Collected Works ✏️ Wreck Beach & Vancouver
Constellations
3:08 AM
It’s five hours to the exam and I know I should be coming up with an argument for each of the six possible topics.
I’m thinking that for sure Old Rex is going to pick The Epic or The Journey. But what if he picks one of the others? In any case, Beauty and Love are throwing me for a loop. By which I mean the memory of Silvia on the beach, with her slim, sun-tanned body and her eyes bluer than the sea. How can I think about The Epic when she’s lying there in my mind? Maybe that should be my first argument: In literature, Beauty and Love disrupt everything.
I could start my essay with a sentence full of thesis and antithesis: Literature may be about the love of beauty, or the beauty of love, yet neither beauty nor love can be controlled by fancy words. Then I could illustrate this point with how Ishtar brought down the wrath of the Bull of Heaven, how Helen and Aphrodite set the thousand ships on a course for Troy, and how Delilah ordered a servant to cut Samson’s hair. I might even quote “My Fairy Queen”:
Someone, someone has drained the colour from my wings
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides
I could then get to what Old Rex really cares about: Homer. For Silvia is a mix of Calypso, with her promise of eternal luxury, and Circe, with her beauty and knowledge, leading me from her shores to the Greek afterlife, with its obscure prophecies and inevitable dread.
The more I think about Silvia as a mix of Calypso and Circe, the more I fear being detained by one, and being sent on a journey to hell by the other. All I really want is to lie next to her on the beach, to forget about English exams, and to eat the strange herbs of the passing drug-dealers on the Island of the Lotus-Eaters.
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Back on Wreck Beach in the dog days of Summer, back when Sirius had burned off all our clothes, Sylvia told me about her fascination with astronomy. I was looking into her blue eyes and wondering if she noticed that I wasn’t always looking into her blue eyes. She told me that her favourite constellation was Pyxis, the mariner’s compass which always faces north. As she was telling me everything she’d learned so far in her astronomy course, I was thinking of the poem “Queens,” by J.M. Synge, and imagining another scenario completely. My scenario went like this:
The pixie with long blonde hair is using her compass to chart the course of man's passion. She insists her compass never wavers from true north, although she was in a past life a queen whose finger once did stir men. She was also once a high lady, acquainted in learned sin, / Jane of Jewry's slender shin. In other words, she isn’t oblivious: she sees it rising, like the Loch Ness monster from the tangled lichen. Once locked in its nest below, it now pops up its warm head — carbunkle its eyes like Milton’s snake amphibian — and rolls slowly onto the warm sand. Hydra the Sea Serpent, slowly rising from its home on the celestial equator.
Waxing poetic about the etymology of the skies — the nebulas of the Tarantula, Cocoon, Red Spider, Bug, Papillon, and Ant — I tell her that our lust is as innocent as John Donne’s flea-bite: in this flea our two bloods mingled be; / Thou know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead. I add that she ought not to spurn the amphibian, no more than she would spurn Cancer the Crab, Cetus the Sea Monster, or Lacerta and Chamaeleon the Lizards. She counters that she will never be a queen that men draw like Mona Lisa, / Or slay with drugs in Rome and Pisa.
I really don’t remember what she was saying, something about arcseconds and astrology not making any sense because the Earth has shifted in relation to the stars since the days of the Greeks. But what I do remember is that she realized I wasn’t following her at all, but rather was looking at her smooth legs and the fine tiny blonde hairs that ran upward toward her mesmerizing ass. But she wasn’t about to be slain by the drugs of metaphysical poetry, and looked at me as if I was some literature professor, crammed with epic pretension and lust. Her eyes fixing me with a formulated phrase, she said, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” She added, “But how your arms and legs are thin!”
From Canis Major to Canis Minor, she quelled my lust with her indifference, with the clarity of her poetic allusions and the perfection of her nipples. The amphibian became a crayfish crawling back into the sea-weed red and brown. Cancer the Crab climbing back into its own nebulous cave of meaningless words, back into the open cluster, the open heart surgery of Messier 44. A pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
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From the dismal suds, I raise a wounded finger and click on “My Fairy Queen”:
Someone, someone has drained the colour from my wings
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides
And yet I also suspect she didn’t mind what she saw. She talks about Sappho and about succumbing to the temptations of Cynthia, yet I wonder if she’s waiting for me to ask the overwhelming question, Will you come over? and if she really wants to make a visit.
Yet even if she did come over, and even if my pride did resurface, I would tell her that I have more important things to do. In a rare flash of revenge and practicality, I would announce to her that. I must return to studying for the exam. I must return to Homer and Dante, Eliot and Donne. White flannel trousers freshly pressed, I must return to Ithaca. I must escape from the grasp of Circe, that crystal-ball-reading, golden-ball-crushing sorceress who is nevertheless very sexy and tempting on her alabaster throne, or pouring green water into the blue depths…
I see the folds of her dress slip downward—but no! She is a lecherous harlot and no good will come of this! Queens who wasted the East by proxy, / Or drove the ass-cart, a tinker's doxy, / Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon — / And we've the sun on rock and garden.
I must pursue a course between the sirens of the sea, each singing to the sailors who are deaf to the libidinous beauty of their song, each to each, while anguished Odysseus remains chained to the mast, with the birds and bees buzzing around his ears, and no wax in sight:
I must block her pixie voice, with its Irish swell and its roughness around the edges, and with its smell of a midnight bonfire in the deep woods. I must look upward into the dark and stormy night and see the constellation Lupus, the Wolf, who is also Fenri, who will ride with Hel and Loki in their devilish longboat toward Ragnarok. I must remember Vulcan and the vulva, and listen for Loki and the völva.
Lupus is riding across the red waves like Capricorn the Sea Goat, like the piper of Ithaca with the bright torches of lust in his eyes, and the lust of the goat which is the glory of God.
The waves are hammering on the shore to the sound of Jon Bonham playing the drums on “Immigrant Song” and “Black Dog,” like Vulcan hammering out new weapons for the northern adventurers.
The horns of Capricorn descend from the heavens of myth, past Virgil and Augustine, past Cicero and that long line of Latin puffs (Old Rex may be a Fairy Queen, but he loves his adventure stories) onto the helmet of Snorri Sturluson, Gorgoroth, Leif Ericson & Co.
Go north-west, young man, by the light of Polaris to the land of the ice and snow.
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Next: 🎲 Two: Golden Letters
Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines