bone that builds the airplane. Using the same technique his fingers invent new ways to test his wrist’s pale flesh. Pins and needles dance their electric shock along a cold cut of sliced skin. A red rivulet seeps to the surface. Lips pinch. Teeth clench. The blade sinks deeper. An icy fire: the cold that burns, the heat that freezes, fire on the flood, and the red blood spurts.

… fear in the gut … an animal urge to surge to and fro and run … feet trapped in mud… dragging through deep sand … crabs’ claws clinging and drawing back … somewhere in his mind’s attic in the scramble of flotsam lining the beach a grey rat scavenges … dry bones … blunt snouts snuff the candle that once brought him a glowworm of hope …

Cold sweat flows, thickens, then dries. A voice inside his head cries out to the emergency numbers on his frozen cell phone but his fingers no longer respond to his mind’s dark urgings. Is this the beginning of the end? Is it the beginning of a world without pain, amen? A century of centuries flash through what’s left of his mind in a single second.

Eternity: that long, dark, endless, winter night — no stars, no sun, no moon, no spark, no hope, just this eternal cold that holds all motion suspended.

Somewhere, within his rib-cage, his heart is a caged animal raging against the white-bone bars. It sees. It senses. It smells the fear that falls to his feet and flows out from his armpits. Nostrils flare and stiffen in a bestial desire that flesh holds for fresh torn flesh. A black velvet band binds eyes, ties hands at the wrists, and pulls itself tighter and closer across his chest. His heart, a stone now, cast into an icy pond. As it descends it bumps into the bodies of vestigial memories that have been here before.

Somewhere in this Arctic night white pads shuffle as sleek feet move across the snow. The polar bear’s snuffle is a whimper of hope that his end will come swiftly in the bright light of midnight descending, all red in tooth and claw. The nightmare draws closer, ever closer with an acquiescent shuffling of feet. Face to face, present and past are ambulant tenses that foretell no conditional. He has no future, let alone a future perfect. A dislocation of infinitives stretches into an intangible infinity.

Lips move and promise an end to heat and cold. Here, they say, is darkness without memory; here is sleep bereft alike of nightmare and dream; here is oblivion; here is the cessation of strife and struggle; here is peace.

Writing: To Task or Multi-Task?

Writing: Task or Multi-Task?

“To task or multi-task? That is the question.”

In the lonely world of creative writing, be it in poetry or in prose, is it better to continue with one text until the task of writing it is thoroughly finished? Or should we flit from text to text, developing several at once and thus multi-tasking in the best sense of the word? This is a key question in the revision process and relates directly to the concepts of write, re-write, revision, revisionism, and the creative process, all of which have been mentioned both in this blog and in the comments to this blog. However, there is no single answer to this seemingly either / or question as many factors must be considered.

Deadlines:

Anyone who has worked with strict deadlines knows that they matter more than anything else. “I want this work on my desk by 4:00 pm today,” says the manager rubbing the magic bottle in which the genie is kept. “Yes, ma’am,” says the genie bowing before vanishing back into his bottle. Only one thing matters, the task in hand, and there can be no multi-tasking.

Novellas and Novels:

With longer texts, while there might be room for manoeuver, provided no deadline is in sight, it is better by far to focus on the task in hand — the extended narrative — and to dedicate all tasking and multi-tasking to that prime task. The majority of writers who have written on the art of writing, including Stephen King, Graham Green, and E. M. Forster, emphasize the necessity of sticking at it, maintaining focus, and getting on with the task. Graham Green’s recommended approach is to write four to five pages a day, re-reading them and revising them the next day, before writing another four pages. That way the events, the action, the characters, are kept well in mind. In addition, Joan Clark and Norman Levine, in their workshops, advise writers to get to know their characters intimately, to think about them, and to write and rewrite until they come living from the page. Anyone who has taken a longish break and then returned to the writing of a novel knows just how difficult it is to get back into the mind of those characters. With an extended narrative, a dialog abandoned is a dialog lost. And one must learn to listen to one’s characters and to never forget what they have said, mustn’t one?.

Poems, Prose Poems, and Flash Fiction:

This is where multi-tasking can truly take place. The brevity of these pieces, and I classify epic and extended poetry with narrative rather than with poetry, allows the writer time to pick the pieces up and put them down again, to play around, to abandon the text and to return to it later. Being shorter pieces by definition, one can re-read them with ease, correct them at leisure, and research around them with impunity. In an extended narrative, or when writing to a deadline, focus is necessary. With shorter pieces, easily recalled, procrastination is a pleasure, not a crime. With poetry, focus is sharper but for shorter periods.

From Poem to Poetry Book:

As the poems accumulate and the writing, or rather the putting together, of the collection becomes more important, so the need to concentrate and single-task, rather than to procrastinate and multi-task becomes paramount.

These are my initial thoughts on Task or Multi-Task. What happens when we apply them in real life to real questions?

On Revision (Chuck):

Will this exercise (revision of older texts) provide you more gratification than starting new ones that may or may not be so important to you?

The question of revision is key. While I would like to avoid revisionism (Al: There is value in showing poetry as a snapshot in time (if only to avoid endless revisionism), the question of how to revise a text is of maximum importance. The text to be revised may be old or it may be recent, but the act of revision — how and why and what to revise — is one that must concern us as writers if we are to eschew automatic writing in a search for le mot et la phrase justes. If I can learn from the revision of older texts what I need to look for in order to revise newer texts, then my search for a way in which to recognize and achieve better form of writing can be justified, for the techniques discovered can surely be applied to future texts as well as to past ones.

The young Roger who was once you is no more (Kevin):

This is a beautiful thought: thank you, Kevin. Much of that earlier writing must stand as it is (and was) as a monument to what and who I was back then. However, some thoughts and phrasings may well be weak and need revision. The recognition of weakness and the realization of how to strengthen and how to renew is surely a part of our ongoing growing writing process. That is what I would argue, anyway. I would argue further that revision is NOT multi-tasking, but is single-tasking in the sense that I, as reviser, am teaching myself how to revise: an ongoing process in the act of creativity.

Conclusion:

In my current situation, I have five creative works (Echoes …, Waiting, Bistro, Stars … , People … ) lying fallow and waiting for their final touches. As I look back on what I have previously written and how I have written it, I am, in my opinion, multi-tasking. That is to say, I am working with many texts rather than concentrating on a single text. However, at the same time, I am working hard on a single task: that of teaching myself, once again, how to revise and how to rewrite. Hopefully I will put a little, objective distance between my current self and my recent texts. Then, when I return to them, I will be able to take them, one at a time, and revise them properly. That is my hope and my intention.

To task or to multi-task … writing or re-writing … each has its place in the creative process. To conclude: I thank all of you who contributed to this conversation (mentioned or not!), and I wish you joy in your (re-)creativity.

Selecting a Selected

Last Year in Paradise, my first book of poetry, was published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books (Fredericton, NB) in 1977. I am once more re-reading Last Year in Paradise in search of some early poems to include in the Selected Poems that I am putting together.

As I leaf through the pages, the words of T. S. Eliot come to my mind: “every attempt / is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure / because one has only learned to get the better of words / for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / one is no longer disposed to say it.”

So: how do I select from poems that no longer say what I want them to say or that are expressed in a way that I am no longer disposed to use? I keep struggling with these ideas. Are my selections signposts along the way of my poetic development? Do they say ‘this is what I was, where I came from’? Or should I re-write, revise, and bring thoughts and poems up to date to fit in with my current way of thinking and expressing?

The first poem in the book illustrates this quandary in metaphoric fashion.

Renovating

The carpenter swings
His bell-faced claw hammer
The closet’s gyproc sides
Tremble
Shiver into dust

Each splintered layer
Reveals
The closet’s secret skeleton

Memories
Spill out flood in
Shake grinning skulls
Like jacks of this box-room

Released from sloughed skins
We stand knee-deep
In a debris of recollections

As I re-read this poem, the scene comes back to me in vivid detail. An old closet cluttered the small room downstairs in our first house, an old army home. We needed more floor space, not another small room. As we tore the closet down, different layers of wall-paper showed up and we found ourselves knee-deep in memories of other times, other places, other renovations.

As I re-read, I also remember working with my first editor, Fred Cogswell. I recall the typed manuscripts going in to his office and the pencilled suggestions and corrections coming back out. What I no longer remember is how much of this poem was actually mine and how much was his. Re-reading it, I find I have no desire to re-write it, to resurrect those memories that the poem preserves. But I do feel an urgent need to trim the poem, to weed it as if it were a flower-bed. I notice repetitions, a doubling of statements, an excess of adjectives … I would like to suggest more with less words. The poem needs minor readjustments. As I rethink, I come up with the following.

Renovating

The carpenter swings
his hammer
The closet’s gyproc sides
shiver into dust

Each splintered layer
reveals the closet’s
secret skeleton

Memories spill out
shake grinning skulls
jacks in this box-room

Released from sloughed skins
we stand knee-deep
in a debris of recollections

I find this sharper, less cluttered, and perhaps a good poem with which to begin my Selected Poems. I need a title for the Selection and will share some thoughts on that later. A Debris of Recollections springs to mind as a first possibility, but there are many other possibilities. In the meantime, I will begin a new journey on this blog and along the way I will read, re-read, commentate, and occasionally re-write the poems that I select.

I invite you to accompany me on this journey. I look forward to any conversations we may start and any comments you may care to make along the way.

My Top Ten Books

My Top Ten Books

For Tanya Cliff
https://postprodigal.com/2016/07/14/top-ten-books-that-changed-my-life/

It sounds so easy, doesn’t it, to choose your ten favorite books? But really: it isn’t.

Clare’s great aunt made the best sponge cakes and rock cakes I have ever tasted. Her formula? Not weights and measures but a simple scale: the egg on one side, the flour on the other — and balance them.

How do I weigh a book?

I think in terms of authors rather than their individual books. For example, on one side of the scale place Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire and on the other, his Petits Poèmes en Prose. Literary and cultural history would opt for Les Fleurs du Mal, and quite rightly so. My own personal preference, and I love them both, is for Petits Poèmes en Prose. De gustibus non est disputando / there is no arguing over taste. My choice is for Baudelaire, the author, rather than for one of his works, selected above the other.

If I apply this theory to other authors, what happens to, for example, William Shakespeare? Must I choose MacBeth over Henry the Fifth, King Lear over Julius Caesar or A Midsummer Night’s Dream over The Merchant of Venice? And what if I refuse to do so? I would much rather choose Shakespeare over any of his plays, the Complete Works, including the sonnets, over any single play. And why shouldn’t I?

By extension, should I choose Shakespeare over Lope de Vega? Corneille over Molière? Racine over Calderón de la Barca? Mira de Amescua over Jean Anouilh? Bernard Shaw over Samuel Becket or Beaumarchais or Ionesco? And look at how Euro-centric (English, French, and Spanish) I am, especially when I am not familiar with the great playwrights of other Western nations: the Russians, the Norwegians, the Germans … and yet they are all Europeans. Are there no other literary nations in the world? Of course there are, but I am not that familiar with their literature and culture, and there is only so much a reader can read in its original form.

So, blessed and privileged as I admit I am, I can read books in English, French, and Spanish … lucky for me. However, I admit to difficulties with books written in Portuguese, Italian, German, Catalan, and Galician. As for Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Arabic … I can only offer my apologies, but for me, these are closed books and I can only reach them in the translations, however good, however bad, that are placed before me. This is true too of the Pre-Columbian Mexican codices, the Zouche-Nuttall, the Vindobonensis et. al. These are also books and they outline the peoples and cultures of Mexico as they were before the arrival and conquest orchestrated by Cortés. And let us not forget Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the man who, in later life, wrote the true history of Cortés’s conquest. And speaking of conquests, how about Julius Caesar’s Bellum gallicum, his personal account, in the third person, of his conquest of Gaul? As a school boy, long ago, I struggled through it in Latin, but I enjoyed it later, in translation.

Translation: traductor / traidor, according to Cervantes, who was undoubtedly following someone else, means translation / betrayal … or does it? Translation: the reverse side of a tapestry (also Cervantes) from which we may through a glass, darkly, glimpse only shape and shadow while stumbling over all those knotted threads … so here’s another question: why would we choose a translation, with all its flaws, over a work we can read and enjoy and hopefully understand in the original?

So far, I have mentioned mainly playwrights; Cervantes was a playwright and wrote a goodly number of plays (Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses). I should also mention novelists. Charles Dickens, for example; or Honoré de Balzac or Gustave Flaubert or Marcel Proust or Pío Baroja or Benito Pérez Galdós or Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes or William Faulkner or Kurt Vonnegut or William Golding or Chuck Bowie or John Sutherland or Kevin Stephens … not to mention Charlotte Bronte … Emily Bronte … Jane Austen … Virginia Woolf … Should I then choose just ten novelists and forget the world’s playwrights? And how can I choose just one book from a single novelist’s vast production, think Trollope, think Balzac?

What about poetry? My ten favorite poems? My ten favorite books of poetry? My ten favorite poets? Perhaps the latter is more achievable. If that is so, I must then choose between Quevedo … Góngora … Antonio Machado … Juan Ramón Jiménez … José Hierro … Wilfred Owen … Dylan Thomas … Gerard Manley Hopkins … Baudelaire … Verlaine … Rimbaud … Prévert … R. S. Thomas … Federico García Lorca … Miguel Hernández … T. S. Eliot … Seamus Heaney … Pedro Salinas … José María Valverde … and how do I choose between the writers I know and love … Patrick Lane … Richard Lemm … Fred Cogswell … Norman Levine … Donna Morrissey … Susan Musgrave … Joan Clark … Erin Mouré … and the ones I work with on a regular basis … Jane Tims … Kathy Mac … Shari Andrews … Michael Pacey … allison Calvern … Ian LeTourneau … Judy Wearing … Rachelle Smith … Cheryl Archer … Judith Mackay … Julie Gordon … ten poets … ten books … ten poems … ten fingers … ten toes … ten commandments … only ten?

Hold on a second: I have forgotten St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz, one of the western world’s great mystics. I must also mention St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the catholic church, and Fray Luis de León, and now I am about to enter a great cloud of unknowing in which mystics, some named, some unnamed, have blessed us with their life thoughts and works.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold … and I have also forgotten W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and I have failed to remember the Poema de Mío Cid and the anonymous epic poems and ballads of the European middle ages, some of which are so deliciously delightful. Alas, I will be forced to abandon so many of my teachers and my friends … ten books, ten speeches, ten lectures, ten words … my life in literature reduced to ten teaspoons of instant coffee, instant tea, instant knowledge.

“My friends, we will not go again
nor ape an ancient rage;
nor let the folly of our youth
become the shame of age.”

Oh yes, that’s G. K. Chesterton. I had forgotten him. When asked what book he would take with him to read in exile on a desert island, he replied: “Green’s Practical Manual of Ship Building and Ship Sailing.” Now that’s a book that should be in everybody’s top ten, especially with the seas rising and disaster lurking round every corner of the suspicious, weather-warmed mind.

However, as I look back on my reading life, believe it or not, some books do stand out. When I entered graduate school and realized the enormous amount of reading that was being thrust upon me, I took a speed reading course. Over the ten weeks of that course my reading speed rose sharply from about 200 words a minute to 800 words a minute. Without that one book, I would have been unable to read so many of the others. Where is it now? It is not on my shelves: ah yes, I gave it to my daughter when she went to law school.

The second special book is the Spanish text book that, in regularly updated versions, I relied on for teaching basic Spanish grammar throughout my academic career in Canada. Without that textbook and the employment it ensured me, I would not have been able to put my family’s bread on the table. I guess you might call it influential. Perhaps the third special book is my own doctoral thesis: that allowed me to gain academic employment and is so very, very special to me, but for all the wrong reasons.

Ladies and Gentlemen and Fellow Bloggers, here I am, marooned in Island View, with not an island in sight, and no reason, as yet, to build a librarian’s arc. I will now replace my selected books and authors back on the shelves from which, one by one, I have taken them down, dusted them off, and glanced through the pages. I admit my inadequacy. I cannot for the life of me choose ten books, let alone ten authors. I lay down my pen. I remove my fingers from the keyboard. I abandon my task. Soon I will leave the room with one of my favorite books in my hand. Will it be Jane Tims’s Within Easy Reach or Chuck Bowie’s Steal it all or John Sutherland’s master work, The Two-Shot Compendium. I think I’ll go with Two-Shot and re-read the first story, Two-Shots Lands in Trouble, as I sip my mid-morning coffee. Meanwhile, I will leave you with this thought from Guillaume Apollinaire.

Je voudrais dans ma maison
une femme ayant sa raison,
un chat passant parmi les livres,
et des amis en toute saison,
sans lesquels je ne peux pas vivre.

Miracle: Flash Fiction.

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Miracle
Bistro 15

A tiny man in a dark brown robe bustled into the library.

“Brother Marcos: come quick. There’s a miracle. We’re witnessing a miracle.”

Brother Marcos raised his eyebrows and Robin looked horrified. Will didn’t know what to think.

“A miracle?” Brother Marcos asked. “What kind of miracle?”

“There are angels and visions. Oh, I can’t explain. It’s happening now. You must come and see. Oh, you must come and see.”

The tiny man scampered out of the library door and Robin and Will followed him.

“Ship of fools,” said Robin to nobody in particular. “We’re all sailing in a ship of fools.”

“Wait and see,” said Brother Marcos. “We must not pass judgment. Wait and see.”

The man in the brown robe led them to the main altar at the heart of the monastery where the lignum crucis stood on display.

A group of tourists clustered around a man on his knees in front of the true cross. A ray of sunlight pierced the stained glass window and picked out the kneeling figure whose arms spread out like an angel’s wings as he knelt there motionless.

It was LJ. His eyes were open and his chest hardly moved. Fragments of colored light from the stained glass window flowed over and around him and at times they gave the impression of flowing through him too. They gifted him with what, in the shifting light of the sun’s ray, seemed to be a halo round his head. Golden specks of dust sparkled in the sun’s bright rays and danced like little angels in the air.

Brother Marcos drew in a deep breath, knelt, and made the sign of the cross.

“Little angels, ascending and descending,” he mused out loud. “How many, I wonder, could dance on the head of a pin?”

“It would depend on the size of the pin,” said Robin. He pushed past the staring crowd. Some were on their knees, their rosary beads clacking through their fingers. Others stood and looked on in wonder at the light descending. Others crossed themselves and looked towards the altar where the lignum crucis was displayed, the time-blackened nail hole exposed in all its glory.

“Come along, now, LJ,” said Robin, touching him on the arm. “That’s enough of that. Get up off your knees now. We’re going.”

There was a low mumble of disapproval from the absorbed spectators.

“Don’t touch him,” said one.

“It’s a miracle,” said another.

“Noli me tangere.” The voice, a deep voice, not at all the voice of LJ, rose seemingly from the kneeling man’s mouth.

The crowd sighed. Some drew closer, in seeming awe. Others drew back in fear.

“I didn’t know LJ spoke Latin,” Will said.

“He doesn’t,” Robin shook his head. “But he could have learned those words at any time while he was in school. Even I know them. It’s a neat trick with the voice, though.”

“It’s no trick,” Brother Marcos crossed himself. “We have witnessed other miracles in this very place, though none quite like this.”

“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” The voice spoke again. And immediately the crowd responded and with the exception of Robin and William those still standing dropped to their knees and joined in the prayers. More rosaries appeared.

“Let the night’s stone be rolled away. Let sunshine pierce the shadows. LJ, my son, pick up thy cross and follow me.”

Two things happened almost at once. First, the sunray that illuminated the scene flickered and vanished and then LJ toppled over and lay on his side.

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