Oh, my, but didn't I break off the last post at just the right time. The very next day, just at "High Noon", to carry on with symbols and names from the Western genre - that is, high noon our time, which was eight p.m. in Italy - we beheld our new Pope, Francis of Argentina, standing on and talking from the balcony of Saint Peter's. It was instantly plain that he is a very dear man, which was good for the heart, and then as the initial biographical details poured forth from the researches of the journalists, both secular and Catholic, that his election was as rich a source of symbols and hope for this writer as could be asked for. For some months I've had a sense that the angels - or was it just the Trinity, as often the angels are in the dark about the future just as much as we are? - were sending chuckles in my direction, due to my natural inability to behold the future, and thus not be able to see all that clearly just what they had up their sleeves. Yet there was certainly a lot of interesting inspiration going on in previous months, and now I can see where it was leading.
Yes, Virginia, there are cowboys in Argentina, vaqueros, or gauchos, and all these images and memories I've been moved to drum up have been a very good foundation indeed for the job ahead. I will be surprised in the current title doesn't stick around for a while.
I even used to sing a hit parade song, in the 50's, "The Bandit of Brazil", all about a bold vaquero, who when he'd shoot, would shoot to kill. I recall being especially pleased that I could figure out the chords on my own, and did not have to resort to a book. I then had no experience of buying sheet music.
They say that amongst Francis' many virtues and interests there exists a passion for literature, therefore an ability to deal with symbols. Should he get around to reading my scribbles, therefore, he's well equipped to take hold of their meaning, unless I happen to wander too far into the upper mansions of the spiritual life without his having been prepared by God's more unusual graces. I have little idea so far of the new Pope's knowledge of the mystics. The journalistas, while interesting and occasionally informative, have so far been so consumed by mere politics - as they see them - that they haven't got around to reporting on his relationship with the Spanish masters of the spiritual life, and so, as usual, are possibly missing some of the most significant stories.
But I have heard - from Marianne, who monitors the news services of the Net much more than I do - that he has used the phrase "Mystical Body of Christ" already, and my soul took yet another little leap upward as it heard about it. As a Jesuit, he is also familiar with the concept of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and that is a good thing too, not only in itself but in the face of so many journalists, and not just secular journalists, who are basically Jansenistic in so much of their thinking. And incredibly unresearched about Benedict's vital role in dealing with the sexual abuse issue, thus almost obliterating their own unquestionable value in helping with this problem, simply by reporting it, in the early days of the clean-up.
Would it help if the Church were to give a formal thank you to the secular press for those first encounters with the horrors of fact and clerical negligence in dealing with it? Certainly the Church was doing nothing about the problem on its own. Had it been facing into it according to the will of Christ, the infamous Father John Monaghan of Nelson would have been arrested a quarter century earlier than 1988. Only Cardinal Ratzinger put into place the system that acts now as it should have been able to act then.
But, as one always has to admit, sadly, not only the world, but the Church and those who pretend to be some quasi-religious organization pretending to be the Church, are all punished, eventually, for ignoring perfection and the spiritual life, which means ignoring what the Bible actually says. It can be no other way. God has a contract with us, by which he is held to do everything He can to get us into heaven. If he could not go back to heaven without suffering, how can mankind expect to get there without a bruise or two, especially when it spends so much energy refusing to study the rules?
But this just in. Marianne told me an hour ago that it has been reported that Francis does know a little at least of the spiritual life from an experience in his youth.
Perhaps that was why, to my eyes, the expectant crowd in Saint Peter's Square, awaiting the sight of the man for whom the white smoke had flown, looked more like the happy portion of humanity at the Last Judgement than any crowd I've ever seen.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Gunfight Two
To tell the simple truth, I don't think the papal election was very much in my mind when I began the Circle X post. I've been puttering at it for so long that it quite possibly started rolling even before I heard that Benedict was resigning. (I don't like that word "abdicate", because of its association with the unfortunate Edward VIII, a man with few of Benedict's virtues, and certainly none of his affection for prayer, service, and scripture scholarship. Given Benedict's undoubted spiritual status at present, and the utter quality of his life in the Church, coupled with God's ordinary preference for contemplation over action, it would be no surprise to discover in heaven that our beloved Bavarian will have accomplished even more, in the eyes of God, as a contemplative than he has as Prefect and Pope.)
Where I was really headed had to do with music, or rather the methods of teaching it, which I had no doubt was going to involve me in a shoot out of massive proportions. The election conclave will be interesting, and it would be surprising to hear that no sparks flew, but it will all be much more mannerly conducted than the process of returning music education to common sense, unless I am greatly - and gratefully - surprised. The establishment, and ignorance, will be reluctant to give up its grip. I know about at least the second because of my own fondness for performance rather than actually understanding what's underneath it all.
Given that I am already at work at Mr Cameron's Conservatory, many chapters well set on the east shore of Vancouver Island, why this sudden shift to the Cariboo Chilcotin, why this obvious sudden reliance on a symbol not only reader, but also the author, never heard of before? In my short time in the Chilcotin I never got around to learning that the Bracewell calves had a Circle X singed into their compliant little rumps.
There are at least two answers, the first and simplest being that it is not at all a sudden shift, for from the first chapters of Contemplatives it is obvious that the three young men and their survey crew are headed for that part of the world, and it is equally obvious that that book has as much to do with music as it has with literature, both ordinary and that which has to do with mysticism. And yet the second answer must admit of a huge surprise, to me, because of the creation of a new, deliberately functional, character, in spite of there being already at least two of these in Conservatory. Deirdre and Maggie are plainly young students being used as vehicles for the dissemination of theoretical information about the keyboard, although they are also very alive individuals to their creator. Why do they need supplementation?
I've been disturbed about this. Every author knows at least a little history of feeding himself red herrings. Blind leads. Inspirations that eventually lead nowhere. Or at least have to be laid aside for a much later date. All three of my young male troika are good examples of that last rule. The plot so far has many difficulties, starting with even the possibility of it being able to happen, given the degree of culture clash between whites and natives, even in the Chilcotin, where the history of co-operation and mutual esteem is quite good, barring the nineteenth century beginnings with the Alexis War.
I've spent some weeks on this, following the recent months of reading a number of great tales from the Cariboo, and I only recently came to peace by being able to make a uniquely contemplative decision. As John of the Cross says, one thought of a man is worth more than all the known universe, so as I am a man with a thought, that goes on and on as a regular meditation, I don't have to write a story about it in order for it have some effect. In his own way, God will find an employment for the meditation, and its assorted images, with or without a written narrative.
The central image of the picture is a native girl, I think around eleven or so, who exhibits an interest in the piano, especially after she sees and hears Jacob Cameron doing all sorts of things on the Circle X keyboard without in any way being under the influence of a written text. Her family are working in the area, as the native people regularly did for the white ranchers, especially at haying time. ( I knew nothing about this arrangement, years ago, when I was suddenly moved to try to write a short story set in the area.) In the sequel to Contemplatives, Jacob has already given some vocal instruction to a daughter from the ranch, summoned home from high school in Williams Lake for just that reason, but the native lassie was not then a factor; for one reason, because I was further along in researching vocal education than I was in keyboard instruction. The vocalist is not required to produce meaningful harmonies out of a single mouth. One tongue is by no means ten fingers.
Nor does eight divided neatly into ten, leaving nothing left over. Quite precisely, piano harmony theory as it has been presented by the music publishing industry is chock full of initially annoying, confusing, depressing, contradictions. We are creatures of structure, of recognizable and reliable patterns, even to the exclusion of reason and common sense, so much so that we are taken in by all sorts of music methods, not just for the keyboard, and make a murky sort of progress much more by uncritical memory than by the freeing, creative, understanding with which the Creator originally intended that music should be studied. We are encouraged to charge at music "literature"just as in second rate fitness centres work-out hopefuls are encouraged to charge at weight quotas. Something is accomplished, for a time, and then the process falls by the wayside, for so many, because of a discontent that is the logical result of failing to get to the core of the matter, where genuine understanding and real pleasure go hand in hand.
Those bound to be professionals or very good amateurs, simply by the natural fact that music is what they love and do best, somehow muddle through. This is because alone among all the arts music is not itself symbolic, like a painting, or the collection of tiny letters that make up a story, it is real. The theory is intentional, but the music itself is real. The student can thus put the paper theory away from him and respond to the reality of sound, the very real dimensions and structure of his instrument, and the even more real quantity, mass, and skill of his organs. In the case of the keyboard, he eventually sorts out his ten fingers. Or, more realistically, his eight fingers, with their somewhat limited lateral motion in relation to each other, and his two thumbs, which can wander all over the place.
But even among the professionals, I have to wonder at the degree of analytical understanding amidst their undoubted performance skills. Their accomplishment is primarily by way of memory. The composer wrote down what he wanted to be played, and they imitate the printed structure, with a few degrees of personal interpretation thrown in, usually in terms of pace and feeling. The basic structure, that is, the intervals between the notes, they leave as penned. Jazz is freer, of course, but many a jazz performance seems to follow a fixed text.
Now, what the native girl hears is not really a performance in the usual sense of the word. Jacob is not playing a known composition, but simply an exercise, or series of exercises, that follow a definite numerical pattern. That is, he is doing the very traditional thing of playing scales and arpeggios, but these scales and arpeggios are all in harmonic form, freely including both major and minor within one sketch, and utilizing however much of the keyboard dimension that he feels like playing at the moment. Thus there is a strong element of inspiration present, utterly lacking in the necessary confinement and limitation of a specific tune, and he can change time signatures as he feels so moved.
There is also perhaps an even stronger element of identity of structure, each more or less unique to the individual key or mode, although this appears more obviously in the left hand than in the right. The right hand is comprised of thirds and fourth only, in a plainly discernible sequence, while the left uses fifths as well as thirds and fourths (sixths where minor intervals within the major key are included) and these patterns can vary from one key or mode to another simply because of the plain demands of pleasant and agreeable sound.
Obviously. the usual plans of the usual scale books have been quite overturned, if not completely ignored, and the traditional mindset with its trouble-making pattern habits thoroughly rejected. All of this leads to a very pleasant combination of utter freedom and complete control, with no reliance on any external guidance or unwanted pressure. The student simply proceeds from his or her own internal interest, his or her own creation and solution of the problems to be solved in the understanding and mastery of numerically identified intervals, or pairs of notes, in each hand, which when put together with both hands create triads, therefore a full harmony and the habitual four voice structure of a piano or organ text.
Also, especially in the case of myself, a singer, the free swinging nature of the golden scale provides a most organic accompaniment, or even a resounding lieder type keyboard support and partnership to the fifth voice, that of the singer/player, and, if relevant, to the others in the room or building joining in. In fact for the last few days, especially as I putter at the numbers and the solfa among the pentachord that lies between great C and the fifth above, I've had so much freedom, quiet resonance, and support rather than resistance from the singer's Muse that with the conclave nicely past the black smoke of its first vote I was even moved to wonder if this was a sign of the new Pope shutting down on the sort of music it is impossible for me to give voice to.
This sounds like a good place to take a post break, as I'm still a long ways from making a conclusion out of all the symbols floating so interestingly out of the image of the Circle X ranch.
Where I was really headed had to do with music, or rather the methods of teaching it, which I had no doubt was going to involve me in a shoot out of massive proportions. The election conclave will be interesting, and it would be surprising to hear that no sparks flew, but it will all be much more mannerly conducted than the process of returning music education to common sense, unless I am greatly - and gratefully - surprised. The establishment, and ignorance, will be reluctant to give up its grip. I know about at least the second because of my own fondness for performance rather than actually understanding what's underneath it all.
Given that I am already at work at Mr Cameron's Conservatory, many chapters well set on the east shore of Vancouver Island, why this sudden shift to the Cariboo Chilcotin, why this obvious sudden reliance on a symbol not only reader, but also the author, never heard of before? In my short time in the Chilcotin I never got around to learning that the Bracewell calves had a Circle X singed into their compliant little rumps.
There are at least two answers, the first and simplest being that it is not at all a sudden shift, for from the first chapters of Contemplatives it is obvious that the three young men and their survey crew are headed for that part of the world, and it is equally obvious that that book has as much to do with music as it has with literature, both ordinary and that which has to do with mysticism. And yet the second answer must admit of a huge surprise, to me, because of the creation of a new, deliberately functional, character, in spite of there being already at least two of these in Conservatory. Deirdre and Maggie are plainly young students being used as vehicles for the dissemination of theoretical information about the keyboard, although they are also very alive individuals to their creator. Why do they need supplementation?
I've been disturbed about this. Every author knows at least a little history of feeding himself red herrings. Blind leads. Inspirations that eventually lead nowhere. Or at least have to be laid aside for a much later date. All three of my young male troika are good examples of that last rule. The plot so far has many difficulties, starting with even the possibility of it being able to happen, given the degree of culture clash between whites and natives, even in the Chilcotin, where the history of co-operation and mutual esteem is quite good, barring the nineteenth century beginnings with the Alexis War.
I've spent some weeks on this, following the recent months of reading a number of great tales from the Cariboo, and I only recently came to peace by being able to make a uniquely contemplative decision. As John of the Cross says, one thought of a man is worth more than all the known universe, so as I am a man with a thought, that goes on and on as a regular meditation, I don't have to write a story about it in order for it have some effect. In his own way, God will find an employment for the meditation, and its assorted images, with or without a written narrative.
The central image of the picture is a native girl, I think around eleven or so, who exhibits an interest in the piano, especially after she sees and hears Jacob Cameron doing all sorts of things on the Circle X keyboard without in any way being under the influence of a written text. Her family are working in the area, as the native people regularly did for the white ranchers, especially at haying time. ( I knew nothing about this arrangement, years ago, when I was suddenly moved to try to write a short story set in the area.) In the sequel to Contemplatives, Jacob has already given some vocal instruction to a daughter from the ranch, summoned home from high school in Williams Lake for just that reason, but the native lassie was not then a factor; for one reason, because I was further along in researching vocal education than I was in keyboard instruction. The vocalist is not required to produce meaningful harmonies out of a single mouth. One tongue is by no means ten fingers.
Nor does eight divided neatly into ten, leaving nothing left over. Quite precisely, piano harmony theory as it has been presented by the music publishing industry is chock full of initially annoying, confusing, depressing, contradictions. We are creatures of structure, of recognizable and reliable patterns, even to the exclusion of reason and common sense, so much so that we are taken in by all sorts of music methods, not just for the keyboard, and make a murky sort of progress much more by uncritical memory than by the freeing, creative, understanding with which the Creator originally intended that music should be studied. We are encouraged to charge at music "literature"just as in second rate fitness centres work-out hopefuls are encouraged to charge at weight quotas. Something is accomplished, for a time, and then the process falls by the wayside, for so many, because of a discontent that is the logical result of failing to get to the core of the matter, where genuine understanding and real pleasure go hand in hand.
Those bound to be professionals or very good amateurs, simply by the natural fact that music is what they love and do best, somehow muddle through. This is because alone among all the arts music is not itself symbolic, like a painting, or the collection of tiny letters that make up a story, it is real. The theory is intentional, but the music itself is real. The student can thus put the paper theory away from him and respond to the reality of sound, the very real dimensions and structure of his instrument, and the even more real quantity, mass, and skill of his organs. In the case of the keyboard, he eventually sorts out his ten fingers. Or, more realistically, his eight fingers, with their somewhat limited lateral motion in relation to each other, and his two thumbs, which can wander all over the place.
But even among the professionals, I have to wonder at the degree of analytical understanding amidst their undoubted performance skills. Their accomplishment is primarily by way of memory. The composer wrote down what he wanted to be played, and they imitate the printed structure, with a few degrees of personal interpretation thrown in, usually in terms of pace and feeling. The basic structure, that is, the intervals between the notes, they leave as penned. Jazz is freer, of course, but many a jazz performance seems to follow a fixed text.
Now, what the native girl hears is not really a performance in the usual sense of the word. Jacob is not playing a known composition, but simply an exercise, or series of exercises, that follow a definite numerical pattern. That is, he is doing the very traditional thing of playing scales and arpeggios, but these scales and arpeggios are all in harmonic form, freely including both major and minor within one sketch, and utilizing however much of the keyboard dimension that he feels like playing at the moment. Thus there is a strong element of inspiration present, utterly lacking in the necessary confinement and limitation of a specific tune, and he can change time signatures as he feels so moved.
There is also perhaps an even stronger element of identity of structure, each more or less unique to the individual key or mode, although this appears more obviously in the left hand than in the right. The right hand is comprised of thirds and fourth only, in a plainly discernible sequence, while the left uses fifths as well as thirds and fourths (sixths where minor intervals within the major key are included) and these patterns can vary from one key or mode to another simply because of the plain demands of pleasant and agreeable sound.
Obviously. the usual plans of the usual scale books have been quite overturned, if not completely ignored, and the traditional mindset with its trouble-making pattern habits thoroughly rejected. All of this leads to a very pleasant combination of utter freedom and complete control, with no reliance on any external guidance or unwanted pressure. The student simply proceeds from his or her own internal interest, his or her own creation and solution of the problems to be solved in the understanding and mastery of numerically identified intervals, or pairs of notes, in each hand, which when put together with both hands create triads, therefore a full harmony and the habitual four voice structure of a piano or organ text.
Also, especially in the case of myself, a singer, the free swinging nature of the golden scale provides a most organic accompaniment, or even a resounding lieder type keyboard support and partnership to the fifth voice, that of the singer/player, and, if relevant, to the others in the room or building joining in. In fact for the last few days, especially as I putter at the numbers and the solfa among the pentachord that lies between great C and the fifth above, I've had so much freedom, quiet resonance, and support rather than resistance from the singer's Muse that with the conclave nicely past the black smoke of its first vote I was even moved to wonder if this was a sign of the new Pope shutting down on the sort of music it is impossible for me to give voice to.
This sounds like a good place to take a post break, as I'm still a long ways from making a conclusion out of all the symbols floating so interestingly out of the image of the Circle X ranch.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Gunfight at the Circle X Corral
When I was growing up, so many decades ago, there was no film a more automatic choice for a Saturday matinee and a movie house full of kids than a good old fashioned Western. Long, lean, actors who knew how to drawl - as well as draw - lovely fast horses, wide open range, the odd heroine, thunderous chases on horseback, and of course the ultimate gunfight, with the bad guy always going for his gun first, and instantly punished for doing so. I was a regular customer at the horse opera by the time I was six, and of all the movie genres I have to say that I think Westerns were the favourites of my youth.
Then when I was ten, the Western novel fell into my grasp, and my imaginative romance with the nineteenth century continued and intensified. Rummaging in a trunk in the upstairs hall of my grandparents' house, where we were living after the war, I found half-a-dozen orange backed Zane Grey's one night before bedtime, and was instantly hooked. The Idaho landscape of Thunder Mountain was vividly similar, in my mind at least, to the country around Falkland, in the North Okanagan, where I had lived for a few months when I was six, and I was delighted to be transported back out of the drizzling winter of the Coast, especially in the company of such stalwarts as Kallispel Emerson and his brothers. Now I no longer had to wait on Hollywood, nor endure the annoying modernity of a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry film just to take in some horses and gun play. I could ride the range whenever I so desired.
You could not really say that I became an addict of the Old West, because I had broad tastes, fortunately, and an enormous affection for the sheer childhood joy to be found in the children's classics, in many ways much more beautifully realistic than any Western could ever be. Westerns work extremely well symbolically - which is why I started this essay in the first place - but they pretty much avoid the real truth, which means they don't work literally, because the literal insists that a society of illiterates is basically dull, spiritless, and addicted to sin. In other words, philosophize well, or you philosophize badly. There is no middle ground, just like there was nobody standing with a thick-walled bucket in order to catch the fatal lead flying up and down between the protagonists shooting it out on the main street of a cow town. In reality, and especially as reflected in literature, a human life without a full participation in the life of the Church is a rather dull and drab affair.
But I did love those six Zane Greys, and they provided me with uncountable hours of pleasure, insight, and vocabulary building. And, to repeat, a nice dry holiday on the open range, far away and across the mountains from west coast drizzle. And a fair amount of practical information about handling animals and camping out. I think it was from Zane Grey that I learned about being wary around horses' hind feet, which came in handy only a very few months later when my father started logging with a pair of the noble brutes, and I was involved from time to time in looking after them. Babe, the four-year old bay mare, was an especially worrisome lady from time to time, but from Grey I had a comforting sense of being schooled in the ways of troublesome horses, and thus was one up on her most of the time, simply by staying well clear of her tail end.
I even tried to write Westerns a few times, once or twice as a script, a few other times in story form, but this was never a lasting effort, and pretty well lacked genuine inspiration. The best thing I got out of the idea was a nice memory of landscape, either from a real memory, or something pleasant imagined from a book.
There was a perfectly good reason for this failure, of course. The point was, I already knew all sorts of landscapes - and seascapes - extremely well, often as virtual, natural, visions of specific locations particularly blessed at a particular moment by the light and spirit of the Almighty, usually under the aspect of one of the members of the Trinity, and I especially knew the truest cowboy landscape of my own province, the Cariboo Chilcotin.The only way I was going to create a successful Western was to fall back, not on six guns and a lot of horses, because there had been none of that kind of action, but on what actually happened in, with, to, and around me in my days in the outback, all that spiritual nudging toward even more light and a deeper spirit.
I had also been nudged by the Muse in the weeks before I went into the woods, for the novel I had left Dun and Bradstreet to write found itself engaged with my shadowy three young men. All three had started off the first chapters of the first effort at the yacht novel, a year later two of them turned up, in the midst of a soaring inspiration, in a short story, and now all three were back again as the principal dancers in my first full length attempt to get away from any hint of slick or expedient fiction. I had spent the winter basically not writing, using all my energy and leisure time for study and reflection on myself, albeit not without plenty of friendly company pretty much addicted to all sorts of cultural questions, and now the trio were functioning, more or less honestly, smack in the middle of the campus, a place I had never really used before for a backdrop.
By saying functioning more or less honestly I mean that I had dropped all attempts at a plot that would rely on the conventional adventures, with excellent results on my own relationship with words, but I had no thoughts on bringing in any aspects whatsoever of the spiritual life, which meant that no matter how well I might use words for what I did describe, there was no way I could reflect what I actually experienced, which had to make for a story that must limp, simply because it could not reflect life as I knew and lived it.
Would things have been different if I'd had any education about the mystics in my own English tradition? The question arises, quite naturally. out of recent months' study of the British medieval quartet, especially of Rolle and the Anonymous author of the Cloud, but I think the answer has to be no. To write of the spiritual life without writing as a plain fool the author needs both divine permission and divine inspiration. Simply experiencing such things takes a soul much out of the way of ordinary thought, and having to write about it takes him even further away from ordinary language. It is rather like flying, for a human, which is impossible with out some kind of manufactured wings.
I definitely had the experience. There is no question of that, profoundly unworthy and religiously unschooled as I might have been. God simply kept coming, showing up with every sunrise, even if that were hidden - as was regularly the case, behind west coast cloud and rain - and albeit lightly, insisted on putting me through my youthful versions of the spiritual exercises, offering regular minor excursions, into and back out of, the dark night of the soul. There was, in its own small but very useful way, a regular rhythm of consolation and desolation, to borrow Ignatius' categories from the Exercises.
But this does not mean I could write about it then, for all the hope and satisfaction I took from knowing that eventually I would write about my life with the Spirit and its unique view of the world I lived in and with. "One of these days . . ." was a constant turn of thought and even spoken word with me, although I did not foresee how far away that day would be, with the exception of that thought, on the north bank of the Mosley in 1957, about the twenty years I would need to see my summer clearly enough so that I could start to write about it. And even when that happy grace arrived, it was only for fiction. There was to be no simple history for decades again. Good thing I came from a family of long livers.
And when I did write a small account of one incident, recently, it was instantly published, always a gratifying event for a writer! Granted there was no reference to the spiritual life, but it was a very true little tale and by its own account could never have been without some intricate rigging by divine Providence. In the last issue before Christmas just past, in the Williams Lake Tribune, the Black Press journal my oldest daughter reports for, there appeared a letter, virtually a short story, recounting my brief career as a "bull fighter" at the Bracewell Ranch, the Circle X, in the far southwest corner of the Chilcotin. As when I worked as a reporter myself, there was plenty of grace for the undertaking, in fact the text was pretty well dictated by the Holy Spirit while we were at Sunday Mass, so that I could write it, in one sitting as soon as we returned home, and fire it off to Monica at lunch time. Computers being what they are, she sent it right away to a Williams Lake writer, Sage Birchwater, retired a few years ago from long service with the Tribune, and he said it should be printed. Merry Christmas. There were already photos in place, not of me, but of the hostess that the party that led us all to the corral. Born in 1922, Gerry Bracewell is still alive - dancing in one of the photos - and was so pleased with what I had done that she had my daughter run off a dozen copies of the story for friends and relatives.
And thus not only a story, but a symbol, came to be, in such dramatic fashion that it is impossible for me not to ponder, extensively, what I might otherwise have not pondered, and ask myself why this sudden return to the Cariboo, so much beyond the ordinary need of the recollections of a writer who never could forget that part of the country in the first place? What is the major cause of it, and does that have anything to do with my agents deciding in September to send the last volume of Contemplatives to the Pope? Certainly by then Benedict was resolved on his retirement, and the arrival of the manuscript, by its very title - with which he was already well familiar - most solemnly did not contradict his decision in pectore.There can be no doubt that God has been deciding for the mystical body of the people of prayer for some time now, and Benedict's decision is simply a very appropriate outward manifestation of that preference. Come time for the election of the new Pope, there will be other manifestations. We will look back in retrospect for what was obvious all along to contemplatives, more or less, yet totally hidden from your average journalist and his/her incapacity to understand the Church as anything more than a collection of politicians who, strangely, refuse to wear business suits. All that cardinal red is to the media like a red cape to a bull.
Or, as was the case, a lady's borrowed bandana to a milk cow in the Circle X corral on a Sunday afternoon long ago. I had some great fun, and so did a number of spectators. That particular brand is what excited me as a symbol, you see. The Circle signifies eternity, the X a version of the Cross, the shape that Saint Andrew was crucified upon. Not a bad symbol for the Vatican to fly, and of course the election will be a shootout of much greater significance than anything set up by Wild Bill Hickok.
In its own way, the letter in the Williams Lake Tribune may be the closest thing to accuracy the secular press will have achieved during this particular season of speculation, at least once all the attendant circumstances are taken into account.
Then when I was ten, the Western novel fell into my grasp, and my imaginative romance with the nineteenth century continued and intensified. Rummaging in a trunk in the upstairs hall of my grandparents' house, where we were living after the war, I found half-a-dozen orange backed Zane Grey's one night before bedtime, and was instantly hooked. The Idaho landscape of Thunder Mountain was vividly similar, in my mind at least, to the country around Falkland, in the North Okanagan, where I had lived for a few months when I was six, and I was delighted to be transported back out of the drizzling winter of the Coast, especially in the company of such stalwarts as Kallispel Emerson and his brothers. Now I no longer had to wait on Hollywood, nor endure the annoying modernity of a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry film just to take in some horses and gun play. I could ride the range whenever I so desired.
You could not really say that I became an addict of the Old West, because I had broad tastes, fortunately, and an enormous affection for the sheer childhood joy to be found in the children's classics, in many ways much more beautifully realistic than any Western could ever be. Westerns work extremely well symbolically - which is why I started this essay in the first place - but they pretty much avoid the real truth, which means they don't work literally, because the literal insists that a society of illiterates is basically dull, spiritless, and addicted to sin. In other words, philosophize well, or you philosophize badly. There is no middle ground, just like there was nobody standing with a thick-walled bucket in order to catch the fatal lead flying up and down between the protagonists shooting it out on the main street of a cow town. In reality, and especially as reflected in literature, a human life without a full participation in the life of the Church is a rather dull and drab affair.
But I did love those six Zane Greys, and they provided me with uncountable hours of pleasure, insight, and vocabulary building. And, to repeat, a nice dry holiday on the open range, far away and across the mountains from west coast drizzle. And a fair amount of practical information about handling animals and camping out. I think it was from Zane Grey that I learned about being wary around horses' hind feet, which came in handy only a very few months later when my father started logging with a pair of the noble brutes, and I was involved from time to time in looking after them. Babe, the four-year old bay mare, was an especially worrisome lady from time to time, but from Grey I had a comforting sense of being schooled in the ways of troublesome horses, and thus was one up on her most of the time, simply by staying well clear of her tail end.
I even tried to write Westerns a few times, once or twice as a script, a few other times in story form, but this was never a lasting effort, and pretty well lacked genuine inspiration. The best thing I got out of the idea was a nice memory of landscape, either from a real memory, or something pleasant imagined from a book.
There was a perfectly good reason for this failure, of course. The point was, I already knew all sorts of landscapes - and seascapes - extremely well, often as virtual, natural, visions of specific locations particularly blessed at a particular moment by the light and spirit of the Almighty, usually under the aspect of one of the members of the Trinity, and I especially knew the truest cowboy landscape of my own province, the Cariboo Chilcotin.The only way I was going to create a successful Western was to fall back, not on six guns and a lot of horses, because there had been none of that kind of action, but on what actually happened in, with, to, and around me in my days in the outback, all that spiritual nudging toward even more light and a deeper spirit.
I had also been nudged by the Muse in the weeks before I went into the woods, for the novel I had left Dun and Bradstreet to write found itself engaged with my shadowy three young men. All three had started off the first chapters of the first effort at the yacht novel, a year later two of them turned up, in the midst of a soaring inspiration, in a short story, and now all three were back again as the principal dancers in my first full length attempt to get away from any hint of slick or expedient fiction. I had spent the winter basically not writing, using all my energy and leisure time for study and reflection on myself, albeit not without plenty of friendly company pretty much addicted to all sorts of cultural questions, and now the trio were functioning, more or less honestly, smack in the middle of the campus, a place I had never really used before for a backdrop.
By saying functioning more or less honestly I mean that I had dropped all attempts at a plot that would rely on the conventional adventures, with excellent results on my own relationship with words, but I had no thoughts on bringing in any aspects whatsoever of the spiritual life, which meant that no matter how well I might use words for what I did describe, there was no way I could reflect what I actually experienced, which had to make for a story that must limp, simply because it could not reflect life as I knew and lived it.
Would things have been different if I'd had any education about the mystics in my own English tradition? The question arises, quite naturally. out of recent months' study of the British medieval quartet, especially of Rolle and the Anonymous author of the Cloud, but I think the answer has to be no. To write of the spiritual life without writing as a plain fool the author needs both divine permission and divine inspiration. Simply experiencing such things takes a soul much out of the way of ordinary thought, and having to write about it takes him even further away from ordinary language. It is rather like flying, for a human, which is impossible with out some kind of manufactured wings.
I definitely had the experience. There is no question of that, profoundly unworthy and religiously unschooled as I might have been. God simply kept coming, showing up with every sunrise, even if that were hidden - as was regularly the case, behind west coast cloud and rain - and albeit lightly, insisted on putting me through my youthful versions of the spiritual exercises, offering regular minor excursions, into and back out of, the dark night of the soul. There was, in its own small but very useful way, a regular rhythm of consolation and desolation, to borrow Ignatius' categories from the Exercises.
But this does not mean I could write about it then, for all the hope and satisfaction I took from knowing that eventually I would write about my life with the Spirit and its unique view of the world I lived in and with. "One of these days . . ." was a constant turn of thought and even spoken word with me, although I did not foresee how far away that day would be, with the exception of that thought, on the north bank of the Mosley in 1957, about the twenty years I would need to see my summer clearly enough so that I could start to write about it. And even when that happy grace arrived, it was only for fiction. There was to be no simple history for decades again. Good thing I came from a family of long livers.
And when I did write a small account of one incident, recently, it was instantly published, always a gratifying event for a writer! Granted there was no reference to the spiritual life, but it was a very true little tale and by its own account could never have been without some intricate rigging by divine Providence. In the last issue before Christmas just past, in the Williams Lake Tribune, the Black Press journal my oldest daughter reports for, there appeared a letter, virtually a short story, recounting my brief career as a "bull fighter" at the Bracewell Ranch, the Circle X, in the far southwest corner of the Chilcotin. As when I worked as a reporter myself, there was plenty of grace for the undertaking, in fact the text was pretty well dictated by the Holy Spirit while we were at Sunday Mass, so that I could write it, in one sitting as soon as we returned home, and fire it off to Monica at lunch time. Computers being what they are, she sent it right away to a Williams Lake writer, Sage Birchwater, retired a few years ago from long service with the Tribune, and he said it should be printed. Merry Christmas. There were already photos in place, not of me, but of the hostess that the party that led us all to the corral. Born in 1922, Gerry Bracewell is still alive - dancing in one of the photos - and was so pleased with what I had done that she had my daughter run off a dozen copies of the story for friends and relatives.
And thus not only a story, but a symbol, came to be, in such dramatic fashion that it is impossible for me not to ponder, extensively, what I might otherwise have not pondered, and ask myself why this sudden return to the Cariboo, so much beyond the ordinary need of the recollections of a writer who never could forget that part of the country in the first place? What is the major cause of it, and does that have anything to do with my agents deciding in September to send the last volume of Contemplatives to the Pope? Certainly by then Benedict was resolved on his retirement, and the arrival of the manuscript, by its very title - with which he was already well familiar - most solemnly did not contradict his decision in pectore.There can be no doubt that God has been deciding for the mystical body of the people of prayer for some time now, and Benedict's decision is simply a very appropriate outward manifestation of that preference. Come time for the election of the new Pope, there will be other manifestations. We will look back in retrospect for what was obvious all along to contemplatives, more or less, yet totally hidden from your average journalist and his/her incapacity to understand the Church as anything more than a collection of politicians who, strangely, refuse to wear business suits. All that cardinal red is to the media like a red cape to a bull.
Or, as was the case, a lady's borrowed bandana to a milk cow in the Circle X corral on a Sunday afternoon long ago. I had some great fun, and so did a number of spectators. That particular brand is what excited me as a symbol, you see. The Circle signifies eternity, the X a version of the Cross, the shape that Saint Andrew was crucified upon. Not a bad symbol for the Vatican to fly, and of course the election will be a shootout of much greater significance than anything set up by Wild Bill Hickok.
In its own way, the letter in the Williams Lake Tribune may be the closest thing to accuracy the secular press will have achieved during this particular season of speculation, at least once all the attendant circumstances are taken into account.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Tatlayoko Lake Two
I don't think that at any time beginning a Ranger post have I felt as if I were launching into a novel. That is, up until now. 159 posts along the way, I have consistently assumed that my Muse came from the department of journalism, or perhaps the essay field, but not from fiction. I enjoy the journalism, and I always recall becoming first aware of the journalists' Muse in the offices of the Ubyssey. (It was a pleasant surprise, and very strong, evidence of profoundly useful mental energy pouring out of my fellow students at work on producing the edition of the day.) I also like the sense of being an essayist, which does not have quite the pressure of simplifying as much as one does for journalism.
But with these examples of intellectual labour there is not quite the same sense of starting off on a voyage of discovery that one has in beginning a work of fiction. Perhaps it is because, to a certain degree, you already know what you are going to say in the lesser forms. Your task is to report on what you already comprehend, as briefly and as clearly as possible. This is, of course, no mean challenge, but I think it means that you had most of the fun in the mental notes made before you started to write, and before that in the gathering of the material.
In the fiction, the material gathers you, and this is what makes writing a novel more like a love affair than a job. It's also what makes it in the long run much tougher. You do get to abstract from the total universe in a novel, as in any smaller form, so you have the comfort and security of limits, but it is so much less of an abstraction, and no matter how clearly defined the limits you have set for yourself, you still somehow look out over an entire horizon of possibilities every time you sit down to the keyboard. It's something like having to look God right in the eye and figuring out what to say for yourself, rather than merely, in a way, taking dictation.
Another aspect of the adventure in fiction is the capacity it has for surprise, and that means surprise to such a degree that it can blow all the best laid plans to pieces, working as much devastation as to have you start all over again. The first five years in this house were like that, a veritable warfare in which the constant victor was the wastebasket, or files to be hidden at the back of the cupboard. It was such a pleasant relief to be able to acknowledge, with help, finally, that the right "final" text had been finalized. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the process of writing without lasting acceptance from my in-house editors but it does mean that I did have to endure several winters of discontent, sprinkled with the humbling recognition of premature enthusiasm. Fortunately, I did always have the grace of being able to start all over again, simply because putting words together to make something more or less unique always has a charm of its own.
In themselves, I have to admit, the surprises were principally of the positive sort, always along the lines of a constant upgrading, insisting every once in a while in just a little more grace, in proportion to nature, and eventually demanding the presence of a certain amount of glory.
To a certain degree, I must admit to repeating myself, using thoughts from early posts of the Ranger, but not for the purpose of indulging memories that I've already enjoyed making use of. A writer is certainly entitled to talk about his own methods with the process, and even obliged on occasion, but he also has to exercise a certain detachment: he has to abstain from finding excuses to go on talking when he's actually run out of things to say. But in this case, the repetition has a distinct purpose of its own, and at this point, at least for myself, it would seem to be utterly marvelous in its application. I certainly do have more to say, and what I have to say has the honoured status of having come from experiences of an ancient vintage. We all know the value of a fifty-year old single malt, especially when it comes in a bottle you thought you would never lay hands on again.
When I said goodbye to Tatlayoko Lake, well on in September of 1957, in my youthful confidence I assumed I'd be back in a few years, four, maybe five or six at the most. It was a sure thing. I'd been making assorted typewriters rattle like Gatling guns for the last four years already, and now that I'd finally tucked into studying classical philosophy, discovered Thomas Aquinas - with help from a friend - and done my apprenticeship with my only real "contemporary" rivals - Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald - I was bound to make it as a novelist pretty shortly. And to make it big. Those two had made their names by the time they were twenty-five, and so would I. It would be a piece of cake. All I had to do was create a readable summary of everything that had happened to me over the past years, at UBC and other places, winding up with my unbelievable summer in the shadow of the Waddington Range. Providence had given me the experiences, both social and literary, and it would continue to provide me with creative triumphs to match. I'd be back, with fame and money in my pocket, and I'd sleep in one of the Bracewell log cabins across the road from the ranch house, and go hunting for moose with that most excellent of men, Alf Bracewell.
Error number one. It was not really Alf who was the hunter's guide. A little recent research, thanks to Sage Birchwater's numerous - and highly readable - texts on the personalities of the Cariboo-Chilcotin reveal that it was really Alf's wife Gerry who stalked the moose, the deer, the grizzlies, on behalf of hunters. I had realized that Gerry was a lot of things - like the wife-to-be I was to discover a few months later something of an archivist and local history promoter - and also like my mother, a great hostess, but somehow I had not totally clued in to her status a class A hunting guide. I was not totally stupid about women with rifles, since in fact my father had hired Birgalette Solberg to ferry us across Sechelt Inlet in her clinker built and show us where the deer hung out on the far shore, but I did not catch on to Gerry's status as a hunter at that point. Her late brother's guitar, a Gibson, as her son Alec has recently informed me, was a principal focus of my interest. It was a most beautiful instrument and I was largely under the quality of its influence, like a visitor to the Louvre struck by an original masterpiece he has heretofore seen only as a print. The simply fact that I was able to get involved in a sort of bullfight the next day after I played it is proof enough that jockdom has always had to compete with the artiste in my life.
To be continued.
But with these examples of intellectual labour there is not quite the same sense of starting off on a voyage of discovery that one has in beginning a work of fiction. Perhaps it is because, to a certain degree, you already know what you are going to say in the lesser forms. Your task is to report on what you already comprehend, as briefly and as clearly as possible. This is, of course, no mean challenge, but I think it means that you had most of the fun in the mental notes made before you started to write, and before that in the gathering of the material.
In the fiction, the material gathers you, and this is what makes writing a novel more like a love affair than a job. It's also what makes it in the long run much tougher. You do get to abstract from the total universe in a novel, as in any smaller form, so you have the comfort and security of limits, but it is so much less of an abstraction, and no matter how clearly defined the limits you have set for yourself, you still somehow look out over an entire horizon of possibilities every time you sit down to the keyboard. It's something like having to look God right in the eye and figuring out what to say for yourself, rather than merely, in a way, taking dictation.
Another aspect of the adventure in fiction is the capacity it has for surprise, and that means surprise to such a degree that it can blow all the best laid plans to pieces, working as much devastation as to have you start all over again. The first five years in this house were like that, a veritable warfare in which the constant victor was the wastebasket, or files to be hidden at the back of the cupboard. It was such a pleasant relief to be able to acknowledge, with help, finally, that the right "final" text had been finalized. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the process of writing without lasting acceptance from my in-house editors but it does mean that I did have to endure several winters of discontent, sprinkled with the humbling recognition of premature enthusiasm. Fortunately, I did always have the grace of being able to start all over again, simply because putting words together to make something more or less unique always has a charm of its own.
In themselves, I have to admit, the surprises were principally of the positive sort, always along the lines of a constant upgrading, insisting every once in a while in just a little more grace, in proportion to nature, and eventually demanding the presence of a certain amount of glory.
To a certain degree, I must admit to repeating myself, using thoughts from early posts of the Ranger, but not for the purpose of indulging memories that I've already enjoyed making use of. A writer is certainly entitled to talk about his own methods with the process, and even obliged on occasion, but he also has to exercise a certain detachment: he has to abstain from finding excuses to go on talking when he's actually run out of things to say. But in this case, the repetition has a distinct purpose of its own, and at this point, at least for myself, it would seem to be utterly marvelous in its application. I certainly do have more to say, and what I have to say has the honoured status of having come from experiences of an ancient vintage. We all know the value of a fifty-year old single malt, especially when it comes in a bottle you thought you would never lay hands on again.
When I said goodbye to Tatlayoko Lake, well on in September of 1957, in my youthful confidence I assumed I'd be back in a few years, four, maybe five or six at the most. It was a sure thing. I'd been making assorted typewriters rattle like Gatling guns for the last four years already, and now that I'd finally tucked into studying classical philosophy, discovered Thomas Aquinas - with help from a friend - and done my apprenticeship with my only real "contemporary" rivals - Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald - I was bound to make it as a novelist pretty shortly. And to make it big. Those two had made their names by the time they were twenty-five, and so would I. It would be a piece of cake. All I had to do was create a readable summary of everything that had happened to me over the past years, at UBC and other places, winding up with my unbelievable summer in the shadow of the Waddington Range. Providence had given me the experiences, both social and literary, and it would continue to provide me with creative triumphs to match. I'd be back, with fame and money in my pocket, and I'd sleep in one of the Bracewell log cabins across the road from the ranch house, and go hunting for moose with that most excellent of men, Alf Bracewell.
Error number one. It was not really Alf who was the hunter's guide. A little recent research, thanks to Sage Birchwater's numerous - and highly readable - texts on the personalities of the Cariboo-Chilcotin reveal that it was really Alf's wife Gerry who stalked the moose, the deer, the grizzlies, on behalf of hunters. I had realized that Gerry was a lot of things - like the wife-to-be I was to discover a few months later something of an archivist and local history promoter - and also like my mother, a great hostess, but somehow I had not totally clued in to her status a class A hunting guide. I was not totally stupid about women with rifles, since in fact my father had hired Birgalette Solberg to ferry us across Sechelt Inlet in her clinker built and show us where the deer hung out on the far shore, but I did not catch on to Gerry's status as a hunter at that point. Her late brother's guitar, a Gibson, as her son Alec has recently informed me, was a principal focus of my interest. It was a most beautiful instrument and I was largely under the quality of its influence, like a visitor to the Louvre struck by an original masterpiece he has heretofore seen only as a print. The simply fact that I was able to get involved in a sort of bullfight the next day after I played it is proof enough that jockdom has always had to compete with the artiste in my life.
To be continued.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Tatlayoko Lake, Looking South
The title of this post takes its name from a photograph title given not by myself, but by the photographer, one Chris Rowat, head designer for the very successful area magazine, Kootenay Mountain Culture. Back in the days of creating Touchstones Nelson, the new museum, although she was no longer the managing director, Shawn still had a number of responsibilities, about which I naturally maintained an interest. Thus, over morning coffee, I would ask her what she was up to at work.
And quite regularly, while the permanent exhibition, on the second floor of the old city hall, was coming into being, she would say, "I have to go and see Chris and Daiva." This was the couple who were designing the PME.
Having once prided myself on my role as a kind of cultural welcome wagon to creative types new to Nelson, I was curious about these two, especially as Shawn assured me they were very good at what they did, but I knew that all my concentration had to remain on the Church and my writing and music research. Anything and anyone not a direct responsibility was a distraction, and any alteration to that schedule could only be wrought by startlingly plain act of Providence.
Or, more precisely, a series of acts, as in a play.
The opening act took place two or three years ago when KMC editor Mitchell Scott and I began emailing back and forth about the possibility of my writing something for the magazine. I had noticed the publication's beginning efforts years before in the gym, when local outdoors supplies and clothing store owner Dave Elliot had started up a small, beginning, version, because there was a good little article in it on interval running by Ed Natyshak, founder of the Summit Health and Fitness, where I was busy learning about weight training; but I had paid only a limited attention to the more ambitious successor because I was no skier, and although I hiked constantly in our local hills, I rarely climbed mountains. Nor did I skate board or mountain bike. I did wonder about writing for KMC at some point, but there seemed no way in specifically open to me.
But because they had once lived on Lasqueti Island, where my father logged with horses after World War II, I was pulled into the KMC orbit after I met Jim and Lily Drake, who had sold their house on the island and moved to Nelson. Jim became, briefly, one of my keyboard guinea pigs, and he and Lily were also parents of Julia, Mitchell Scott's wife. I happened to drop by one day when Julia was visiting her Mom, and Lily handed me a copy of the latest KMC, just brought along by her daughter. From that particular issue I learned why Whitewater, our local ski hill, has such enviable powder, as opposed to the coastal ski slopes. But none of this was going to tempt me to turn skier. Contemplation and writing about contemplation were adventure and challenge enough. Moreover, as a story teller I still had miles to go before I had done justice to the time I had spent in the kind of youthful adventures KMC thrives on.
But then came an inspiration to somehow crack the pages, and also have a bit of literary fun. MT and I went out on the annual search for huckleberries, an integral part of her fabulous winter feasts, and we went with a new picking device, a kind of toothed scoop, actually modelled, I later learned, on a native implement carved out of wood, usually cedar. Our scoops were red plastic, from Lee Valley, and they really worked, although it took me all day to catch up with the skill Marianne exhibited from Bush One, and then it was only because an incredible, bone chilling, deluge in the berry mother lode convinced me to imitate her profoundly swashbuckling approach and thus catch on. Her buckets had all day filled at an humiliatingly greater rate than mine, but I somehow clung to my own more careful approach until the heavens opened.
Once I did catch on, the whole process got quite exciting, especially with the thunderous sound track of primeval downpour and the gale in the trees, and I was reminded acutely of the climax of Ernest Hemingway's unmistakeable classic hunting tale, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Macomber had lost his nerve when his lion charged, then regained it later when dealing with a herd of Cape buffalo. I had stopped being meticulous in a losing cause, and finally learned to go with the flow. There was, I realized later, an analogy, with a story and a summer of Hemingway stories I had always felt grateful to have had the opportunity to study. And there was also a way into Kootenay Mountain Culture, which seemed important to utilize.
So I got in touch with the magazine, and wrote, and then had to fiercely edit - in the middle of the night, which is usually dedicated to contemplation over much more significant things than huckleberry harvesting - and was published, in company with the most wonderful photograph of dear old Ernie with his gun and a mighty black buffalo, quite dead. Shawn had said to me one morning, "Peter Moynes came into the museum yesterday and said 'Wait till Ken sees the photo we found to go with the story!'" Peter is co-publisher of KMC and the photo editor.
I did wait, eagerly, and then when I saw the photo I was delighted. Nothing could be better. Nothing could more clearly state, in print registered for all time, how much of a debt I felt to Hemingway for those clarifying literary summers of my apprenticeship as a writer. It is quite possible that because I was a mystic I got more of him than anyone else ever has, but all the special illumination of his sparseness by the mystic's Muse still required the blood, sweat, and tears that went into his text in the first place was a most useful clarifier for my imagination. And he was probably the first modern writer who had given me a sense of my own writing voice, or who put pressure on me - as well as giving me hope that I could do it - to feel my way into my own style. He was startling in that way, as F. Scott Fitzgerald, to a lesser degree, would be a few months later. Other writers had given me other things, of course, but not with the same authoritative sense of myself.
By literary summers that particularly belonged to Hemingway I mean those of 1956 and 57. By 58, theology had taken me beyond humanism, and as much as I might enjoy reading fiction thereafter, I knew that its earlier signal influence as my only mentor had been lost forever.
The way that the publishing industry works now, you can barrel along at it for some time without actually meeting any of the people at the hard copy end. A stunner, of course, because in my days with The Ubyssey, I even knew the press men, because I had to wander into the print shop behind the front office to hand them corrected galleys. So it was months before I met Chris, and learned that it was actually he who had found the buffalo photograph and judged it the perfect match for my story. And we ran into each other entirely because of accident, because we both wanted to talk to the same man, even though he had nothing what to do with my story or Chris' magazine and other commitments.
The man was Stan Triggs, who grew up in Nelson and had been attending UBC and was involved with the student annual as photography editor the same year I met Shawn. He played an excellent mandolin as well as sang folk songs, and we had found ourselves jamming together one afternoon in the Ubyssey offices. A few years later, while I was teaching in Terrace, I spotted a Folkways record he had put out, Bunkhouse and Forecastle Ballads of the Pacific Northwest. It became a standard in our record library, and I used a number of his songs in the classroom and in performances with Shawn and others. We met again after we moved to Nelson, as Stan regularly returned to his roots from Montreal, where he was by then director of the McCord photography museum at McGill.
It was for this part of Stan's history that Chris was anxious to meet him. He had grown up hearing about Stan's work from his own mother, and when he first learned about the virtual museum exhibit in Nelson that Stan had helped with he could not believe it was the same man! This was another of those early morning tales from our household and just one more in the long roll of annals of the initial disbelief in the world class excellence of so many aspects of Nelson's history and culture.
Chris and I arrived at the building about the same time, I think, somewhat after the initial proceedings of simply gathering, so we were contending with a standing room only museum lobby and a long job of getting near to Mr. Triggs. So we took the next best step: we started taking to each other and thus two things of vital importance to past and future fell out together. Chris described the anxieties he goes through over his design projects, such as matching just the right illustration to my story, trying to combine the best elements in the best way, and then somehow it came up that he knew Tatlayoko Lake and area very well. He had encountered it on a mountain bike tour a few years back. I might have said, in reference to the late buffalo, that it had been my dream at the time that when I was rich and famous - in just a few years, of course - I would come back to the Chilcotin and hire Alf Bracewell to take me on a moose hunt, and thus get my own experiences as a hunter to write about.
But I also mentioned the music research and, as I feel relatively close to publication point, began to search him out about designing the text. That it will have to be more radical than anything ever printed so far is a foregone conclusion, and I have always hoped that all that creation could be done right here in Nelson.
Eventually, he said he was too busy. For one thing, KMC has recently doubled its output by adding a Coast version. But Chris and I continued to rattle our computer keyboards at each other and he swiftly sent me the photographs he had taken on the Tatlayoko/Chilko Lake bike tour.
And then things really started to take off, as I will continue to explain.
And quite regularly, while the permanent exhibition, on the second floor of the old city hall, was coming into being, she would say, "I have to go and see Chris and Daiva." This was the couple who were designing the PME.
Having once prided myself on my role as a kind of cultural welcome wagon to creative types new to Nelson, I was curious about these two, especially as Shawn assured me they were very good at what they did, but I knew that all my concentration had to remain on the Church and my writing and music research. Anything and anyone not a direct responsibility was a distraction, and any alteration to that schedule could only be wrought by startlingly plain act of Providence.
Or, more precisely, a series of acts, as in a play.
The opening act took place two or three years ago when KMC editor Mitchell Scott and I began emailing back and forth about the possibility of my writing something for the magazine. I had noticed the publication's beginning efforts years before in the gym, when local outdoors supplies and clothing store owner Dave Elliot had started up a small, beginning, version, because there was a good little article in it on interval running by Ed Natyshak, founder of the Summit Health and Fitness, where I was busy learning about weight training; but I had paid only a limited attention to the more ambitious successor because I was no skier, and although I hiked constantly in our local hills, I rarely climbed mountains. Nor did I skate board or mountain bike. I did wonder about writing for KMC at some point, but there seemed no way in specifically open to me.
But because they had once lived on Lasqueti Island, where my father logged with horses after World War II, I was pulled into the KMC orbit after I met Jim and Lily Drake, who had sold their house on the island and moved to Nelson. Jim became, briefly, one of my keyboard guinea pigs, and he and Lily were also parents of Julia, Mitchell Scott's wife. I happened to drop by one day when Julia was visiting her Mom, and Lily handed me a copy of the latest KMC, just brought along by her daughter. From that particular issue I learned why Whitewater, our local ski hill, has such enviable powder, as opposed to the coastal ski slopes. But none of this was going to tempt me to turn skier. Contemplation and writing about contemplation were adventure and challenge enough. Moreover, as a story teller I still had miles to go before I had done justice to the time I had spent in the kind of youthful adventures KMC thrives on.
But then came an inspiration to somehow crack the pages, and also have a bit of literary fun. MT and I went out on the annual search for huckleberries, an integral part of her fabulous winter feasts, and we went with a new picking device, a kind of toothed scoop, actually modelled, I later learned, on a native implement carved out of wood, usually cedar. Our scoops were red plastic, from Lee Valley, and they really worked, although it took me all day to catch up with the skill Marianne exhibited from Bush One, and then it was only because an incredible, bone chilling, deluge in the berry mother lode convinced me to imitate her profoundly swashbuckling approach and thus catch on. Her buckets had all day filled at an humiliatingly greater rate than mine, but I somehow clung to my own more careful approach until the heavens opened.
Once I did catch on, the whole process got quite exciting, especially with the thunderous sound track of primeval downpour and the gale in the trees, and I was reminded acutely of the climax of Ernest Hemingway's unmistakeable classic hunting tale, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Macomber had lost his nerve when his lion charged, then regained it later when dealing with a herd of Cape buffalo. I had stopped being meticulous in a losing cause, and finally learned to go with the flow. There was, I realized later, an analogy, with a story and a summer of Hemingway stories I had always felt grateful to have had the opportunity to study. And there was also a way into Kootenay Mountain Culture, which seemed important to utilize.
So I got in touch with the magazine, and wrote, and then had to fiercely edit - in the middle of the night, which is usually dedicated to contemplation over much more significant things than huckleberry harvesting - and was published, in company with the most wonderful photograph of dear old Ernie with his gun and a mighty black buffalo, quite dead. Shawn had said to me one morning, "Peter Moynes came into the museum yesterday and said 'Wait till Ken sees the photo we found to go with the story!'" Peter is co-publisher of KMC and the photo editor.
I did wait, eagerly, and then when I saw the photo I was delighted. Nothing could be better. Nothing could more clearly state, in print registered for all time, how much of a debt I felt to Hemingway for those clarifying literary summers of my apprenticeship as a writer. It is quite possible that because I was a mystic I got more of him than anyone else ever has, but all the special illumination of his sparseness by the mystic's Muse still required the blood, sweat, and tears that went into his text in the first place was a most useful clarifier for my imagination. And he was probably the first modern writer who had given me a sense of my own writing voice, or who put pressure on me - as well as giving me hope that I could do it - to feel my way into my own style. He was startling in that way, as F. Scott Fitzgerald, to a lesser degree, would be a few months later. Other writers had given me other things, of course, but not with the same authoritative sense of myself.
By literary summers that particularly belonged to Hemingway I mean those of 1956 and 57. By 58, theology had taken me beyond humanism, and as much as I might enjoy reading fiction thereafter, I knew that its earlier signal influence as my only mentor had been lost forever.
The way that the publishing industry works now, you can barrel along at it for some time without actually meeting any of the people at the hard copy end. A stunner, of course, because in my days with The Ubyssey, I even knew the press men, because I had to wander into the print shop behind the front office to hand them corrected galleys. So it was months before I met Chris, and learned that it was actually he who had found the buffalo photograph and judged it the perfect match for my story. And we ran into each other entirely because of accident, because we both wanted to talk to the same man, even though he had nothing what to do with my story or Chris' magazine and other commitments.
The man was Stan Triggs, who grew up in Nelson and had been attending UBC and was involved with the student annual as photography editor the same year I met Shawn. He played an excellent mandolin as well as sang folk songs, and we had found ourselves jamming together one afternoon in the Ubyssey offices. A few years later, while I was teaching in Terrace, I spotted a Folkways record he had put out, Bunkhouse and Forecastle Ballads of the Pacific Northwest. It became a standard in our record library, and I used a number of his songs in the classroom and in performances with Shawn and others. We met again after we moved to Nelson, as Stan regularly returned to his roots from Montreal, where he was by then director of the McCord photography museum at McGill.
It was for this part of Stan's history that Chris was anxious to meet him. He had grown up hearing about Stan's work from his own mother, and when he first learned about the virtual museum exhibit in Nelson that Stan had helped with he could not believe it was the same man! This was another of those early morning tales from our household and just one more in the long roll of annals of the initial disbelief in the world class excellence of so many aspects of Nelson's history and culture.
Chris and I arrived at the building about the same time, I think, somewhat after the initial proceedings of simply gathering, so we were contending with a standing room only museum lobby and a long job of getting near to Mr. Triggs. So we took the next best step: we started taking to each other and thus two things of vital importance to past and future fell out together. Chris described the anxieties he goes through over his design projects, such as matching just the right illustration to my story, trying to combine the best elements in the best way, and then somehow it came up that he knew Tatlayoko Lake and area very well. He had encountered it on a mountain bike tour a few years back. I might have said, in reference to the late buffalo, that it had been my dream at the time that when I was rich and famous - in just a few years, of course - I would come back to the Chilcotin and hire Alf Bracewell to take me on a moose hunt, and thus get my own experiences as a hunter to write about.
But I also mentioned the music research and, as I feel relatively close to publication point, began to search him out about designing the text. That it will have to be more radical than anything ever printed so far is a foregone conclusion, and I have always hoped that all that creation could be done right here in Nelson.
Eventually, he said he was too busy. For one thing, KMC has recently doubled its output by adding a Coast version. But Chris and I continued to rattle our computer keyboards at each other and he swiftly sent me the photographs he had taken on the Tatlayoko/Chilko Lake bike tour.
And then things really started to take off, as I will continue to explain.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Anthony Trollope
We have been watching the BBC television production, The Barchester Chronicles, once again. The series has been around for a while, and will never be forgotten in this house, but this time it has quite outdone itself by inspiring more than pleasant memories, meditations, and gratitude for the talents of actors, screen writers and all the other skills of the crew that can make something so entertaining and abidingly worthwhile. This time it sent me rummaging for our hardbound copy of Barchester Towers, the novel that made Anthony Trollope an unquestioned master of his craft, and as soon as I started reading it again, before I went to bed, I realized that I had been set upon a turning point in the current schedule of literary deliberations. The spirit of priority has come and gone with that book, over the years, but now it was time for it to come, and stay, with major significance.
I first met Trollope when I had just turned twenty two. Or, rather, I met his spirit and reputation, for I had never heard of him before that voluntary moment, in spite of his brief mention in the major text of UBC English classes 100 and 200, College Survey, and I did not read him for a year-and-a-half after that first acquaintance.
And even then, I did not read the novel right through, as the personality of Mr. Slope and the doctrinal squabbles of nineteenth century Anglicanism were poor competition to the texts I was also reading by that time, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Summa Theologica. Slope was simply outrageous, Bishop Proudie was as unlike the "Iron Duke", as they called the archbishop of Vancouver in his day, as any "bishop" could be, and Mrs. Proudie and other clerical wives, good and bad, had not existed in the Roman Catholic Church for a thousand years. Given the pressures to learn the wisdom of the Church I had not known at all in my youth, at the level known it by John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, Trollope was simply not that high a priority. Moreover, although in one of his later novels I wondered if I detected a hint of the heartbreaking beauty of mysticism, I could find none of it in the otherwise excellence of Barchester, and I was much beyond believing and applying the ordinary rule of the novel, that the major plot must turn around a romance, especially a romance that shared none of the high adventure of my own courtship.
But it is also to be admitted, and forcefully, that some of the text had been an unforgettable inspiration, a professional directive from on high, for in the book, in the main, I had beheld the possibility of my own fiction, as fully staffed with clergy and doctrinal discussions. In my youthful confidence, of course, and totally unaware as yet - and for some time - of so much of the hideous material that would later occupy my inspirations of plot and character - I assumed my own masterpiece was just around the corner, like Agamemnon's swift conquest of Troy, and had no idea that such a fiery little feast of light - precisely aboard the Canadian Prince, as she throbbed through Johnstone Straight on her way to Alert Bay - on radar - through the dense fog of middle August, 1959, would not find its true target for many years, and in a certain sense, insofar as the whole truth of a major piece of fiction is concerned, for half-a-century.
Such are the ways of God with a story teller also a mystic. The greatest thing any man can do is pray, and the better God makes him at this most supreme and most universal of arts, the more likely he is to be more of a soul of prayer than a soul of anything else. After all, there is a good deal of writing, even of literature, which never got anyone out of purgatory, whereas it is well known that simply by being devoutly hidden away and not writing a sentence for the eyes of the world, humble, quiet, religious are helping souls get out of purgatory all the time.
They also help the Church get itself out of disastrous situations, which has been a pressing need of these times, as the pages of the press and the records of the courts, both criminal and civil have amply shown. And by the press I include the newest members of that profession, the bloggers, especially those who write out of a genuine love for theology and all that pertains to it. Just hours ago, Marianne was bringing me news, from one of the Net columnists she reads regularly, of a list of the theological crimes of the Basilian priest, Gregory Baum, a cleric in high places who yapped incessantly for years, with no one in authority shutting him up, in such a way as to flatly contradict everything Saint Paul ever said. The little man from Tarsus probably received more respect from Mohammed than he has from Baum. I vaguely recall Baum, I think, at the height of his influence, when I saw a late 60s TV special on the intellectual climate of Saint Michael's, the Basilian stronghold at the University of Toronto, which was disturbing on an astounding scale. I think that was my first intimation, locked away in the Kootenay mountains, of other areas of the Church smelling as bad as the diocese of Nelson under Emmett Doyle and a variety of other perverse priests.
Baum, who had been a peritus, or expert, at Vatican Two, was recently interviewed by Father Thomas Rosica, also a Basilian, who runs the Net programme, Salt and Light. Why he would give time and space to such a plain enemy of the Church I have no idea. Baum left the priesthood and got married long ago. Like Luther. The only thing more stupid that I can think of would be for a judge trying an alleged murderer to allow him to take a nice chunk of the court's time to air his theories on the value of murder as a method of population control.
But back to Trollope and his skill at making clergy the interesting protagonists in a work of fiction. As I said, there was a small mention of the Victorian novelist, enormously successful in his own day, in our text book, but I never saw it then. I did not swat my books, because my main interest was my fellow students, especially at the Ubyssey, who were all themselves writers of one degree or another, and if not novelists or playwrights in themselves, at least capable of being interesting characters within either format. So, in my fifth year on the campus, half-way through, in February just after Shawn and I had met, she announced to me that the Vancouver writer Ethel Wilson, originally from South Africa, was giving a lecture on Anthony Trollope and his writing and she was definitely going to it, and I could come if I liked.
I distinctly remember my first two responses. I was embarrassed at not knowing anything of Trollope at all, and I was delighted at the idea of sitting beside her listening to a fellow, local, writer catch me up on someone, Shawn said, who had been right in there with Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. This sort of opportunity was precisely what I had come back for, instead of trotting off to Toronto to become a journalist. To be honest, I knew nothing of Ethel Wilson either, but I have always been grateful for that lecture.
There was a full house, although I can't remember in what setting. I do remember that there were a lot of windows in the the north wall, and that the February light streamed through them as Ethel poured out her appreciation of the man that Britain had learned to forget, not just at that time, but decades earlier, not very long after Trollope was dead. Listening to her was like listening to Lister Sinclair a couple of years previous. I can recall no precise words of advice, just the utter conviction that without a life with literature, you had no life at all. And here was a new star in the firmament I had known ever since I learned how to read.
Nonetheless, I did not immediately sack the UBC stacks for every Trollope they held. I had been at work on my own novel for a few weeks by then, I was getting increasingly hammered by the dark night, and I was inch by inch crawling toward my final leaving of law school. And, of course, hanging on every word Shawn Harold said, and every gesture she made. As Trollope experts will have to admit, this simply made good sense. As brilliant as he was with his early morning pen, he created no Catholic intellectuals, especially of the female sort. This novelist already had something to study neither he nor his British culture never laid eyes on. At least not in any print that I had ever seen.
To be continued, as was the landing on the beaches of Normandy.
I first met Trollope when I had just turned twenty two. Or, rather, I met his spirit and reputation, for I had never heard of him before that voluntary moment, in spite of his brief mention in the major text of UBC English classes 100 and 200, College Survey, and I did not read him for a year-and-a-half after that first acquaintance.
And even then, I did not read the novel right through, as the personality of Mr. Slope and the doctrinal squabbles of nineteenth century Anglicanism were poor competition to the texts I was also reading by that time, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Summa Theologica. Slope was simply outrageous, Bishop Proudie was as unlike the "Iron Duke", as they called the archbishop of Vancouver in his day, as any "bishop" could be, and Mrs. Proudie and other clerical wives, good and bad, had not existed in the Roman Catholic Church for a thousand years. Given the pressures to learn the wisdom of the Church I had not known at all in my youth, at the level known it by John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, Trollope was simply not that high a priority. Moreover, although in one of his later novels I wondered if I detected a hint of the heartbreaking beauty of mysticism, I could find none of it in the otherwise excellence of Barchester, and I was much beyond believing and applying the ordinary rule of the novel, that the major plot must turn around a romance, especially a romance that shared none of the high adventure of my own courtship.
But it is also to be admitted, and forcefully, that some of the text had been an unforgettable inspiration, a professional directive from on high, for in the book, in the main, I had beheld the possibility of my own fiction, as fully staffed with clergy and doctrinal discussions. In my youthful confidence, of course, and totally unaware as yet - and for some time - of so much of the hideous material that would later occupy my inspirations of plot and character - I assumed my own masterpiece was just around the corner, like Agamemnon's swift conquest of Troy, and had no idea that such a fiery little feast of light - precisely aboard the Canadian Prince, as she throbbed through Johnstone Straight on her way to Alert Bay - on radar - through the dense fog of middle August, 1959, would not find its true target for many years, and in a certain sense, insofar as the whole truth of a major piece of fiction is concerned, for half-a-century.
Such are the ways of God with a story teller also a mystic. The greatest thing any man can do is pray, and the better God makes him at this most supreme and most universal of arts, the more likely he is to be more of a soul of prayer than a soul of anything else. After all, there is a good deal of writing, even of literature, which never got anyone out of purgatory, whereas it is well known that simply by being devoutly hidden away and not writing a sentence for the eyes of the world, humble, quiet, religious are helping souls get out of purgatory all the time.
They also help the Church get itself out of disastrous situations, which has been a pressing need of these times, as the pages of the press and the records of the courts, both criminal and civil have amply shown. And by the press I include the newest members of that profession, the bloggers, especially those who write out of a genuine love for theology and all that pertains to it. Just hours ago, Marianne was bringing me news, from one of the Net columnists she reads regularly, of a list of the theological crimes of the Basilian priest, Gregory Baum, a cleric in high places who yapped incessantly for years, with no one in authority shutting him up, in such a way as to flatly contradict everything Saint Paul ever said. The little man from Tarsus probably received more respect from Mohammed than he has from Baum. I vaguely recall Baum, I think, at the height of his influence, when I saw a late 60s TV special on the intellectual climate of Saint Michael's, the Basilian stronghold at the University of Toronto, which was disturbing on an astounding scale. I think that was my first intimation, locked away in the Kootenay mountains, of other areas of the Church smelling as bad as the diocese of Nelson under Emmett Doyle and a variety of other perverse priests.
Baum, who had been a peritus, or expert, at Vatican Two, was recently interviewed by Father Thomas Rosica, also a Basilian, who runs the Net programme, Salt and Light. Why he would give time and space to such a plain enemy of the Church I have no idea. Baum left the priesthood and got married long ago. Like Luther. The only thing more stupid that I can think of would be for a judge trying an alleged murderer to allow him to take a nice chunk of the court's time to air his theories on the value of murder as a method of population control.
But back to Trollope and his skill at making clergy the interesting protagonists in a work of fiction. As I said, there was a small mention of the Victorian novelist, enormously successful in his own day, in our text book, but I never saw it then. I did not swat my books, because my main interest was my fellow students, especially at the Ubyssey, who were all themselves writers of one degree or another, and if not novelists or playwrights in themselves, at least capable of being interesting characters within either format. So, in my fifth year on the campus, half-way through, in February just after Shawn and I had met, she announced to me that the Vancouver writer Ethel Wilson, originally from South Africa, was giving a lecture on Anthony Trollope and his writing and she was definitely going to it, and I could come if I liked.
I distinctly remember my first two responses. I was embarrassed at not knowing anything of Trollope at all, and I was delighted at the idea of sitting beside her listening to a fellow, local, writer catch me up on someone, Shawn said, who had been right in there with Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. This sort of opportunity was precisely what I had come back for, instead of trotting off to Toronto to become a journalist. To be honest, I knew nothing of Ethel Wilson either, but I have always been grateful for that lecture.
There was a full house, although I can't remember in what setting. I do remember that there were a lot of windows in the the north wall, and that the February light streamed through them as Ethel poured out her appreciation of the man that Britain had learned to forget, not just at that time, but decades earlier, not very long after Trollope was dead. Listening to her was like listening to Lister Sinclair a couple of years previous. I can recall no precise words of advice, just the utter conviction that without a life with literature, you had no life at all. And here was a new star in the firmament I had known ever since I learned how to read.
Nonetheless, I did not immediately sack the UBC stacks for every Trollope they held. I had been at work on my own novel for a few weeks by then, I was getting increasingly hammered by the dark night, and I was inch by inch crawling toward my final leaving of law school. And, of course, hanging on every word Shawn Harold said, and every gesture she made. As Trollope experts will have to admit, this simply made good sense. As brilliant as he was with his early morning pen, he created no Catholic intellectuals, especially of the female sort. This novelist already had something to study neither he nor his British culture never laid eyes on. At least not in any print that I had ever seen.
To be continued, as was the landing on the beaches of Normandy.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Light in the West
A few days ago, as I was nattering at Marianne about some of the mental and spiritual house cleaning I have found necessary over the past while, I said something that provoked her to say, "That's because God is incomprehensible."
If I remember correctly, what I had said was something to the effect of wondering why I had recently been feeling as if I had been much better at keeping my mind clear, that is, out of the devil's continual programme for confusing me, when I was a mere beginner in the spiritual life than I was at the moment. Of late, I said, I had been continually making mental errors. From the strictly human point of view within the process of ordinary logic, what MT said had no plain connection. At least to me it didn't. But it carried an obvious conviction, from her point of view, and I accepted it. Good thing I did, because the Incomprehensible has just shed some light, in fact so much light, that I can at least say that a fair chunk of spiritual activity within myself that I had been much puzzled over has suddenly, very dramatically, become astoundingly clear.
And, as an old newspaper man, I rather like the way God chose to illuminate me the way He did, not only through the secular press, which the Church periodically fails - sometimes grossly fails - to appreciate, but through the very big city daily I once worked for, the Vancouver Sun.
In a household dedicated to the spiritual life, while it is unquestionably charity that makes the day go round, what makes the charity real is good order and teamwork. You have to have a game plan, and designated assignments, and you have to learn to play only your own position, stick to your own duties, and don't interfere with the other person's unless asked for help.
This attitude and programme works utter wonders in nature and grace on our property, but not always without clashes of opinion, and even, for the moment, personal conviction. With a novelist's imagination I have to be the chief offender in this regard, but my companions also know occasional moments when their bright ideas have to be growled at, usually over breakfast, which is always leisurely as well as delicious and very worth getting up for. Nobody leaves the table until all apparent contradictions have been resolved. Case in point. At one time I left early, feeling the call of other work. Shawn told me I was to stick around for another fifteen minutes or so, and her schedule proved to be the correct one.
All these organizational problems arise, of course, from the apparent conflict between the Lord's two fundamental commandments: love God with your whole being and love thy neighbour as thyself. At our age and experience the chance of dissension arising from self-love is virtually non-existent. All errors come from misjudging the three-fold radar devices' continual sweep of the always needy human race.
As befits contemplatives, a lot of this sweep is entirely of a divine causality, immediately sourced from God, or clued from the pages of a distinctly spiritual text: the breviary or a spiritual writer. You have to lead with these, day in and day out, and at regularly scheduled times. This is the routine that incarnates that boldest of prayers: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Back in the days when we all stood up first thing in the morning and recited The Lord's Prayer, even in government schools, that was the one sentence I felt I had no hope of understanding. The rest of it seemed straightforward enough, so why the mysterious part? I had to wait years even to begin to see why something apparently so impossible should be included with requests that were not only quite achievable but actually made such obvious good sense.
The Lord, of course, was simply including his contemplatives. Only they, and only a fraction of them at that, were going to get his point in all its fullness, but that didn't mean that such a small audience should be left out. His mother already understood him, and Mary Magdalene and a few others would eventually catch on. Even I, unschooled contemplative as I was at the time, would catch on.
But, of course, only because of the grace and providence of God.
Possibly this is the most concentrated essay on the pastoral theology of a domestic monastery that I have produced so far. After all, the Christian life is best fulfilled by looking beyond one's own needs, as soon as they are, as they must be, taken care of. Vatican Two, for example, insisted that even bishops, as diligently as they were obliged to care for their own dioceses, were to consider the needs of other parts of the Church not as fortunate, one way or another, as their own. If this inward look is indeed so emphatic, its cause is my just learning of the establishment of another monastery, in my own province yet, very much to my own liking. The nuns involved have been in the province, in the archdiocese of Vancouver, for over a decade, but I had not heard of them until precisely a week ago, when Shawn descended the staircase between the first and second floors to hand me a page from the Vancouver Sun (August 11 edition) long ago, for a very interesting six months, my employer.
It's always been one of her jobs, the locating of a text, large or small, that she knows I need to read.
Sometimes it's a book - Beethoven's sonatas, Turgeniev's Sketches From a Sportsman's Diary - or a magazine or newspaper article. She has an old friend from her museum days who passes on his Suns, Globe and Mails, and Macleans for her to browse through. Out of her enormous concern and compassion for the needs of the universe, and of her interest in its triumphs and tragedies, she reads from cover to cover, front page to back, and prays accordingly. When she finds something she instinctively recognizes I need not only to pray for but to deal with, she hands it to me.
Thus a few years back, as she was sensing my getting closer and closer to using the computer, she handed me a Macleans with an article on Tim Berners Lee, the man who invented the Web and thus became one of the most important agents of civilization and the spread of the Gospel since Gutenberg. That was very interesting, and an unmistakable sign, but I don't think it hit me in the heart like the front page of the August 11 Sun.
That was a show stopper, as they say in theatrical circles. The audience rises to its feet, and roars such a volume of approval that the conductor has no alternative but to direct the performers and orchestra back to the beginning of the piece, and do it again.
Not only a convent of contemplative nuns, but eventually twenty of them, it was hoped, and Dominican sisters at that. It was almost too much to believe, for an old contemplative long schooled in the inertia of the world and the spiritual sluggishness of Canadian Catholicism, but there it was, not in the pages of a Church publication, but on the front page of, arguably, the leading daily of western Canada, the story of the foundation, 5 million dollars' worth, at Squamish, of The Queen of Peace Monastery.
What a bloody miracle, not only in the fact, but in the presentation of the story. I suspect it's going to take a number of posts to explain why this establishment is one of the most exciting pieces of news I've heard in a long time.
If I remember correctly, what I had said was something to the effect of wondering why I had recently been feeling as if I had been much better at keeping my mind clear, that is, out of the devil's continual programme for confusing me, when I was a mere beginner in the spiritual life than I was at the moment. Of late, I said, I had been continually making mental errors. From the strictly human point of view within the process of ordinary logic, what MT said had no plain connection. At least to me it didn't. But it carried an obvious conviction, from her point of view, and I accepted it. Good thing I did, because the Incomprehensible has just shed some light, in fact so much light, that I can at least say that a fair chunk of spiritual activity within myself that I had been much puzzled over has suddenly, very dramatically, become astoundingly clear.
And, as an old newspaper man, I rather like the way God chose to illuminate me the way He did, not only through the secular press, which the Church periodically fails - sometimes grossly fails - to appreciate, but through the very big city daily I once worked for, the Vancouver Sun.
In a household dedicated to the spiritual life, while it is unquestionably charity that makes the day go round, what makes the charity real is good order and teamwork. You have to have a game plan, and designated assignments, and you have to learn to play only your own position, stick to your own duties, and don't interfere with the other person's unless asked for help.
This attitude and programme works utter wonders in nature and grace on our property, but not always without clashes of opinion, and even, for the moment, personal conviction. With a novelist's imagination I have to be the chief offender in this regard, but my companions also know occasional moments when their bright ideas have to be growled at, usually over breakfast, which is always leisurely as well as delicious and very worth getting up for. Nobody leaves the table until all apparent contradictions have been resolved. Case in point. At one time I left early, feeling the call of other work. Shawn told me I was to stick around for another fifteen minutes or so, and her schedule proved to be the correct one.
All these organizational problems arise, of course, from the apparent conflict between the Lord's two fundamental commandments: love God with your whole being and love thy neighbour as thyself. At our age and experience the chance of dissension arising from self-love is virtually non-existent. All errors come from misjudging the three-fold radar devices' continual sweep of the always needy human race.
As befits contemplatives, a lot of this sweep is entirely of a divine causality, immediately sourced from God, or clued from the pages of a distinctly spiritual text: the breviary or a spiritual writer. You have to lead with these, day in and day out, and at regularly scheduled times. This is the routine that incarnates that boldest of prayers: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Back in the days when we all stood up first thing in the morning and recited The Lord's Prayer, even in government schools, that was the one sentence I felt I had no hope of understanding. The rest of it seemed straightforward enough, so why the mysterious part? I had to wait years even to begin to see why something apparently so impossible should be included with requests that were not only quite achievable but actually made such obvious good sense.
The Lord, of course, was simply including his contemplatives. Only they, and only a fraction of them at that, were going to get his point in all its fullness, but that didn't mean that such a small audience should be left out. His mother already understood him, and Mary Magdalene and a few others would eventually catch on. Even I, unschooled contemplative as I was at the time, would catch on.
But, of course, only because of the grace and providence of God.
Possibly this is the most concentrated essay on the pastoral theology of a domestic monastery that I have produced so far. After all, the Christian life is best fulfilled by looking beyond one's own needs, as soon as they are, as they must be, taken care of. Vatican Two, for example, insisted that even bishops, as diligently as they were obliged to care for their own dioceses, were to consider the needs of other parts of the Church not as fortunate, one way or another, as their own. If this inward look is indeed so emphatic, its cause is my just learning of the establishment of another monastery, in my own province yet, very much to my own liking. The nuns involved have been in the province, in the archdiocese of Vancouver, for over a decade, but I had not heard of them until precisely a week ago, when Shawn descended the staircase between the first and second floors to hand me a page from the Vancouver Sun (August 11 edition) long ago, for a very interesting six months, my employer.
It's always been one of her jobs, the locating of a text, large or small, that she knows I need to read.
Sometimes it's a book - Beethoven's sonatas, Turgeniev's Sketches From a Sportsman's Diary - or a magazine or newspaper article. She has an old friend from her museum days who passes on his Suns, Globe and Mails, and Macleans for her to browse through. Out of her enormous concern and compassion for the needs of the universe, and of her interest in its triumphs and tragedies, she reads from cover to cover, front page to back, and prays accordingly. When she finds something she instinctively recognizes I need not only to pray for but to deal with, she hands it to me.
Thus a few years back, as she was sensing my getting closer and closer to using the computer, she handed me a Macleans with an article on Tim Berners Lee, the man who invented the Web and thus became one of the most important agents of civilization and the spread of the Gospel since Gutenberg. That was very interesting, and an unmistakable sign, but I don't think it hit me in the heart like the front page of the August 11 Sun.
That was a show stopper, as they say in theatrical circles. The audience rises to its feet, and roars such a volume of approval that the conductor has no alternative but to direct the performers and orchestra back to the beginning of the piece, and do it again.
Not only a convent of contemplative nuns, but eventually twenty of them, it was hoped, and Dominican sisters at that. It was almost too much to believe, for an old contemplative long schooled in the inertia of the world and the spiritual sluggishness of Canadian Catholicism, but there it was, not in the pages of a Church publication, but on the front page of, arguably, the leading daily of western Canada, the story of the foundation, 5 million dollars' worth, at Squamish, of The Queen of Peace Monastery.
What a bloody miracle, not only in the fact, but in the presentation of the story. I suspect it's going to take a number of posts to explain why this establishment is one of the most exciting pieces of news I've heard in a long time.
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