I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
I’m returning to Bowen Island after a week in Ottawa working and visiting friends and the old haunts we occupied back in 91-94 when we lived there. Some things are the same, like The Manx pub which opened the same week we arrived right at the end of our block. Or good old Octopus Books, now in the Glebe where I bought Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest book The Theory of Water. Of course much in Ottawa has changed since the early 90s, and it is fun to find new places like The Rowan where, among other things, we ate a plate of salt-roasted carrots that had been grilled. It was one of the finest things I have ever tasted.
Being back in Ottawa also brought me to a state of mind that was a little bit slower. We lived there long before smart phones and social media had been invented. I spent many days in Ottawa writing poems, reading journals and lingering over words. I served a short stint as an associate editor of ARC magazine, so I always associate Ottawa with its literary scene.
During this trip, I travelled with the latest issue of Poetry and a couple of poems stand out.
Try. Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa which threw me to the ground.
Or how about this one from Rigoberto Gonzales called The Luna Moth Has No Mouth which is both astonishing and true.
Gonzales, by the way, won the Ruth Lilly Poetry prize and in his reflections on his craft published in the October edition of Poetry, he remembers a line he wrote years ago which someone quoted on Twitter: “what is a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.” That is some lovely.
Jane Siberry last night
There were things I saw last night that I may never see again. The first was the stunning conclusion to the World Series, in which the situation arose at the end of the game where any one pitch would win or lose an entire season. A base hit and the Blue Jays win. A double play and the Dodgers win. I think I awoke in the timeline where the Dodgers won, but it did indeed have the feeling of one of those situations in which a timeline splits into two. Somewhere in a parallel universe, the Blue Jays won and the baseball gods took a shine to this particular Cinderella and granted her an inch or two of leeway, for a ball stuck under a wall, a bounce off an outfielders glove in a collision at the warning track, a zephyr to deflect a line drive an inch or two further away from a third baseman who happened to be in the way, the ever so slightest dip on a pitch that would have sunk a fastball in the strike zone and resulted in a ground out instead of a towering home run.
I have never seen a sporting contest come down to minuscule twists of fate in such strange ways.
When the game was over I took advantage of the extra hour of time change to watch all the post game interviews with the Blue Jays players. All they could talk about was the love they held for one another. Professional athletes don’t always have the broadest emotional vocabulary and you could see every single one of them struggling to find words to describe the depth of relationship they have with their colleagues, and their families and the staff of the organization. They were pleading with the cynical corps of sports reporters to have them truly understand the depth of love that they all experienced. It was a once in a lifetime experience. It was transformational. They didn’t win the World Series, but they can never forget the love – the utter agapé of it all – that flows between them. It is love that transformed them from a last place team to a team that missed their destiny by a whisper. It is love that left them changed as people. It is, I might say, the love that we should all have a chance to experience once in our lives. We are built for it. It does something to us. I’m not shy in saying there is a theology about it.
And that brings me to the second thing that happened to me last night, which I may never see again, and that was going to see Jane Siberry perform live and solo at the Motel Chelsea up in the Gatineau. It is a surprising and lovely little venue, a place of vision, stuck on a side road by an off ramp from the Highway 5 that winds its way from the city of Gatineau across the river from Ottawa up into the Gatineau hills and beyond in the wilderness of southwestern Quebec and the Kitigan Zibi homelands.
Jane Siberry is one of the people I count among the pantheon of psalmists in my life, along with Bruce Cockburn, Dougie McLean, Martyn Joseph and Ani DiFranco. She opens me up and can make me cry at the drop of a hat. Her performance last night was a ceremony of liberation, a woven story where lyrics and images flowed and churned like a river, coming back around in back eddies of meaning and imagery. A consistent tone centre, an entire first half hour played on guitar in a diatonic scale of open E voicings, the words “light” and “love” and “mother” coming back again and again, deepening each time.
I turned to the friends we were with at the end and said “this is a liturgy.”
She finished with “Love is Everything” and if you didn’t know the truth of these lyrics before, then you might have had a chance to witness them in much more stifled words from the mouths of the Blue Jay players in the locker room last night. And so, here they are. Because I hope that everyone who witnessed that journey – who witness the deep journey of being human, in fact – at some point comes to the realization that Jane Siberry and Ernie Clement et. al. have come to. May you live this.
maybe it was to learn how to love
maybe it was to learn how to leave
maybe it was for the games we played
maybe it was to learn how to choose
maybe it was to learn how to lose
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love made sweet and sad the same
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingmaybe it was to learn how to fight
maybe it was for the lesson in pride
maybe it was the cowboys’ ways
maybe it was to learn not to lie
maybe it was to learn how to cry
maybe it was for the love we madelove is everything they said it would be
love did not hold back the reins
but love forgot to make me too blind to see
you’re chickening out aren’t you?
you’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait ’til you make
the whole kingdom come
so I’m leavingfirst he turns to you
then he turns to her
so you try to hurt him back
but it breaks your body down
so you try to love bigger
bigger still
but it… it’s too lateso take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
and know you’ll never be the same
and find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn’t I?
and I gave it big… sometimes
and I gave it in my own sweet time
I’m just leavinglove is everything…
The hairiest road in British Columbia was built by the citizens of the Bella Coola valley back in the 1950s and it isn’t much different today then it was back then. A 1200 meter descent over 18 kilometres on a gravel road with no guardrails and the occasional 1000 meter drop to the creek below. The Tyee has published a terrific oral history of the tricky end of Highway 20. It’s such a story of its time, and even evokes the age old “free enterprise vs. socialist” trope that dominated BC politics for decades before everything became privatized and financialized.
Anyone driving that road needs a pep talk and although I haven’t driven it, I know that almost everyone who has relates contemplating their mortality at least once. Here is a poem by Rosemary Trommer about letting go.
A Little Pep Talk
The swirling ash
doesn’t try
to be become
log again.
The flying leaves
don’t attempt
to return
to the tree.
The girl
can’t untwist
her genome
back into
separate strands.
The flour
in the bread
can’t return
to the sack,
can’t undo
the kneading
of hands.
In all things
lives a memory
of letting go
and the chance
to transform
into what
it can’t know.
What do you say
to that, heart?
Good self,
what do you say
to that?
My memory is not what to used to be. Leaning into my ADHD, and then noticing changes over the years associated with the experience I had last year with COVID (and possibly right at the beginning of the pandemic too). That plus the way I now connect to people, having many important and meaningful conversations on the same screens week after week, with no difference in context to delineate or anchor our insights. But I’m developing some strategies. I rely on automated transcripts to help me remember what we are talking about, and to later recall conversations. I have stopped writing elsewhere on the Web, and focused here, where I own my words and they are gathered in a searchable archive. You won’t find me writing on any social media platforms and only occasionally will I comment elsewhere. Even then I will make a note here too, where I will always have access to it. Aeon today published an essay about recording everything, and on the face of it is seems dystopian, and with respect to the poem I just posted, it seem counter-productive to my own spiritual liberation. But then again, the worst experience for me is to know that I know something but I cannot recall what it is. I go blank and feel empty when I am in a position of needing to be in service. It’s embarrassing and makes me sad. I have no answers, just strategies to try, and I’m doing my best.
You know you’re getting older when you strain a tendon in your little finger whilst holding a bowl. Ouch. My guitar practice will be about more compact chord voicings for the next few days I think.
Sometimes (all the time?) music needs you to be the channel for it, not the filter or the gatekeeper. Cal explors their growth as a musician in a beautiful post this morning. And my friend Luke Concannon, who is as pure a channel for music as I have ever met, has news about a new album, which I can’t WAIT to hear. I just my copy.
Making meetings a channel for good work requires asking the right questions and designing from deeper intent. Mana Shah shares her go to questions, framed through an appreciative inquiry design cycle. Helpful stuff.
A conversation in verse between Dave Pollard and PS Pirro, has me reflecting on Dave’s lines:
The problem — where it all begins, it seems —
is in the desperate need of our sad species
to find patterns, to make everything ‘fit’
into this flimsy model we mistake for reality.
I’m partial to Brian Cox’s idea that Earth could be the only place in the galaxy where meaning is made. I don’t know why, I don’t know what for, and I don’t think we are really equipped to do it well on our own. But it is something that we do, and it enlivens my animal life.
The Canadian National Men’s team set a new standard for themselves, claiming to 26th best in the world after their performances in friendlies last week. That’s the right direction.