New Horizons

“Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.” ~Palinurus (Cyril Conolly), The Unquiet Grave (1945)

I awoke this morning thinking of a book I read, 48-years-ago: The Unquiet Grave, by Palinurus.

The content of my dreams receded as I recalled distinctive passages that influenced my thinking at the time and thereafter.

“If we apply depth psychology to our own lives, we see how enslaved we remain to the womb and the mother. Womb of Mother Church, of Europe, Mother of continents, of horseshoe harbour and valley, of the lap of earth, of the bed, the armchair and the bath or of the Court of Charles II, of Augustan London, or the Rome of Cicero; of the bow window of the club, of the house by the lake or water-front sacred to Venus; —all our lives seeking a womb with a view.” ibid.

Perhaps Conolly’s meditations and the Collected Works of Carl Jung, read coincidentally, became a womb of sorts from which I pondered the human condition and, consciously or not, pecked out related poems on my Brother portable typewriter, in a tiny cottage with just one window.

know we sleep the sleep of children
pleased by symbol and incantation

Long before Microsoft staked a claim on the portal of cyberspace, I recall the Early Windows, overlooking the streets of English council estates, circa 1960. On Bayliss Avenue, where my first dog met his end, I cried tears of grief at the window of my playhouse, a spacious cedar shed stamped “Made in Canada.” On Birch Road I shed a curtain of angry tears, loosed by some parental reprimand; I peered across the street, cheeks flushed, as three rebel cancan girls, perched atop a garden wall, flashed their blue knickers. 

In Canada, my cousins’ bedrooms overlooked the Fraser River, in New Westminster, south to the white flank of Mount Baker. That hot summer of 1965, I watched electrical storms lighting up red, lenticular clouds over the domed volcanic summit, never dreaming I’d ascend its towering glaciers, just over a decade later.

In 1973, I fled the comfort of my adopted home-by-the-sea to explore the Rocky mountains of Alberta and eastern British Columbia. Settling in B.C.’s Purcell Mountains, I restored a 50-year-old log cabin hidden in a remote alpine valley. I cut an oblong hole alongside the elevated sleeping-loft I’d built from lodgepole pine boughs and rough planks rescued from an abandoned portable mill site. In the breach, I fitted a double-glazed window, donated by Fred Weller, a neighbouring trapper. 

Accompanying Fred on his trapline was to witness a lifetime of practical learning: the identification of wildlife footprints in the snow, the fastest and most painless way to dispatch a pine martin, cautions against mistaking “book learnin’” for common sense, a reminder that, as spectacular as the high mountains may be, “You can’t eat the view.”

At The Meadow, our lives adapted to the phases of the moon. Viewed from the cabin window, her brilliant light spilled over the shoulder of the mountain, eclipsing the diamond-dust cloud of the Milky Way. With a star-chart pinned to the broad-axed larch of the cabin wall, I studied the constellations by kerosene lantern. My daughter was conceived in the lamplit bower under the stars.

Aside from trapping, hauling water from Lavington Creek, and cutting firewood, I edited The Rocky Mountain Poems. Among a sheaf of poetry I thrust into the wood stove during a fit of self-pity following another rejection slip (collected from a post office box in the nearest town), I recall a few lines of verse brought from a dream, a sort of Lord’s Prayer dedicated to IBM — “The Power and the Glory” — that might now be dedicated to Facebook or Google. In it, I imagined a world ruled by a technological elite who had seized control of society’s information through integrated computer systems, crucially gaining power over our personal finances.

I turned to the window, beyond which the morning sun was illuminating the viridian needles of the western larch. A hummingbird appeared on the other side of the cracked glass, the scarlet feathers of its iridescent head and gorget shimmering as though lit from within.

I’d never seen one of these tiny avian jets before (or the northern lights either, which, when I saw them from the summit of nearby Mount Scartooley, I took to indicate US President Richard Nixon — rocked that year by Watergate — or Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had pushed the nuclear button). As for the hummer, I momentarily thought that the Purcell Mountains produced the biggest fucking bees in all of Creation.

Just 45-years after my dystopian nightmare, the Chinese “social credit” system seems to have realized the technocrat’s dream of control over the proletariat.

When I announced to Fred that I was returning to Vancouver, incredulous, he asked “Why would you want to do that?” He’d been hungry on the street there during the Great Depression, finally joining the On-To-Ottawa Trek, a mass protest that ended, short of its goal, in confrontation and death in Winnipeg.

He offered me a corner of his property where I might build a cabin and raise turnips and potatoes in the short summer months. “A man can survive with a few traps and some root vegetables.”

“Now that I seem to have attained a temporary calm, I understand how valuable unhappiness can be; melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.” ibid.

Womb With a View

Three years ago, I emerged from 12-years surrounded by high-rises and seasonal affective disorder (SAD), gaining light and a view, along with a Stalinist strata council.

With the latest move, I’ve escaped remorse and external bullies, emerging again into the sun. The torments of insomnia have retreated, at least for now, along with the problems of the world … half of which I created through blindness, obstinacy and pride.

The view from our sitting room window and the balcony off our bedroom is an ever-changing panorama of islands and sea, chameleon clouds and sky; an archipelago of forested ridges lead to the high mountains, capped on clear nights by twinkling constellations I can still name: Ursa Major and Minor, Aries (my own “sign”), Leo, Aquarius and Gemini (who have had starring roles across the zodiac of my life), Orion and that beautiful big W, Cassiopeia.

I know that I and several of those urban refugees I’ve kept in touch with since the Days of the Meadow, have searched ever since for a facsimile of that magical meeting of serendipity and Shangri-La we found below Scartooley.

Have I found such a place — a compromise between comfort and adventure, a beacon in a world caught between the golden promises of technology and its intrusions? I can’t say. Our philosophies, religions, modern psychotherapy, science and the tenets of reason, search for a window into the soul. I can only say that my dreams and desires have for a few short weeks seemed to reflect just a bit of the wonder of the world outside my window.

In deference to Weller’s wisdom, there are plans for a greenhouse and raised beds at the bottom of the garden (providing I can devise a deer- and rabbit-proof fence). In the meantime, our souls are well-nourished.

And I seem to have returned to the camera, itself a kind of “womb with a view,” with an eye to new horizons and revisiting established traditions.

This morning, over coffee on the balcony, my wife Amanda and I used binoculars and Google Earth surveillance system to plot our next adventure.