Tag: ovid

redux: “I wish to be with you in any way I can.” — Ovid, Tristia 5 79-80

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Two things: Autumn means (in part) the return of the coho here on the north end of the Sechelt Peninsula. And today I am feeling gratitude that the health issue of 2016 didn’t end up being what my specialist thought it was. Another thing: apparently the Google ad that pops up on my site is a scam so don’t click it. (WordPress says to click the report button and they’ll investigate…)

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On the weekend, friends came to dinner and after we’d eaten, just as they were preparing to leave, one friend asked me if I believed in an afterlife, a consciousness after this one. The way he looked at me, I knew that he knew what my answer would be. Not that I have a clear answer or a sense of an afterlife that corresponds with the Christian one I was raised to believe in — though I found myself quite firmly rejecting that Christian belief system when I was ten and spent an afternoon looking at photographs of the liberation of Belsen. I remember asking my parents how a just god could allow such things to happen — the Shoah as well as other events in human history — and they were at a loss to answer. And I knew that the god I had been raised to believe in didn’t — or couldn’t possibly — exist. (Not as I was taught he existed. And in those years, it was clear that god was male.) Because my friend is a poet as well as a commercial fisherman, I knew that he would understand me if I used the language of metaphor and the cycles of nature to try to explain what I thought happened after we die. Every year, about this time, we go to the salmon-bearing creek near us to watch the coho salmon excavate their redds and lay their eggs. They have come so far to do this and they find the creek — a small one, emptying into a long lake eventually draining into the ocean — they were born in. After the females have laid their eggs and the males have fertilized those eggs, the salmon die and eagles, coyotes, bears, wolves, and other animals feed on what’s left of the bodies. To see the live bodies hover in the water where generations of fish have undulated, expelled eggs or milt, died, and then emerged from the gravel to develop into an organism capable of swimming as far as Alaska, only to return again,purposefully and deliberately, is to think of life as everlasting. Not necessarily our own but what outlives us is part of us. We’re part of what goes forever. We’ve done our best to both damage these cycles (I’d like to think we haven’t done it willfully but that’s perhaps generous) and to ensure their vitality and endurance.

This is not a post about religion or dogma. It’s about how we live and how we accommodate death and rebirth. I’m just home from yet another test to determine how long I will continue on the earth in this state — sentient, lively, alert; and the news today was reasonably good — and when I open a file of the work I am currently revising, I see that my own preoccupations have been with consciousness and what it means for some time now. My whole life. And the lives that came before me and those that will continue after me. Fish, faithful dogs, beloved family members, the tiny remnants of birds who’ve hit the windows, friends who departed in joy or in pain…I told my friend I believed in ghosts and that I saw them regularly. I do. And I’m grateful for that.

(from “West of the 4th Meridian: A Libretto for Migrating Voices” (Euclid’s Orchard, 2017)

“I wish to be with you in any way I can.” — Ovid, Tristia 5 79-80

On my desk, folders and envelopes of papers, some of them in pieces – the remains of my grandmother’s life in Alberta, before she met my grandfather and after. She married him in 1920, a widow with 8 children and another buried in the cemetery where her first husband and her younger brother are also buried. It’s a sad process, in a way. I think of them in their bleak house in Drumheller with its legacy of death and illness — the Spanish flu, diphtheria. The graves in the nearby cemetery, the marked ones and the unmarked. In the photographs I’ve been studying, there are blurry moments when I suspect I’m seeing ghosts. A hat on a chair. A dog watching an empty road, as though in anticipation. But those ghosts are also my ghosts so it’s work I need to do. My grandmother is in my hands, my body, the way I peg sheets to the line on a summer morning, or chop garlic for my own version of česnečka. I am the mother of sons and a daughter who are her great-grandchildren, though they only know her through a couple of photographs, some stories, a long folk-song of food they hear when I sing her praises: her soup, her striky, her rich perogies, cabbage rolls tender as butter.

 

 

winter jasmine, crocus, the first circle of hell

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Like so many others, I find January a long month. A dark month. And although we are not in the middle of the polar vortex that is creating such frigid temperatures in other parts of the continent, it’s cold here. In the mornings I put on two or three layers and drink my coffee close to the fire.

But then there’s a morning when it’s somehow lighter. I woke at 5 a.m. on Monday and the sky was dense with stars against the deepest indigo. I thought, oh, that would make a beautiful quilt and then I realized I’d made several inspired by winter skies. In my book Phantom Limb, there’s an essay called “An Autobiography of Stars” in which I detail the making of a quilt for my daughter Angelica, set against a meditation on astronomy and the Leonid showers.

On each bed, a patchwork, for warmth and for safe passage through the night. In the sky we might fashion a parallel life, a world mirroring the topography of our own lives, irregular and beautiful, geometry in service to love. Sewing stars for my daughter to sleep under, I am fashioning a metaphor for my love of her and a belief in her luminosity, a parable of meteors and radiance and grace.

I have no photograph of that quilt to share but it was silvery stars—Variable Star blocks—on a ground of deep purple and blue. And I’m pretty sure I was making it in winter.

So a morning when it’s lighter, when you walk across the patio and realize that the winter jasmine has begun to bloom, single yellow stars in a thicket of branches:

winterjasmine

A morning when you are looking forward to reading more of Dante’s Inferno by the fire. Last night we read the 4th Canto, the long beautiful lines taking us into the first circle of hell with Dante and Virgil. And in that place too is a bright fire with poets gathered—Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid. More company appears, every poet or philosopher or mathematician important to Dante. In the poem’s notes, written by Robert Pinsky’s daughter Nicole, she calls this “an abundant, almost ecstatic identifying list.” Dante and Virgil spend some time with them and then

         …my wise guide leads me away from that quiet
Another way—again I see air tremble,

And come to a part that has no light inside it.

Tonight we’ll go there, into the second circle. But even in that darkness, there will be beauty. I remembered in 2013, in the aftermath of having to take the vegetable garden apart for a septic field repair and then rebuilding it again, digging in a new border and finding, underground, unexpected beauty. When I’d dug up all the plants and trees a few months earlier, I thought I’d also lifted all the bulbs to set aside and replant again. But there, in the dark, an incandescent clump of crocus.

underworld

 

a year later

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what's new

This morning, because it’s cooler and I don’t have to rush out to water everything that droops, shrivels, or turns brown overnight, I was looking at posts from this time last year. In a way, my blog is my journal. Between it and my datebook, I am able to keep track of what happened when. On this day last year, my publisher Mona Fertig sent me two photographs of the advance proof copy of Euclid’s Orchard. I wrote about that here. As I’ve said before, it was a book I hadn’t expected to write. Or at least I hadn’t expected it to come together quite so quickly. I’m very glad it did. I’m very glad the reasons I wrote most of it—facing a potentially devastating health issue—have resolved themselves. The year leading up to Euclid’s Orchard‘s publication was filled with appointments and tests and the year leading away from it had some of those but also the relief that comes with knowing that the thing I dreaded was almost certainly not going to happen. At least not yet.

reading copy

It was a good year, this past one. My book took me to various places for readings and festivals. People wrote reviews and letters with such generosity. My book took me to the B.C. Book Prizes Gala because of its place on the Hubert Evans Award shortlist and that was fun. Some of the writing has led me to new work and for that I’m grateful. This is one of the best things about the essay form: it can be truly open-ended and you don’t have to think of it as “finished”.  It turns out “West of the 4th Meridian: A Libretto for Migrating Voices” was only the beginning of the stories I was listening to in the night as I came down to my desk to work during those weeks of waiting to learn if I had metastatic lung cancer. I’d sit in the dark with only the glow of my laptop light and the tiny desk lamp to one side and feel the presence of my father’s family around me. There is no logical way to explain this and I won’t but it was a source of comfort and now that I know a little more about them, I want to  explore their lives. In “West of the 4th Meridian”, there’s a line from Ovid’s Tristia, the letters he wrote in exile in Tomis: “I wish to be with you in any way possible.” To this end, I’m reading books about the Holodomor, about the politics of early 20th c. Ukraine, about the waves of emigrants who came to North America any way that they could. I want to find out who this woman was, the tiny image that was part of my grandfather’s archive. She is somehow familiar.

single woman

Time and the essay are related, I think. Spacious and widening, circling back on themselves when necessary, asking questions, pausing to listen to music, to take the air, remembering to keep the mind and the heart open to chance, to love, to the complexities of what a sentence can hold and also to what it can let go.

in any way possible

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new dawn

This morning I was up early, just before 5, to work on the corrections of Euclid’s Orchard. Before I got out of bed, I heard the dawn chorus begin, the sound coming in the window as it does every year. I wrote about this in my essay “Love Song”, included in The Summer Book, which had one of its launches yesterday at the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver, an event I’d loved to have participated in but we’re leaving tomorrow morning for 10 days in Ottawa so I couldn’t get away so soon before our departure.

On an early summer morning, I wake to the sound of Swainson’s thrushes. Beyond my bedroom window, beyond the house, they sing where the woods begin. And there are robins, vireos, the long whistle of a varied thrush. My curtains are rough white linen and they filter light, the light at dawn, coming from the east, pink and golden as the sun finds its way over Mount Hallowell. My husband sleeps closest to the window and he pulls the curtains aside to let in more song. There is honeysuckle blooming, and dog roses, trumpet vines. Hummingbirds bury themselves in the flowers. The pink throats of the tree frogs inflate, a loud vibrato close enough to touch.

This morning I listened and then came downstairs to work at the dining table (my desk is too cluttered…), reading and correcting, and stopping now and then to think about how an essay began or to wonder if others would remember a particular event the way I do. I confess to a little trepidation about this book. It’s very personal. But when I wrote at least three of the essays, I was in a strange place; I was living between worlds, between the living and the dead. I know that sounds dramatic but it felt very much that way in the fall as I waited for the results of tests and scans, all undertaken because of the suspicious nature of some nodules in my lungs. For a time, it was thought that they might be metastases, which meant that every effort had to be made to determine either the location of primary cancer or to rule it out. I am grateful that the results were so good and that I am actually very healthy (I always took my robust health for granted) and in a profound way I am grateful also for the time I spent in the company of ghosts. I learned things. I finished things. My daughter Angelica translated a line from Ovid’s Tristia for me to use as an epigraph for one section in the essay “West of the 4th Meridian: A Libretto for Migrating Voices”:  I wish to be with you in any way possible. When I was writing the essay, I didn’t know what might be possible. I only knew I didn’t want to waste time. And this morning, getting up from the table to make coffee, I looked out to see the New Dawns cascading over a beam on the patio.  A warbler paused for a moment on the little hanging birdbath by the kitchen window. In any way possible…

“bright in the fertile fields”

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look up.JPG

It’s come. more or less on schedule. When I went out this morning, I heard the first varied thrush of the year, whistling in our woods. Yesterday on our walk along one flank of the mountain,  we saw the first salmonberry blossoms and the orchids (Northwestern twayblades) are up along the trail. Just now I went out into the vegetable garden, thinking to do some work, and realized I need gloves. It’s not warm when the sun goes behind clouds but the light is spring light and there are birds everywhere. Robins hopping on the grass and listening, in the way they do. Chickadees and the single nuthatch that travels with them at the feeder, taking turns, the others waiting in the forsythia. Which is blooming! (Just at the tips of the branches. This is a spray I cut the other day for a dinner party and the buds have relaxed in the warm kitchen.)

 forsythia

One of spring’s truest poets is Ovid. This morning I got out my copy of the Metamorphoses, the Rolf Humphries translation (and I’m sure there are more recent ones but this is one I read as a university student in Peter Smith’s class at UVic in, oh, around 1974), and read the beautiful passage on spring:

Notice the year’s four seasons: they resemble
Our lives. Spring is a nursling, a young child,
Tender and young, and grass shines and buds
Swell with new life, not yet full-grown nor hardy,
But promising much of husbandmen, with blossom
Bright in the fertile fields.

So the garlic, not full-grown, but promising (and it’s Metechi in this bed, a variety from Georgia, by way of Lytton) —

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— and the rhubarb,

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and this little crocus, escaped from a border and happy in the green moss:

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The garden’s guardian, an elk skull found up the mountain a few years ago, was covered in snow three weeks ago but now is ready for work.

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Reading Jack Gilbert while watering the eggplants

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Some mornings are impossibly beautiful, before the heat comes, before the dew on the sweet clover dries. I’ve just come in from beginning the watering and am trying to identify the strange bird call I heard, a long whine, not a towhee, but something like it. I paused by the eggplants on the upper deck and saw how the young fruit are forming under the broad leaves, how the purple flowers are open to the bees which rise from them, heavy with pollen. A new rose, “Night Owl”, is blooming in large winey clusters smelling of cloves. I’ve been thinking of the austere poems of Jack Gilbert, the care with which he addresses the things he loves.

The hand holding him slipped and he fell.

“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said

as they picked him up. “Not the great fires

built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew

fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody

and the symphony. The imperfect dancing

in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

–from “Ovid in Tears”