Celebrations

A couple of mornings ago, this was the treat that was in my Gmail inbox, while the image above was the treat outside my window that morning, looking not at the harbour but at the white birches between our house and our neighbour’s.  Those are certainly two things to celebrate.  This blog is titled Field Days: A Miscellany with the subtitle A Day Book of Sorts, and this post is an observation and celebration of that day and some other days in the past couple of weeks.

Just over forty years ago Lorraine was in the Grace Maternity Hospital with our first child, who was born after a long and difficult labour.  It was profound and life-changing for both of us, but more especially for Lorraine, who had been confined to her hospital room for quite a few days.  She went to the window to look at the world outside and was amazed to see that things were carrying on quite normally out there, people walking along the sidewalks, waiting at crosswalks, talking to each other, all apparently oblivious to the fact that our first child had been born.  The night he was born I wrote the following as part of a much longer poem:

              I am not artiste

c’est tres simple

aujourdhui je suis

tous hommes

this baby born the first

ever in the world

and I the first father

On his 40^th birthday we celebrated, and perhaps the most wonderful aspect of this celebration was the great joy and pleasure our two granddaughters took in the celebration, especially when they got to shoot their aerosol cans of “party string” at their beloved dad and when they got to watch him blow out his candles and enjoy their slices of the chocolate cakes.

Later on that same weekend I participated in a reading that was part of Word on the Street, a celebration of books and of both writing and reading, held on the Halifax waterfront.  I was very happy to be there, along with the other winners in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia 35^th Annual Atlantic Writing Competition.   

My entry, “Orientations, Syria”, included five poems that explored my experience of, and orientation to, being In Syria with Lorraine to help her with the completion of her photographic work there.  It was great to have my work recognized in this competition and to have the opportunity to share it with others, though this celebration, like any celebration involving Syria must be tempered by our knowledge of what is still happening there.  Here is my introduction to my reading:

My submission, “Orientations, Syria”, is part of a larger series, Orientations, I have been working on.  The verb “orient” means to locate and understand one’s self in relation to the east.

I want to dedicate this reading to my intrepid wife Lorraine Field, who has been travelling to Syria since 2004 to make and exhibit photographic work (her last visit there was in February, 2011, just as the Dera’a demonstrations were beginning to spread); also to our stalwart friend and guide G. and his extended family; and most especially to the Syrian people, whose spirit, courage, and heroism have inspired them to continue resisting and fighting back against the Assad’s cruel regime through a time of heartbreak, injury, and death.

These poems are from a quieter time in that brave and broken country.

The reading went well, and I was very happy to be able to do it and get such a positive response from those who attended.  As to celebration, I am always happy to join in celebrations of the written word, and I was also happy to watch this shortvideo clip on Al Jazeera today that may hold hope for a future Syria without the Al Assad family crushing its own people so ruthlessly.  So, from our positions of relative privilege, comfort, and safety, let us hope for the dawning of better days for Syria’s freedom fighters – it is the least we can do.

Recuperation/Recovery #6: Heart and Hearth

What have heart and hearth got to do with each other except that they share the same first five letters?  I have often thought that there should be a connection, though etymologically there is none that is apparent to me, each one coming quite directly from a different early Germanic root word.  For me the connection is approximately this: each one is central to some sense of house or home, and here I mean literally as well as metaphorically central. 

The heart is housed in the body centrally and pumps its blood to our extremities, including that bonebox of a skull protecting our brains, without which my forefinger would not be able to hunt and peck its way through the writing of this post, and without which there would of course be no post to posit, no etymological proposition to explore. 

A few years ago I watched an ultrasound image of my own heart beating and was struck by the profundity of it all, since I was observing the central pump of my own life system, realizing that it had been faithfully doing its work since months before I was born and would keep going until the end of my life.  It was, both literally and metaphorically, getting to the heart of the matter.

In our house we don’t have a hearth, which is actually the floor of a fireplace, but our woodstove provides a good approximation of one, as it is central to our sense of home and an important source of warmth, again both literally and metaphorically.  Both the hearth and the heart are central to my idea of recuperation, which is the restoration of health and balance to my body system.

When I was recovering/recuperating in Foothills Medical Centre in the early stages of this illness journey, we had some notes on the whiteboard in my hospital room.  One was the following poem by Li Po that our son JE put there:

Long is the journey,

Long is the journey,

So many turnings

And now where am I?

And where was I?  I was in a hospital bed where people who cared were looking after me, working in every way they could to facilitate my body’s recuperation.  It was not, however, where I wanted to be, though I understood the necessities that kept me there; I wanted to be home.  After all, home is where the heart/hearth is.  So the other messages on the whiteboard, besides the list of questions to ask the doctors on their early morning rounds, were reminders of home: my own bed, a place where I could see Halifax Harbour, a place to sleep with the window open.

Now I am here, in our house, in a comfortable bed, and the rainbow of recovery is still working.  Alleluia, I say, let the recuperation continue!

Recuperation/Recovery # 5, including A Celebration Breakfast

Background to this post:

I woke up this morning at 5:06.  I had slept since something after three.  For me this was a good stretch of sleep.  I didn’t turn on CNN, or CBCNW, or CTVNC and actually wondered about putting my head back down to sleep some more; after all, I had already watched the stiff little marionette figure of Paul Ryan address the predominantly blond female and mostly pudgy and nondescript male inhabitants of/participants in the 3-day RNC infomercial and listened to the commentaries of the insipid Piers Morgan with his assortment of beer drinkers at the CNN Grill as they analysed Ryan’s lies (like accusing Obama of closing the Janesville GM plant when it  was actually the Bush-monkey who did), his half-truths, empty platitudes, and assorted pandering to whatever the party strategists figured was needed last night.

I decided to snuggle down, and let my own mind and body decide whether more sleep was the answer.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I had things on my mind and that I could do some more sleeping later before E. came over for EFT so I sat up, slid my feet into my sandals, noted the brightening bluish light to the east, collected the debris from my 3 a.m. snack, and headed downstairs to prepare a new picnic for this new morning, the second last day of August, with its touch of summer’s end in the air.

Before I ate anything I thought of the deck of cards in a drawer and played a game of Patience on the dining room table.  The game was taught to me by my grandmother and I played it in her memory (she died in 1970 the same week Lorraine and I were married, during the October Crisis), and in memory of her daughter, my mother, who died on August 27 of last year (see RECUPERATION #3).  If you understand the game at all, you will recognize that I had one move left to make (in column 2), but after that the game was finished, four diamonds up.  Then I was free to eat.

It is now 6:43.  The sun has risen and illuminated our bedroom, shining on my Egyptian fabric piece and Lorraine’s Tunisian desert photo, and on the chakra garden that has been with me more than two months now.

Actually it is now 2:22 p.m. ADT, an auspicious sounding time, and I have just woken up, after a morning when  I have eaten some, slept some, drunk some, and been treated to a celebration breakfast (see Recuperation #6, not yet written, on the amazing and immediate effects of vemurafenib, a new drug for treatment of metastatic melanoma  like mine, produced by Roche and provided/sold as Zelboraf).

 

I have just looked at my sitemeter, which reads 482 visits this month (you are reading a non-viral blog here!), noted that our son JE was one of two visitors to the site today, read Fareed and Saleha’s kind e-mail from Kabul, signed on to an Avaaz petition, and photographed a message of love from my 5-year old granddaughter. 

And now it’s time to get to the post:

RECUPERATION #5 – Remembering who you are:

I believe it is important to remember who you are and to understand the continuity of self from as far back as you can trace it to the present moment in order to be more present in the world, whether it is the recuperative journey I am travelling in/on at the present or any other activity/focus/perceptual awareness I am engaged in (if I am starting to sound prescriptive or tendentious or proselytizing here, please forgive – or, at the least, humour – me for the moment).

In my EFT session with E. this morning, she finished the session with” “Backward visualize to a time when you were at optimum health, and bring that forward to now.”  I did what she suggested, going back to a summer 30 years ago when she was just three, and felt a stream of energy move through my body from my feet to my head, and it was a good thing.

I have not been reading a lot on this journey (other than Al Jazeera online and The New Yorker), but I have been exploring over the last few days some areas of my bookshelf for some treasures from my past and present that help remind me who I am and have been. 

Although the list is long, I’ll try to keep the entries precise, and please remember that these entries are descriptive of my recuperation/recovery process and not prescriptive – you don’t actually have to look at any of them.

Here’s the list:

THE LINES OF MY HAND by Robert Frank (1989) – look in the section “IN NOVA SCOTIA Canada” for “words”, “for my daughter Andrea who died…”, “POUR LA FILLE” on the following page, “sick of goodby’s”, “4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME   4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME”, and “HOSPITAL” that includes this message: “THE WIND WILL BLOW THE FIRE OF PAIN ACROSS EVERYONE IN TIME”.  Go there if you like.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje (1992).

.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED by Anne Carson (1998), another great novel, this one in verse.

UNDER THE ICE by Alden Nowlan (1961), inscribed in blue marker, “For my son, Johnnie, with love Alden Nowlan”, and I wonder where is Johnnie now and think of Frank’s works about Andrea (mentioned above) and any works he made about his son Pablo (both of Frank's children were young when they died).  I also remember finding the section in the Dalhousie University stacks in 1964 where Nowlan’s books were lined up and I remember living inside them for days.  This book is from my late father’s collection and I do wonder if he bought it with me in mind.

DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES by Alice Munro (1968), a wonderful bunch of very short novels.

PLAINWATER by Anne Carson (2000), a gift of poetry and prose given to me by my old friend Udo (a small prescriptive note: read “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother – pp. 245-260 – before reading NOX).

NOX by Anne Carson (2010), a book of loss housed in a box.

THE COLOUR OF THE TIMES: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RAYMOND SOUSTER by Raymond Souster (1964) found down the stacks shelf from Nowlan, another place to live for a few days.

THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald M. Allen (1960).

THE POETICS OF THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald Allen& Warren Tallman (1973).  A companion piece to the one above.  It was edited by Warren, who was on my thesis committee and who organized a memorial service at UBC for Charles Olson at which I wrote a short poem involving the moon that night, the constellation Orion, and The Aspy Fault which is a connecting earth line between northern Cape Breton and Gloucester and read as part of the service.  I never met Olson.

THE BROKEN ARK: a book of beasts, poems chosen by MichaelOndaatje/drawings by Tony Urquhart (1971).

HIS IDEA by Robert Creeley, photographs by Elsa Dorfman (publication date is shown as 2 March 1973, my 28^th birthday), includes the following: 

"Note read re
letter of Lawrence’s

to Mrs. Aldous/Huxley? That
films are obscene

if when the young
man and woman come home,

they masturbate one by one.

Not so --
if they make love.”  

I did meet Creeley.

LETTERS FROM THE SAVAGE MIND by Patrick Lane, “a loon/without wings/wanting to fly/recording letters/from the savage mind”, “This book is for Red Lane/The/Carnival/Man” (1966).

MEXICO CITY BLUES (242 CHORUSES) by Jack Kerouac (1959).

And there are two additional books not included in the image:

FIRST VOICE by J. E. Field (1991), with the following dedication:
"TO ROGER
MY DEAR FATHER
WHO SHOWED ME THE WAY"
It also included a longer personal inscription in blue ballpoint.

THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927 – 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1995) with “At the Fish Houses” (pp. 64-66), “Cape Breton” (pp.67-68), “First Death in Nova Scotia” (pp. 125-126), and “The Moose (for Grace Bulmer Bowers)” (pp. 169-173), as well, of course, as “One Art” (p. 178).