The Quiescence of Frigid January
I “remember” the somewhat curled, old printout I made of
Jack Kerouacs’ tips on being a writer. Somehow the long list of inspiring words
has blended into my own sense of adventure, and my terms for exciting
authorship are my own.
When I contact the adventuress she is trying to remember
Jack Kerouac, the great authority on truly wonderful authorship. She is also
striving to understand the need to write, and reluctant to embark upon any such
journey, choosing to peruse sheaves of quilled delicacies from children,
Alzheimers’ patients and The Walrus Magazine, a Canadian Poets’ Own – only to
look for more inspiration.
What writing is to me when it is a brilliant butterfly in a
zephyr gale opens the histories and WORD written into billions of years of
adaptation and of magical discoveries because it is a free will blown beyond
the cares and ennui of practical maintenance.
I aspire (and most likely always will flutter more
dangerously into that candle on a Friday night) to let the depth of perception
become the flow of these essays into illustration. For an artist, writing is a
cold and Pecksniffian sear upon a
boldscape of colour, texture and form. Words or perhaps rhythms, rhymes and
sentence shaping need explain the urgency of self-expression, or that messianic
call to “show” others the meaning of life.
I have researched January as Janus, the god who gave this
dried out frozen month its’ name. Synonyms for Janus-faced (as befits the month
of January) abound besides Pecksniffian ( meaning “thew” ) begging for mention of some riotous
themes I feel deserve equal billing:
left-handed,lip, mealy, mealymouthed, Pecksniffian, phony ”
As well: ”
artificial,backhanded,counterfeit,double,double-dealing, double-faced,fake,feigned, hypocritical, Janus-faced, jive”
Lovingly collected and presented, free of charge from the word
dispenser at Merriam Webster Thesaurus.
Definition of
Thew:
Popularity: Bottom 30% of words
1a : muscular power or development
Damn January Anyway
Why, I wonder, have I chosen a word for January that
involves the concepts of muscular power or development? I think of this month
of shut in days as times of iron detention, ice hard will forcing me into
quiescence during the fortitudinous provision of coolers and moistening
fertility for the world.
We Canadians are
proud of our snows and ices. Yet January is mealy-mouthed, double-dealing, backhanded and counterfeit. We are. We Canadians. No sooner has the pride of
identity of belonging to delicate individual caloric florals and of maintaining
the very sinews of coherence for the worlds’ last delicate few million years of life than
the commoners’ whine farts out, dying of
blighted short dark days of bitterness in the frost death of all. We are not proud, we all say. Damn January
anyway.
Thank you, Ma’am
These years thawing the personal poet from years of
permafrost is too difficult.
What bounced into poetry and more
quickly conceived of design and colour, the listening
that let bells and high violin notes define life, which let the rough rude
scrape of chromatinous leaf equal those as magical musical events ( although it
be the sonar elephant in a sweet ringing of nightingales ) is now numbed. It
has the texture of an eraser, a rubber. Perhaps it is the spent rubber after a
night of Spring banging away at a frigid January, to no avail but for the
swollen red extremities, the ensuing pain.
This written work is just an
exercise and particularly has no reason, no mission, (not even the Missionary
position) not much sense and it is a way to re-kindle the quiet world of
intellectual pursuit.
what a’ do when i’m senile
January is a month of new
beginnings, and every gardener will start something growing indoors, whether
this is a pot of fast-growing herbs or the thought of bulb roots beginning to
spread their vital, newness of adolescent, short roots into the seemingly
stalled, dead earth.
We gardeners have hope. Gardening
is my saving grace, if all other activities fail to attract me to act, even if
it will not pay me a wage. Gardening is, at least, fruitful. My dining table
often has huge bouquets of garden flowers that cost me nothing. My cooking is
nothing without the Basil I grow summer and winter indoors, nor the Oregano,
Thyme, Mints and other fresh things that I have grown organically over the
years.
The gardener in me is not a joker
or a lame aspirant in reaching for the correct words or tenor within an
increasingly literate web. My gardening self doesn’t care what people think,
has no need to win at gardening shows or to sell produce.
If I become senile my love for flowers and
herbs will shine on, touching, sensing volatile oils, scenting fragrances that
will be curative. I care so much about
peoples’ right to perceive beyond the restrictions of physicality that I recently
shared an article about nano sculptures made by 3D printer. The sculptures fit
into the eye of a needle, in fact one hundred of them could fit into this
space.
These classical sculptures gave me
an idea; that even if a person has a pins’ breadth left of vision due to
glaucoma , they could still experience an aesthetic journey into the shaping of
things.
3D printing lets you print the colours of the
work onto them, I think. So a child could see a 3D image of Mommy. Start with
Mamas and breasts and little flowers and cows. People so have the right to see
something and to elevate the wonder within them that shows them the Creation
evolved by a Supreme entity, void that
is at once life and breath in all of its dappling and flashing, velvet and
knifing splendor.
Here is the sort of miraculous
journey that lets a person go beyond what is safe and familiar. Information
from every school and culture is available to anybody via a world-wide library.
We are encouraged to go beyond. There is no reason now to believe in an old age
spent nodding at bees and eating handsful of mint and rose petals for days of
palliative erotica.
is senility just wrenchingly redundant boredom?
Now that I have recognized that my
body is still in January, though- I realize that I need some time to eat fresh
herbs from my fingers, or to lay in a pool of glass-filtered sunshine. I spend
time thinking to the bees underground, anyway.
And not the nota benes or their knees, just bumblebees.
Even moles and bumblebees get
bored and evolve conversations with monstrosities outside their own personal
boxes. So I get to learn at the spirit-3D print of the bees’ knee or agape at
the feet of wise voles of vole hill.
There is no reason for our
thoughts to be large and small, just understandable. For instance the other day
I was remarking upon the witch hat rock form under the neighbours’ garden,
since I was thinking of how a mineral may have gone askew. I got to report the
comments (in pictures) of voles, who are avid geophysicists .. It had
separated, thought the vole, and my question was- is it going to cause trouble?
A three way dialectic ensued,
during which a knowledgeable scientist told us that it separates from and then
clips the rocks every year.
The vole heard me describe the whereabouts of
his own entry as “under Ians’ Onion patch”.
She asked, then: “Are there any
juicy onions?”.
A fourth conversationist joined to
say, “No, I pulled them all”.
But at that point the vole had
managed to rush down about eighteen feet and had found tiny green spring onions
forming. They were from seed fallen through the patch, collecting growths of
onion sprouts on their sides in slight crevasses of the rock. Or they were.
Even if I have no one left who
understands me, I imagine, nature will love me and keep me informed.
At least.
A Third Day: January 21st,
2016
Tears in my heart this second, after watching a video of a
wedding- a NewZealand Haka. Trying to describe this in words is not possible,
unless one were from Maori ancestry and had literary mastery the equivalent of
Katzansakis at the fulcrum of his abilities.
To quote:
I said to the
almond tree:
"Speak to me of God
."
and the almond tree blossomed.
·
The Fratricides (1964)
Calling in Canada
I am reminded that this day is January, 18 degrees below
zero and that I am escaping the idea of its death blows toward youngsters and
linesmen underground, and the boredom of routine house cleaning.
I am aware that I
have never even holidayed in New Zealand, although Australian and Maori New
Zealanders have been my friends since childhood.
You never know who a person truly is until you have
understood their environmental conditions, and have lived their lives with
them, to some degree. The richness and closeness of tribal society is a
Canadian way, certainly, and even I have spent time in a medicine wheel prayer
circle, or outdoors praying for rain with a friend who was one of the shamans
of our area.
Our minds are so much more a global village in Canada, and
probably because both environment (being grandly enormous and subject to
extremes in weather) and our economic barriers keep us separated from each
other.
In intellectual minds there are few separators during the
meaningful times of meditation, or when there is mutual concern, joy or
sorrow. Canadians readily hop over fences
and boundaries. At Tim Hortons’ coffee shop you find yourself sitting opposite
the Minister of Forestry one day and a famous sci-fi author the next. They want
someone to chat with while taking a coffee and sandwich.
You thought they would be snobby, but like you they are only
too willing to explore social themes or politics or like Roger, talk about
building his castle or reinventing the faster snowmobile. Some of these people are very rich and well
known, while others, like myself , have been poor artists and single Mommies
all their lives. Above all, if you love
your brothers and sisters your relationships, whether long term or of the
instant will become enriching and valuable days of thought and experience,
because everybody counts.
Tears are still behind my eyes. We live in a winter of long
miles away from each other, of huge economic hardships and in fear of meeting
up with the wrong racial politick.
Not too many aspects of society demand or allow up front
emotion in Canada, and the familial side
of each groups’ tribal identity is occult. In so many ways Canada is a lonely
place, unless we share humanistic goals and work together in a communally
thought out space, which demolishes distance and social hardship. I think that
is why, when people share their very sacred marriage vows and celebrations with
us over the net, we still cry, no matter that we do not know the couple or
their families. I feel that the tears
are for that lonesome Canadian way of life sometimes, so often a masked,
cloistered and inhibited social yearning.
You can see this wedding Haka via this link: Wedding Haka
Perhaps Facebook has brought rays of kind intention, some
meaningfulness into my cyber-day. The sun warms my skin through the window. I have
forgotten the effort it took to start writing again, and my heart has
remembered that tears and deeply felt emotions have been far from my experience
for some time.
There is awareness that our global village experience
becomes a parochial nuisance at times, too. We hear each other think when we
have gone on beyond the documents or postings and we collide. Here is the time
to sow (even if I have to fake it, this being yet another miserably frozen day)
– it is a time to create something that is my future, and not to reap what
others have so passionately sown.
Social media can, I imagine, make of our readership somewhat
of a social succubus- our global awareness having left egos less convoluted and
more susceptible like youth to emotional or psycho-sexual plundering.
Buddhist masters say we live in a dream, but it is not so
viable an idea when one can verify events, names, situations and interrelate so
instantly across the world.
I feel now that it is time to give my blog in, that musing
about frigidity in January is not so productive as in sharing whatever seeds of
expression this might sow elsewhere.
Cheers! Sue.
