"Excrementitious" Spring

Spring is largely a myth, isn't it?  The myth, of course, is the sort of stuff you see on Easter cards: green grass, sunshine, flowers and lush leaves.  For many parts of Canada, especially the great swath of land once called "the north west," spring is not so cheerful and sunny.  Instead spring is the muddiest, dirtiest, wettest, sloppiest, slushiest, filthiest season.  And even in May we can be weeks away from new leaves.


Yet it is still, in its muddy way, beautiful.  What amazes me every year at this time is just how many, many shades of brown there are: the grass on the lawns, the leafless branches, the sandy ditches, the bare fields, the churned-up mud, the turbid puddled water.


What also amazes me is how few expressions there are about this time of year--the real spring.  The spring that begins in March and slowly, muddily churns its way through to April and into May.  There is E. E. Cummings' "in Just-spring" in which "the world is mud-/luscious" and "puddle-wonderful."  Or Wm. Carlos Williams' "By the road to the contagious hospital," one of my favourite poems, where:


"Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches---"


But perhaps one of the most profound discussions of the nature of spring is Henry David Thoreau's "Spring" chapter from Walden, in which the dirty and the beautiful mingle evocatively.  Here is a quote from "Spring" (the word that delights me here in its aptness is "excrementitious"):


True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.


For the full chapter, visit: http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden17.html

Farley Mowat (1921-2014)

Farley Mowat had lived a long life.  And as a literary figure - a very public literary figure, at that - he'd had a long and productive career.  He'd lived a full and rich life, it seems to me.  

After his passing earlier this week, in many of the tributes I saw about Mr. Mowat, most admirers focused on his work as an out-spoken advocate of Canada's natural environment.  He was that, for sure.  But it seems to me that fewer focused on his legacy as a writer.  It is quite a legacy--and a problematic one with serious controversies.  His tempestuous relationship to truth (he's known to have said "fuck the facts") I suspect will dog his reputation for years.  And this is no small concern as he is often regarded as a nonfiction writer.  

But problematic grey areas, serious controversies, a sometimes questionable reputation--these don't discredit him.  Not in the least.  These don't cloud his legacy at all but instead point to the very nature of that legacy: he was one of the most complex Canadian writers of our time. 

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On a personal note, Farley Mowat was an important figure on the family bookshelf when I was growing up.  My father had many of Mowat's books in paperback (Dad kept these Bantam-Seal editions in mint-condition).  To name a few: Never Cry Wolf, A Whale for the Killing,  And No Birds Sang, The Boat Who Wouldn't Float.  

I still recall how saddened my Dad was after he had finished A Whale for the Killing.  I can still see him sitting on the edge of my bed one night when I was about 10 years old or so, telling  me about the book he'd just read.  The story had clearly moved him.  

Nearly 30 years later when I got around to reading it myself (I have no excuse for this procrastination), I was also disturbed by it.  No book I know reveals in such stark and memorable detail how the pastoral promise - that humanity might live amicably with nature - is just a pipe dream.  Human nature won't allow it. 

But that's all beside the point.  When I'd heard that he'd died, I thought of those pristine paperbacks, I thought of my Dad, and I thought of home.  And that's at the heart of my modest tribute to Mr. Mowat: When I thought of him, I thought of home.   

Re. Wilson's Swamp Angel (and the joys of leisure reading)

I teach English with a small university-college in northern Manitoba.  Although I do love my work, I will admit that it leaves me with little time for leisure reading.  Throughout the fall and winter months, most of the reading I do is re-reading novels, poems, short-fiction, articles, etc., in preparation for classes.  There's not a lot of time for much more than that.  So when spring and summer roll around, they arrive offering a luxury--the luxury of extra time for leisure reading. 

Now that teaching is once again behind me, what did I wind up picking up recently? Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel.  

Perhaps because I always thought of the novel as a Can. Lit. duty-read, I dutifully avoided Swamp Angel for years.  But the time had finally come to end avoidance and open up the novel to see what I might find in its pages.   

Although Ethel Wilson's book had many fine moment, it must be said that it simply didn't satisfy me.    

The novel's title is taken from the name of the Swamp Angel revolver, a gun highly prized by one of the novel's characters, Nell Severance, who used to juggle the gun in a circus act.  She later gives the Angel to Maggie Lloyd, the novel's main character, who has recently left her husband in order to start a new life as a cook at a down-on-its-luck resort in the British Columbia interior. Even though there is conflict between Maggie and Vera, the resort owner's wife, who is fiercely and angrily jealous of Maggie, the gun never comes into play.  

Spoiler Alert: at the novel's end Maggie mildly drops the Swamp Angel into the lake and watches it submerge below the surface.  And so for most of the novel, the Angel feels like a Chekhovian gun--one that's bound to get used.  And yet it never goes off, is never fired.  

Of course, I don't doubt that there are nuance and subtleties to Wilson's use of the gun in the novel that I'm not taking into account.  All  I'm taking into account is the overall impression that the novel left.  And that impression is, to use an old Labradorian word, that it's a bit "dunchy," meaning under-baked.

And this is one of the pleasures of leisure reading.  Overall impressions are good enough.  I don't need to interpret the book, analyze it, theorize about it, prepare a lecture on it, devise discussion questions about it, write a conference paper on it---nothing of the sort.  All that's required is to read and decide whether or not I like what I'm reading.  To see whether or not the story, the play, the poem, the novel - to borrow a bit from Dylan Thomas - makes my toenails twinkle. 

A walk in the snow

On Easter Sunday my wife and I wrestled our toddler son into our Baby Trekker and walked into the snowy woods near our home in Norway House, MB.  

I always love the woods with snow, so it's important to see them again in this state before it melts away for another year.   Most people are more than eager to see the snow disappear--and I can understand that sentiment, absolutely.  I'm also looking forward to the spring.  But there is a certain serenity about forests and snow, forests in snow, and I'll miss that when it's gone.  At one point during the walk, we let our son out of the carrier and stopped for some tea and homemade gingersnap cookies. Don't tea and cookies taste best when eaten outdoors in cold weather? 

Yes, the charms of spring and summer are many--but I'll miss this wintry weather when it's gone and I'll enjoy seeing it once more when it comes around again next November.  

Eagles (have landed)

And now I can say that I've spotted that other harbinger of spring--Bald Eagles.  First come crows, then eagles.  On Sunday, while on a hike with my family on the still frozen Jack River - perhaps our last trip out onto the ice for the year - we saw three Bald Eagles cruising above Johnson Island.  I had binoculars handy, so we had a great view of them.  As always when I spot them in the rather wintry northern springtime, I wonder: What do they eat? How do they get by when everything is still under ice and snow? 

 

Sign of spring

In this part of the world, the harbinger of spring is not the American Robin but the American Crow.  And we've started to see and hear crows around Norway House.

Re. Wells' Career Limiting Moves and Can. Lit.

I've been reading Zachariah Wells recent book of reviews and essays titled Career Limiting Moves  and enjoying it immensely.  As with Carmine Starnino's Lazy Bastardism, another collection of reviews and essay on Can. Lit., I find myself eagerly reading it, going from one piece to the next to see what he'll say next.  Because Wells' evaluations of Canadian poets and poetry are so bracing and at times critical, I find myself quite curious to hear more of his thoughts.  

Does that mean I agree with him? Sometimes, yes.  Often, no.  Don McKay's poetry gets a bit of a drubbing in Career Limiting Moves--an undeserved drubbing, I think.  But books like Wells', like Starnino's, do some real good in Can. Lit. circles because they remind us that the die is not cast, the canon is potentially shifting. They remind us that debates about aesthetics and poetics are worth having.  They remind us that we ought to employ rigorous reading, rigorous discussion and a keen critical eye toward the literature presented to us.  

Best of all, when I read books like Wells', I'm reminded that Can. Lit. matters.   

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For more about Wells, visit his blog:  http://zachariahwells.blogspot.ca/

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UPDATE: 
Please see my interview with Wells at the Humber Literary Review's webpage: 
http://humberliteraryreview.com/in-conversation-zach-wells/