Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty 

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August 17, 2018

I feel like my entire life is being compressed into the next six hours. I’ve completed all my courses, and finished all but one exam, on English 440: Foundations of Western Literature. It’s a four-month intensive summer course taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one.

After the exam, I’ll have my B.A from UBC. I’ll then have all the time in the world to work, travel, and see what I really want out of life. Perhaps I’ll sling martinis and cappuccinos for a year and then wander through the Tuscan countryside. Or perhaps I’ll stretch out on a beach in Puerto Vallarta, or drink coffee on the humid banks of the Mekong, somewhere on the outskirts of Vientiane. Yet at the moment I feel constrained and frozen in time. Every hour feels like an Ice Age.

The exam is at 8:30 A.M., and it’s now 2 A.M. I have six and a half hours, yet it seems that the one thing I don’t have is time. So I decided to draw all at once on everything I’ve learned, and to stop worrying about everything I can’t remember. I’ve decided to remember everything I know, and forget everything I’ve forgotten.

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I was born in the conservative province of Alberta. Both my parrents were brought up on farms. Yet my father went to school and became a lawyer, and eventually worked for a French oil company, and this allowed our family to live in Europe for several years. At the tender age of fifteen I was set loose in the streets of Paris, where there was no enforced drinking age. In Calgary I had to find some friendly cowboy with a pick-up truck who was willing to bootleg. In Paris I could just walk into a corner store and come out with a golden six-pack of Kronenbourg or Stella Artois.

In Paris I also learned that throwing rocks at policeman was a viable form of political expression, and that it wasn’t necessary for me to act like an idiot in order to impress girls. (Although, still, I acted like an idiot). Coming back to Calgary from Paris wasn’t easy. One year I was having desert with a Russian girl on the Champs-Elysées, and the next year I was at a keg party in the bush somewhere near Okotoks, acting like an idiot. Here’s a picture of the Russian girl outside my school in Paris, and here’s a picture of me on my Suzuki 90 two years earlier, acting like a maniac from the fourth dimension:

You can take the boy away from his motorcycle, but you can’t get take the motorcycle out of the boy.

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After Paris I experienced a year of 17-year-old angst. Seventeen! — they even have a magazine to remind you about what an idiot you were, and about all the beautiful girls you never dated.

After this year I somehow managed to complete a few years of university here and there. I ended up in Vancouver, to finish off my Bachelor’s degree.

From the first time I saw Vancouver I loved its mix of grit & polish, beaches & skyscrapers, mountain vistas & funky cafes. Renting a tiny apartment in the old Greek district of Kitsilano, I now spend most of my days at school and at different cafes all over town — from the Italian caffès on Commercial to the student hang-outs on Main.

Although I love the city, I grew up in suburban Calgary, and could never really get used to the darker side of Vancouver: the skid row of the downtown east-side, and all the angry, fucked-up, drugged-out people on the streets, buses, and Skytrain. I often wondered, Would my two years of karate help me against a knife-wielding maniac? Vancouver still makes me think of San Francisco: a city of cyber-geniuses and broken, angry souls.

In my spare time I write stories about epic journeys and existential wastelands, angels and devils that fight it out in my head, and spies and sorcerers from faraway galaxies. I keep these stories in a ringed blue binder, with the working title, Demons & Wizards. I used two-sided tape to attach the old CD cover of the album Demons & Wizards to the front of the binder, to remind me where I came from.

The main reason I write about demons and wizards is that I feel adrift in the world.

Tell the helmsman, Veer to starboard / Bring this ship around to port / And if the sea was not so salty / I could sink instead of walk. (“Crucifixion Lane,” Procol Harum, 1969)

I hope that some day, by some magical chance, I might find a boat to take me back to port. Till then, I remain like the woman in the extended version of the song “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (which includes a third and fourth stanza). She tells her drinking partner that however heroic, powerful, or knowledgeable she may seem to him, she knows that that she is, in the greater scheme of things, common, weak, and ignorant:

She said, “I'm home on shore leave”
Though in truth we were at sea
So I took her by the looking glass
And forced her to agree
Saying, “You must be the mermaid
Who took Neptune for a ride”
But she smiled at me so sadly
That my anger straightway died.

Another version of myself analyzes this poem in detail, arguing that it’s quintessentially existentialist — that is, in mixing essence and existence it confounds both certainty and skepticism. This other version — of the song and my self — leads only to an answer in the shape of a question mark.

There are at least three reasons why I feel adrift. I think of these three reasons as the three smallest layers of an onion, lying at the core of my vegetable soul. The outermost of these three — buried beneath about ten other layers… — is that I was traumatized by a first-year course at Queen’s University: Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West. This course explored a staggering range of ideas, from Plato’s Republic to Sartre’s Nausea. It was taught in a small square room in the basement of the Physics Building by a visiting professor from Paris, Brigitte Dupont.

In 26 weeks Madame Dupont took us from myth to quantum mechanics. One week there was Greek democracy and the next there was war with Sparta. One week there was Reason and a Chain of Being, the next there was riot and the Plague-Journal. One minute DNA brought human evolution into focus, the next an alienated Frenchman was staring at a slithering black tree root that he refused to call Satan.

Madame Dupont’s course blew my mind. Everything I’ve done after it is a vain attempt to bring it back together again. Which is why I intend to call my finished writings, The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty.

A second, deeper, earlier reason that I write about demons and wizards is that I read The Lord of the Rings at the age of thirteen — a trauma magnified by the later movies, where the orcs of my imagination became Uruk-hai birthing from within the inner membrane of my nightmares.

The third reason is that at the age of eleven I went to a summer camp where the counsellors professed to know all about angels, devils, and Jesus. At this pivotal point in my life, I also wanted to know about Jesus, especially if he had something to do with priests and wizards fighting demons and orcs. Yet some of the counsellors also wanted to get to know the boys too, in the biblical sense, which was very confusing. Yet I didn’t want anything to do with their interpretation of theology.

It wasn’t long after this experience that I revolted against the entire system — Heaven and Hell, priests and politicians, and all manner of golden-tongued liars and institutionalized fantasies. I was soon smoking pot, dropping assorted chemicals, arguing with Saruman, and wondering if Gandalf and the departing Elves didn’t have a point.

The heroes of fantasy became my personal heroes. At least the authors of these fantasies never pretended their characters were real. It was because Tolkien never lied to me that I willingly humbled myself before Strider, who sat hidden beneath a dark hood, the unrecognized King, in some dark corner of a bar. It was because Tolkien never expected me to believe in the characters he wrote about that I believed in them.

I swore that I would never become like Ron Hubbard, and allow fantasies to be turned into theology. Least of all, a theology that had the word science built right into it. I boiled this belief down to the phrase, Old Mother Hubbard kicked the dog Ronald Hubbard into her cupboard.

I remember Madame Dupont, and the square little room at the bottom of the Physics building at eight in the morning. I remember her grey hair and thick glasses, as well as the way she helped her students to understand Plato’s cave, Augustine’s City of God, Galileo’s Dialogue, Pascal’s abyss, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s sense impressions, Candide’s voyage, Mill’s optimism, and Sartre’s pessimism.

I wonder what Madame Dupont would think about the stories I write.

I also wonder what I’ll write tomorrow morning at 8:30 A.M. Old Rex isn’t likely to be as charitable as Madame Dupont.

It’s now 2 A.M. The exam starts in six and a half hours.

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Next: ✏️ The Homework Blues

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Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines