Gunfight Six

This post almost had a different title: Malbec.
As wine connoisseurs know, Malbec is a wine, although originating in France since before the Middle Ages, that is considered the "flagship" grape of Argentina, which some think produces a better Malbec than France does. I am not a wine conoisseur, of course, but I am happy to have made the acquaintance of a bottle of Malbec recently, and I am, as a writer, profoundly fascinated by the coincidental use of the word "flagship" that is used to honour the vintage by its Argentinian promoters. Every country, every culture, needs images and items of excellence that identify its uniqueness in an inarguable fashion.
Now, as my readers know, I have used the term "flagship" in my most recent post to label a book written by an Argentinian from the nineteenth century, Domingo Sarmiento, who not only wrote, but served his country as president and minister of education, and perhaps even more startling for my purposes, had something to do with introducing Malbec to his homeland. I even used the phrase "flagship novel", I think, to designate his "Facundo", generally considered the first Argentinian attempt at "fiction", the claims for which I initially took in good faith. With a new Pope from Argentina I was concerned to learn more about a culture which I had hitherto not known very much about except that it had been especially prolific at producing dictators, and recently suffered severe financial difficulties.
I was even totally ignorant about Argetinian wine. Chilean we had sampled occasionally, but our main supplies from the sun drenched southern hemisphere have been Cawara, from Australia, as Shawn waxed sympathetic toward a faltering Antipodean wine industry; and then Obikwa, from South Africa, in honour of Father Matthieu, who, though from the Congo, lived and worked in the more southern country for a time. (Father was also almost killed there, when a robber creased his skull with a bullet fired at point blank range.) Both those brands produced a litre-and-a-half bottle of excellent vintage at a modest price.
You can see the path clearly. With a habit of using wine to celebrate events it was only natural, after the papal election, to try something Jorge Bergoglio - whom I doubt for all his concern for the poor is a teetotaler - had probably tasted and was proud of.
My first choice was not Malbec, but a different grape called Dos Cardos - The Thistles - and it was so good that I instantly became interested in Argentina's stature on the world wine stage. So I've learned that the prime wine producing area of that country is Mendoza Province (or State), named after the Spaniard who led the 1536 expedition to search for gold and silver. His party found none of these minerals around Buenos Aires, so it headed north to Paraguay, but not before leaving behind a substantial quantity of breeding stock: cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. Left wild on a virtual ocean of all season grasslands, the pampas, they became the raw material of the bootleg hide industry that eventually led to Argentina becoming the wealthiest country in South America, and the home of the gaucho culture. A friend of mine said she had known how good Argentinian wine was for some time, and also told me Mendoza lay in the same latitude as the wine belt of Chile.
With the introduction of gauchos to these deliberations, the images of weaponry change. Although in the civil wars of Argentina in the earlier part of the nineteenth century there was no shortage of guns, and even cannon, the gauchos as individuals much preferred the knife for duels in small numbers. Have they ever made a movie: Knife Fight on the Buena Vista Hacienda?
I think I have seen only one Argentinian film, a strange film, to me, about some women, and I bailed fairly quickly. Last night we bailed from two films certainly not Argentinian just as fast or even faster, and settled down to thoroughly enjoy Trouble With The Curve, with Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and a baseball that went like a rocket and was indeed the weapon of choice in its own way. For most of the film, the weapon was a bat, wielded by a big kid whose great natural strength had not undergone the needed element that good coaching so necessarily provides. But in the end it was the ball that won.
In its own way, the film was disarmingly simple, substantially aimed at kids, snarling at racial prejudice, and in Atlanta Braves scout Eastwood, letting out a couple of the secrets pretty well known only to the hitting coaches of the major leagues. For my particular purposes, one of the most useful sport films I've seen. God bless em all, and I think it will be a while before I've thoroughly digested the symbolism.

Gunfight Five

As I have said before, my computer skills are always a bit wanting. This was never more evident than a few days back when I prematurely punched Gunfight Four into cyber space. It's a short piece, obviously, and perhaps a bit choppy, because I had intended to say more and then, as usual, take some time  to edit. But there was a problem either with how Blogger was behaving - it's been odd before - or, more likely, with my understanding of how Blogger was behaving. When did they bring in this "update" thing, and what exactly is it for? In fact I had no idea that I was not in draft, and was actually published, until Marianne was on the machine at the close of the day and told me what had happened. So I got her to let me see how it looked, and decided to let it fly. I wanted to register as soon as possible that I cannot possibly agree with Pope Francis flaunting canon law. Style, as some say Saint Paul has shown, is never more important than substance, especially in such high profile circumstances.
It also turns out that I wanted as much time as possible to think out the next steps after the new pontiff's disturbing decision. Anyone who has taken the time to cruise through these blogs in their entirety should be able to appreciate, should he have any genuine skill in theology whatsoever, that I am not exactly uninformed about the mind of God. The Seventh Mansion has enormous advantages in understanding the true nature of the Mystical Body. Those who participate within the relationship of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary, the angels and the saints, at that level automatically carry more spiritual authority in some areas than even a Pope does, as John Paul II was quick to acknowledge, both privately and officially, and their wrath is not a thing to be trifled with. Ordinarily, their prayers are for the support of ecclesiastical labours, but if those labours turn corrupt, they have no choice but to petition God for punishment and correction of the guilty.
Unquestionably, Francis has given comfort to the enemy. Therefore, his punishment is certain. To Heaven, he is a marked man, in spite of his other virtues. God always chastises those He loves, to make them more loveable, but in my experience such correction is usually private, or, if "public", only among spiritual friends. But a decision like the Pope's over the foot washing, to include females, against the plain law of the Church as well as the example of Christ, suggests to that his spiritual life is not so excellent as to automatically merit the private route. This is a Jesuit, it seems to me, who has not proceeded as thoroughly as he might have through the little book the founder of his order took so many years to perfect. He needs to revisit, and soon, the paragraphs on the discernment of spirits.
Mind you, I didn't like what was done to another canon in the days of John Paul II, when they removed the rule that Leo XIII had introduced, insisting on some minimal studies of Thomas Aquinas. To me, the corner stone of the slippery slope had already been laid, once that happened. After all, if Aquinas was no longer mandatory, then no one was reading that bit in the Summa where he condemns "ridiculous" practices in the liturgy. As nothing could be more ridiculous than altar girls, who actually needed a canon? Eventually, after what's been going on, they'll put one in, but perhaps not until the reign of a an African Pope. Had he not been just too old, I would have prayed for Cardinal Arinze to be the next successor of Peter. He was not afraid to use the term "mortal sin", he would have got rid of altar girls, and he knew what a load of the unprintable the current North American craze for standing after communion is.
Yet, once Jorge Bergoglio was brought out on the balcony and identified, I felt that the crowd would not have been ready, yet, for a black Pontiff, and I was quite content, started reading about Argentina, got out a couple of our Spanish texts, and ordered a copy of Facundo, in translation. The last is Agentina's watershed novel, from the nineteenth century. I'm interested in comparing Sarmiento with Zane Grey and Owen Wister, and also comparing gaucho culture to cowboy.
Then came the news on the foot washing, female, and I realized I had some rather unpleasant work ahead of me. When is the Church going to remember how much Christ loves simple obedience?

Gunfight Four

'Tis the season to be surprised.
Benedict XVI resigned as Pope, the College of Cardinals elected as his successor, for the first time in history, someone not from a European see, and your humble scribe, who also putters about in the land of music from time to time, has just decided not to try to publish a radical series of scale and study texts for the piano.That is, not in the usual form, which requires pages full of staff lines covered with musical notes.
And not only have I made the decision, but my advisors all cheerfully agree with me, especially my senior agent, who was always such a supporter of the idea that she was vehemently concerned, from time to time as I came up with yet another "brilliant idea", of it falling into the wrong hands. Jill was temporarily returned to her old position of chairman of the board, heard my new thoughts with a approval, and then was allowed to resign again.
(One wonders if the latest version of the Vatican will have to make a similar arrangement for Benedict. Already there are appearing signs of some interesting thought patterns that are unlikely to gain universal approval from the Mystical Body of Christ. There are absolutely no Biblical references to Christ ever washing women's feet, for example.)
I was actually warned that my decision was coming up a few weeks ago, during a lesson with Tim McDaniel, but the terms of the warning, although clearly Divine in their style, were phrased mysteriously, and not understood until this week, possibly awaiting  the new Pope's declared preference for thinking about the poor. The old plans obviously concerned making money, and possibly a great deal of it, but the new plan plainly does not. The information will continue to flow, and possibly with a greater rapidity, but you won't be able to buy it in a music store, you will have to read it in these blogs.
At 77, who needs lots of money? whereas at all ages, the world, including most Catholics, is spiritually illiterate and in very bad need of upgrading its reading habits.

Gunfight Three

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.

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.

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.

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.