Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

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5:02 AM: attention au depart

When I get to the exam, in precisely two hours and fifty-eight minutes, I have to remember everything. Otherwise the Inquisitor, a master of the Ancient Texts, will know that I’m only a tourist. He’ll know that I haven’t descended into Odin’s Well of Omniscient Oblivion, where the Fates hover and the old gods keep their solitary court. He’ll suspect that I haven't conversed with a single mermaid, let alone talked to a Rheinmaiden. 

I must also remember to be diplomatic, to suggest ever so gently to Old Rex of the Brittle Dinosaur Bones that his Greek-centred view of the universe needs a revision. He needs to give the windmills a break from Don Quixote, and get the Epic off its high horse. 

Old Rex thinks that the Epic (always with a capital E) starts in Greece and represents everything civilization has to offer. To him, the Epic was born in the Mycenaean Dawn of Time. It sailed, like Odysseus with a strong wind behind him, from Athens to Syracuse and Messina, up the Tiber, and o’er the Alps. From there it travelled to the fair city of Paris, down the Seine into the English Channel, past the white cliffs of Dover, up the Thames, and into the bosom of Queen Elizabeth the First. Sir Walter Raleigh was by her side, while Shakespeare was sighing o’er the grave of Chaucer. Milton was hovering in the wings, and the great despoilers — Byron & Joyce — were ready to pounce.

The problem is that Miltonic angels don’t seem to hover much these days. Poets even less. And he can’t just blame Byron for their crash. Two hundred years before him, Don Quixote saw two gentle damsels, and addressed them with valiant words of chivalry: “Your ladyships need not fly or fear any rudeness, for that it belongs not to the order of knighthood which I profess to offer to anyone, much less to highborn maidens as your appearance proclaims you to be.” But the gentle damsels were ladies of easy virtue. To put it mildly, they didn’t need his help. The castle was in fact an inn. The innkeeper eyed his mark, good-humouredly.

For the last seven months Old Rex has been telling us that the Epic presents us with Civilization on a golden platter, complete with Nike wings and winking cherubim. It gives us Meaning, with a capital M. He imagines it to be a perfect fusion of Classical and Christian worlds.

I remember him looking out the window and sighing, while Juniper sat in her torn jeans on the other side of the room, smirking. He filled his chest with air (just as Dante filled his sails with the fair winds of Grace) and said to the birds darting beyond the sill: “The Epic is what breathed life into Tennyson’s Ulysses. It’s what carried the Truths of Greece from the Old World into the Modern World, filled the sails, ran the horses, pumped the steam. It’s what Prufrock saw, but couldn’t be. The train was waiting at the station, but Prufrock couldn’t mind the gap.”

Old Rex turned from the greater light to the lesser: “But you, my young acolytes, are braver than he. Breathe in the Epic’s pure serene! Don’t be afraid of the gap beneath your feet! Just jump on board! Attention au départ!”

Old Rex was on a roll and on the rails, rolling full steam. “Others will tell you that Nietzsche and Sartre are right to protest against the Epic’s Overwhelming Meaning. These godless professors — with names like Von Trapp and le Conte d’Abîme — will tell you that you’re right not to get on board, because the old Epic train no longer runs. Or the Darwinian train leads nowhere, having lost its way among the finches and canaries of the Somerset coalfields.

“Of course the train leads nowhere if you strip it of its glory, if you decouple the finest carriages, once brimming with Tuscan wine and Keats’ beakers winking at the brim.

O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Old Rex was in another country now. Fair damsels were waving at him from the castle windows. King David was playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor.

Old Rex saw a long dock leading into the sea. The sun was setting, gold and white. He would get off the train, walk down the dock, and set sail for Avalon.

Straightening his back, he continued: “No one appreciates history anymore. No one remembers the train carriages coming north, lavish with the artefacts carefully selected from the southern lands, from Athens and Cairo, from Calcutta and Dunhuang. Of course it seems like an empty train if you swap its glory for the latest COSCO cargo of Chinese junk.”

Old Rex looked uneasily at the seven or eight East Asian faces in the classroom. He realized that he had no idea where they came from. Shanghai? Phnom Penh? Saskatoon? But that wasn’t what he meant. That wasn’t it, at all. Filling his lungs once again, he concluded with the faultless wording of the Bard: “Without the Epic, humanity is nothing but a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”

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From the footlights an echo drifted across the room: “Nothing but a poor player, indeed. A tale told by an idiot, signifying … whatever.”

Juniper stood up and addressed the class: “Didn’t all that Grand Fusion stuff go out with Robert Plant and the Fruit Grinders? With all those references to Lord of the Rings and Mordor, and all that rock and roll nostalgia? Your obsession with Meaning is, frankly, a bit meaningless.”

Juniper stepped toward the middle of the room, and made several turns to size up her audience. Her bright pink hair and blazing green eyes made the students forget all about the hunchbacked Prufrock and his Epic failures. A light perfume swept through the still air as her skirt trailed along the floor. What was that scent, peach?

It was as if she cast light from a magic lantern, exposing the old, worn-out doctrines, projecting the nerves of dinosaur brains in variegated patterns on the classroom walls. She continued: “There is no land of Mordor. There is no Sauron. No Gandalf.” Looking down at the wispy crop of male English majors in the room, she added, “And not many Striders either.” She then swivelled her head and looked squarely into the eyes of the leather-clad bad boy at the back of the room. She winked at Berry.

She looked down at her Norton Anthology, then looked up and asked, “What do you read, my lord?” Looking down again at the textbook, she responded to her own question, “Words, words, words … for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards…” She looked directly at the unbearded faces around her, which were stunned by her impish bravery. “We’ve all paid our tuition fees. 7,000 dollars a year. 38,000 dollars a year if you have the indecency to come from somewhere else.”

(Old Rex looked again at the Asian faces. Where were they from?)

“Do you know what the tuition fee was 40 years ago, for all those hippies who became yuppies, back in the age of the dinosaurs? 800 dollars for five full-year courses. That’s 80 bucks for a four-month course. And what do we pay? 620 dollars for the same course. I can imagine a Golden Age, but I don’t see any Stairway to Heaven. Do you? And they’ve raped the planet to boot.”

To emphasize her point, Juniper kicked over an empty chair with one of her army boots, which she wore without socks, the ivory whiteness of her leg a shocking contrast to the black leather. Her violent movement startled Old Rex, who had slowly been edging himself into a corner and behind a curtain, as if he were an attendant lord, whose only job was to start a scene or two.

Unfurling her Latin Quarter scarf, Juniper settled it over the deceased corpse of the chair lying on the floor. “No more looming ladies behind the veils! Let the Lady of Shalott drift down the river!”

Just in case her peers were tempted to imagine a delicate Waterhouse canvas of aesthetic tragedy, she added, “Penelope should have tossed her loom away long ago, and found a babe like Sappho to fuck.”

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In addition to being a militant bisexual eco-feminist, Juniper was also an actress, and had starred in productions of Ionesco and Sartre. Looking down at the wooden corpse of the chair, she intoned in a mock-priestly voice, “Deus est, quod valde dolendum, mortuus. I’m afraid, my friends, that the Epic is dead. I don’t see any Grand Fusion here. Just Old White Men’s bones and a grey beard. Skulls and crossbones, and, alas, not a pirate in sight.” Again, she looked at the back of the room and gave Berry a wink.

Looking at the bulging curtain, she concocted an impromptu mix: “It used to be that meaning was like water flowing between our fingers. Reality was like a boulder that rolled down on us every time, and we were supposed to kept rolling it back up the hill anyway. Or at least that’s what Camus says. But that’s all gone now, as the Stones put it, With flowers and my love, / Both never to come back. Or as Amy said it — and meant it more than Mick the businessman could ever mean it — I tread a troubled track / My odds are stacked / I'll go back to black. […] And life is like a pipe. And I'm a tiny penny / Rolling up the walls inside."

Her words lit a fire in the eyes of her classmates, especially the budding poets, Apollonian and Sapphic. Yet she just shrugged, slouched back to her chair, and sat down.

❧

From behind the curtain, Old Rex saw King Sisyphus complaining to Persephone on the banks of the Styx. Then he saw the winged god Morpheus committing suicide in his own river of dreams. He cowered behind the arras, fearing that what Juniper said about Camus might apply to Prufrock, and to the Epic Express as it sailed through the station and over a cliff.

Old Rex didn’t know what it meant to be a tiny penny rolling up the walls of a pipe, but it didn’t sound good. His uncertainty made him feel all the more out of touch. It was as if his star student, whose first paper conflated Lysistrata and eco-feminism, was shining a spotlight on his balding head.

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

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Juniper can afford to be right — and to be dramatic and sarcastic. She isn’t an English major and she doesn’t need a reference letter to get into grad school. If Old Rex fails her because he doesn’t like her politics, she can slough it off or tear him apart in the student rag. Either way, she wins.

I, on the other hand, want to get a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and can’t afford to paint Old Rex into a corner. I spent ten years preparing for university: making money, seeing the world, and reading everything I could get my hands on. I worked for three years on an oil derrick, travelled and worked for six years, and then worked another year planting trees in the waste land of northern Alberta. I remain determined not only to make my way in the dark forests of Academia, but to plant my own little trees along the way.

In brief, I can’t afford to put Old T-Rex into a rage. The meteors will come in their own time. For the moment, I must stand and wait.

And unlike Juniper, I relate to the things Old Rex says, even though he says them in ways that no longer connect to his audience. I take it for granted that most male writers in the past didn’t worry about the status of women or the state of the environment, but Juniper takes it to heart. I see the past in the same way Roethke sees a woman: she can be kind or cruel, yet she remains a bright container and men can only marvel at the shapes she might contain.

Juniper can also afford to scoff at Old Rex and his capitalized Meaning. I, on the other hand, cower in Its long shadow. If only such a Meaning existed! If only Nietzsche and Camus weren’t right! What a relief it would be if God, or even aliens, came down to Earth and showed us that oblivion wasn’t where we’re headed. To die, perforce to dream! To cross the border into that country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns, remains a consummation devoutly to be wished.

If only there were no Voltaire and no Age of Reason, no geology and no genetics. And no monkeys babbling inside us.

If only there were no Byron, joyfully dismantling the Epic and the seemingly solid meanings of the Old World. If only reason could still accommodate a Great Chain of Being, and Pope was still convincing when he writes, “Let Newton Be! and all was Light.”

9:22 AM

Prelude to the Collapse of the Epic:

If Only

If only there was no Don Juan, with its opening promise of an Epic Plan, and its echoing laughter at anyone who saw Its silver outline on the edges of a cloud:

My poem’s epic, and is meant to be 
Divided in twelve books; each book containing, 
With love, and war, a heavy gale at sea, 
A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning, 
New characters; the episodes are three: 
A panoramic view of Hell’s in training, 
After the style of Virgil and of Homer, 
So that my name of Epic’s no misnomer. 

Of course, Byron had no intention of writing twelve books like Homer and Virgil, or three episodes like Dante. He died while writing the 17th canto. His mock-advertisement for “supernatural scenery” makes fun of a holy host of poets, from Homer and Dante to Coleridge and Wordsworth, with their natural supernaturalism and their mystical spots in time.

Layering absurd advertisement on absurd advertisement, Byron suggests that his epic hero, Don Juan, is an actual person, verified by tradition and art:

If any person doubt it, I appeal 
To history, tradition, and to facts, 
To newspapers, whose truth all know and feel, 
To plays in five, and operas in three acts; 
All these confirm my statement a good deal, 
But that which more completely faith exacts 
Is, that myself, and several now in Seville, 
Saw Juan’s last elopement with the Devil. 

If only there was still a Spanish gentleman, talking to the young ladies after the play, assuring them over a very dry sherry, “Yes, I saw him in the theatre, he was as real as you or I. I tell you, Don Juan is alive and well and living in Seville.”

If only we could retain a Byronic sense of humour in the face of the splintering scaffolds, the burning timbers of the French Revolution, and the smouldering ecclesiastical ruins of Varg Vikernes. If only there was a Manfred still arguing with the ghost of Saint Francis on the peak of the Jungfrau.

But unfortunately, meaning rolls around to the same old thing: a nothingness, a billion leagues of outer space. And we are, as Amy Winehouse suggested, so many pennies rolling in a pipe.

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Next: ✏️ Lindisfarne

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