Gospel & Universe⛱ Señor Locke

Train of Memory

Blossoms - Point of Departure - Time to Ramble On - Spots, Slips, & Slides - High School Confession - Time to Ramble On, Take 2

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Blossoms

Who you are came from who you were, yet who you were is not who you are.

Nostalgia and regret are part of who you are, but only part.

I tell myself this, yet all too often nostalgia and regret are the emotions that remain after the others are winnowed away. I try to think about the intense and happy moments, yet this only makes their disappearance more sad, and the regrets more bitter.

So I try to think about the beauty of the moment and about how precious life is in the here and now. And yet, inevitably, I think about how limited it is, and how brief. Beautiful, yet ultimately sad. We exist for eighty-odd years in the sunlight, and then we fall back into the dark, water or soil, without knowing whether or not we’ll see the sun again.

Scatter at random, / O blossoms of the cherry, / and cloud the heavens, / so that you conceal the path / old age is said to follow. (Ariwara Narihira, 825-880 AD)

The rays of Heaven and the light of rebirth are dreams which the harsh light of morning casts into a dozen quizzical shapes.

One day our bodies won’t wake up, yet whether or not we’ll continue to exist is another matter. The afterlife is, as Hamlet puts it, the undiscovered country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns. Those who say they’ve made the return trip, or who take someone else’s word for it, may be living in a fool’s paradise. Yet is it foolish to give yourself such hope?

In the absence of the miraculous, life still has beauty. Yet this absence makes it unnerving to ponder what lies beneath the fallen cherry blossoms.

We’ll all end up broken in the scrap-heap of time

with the boards and steel latches

that once upon a time opened stained-glass windows to the rolling seas;

with the callipers and giant mirrors

that first showed us our small reflection in the rolling stars.

One day all the windows and the mirrors will be shattered.

They’ll make the bed on which we lie.

The unreflecting fragments will form our covers

as we lie silently six feet underground

in a layer of sediment twenty thousand years old.

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I look at another photo, taken in 1974, with my dad and I looking out from a rail car, somewhere in France. I place it next to a photo I took the other week of the sun falling over Northview Golf Course in Surrey:

The railway picture may seem blurry, yet it’s not as blurry as my memory. What were we thinking? If not for the photo, I wouldn’t even remember that we were ever standing like that, leaning against the window, presumably looking out at my brother who took the shot.

A hundred years ago, Ezra Pound wrote about the beauty of the moment in the two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough. I know that his poem is supposed to make me think of the moment, yet it reminds me instead of the path / old age is said to follow. The petals on a wet black bough make me think of fallen cherry blossoms scattered on the way. The metro station makes me think of French trains and points of departures and final destinations, and where it all leads.

I tell myself, Relax, enjoy the moment, don’t think so much about the past or the future. Yet my baggage is already on the train. The sense impressions have already been made, just as surely as my father’s DNA has already imprinted itself into every cell in my body.

My mind, sliding into those memories, slips into the past, even as the train is about to leave the station and move into the future. Attention au départ.

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Point of Departure

My family started somewhere between Derry and Rotterdam, centuries ago. They took boats over the North Atlantic and ended up in places like Edmonton, Carlyle, and Calgary. In the mid-1970s my family was drawn back to Europe, like salmon pulled upstream.

My dad worked for the Canadian branch of the French national oil company Elf Aquitaine, and so I got to live in Paris (1975-6), Fribourg (1978), and Geneva (1979-80). These years left such a deep impression on me that I go back every year, drawn magnetically east and south. I could happily live out the rest of my days going from one arrondissement to the next, or going on a never-ending Grand Tour, from London to Rome, Zagreb to Edinburgh, Berlin to Lisbon, Sintra to Saint Petersburg, Stockholm to Syracuse. I guess that’s what they call eurocentric.

But no matter how often I take the TGV or the Frecciarossa, part of me keeps coming back to the stations of early adolescence, especially the first magical encounters with girls and the first anguished misdirections of love. Nostalgia, from nóstos “homecoming” and álgos “pain,” keeps me coming back to the foothills of Alberta and the small towns of southeastern B.C., where I fell in love with an Italian girl. Even when I’m on a train to Sicily, I yearn for that lost Italy.

Let me explain.

In 1974, when I was 14, my dad took my older brother and I on a six-week tour of Europe, from Saint Andrews to Florence. Before going on this trip I learned a bit of Italian. I remember myself repeating Dove se trove la stazione per favore? Where is the train station, please? When we returned to Canada that summer, I met an Italian-Canadian girl called Angela, whose family had a cabin on the other side of the lake from us. It was a cruel turn of fate that my most painful experience of love occurred that summer, while the radio stations were still playing the Rolling Stones song “Angie.”

Angie, you're beautiful / But ain't it time we said goodbye

The train creeps so slowly that I can almost see her face on the platform. Yet I have a terrible visual memory, and I can’t remember what she looked like. Anywhere I look I can’t see her eyes, those eyes that held me spellbound in their lazy, electric gaze. So I fill in the missing image with an archetypal beauty, one I found while I was wandering in a museum looking for angels. She’ll have to do, this Beatrice senz'Arno:

Angela was my angel in the summer of 1974. She was my first cigarette in a camper, where we spent the afternoons lying next to each other, smoking Export A and making out. This was also where I learned there were rules about where your hands were allowed to go, no matter how large her breasts were and how much you wanted to find out.

At the end of the summer we planned to go to a concert, yet the plan would only work if I stayed over at her house in town and we got a ride back to the lake with her brother the next morning.

My dad, however, didn’t like the idea. So, I got on my Suzuki 90 and did circles round and round the cabin. Here I am in a colour-enhanced photo, as if to get at the volcanic emotions I had in those days:

I went round and round the cabin, no doubt driving the neighbours crazy. Eventually, my dad came out onto the porch and said that I could do whatever the heck I wanted. He was through trying to tell me what to do (which wasn’t quite true, although he never again told me when to come home). Perhaps he had a crystal ball in the cabin somewhere, and knew that I would learn my lesson that night. Yet even if he did have a crystal ball sitting on the kitchen table, bright as a disco ball, I wouldn’t have bothered to look at it. I could’ve seen my future clear as Scrooge’s conscience, and ignored it anyway.

After the concert, I slept over at Angie’s house, and we found ourselves together in her bed, her parents having gone somewhere for the weekend. At last! Sometime in the middle of the night, while we were pressed against each other in her bed, drugs and music still coursing through our systems, the tips of my fingers dipped just slightly south of a pyjama elastic. This seemed like a reasonable course of action to me, but in the back of my brain I knew that I was definitely south of the border. I was half a block into Tijuana, wondering what sort of tequila madness was in the centre of town.

She was Catholic in a way I simply couldn’t understand. I assumed that, underneath her rules, she was like me. I imagined that she would take this chance — house to ourselves, middle of the night — to do what she really wanted to do. But perhaps she really didn’t want to. I never found out. She said she wanted to sleep and went to another room.

The next morning in the back of her brother's car, she wouldn't look at me. She wouldn't speak to me, except to say good-bye.

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Time to Ramble On

It's all so stupid and inconsequential! It's more than forty years ago! I say to myself, haranguing the loops of neurons from my frontal cortex to my amygdala. But they aren't listening. 

So I try to focus on other romantic memories, ones that don’t railroad me into feedback loops of frustration and regret. For instance, the innocent romances of grades six and seven: spinning the bottle and ending up behind a closed door for thirty seconds face to face with a different girl; dancing to “Where Evil Grows” with incense sticks waving in the dark; kissing on couches till the parents upstairs turned the lights on.

Or memories of my grade ten girlfriend, who wasn’t Catholic at all. She spent her weekend nights making out with me, while we listened to Elton John albums next to the pool table in her basement. Big-hearted, big-breasted Marilou from Kansas. Makes me want to click my heels three times. She was definitely too good for me.

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Spots, Slips, & Slides

In Book 12 of The Prelude (1850), Wordsworth writes about what he calls spots of time, which are luminous moments in the past, when the clear light of understanding breaks through the dull light of ordinary day: “There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue.” He says that “Such moments / Are scattered everywhere, taking their date / From our first childhood.” Wordsworth was fortunate enough to spend his later years recollecting in tranquility those glowing moments, yet even in 1798 (when he was in his late twenties) he already appreciated these moments,

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. — “Tintern Abbey”

But for many people this light shines so rarely that it doesn’t illuminate any radiant pattern within the core — be it the core of one’s self or the core of things. Instead, these brief moments of moral clarity only serve to light up other moments far less enlightening, moments I would call slips in time.

Instead of intimating a path to meaning and moral clarity, these slips in time light the mind with an obscure light, a darkness visible leading anywhere but up. What we see is a different path, one of selfishness, of not really caring about what the other person feels as long as we get what we want. Some of these downward trips are merely moments of bad judgment, momentary lapses in decency, or short-lived urges that possess us when we’re too young to know better, or too weak to overcome the momentary urge. Others are less easy to explain away as anomalies of the moment. I’d call these longer digressions into selfishness, slides into what we really want. Slides of time.

Whether we slip briefly or take a long deep slide, we relive these downfalls with remorse. They’re reproaches to who we think we are, or to who we think we’ve become. They bite at our self-worth whether we consciously acknowledge them or not. In his song, “Phantom’s Theme,” Paul Williams gets at this experience, adding to it the relevant mythology:

Half asleep I hear a voice / Is it only in my mind? / Or is it someone calling me / Someone I failed and left behind? / To work it out I let them in / All the good guys and the bad guys that I've been / All the devils that disturbed me and the angels that defeated them somehow / Come together in me now

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High School Confession

Just as an alcoholic confesses and makes amends, canvassing the backstreets of his life, so we should own up to the stupidities and cruelties of our past. The Board of Education should institute a series of High School Reunion Confessions, where we might come to terms with all the things we’ve done instead of homework. We might exorcise our demons by drinking tequila shooters and apologizing to each other through little wooden windows, laying bare all the times we lied and cheated, all the times we used and mistreated the people we called friends.

Or, if high school reunions can only be contemplated with existential dread, we could meet individually those special people we used and abused. We could fly from city to city, catching a ride on Greta Thunberg’s airbus of castigation, facing our past faults at every stop, prostrating ourselves before each god of guilt, each girl we lied to in order to get what we wanted, each friend we double-dealt, whipping our backs until our minds enter an honest state of humility and repentance. Afterwards, we could live with all those memories without distorting them, without justifying what we did to the point where we aren’t even acknowledging what we did. We might even be able to finally enjoy the positive memories, the larger stretches of time that surround our momentary slips and our longer precipitous falls.

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Time to Ramble On, Take 2

Determined to think about positive spots of time, I try to remember the romantic moments that didn’t end in disaster. For instance, the brief relation with a Russian girl whose name I can't remember. Here she is in Paris, standing on the sidewalk outside École Active Bilingue, three blocks north of Place des Ternes:

There she is, mitten up, the apparition of her face in a crowd, days before our little summit beneath the glittering lights on the Champs Élysées, the evening before she went back to Moscow. Who knows what would have happened if she hadn’t gone back? Perhaps it’s better to leave some things in the realm of speculation. I’m pretty sure I would have blown it with her too. In any case, in spite of its brevity, our innocent romantic evening had more of an impact on me than the famous 1972 hockey series between Canada and Russia.

Or, I remember the sweetness of upland flowers, and a girl named Monique, who helped me rid myself of the stereotype of Heidi in the Alps:

Monique, with her four languages, and her grey mobylette that she rode all over Geneva:

Or je me souviens the summer in Québec City with Suzanne:

I remember how we swapped languages over the course of our first year at Queen’s University. I also remember one late afternoon, under the blue winter skies of Kingston, across from the limestone buildings: the dark blue skies were mirrored in the dark blue eyes of Suzanne.

Suzanne takes me down the river of memory

to the innocence of tea and oranges and tangerine.

All I need now is a madeleine.

Oui, je me souviens.

I can keep all these memories, but only if I keep the other ones too. The camp counsellor at the so-called Christian camp. Angie who wouldn’t even look at me in the car the next morning. All the people I disappointed somehow. The invisible lines I crossed.

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The train keeps stopping at the same old places. The same old junctions keep me looped into what I needed and what they needed. What I did and what I didn't do. What they told me or didn't tell me.

All this has me stalled somewhere near Roma Termini, or in the back of the car where Angela still won't hold my hand, or even look at me.

The last time I saw her, several years later, was in a ski resort parking lot. As we slowly walked by each other, the conversation went like this:

"Hi Rog.”

"Hi Ange."

It's hard to explain the feelings that inhabit those four words, and the look I still imagine in her eyes:

I go over and over it all, circling inside myself, while the sun sets on the outskirts of Catania and the marble streets of Syracuse gleam in the dusk:      

I see the faces, fond and reproachful, and invite them one last time to continue the journey. But they stay on the platform, or wander about the scrub and tinder.

The doors and windows of the carriage are open, and the train is rambling on.

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