(with apologies to Said the Whale)
The sky is filled with high clouds, some white, some grey, some gold as the sun edges behind them toward the west. The wind pushes the water west to east, on the inner arm of an inner arm of an inner arm of a bay of Lake Ontario. Willow trees line the shore, stalks of old celery with less water and more time making them stretch towards the sky, the brown green fuzz of spring buds anointing their furthest limbs. Across the water the birch trees are still bare. The trees on the south shore get the spring light last; their leaves will take a few more weeks to appear. Yesterday was bright blue sky, no clouds, but the wind was stronger from the north. Today is warm and kind, the wind from the west, the sun a little harder to make out.
The dog and I went out to the proper lakeshore at midday, to a provincial park forty minutes away. The wind was calm and the sandflies were out, great swarms of them hanging suspended in the air around me and around him as we walked through the pine scrub towards the shore. If we stopped walking, they would descend – I could feel the pricks as they bit through my jeans and my shirt almost immediately, the dog would jump a bit while they found their way through his fur and sucked the blood from his back. We walked for twenty minutes or so and then I told him we were heading back to the car. I came for a walk, and while I’m glad to sacrifice some of myself to local nature, I had contributed enough blood and plasma for the day. I didn’t envy the cardinal and skylings, even though they probably ate more of the sandflies than what they gave up to them.
Yesterday was sunny and bright and windy and today is high overcast and wan and windy, but today is better somehow. I’m staying with my friends in Prince Edward County; the old banker is recovering from minor surgery but the anaesthesia hangover is more than he would like, and his partner is busy putting things right before she heads south to hike the Appalachian Trail for a few weeks. I made dinner for them on Sunday, lamb two ways with a port reduction, roasted potatoes and leeks, asparagus, salad; tonight I’m making steelhead trout with onions and mushrooms and cream, maple syrup candied carrots, another salad – the vinegarette is always a sharp cut to the rest of the meal. They are lovely, they live in a lovely place, they are lost in their own way just like we all are but the cubed inner arm of the lake and the birds and the acreage allow for reflection, and they are happy to have me here even though most of what I do is read, and write, and reflect myself.
I met the old banker almost ten years ago and he’s no longer an old banker; he’s neither a banker or, for that matter, as old as he was when I met him. His partner helped him shed layer upon layer of varnish that had defined him as a banker, so much scraping and stripping down that the young, beautiful man who had grown up in northern Ontario finally shined through again, happy, new, but a series of unfortunate events has weighed him down. It’s different than when I met him – he’s no longer hidden behind the shellac but instead he’s weighed down by his own unnecessary shame. He built for himself his own woodpile of shame and tries to carry it, despite his friends telling him that he can let it go, despite his partner trying every day to take another log off the pile. I want to tell him to write, to use the clackety-clack of a keyboard or the scritch-scratch of a pen on rough paper to wear down the wood that he’s piled on his back. I’m doing so now, more so than I could do face to face. He’s old school Canadian; direct discussion can be too harsh. But he’ll read this and I think he’ll know what I’m trying to say.
The dog likes to lie down near the hiker, the explorer, as she saws and sands and sews to get her last consignments out before she hits the trail. Their dog – a mildly insane poodle, which is redundant – sits by me and asks every few minutes to be scratched, then bounds outside to investigate nothing perceivable out by the actual woodpile, then comes back and lies down until he asks for a scratch again.
I’ve been reading. I finished the Habermas, unsatisfied with the scope of his work but understanding its importance. I found myself wondering about a social theory that could build upon the starting blocks of a man and a woman navigating their own understanding – I say that as a straight guy, but it’s really about two adults navigating the understanding that can embrace their bodies, their minds, their hearts, and then pierce through and finally try to merge around their thoughts of the divine. It could be friends, it could be lovers, but that dance is really the starting point for how we create. We explore that other in the other and use that understanding to paint on canvas, to write our words on paper, to build with stone and wood and brick. The social construct is enabled first and without any other precedent through a dance, a pas de deux between two individuals. Only then do we have a sense of what it would be to exchange objects, to collaborate on our creations, to even articulate what it is to experience pleasure. We can’t do that on our own – none of it – we require a mirror to first validate that we exist and that what we are straining for in articulation is valid to another. Then we can create – create society, create things, create meaning.
I’ve tripped across lower Upper Canada doing exactly that. It happens between two individuals – not in a collective, first it happens in pairs, it only really happens in pairs – and I think it happens easily for me here because the land and the sky and the water make me feel at ease. I can be myself here like I can be in Alberta or in Maine, and sometimes in places like England or France or even every now and again in Seattle, and I don’t think it’s just me. The people I find in these places have enough of the west wind and the faded afternoon sky and sun and the emerging green grass of spring in them to be able to open up, to be ready for intimacy, and I pair off and find it, and we start that dance that prepares us to find the job or start the hike or have the conversation we need to have with the others, to create.
The explorer said last night as our conversation reached its end that she wants the global village right here. The dog was exploring out in the backyard – he has found a number of dead animals, desiccated skeletons of raccoons and mice that he finds as he wanders and then comes back to, lying in the grass and holding the bones between his front paws as he gnaws at them, tasting the dried streaks of old flesh with his ears up and the wind playing at his fur – and we had finished a long conversation about how beautiful the two of them are. The old banker sometimes forgets his role in that beauty and the night had turned to reminding him of his own loveliness, to reminding him that the extraordinary potential of them as a couple was because of him as much as her, and it was gentle and kind and overwhelming at times, the darkness outside not looming so much as cradling the house and the windows and our conversation.
I get what she was talking about. I’ve been lucky enough in my life to assemble a small village of critical non-conformists but they are dispersed in space and time. I’m on a road trip to see one part of the village – the Canadian part, which is my favorite part if I’m honest, the food is good but the air is also cleaner and inside jokes quite a bit funnier than the ones in America or England or France – but the need to travel twelve hundred miles to see even this wing of it is tiring, even if I get to have fois gras poutine and good Jewish steakhouse steak tonight in Montreal. I want the village to be in one place, somewhere with food and the darkening blue of the inner arm of the inner arm of the inner arm as it wakes up to the morning sun, but also with a bookstore and a good bar and a hotel it doesn’t deserve to have that lets the dog sleep on the bed while I write in the lobby.
For now, though, we are scattered. Communications theory has given us internet videoconferencing with only scattered interruptions from transmission noise, but it hasn’t yet given us the village in one place. I actually hope it doesn’t. I hope we never forget the importance of seeing one another in person, and I’m glad that gives us a chance to reassure one another of our beauty. Even those who will never see me again, to you, I hope you know how much I want to reassure you of your beauty, how much love never fades.
I read a few essays by Delmore Schwartz this morning and it helped remind me that this village is durable. He wrote in the forties and fifties and found the poets and authors of his day that made sense to him and it inspired him to do something different. He wrote quite a bit about Wallace Stevens, a fine poet but more importantly from my perspective also a long time successful insurance executive. Stevens was part of the village too, at least on weekends and evenings, and it feels good to know there’s a commuter rail stop in the village that lets us go back to the vast productive middlebrow metropolis where we can contribute our labor and find our distractions but then quickly return to the village for restoration and food and love.
There aren’t many clouds this morning but always the sun manages to find one, this time a tiny wisp that barely darkens it but by doing so turns the water a deeper blue, making the white caps that much brighter. At this early hour every bird in the willows seems to be singing and screeching and chatting at their loudest breakfast tone. The dog has had his breakfast and is now sleeping at the bottom of the stairs. My friends are starting to stir, their dog is out of his crate and trying to read what I’m writing. The wind hasn’t stopped, and on the scrub tree plain of Prince Edward County it won’t stop any time soon, pushing the water towards the reeds and swaying the willows at the edge of the bay. I’ll rouse the dog in an hour or two, strike out towards the 401 and my long-awaited Teen Burger at A&W and the expanse of picnic area 150 kilometers down the highway, towards Montreal where my incomprehensible French will at least make it clear that I’m not one of “those” Anglo Canadians. I’ll get there.