“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 fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
                                                                                                Henry Thoreau, "Walden"

I, Larry A. Gibbons, also hereby declare that my snow blower is useless. Unless I can hire a team of moose to pull it through the above mentioned precipitation. Snow blowers detest ice pellets underneath their wheels. Confound them!

I’m not a person who has settled into many new places. So I don’t have the skills down pat on how to burrow into a new environment, while keeping the connections back in the last place piping hot and fresh. And, being reasonably sensitive, according to some observers, I worry about keeping the old emotional ties strong back in Ontario, while working on building new emotional bonds in Cape Breton.

One niggling worry is that my associations in Ontario are feeling the strain on the psychological threads of friendship that were nurtured over so many years.

So, hello to all my friends in Ontario, Alberta and Michigan.

C’est la vie, mes amis. May we someday enjoy a Gamay together at our favourite aunt’s place. 

Life is a koan. Don’t you think? One of the biggest koans might be the viewpoints held by non-Aboriginals versus those of the Aboriginals. Whew, a tough one, and the puzzle is quite apparent up here in Cape Breton, where different colonial cultures live side by side with the Aboriginal population.
On Saturday, I was talking to an Aboriginal friend who lives off the reserve. This offers him a different set of problems from
those who live on the reserve.

So he deals from his unique perspective with the intrinsic views of the non-Aboriginals and with those of his culture who live on the reserve. If that isn’t a rock to the noggin, problem-solving puzzle, I don’t know what is. His attempts to fit the pieces together must have his synapses firing fast enough to burn down a meth lab.

I was thinking, what if this fella was a writer? He’d have lots of emotional material to put into words. Because, as you know, I believe writers need at least some chaos and uncertainty in their lives for them to have the material to incorporate into their blood and guts creations.

However, it may be difficult to write about a crisis such as a relationship breakdown, if you are in the midst of one. But once you’ve put it behind you and are trucking on down the road, well, the pen will, at some point, be ready to burn, baby, burn.

Many writers, like myself, get discouraged. Sometimes I’ll read a short story or a novel and I’ll think, “Shit, I can’t write like that. Hell, I don’t even think like that”.

Take many of the literary magazines. So many of their stories have been diced, spliced and sautéed into an urban gruel. They’re the ones that seem to grab the publishers’ attention. Put a character in a bar, a bedroom, a downtown apartment, a subdivision, a jail or a whore house on Yonge Street and your odds of being published rise. Of course, I know this is not always true, but these thoughts do occasionally bounce around inside my skull.

And hell, we live in a forty-five-foot mini home in the forest. My main conversations are with crows, squirrels and Ben, the dog down the road. Now, I’ve seen birds and squirrels getting amorous. And I’ve seen a crow eating a dead squirrel while the squirrel’s family members run up and down the branch trying to get a look at who it was that was killed and is being devoured. We suspect the perpetrator was the black cat who creeps up to our house in the early morning and waits for breakfast by our bird feeders.

And the chatter on the street is there’s a new crow in town. What is the inner angst of this rogue crow? Why does Ben choose to poop on our laneway and not on his own? Look out, literary magazines. Here comes an award winner.

But, really, there are so many good writers out there. Urban or rural. Which leads me to a point about my marketing savvy. By the way, don’t spend too much time trying to find my marketing savvy, because I don’t have a lot. And, I don’t know if I will ever get myself worked up into a marketing frenzy. Which, I think, is a problem for many writers. Because the various forms of social media, with their unlimited potential, are so powerful that writers feel they have to be involved in it all the time. If not, they worry they are going to be left behind by a massive herd of social media-savvy key-tappers. Which must have some deleterious effects on their energy to create.

 Here’s an example of my marketing enthusiasm. When I was a kid and thought as a kid and didn’t look at myself in the mirror very often, I used to have a paper route. The newspaper would hold subscription drives. I hated the door-knocking, the persuading and the rah-rah sessions. I did, however, win a raincoat at one rally, but they had to draw twenty times and there were only about twenty-five carriers in the room. Plus it was a dry summer. Ha.

                                                                            ***

I’m also humble about my vocabulary. Which isn’t gigantic, although it’s growing. People generally use the words they heard when they were growing up. So, if you hear a lot of words when you are a child, you will most likely use them when you’re older, along with the dialect you heard.

Note, that doesn’t make a person with a larger vocabulary more intelligent, but it will open up more opportunities for them. My warning to those with a big vocabulary is to not resent having to drop your vocabulary by a thousand words so you can communicate with the likes of me. Because isn’t it the luck of the draw as to what family you have or don’t have? Just buck up and enjoy your view.

Stephen King has pointed out that a person shouldn’t wait to write until after they have acquired a greater number of words. The words will come with the writing and the reading. However, you must read.

                                                                             ***  
Finally, what amazes me about writing, is that the creative activity involved in this pen to paper thing, opens us up to universal bits and pieces. Maybe because a writer is someone who keeps an eye out for these messages and surprises. Most writers are always on the job. Therefore they recognize more clues and bits of unusual info. 

Like last week. I was travelling down Disheartened Highway 104. I was questioning my vision and my style and indulging in other downer thoughts, when I stumbled upon a Walter Whitman poem. It’s called, “Quicksand Years”. (I do this stumbling thing all the time.) Here’s the poem:

“One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
                                                                                                  Walt Whitman

From reading the above poem, I would have to believe that Walt Whitman would have agreed with the idea that we write from the gut and not from the head.

So might Salman Rushdie, who wrote: “...the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

And what is my opinion? I think that emotions are at least as important as logic and knowledge. Maybe more so. That feelings are to our creativity, as firewood is to our wood stove.

And sometimes that can cause a problem or two. Because writers flirt, play, manipulate, tease and struggle with emotional material. Like a lion tamer, who tries to get the lion to do this and that while said lion growls, hisses, roars and even charges at the tamer. Now most of the time the charges aren’t carried to their final possibilities and the lion backs off. But sometimes the lion doesn’t drop his eyes and back off. Isn’t obedient. His attack is for real. Then you have trouble.

Which is, as I previously said, one of the writer’s main sources of literary fuel.

If the lion gets you then you’re emotionally bleeding. A lot or a little bit, and the lion may be out of his cage. Outside your writing office. He’s free to roam wherever he darn well pleases while you try to wrangle him back into his cage. And doesn’t he just love to cuff you around when you’re trying to sleep? Like a cat toying with a mouse.

Chaos is defined in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as: “utter confusion” or “the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe”.

Chaos is like having a truck dump a pile of building supplies onto your front lawn leaving you to figure out which part goes where. And winter is coming. And you’re low on money.

Chaos plays willy-nilly with our normalcy. And yet it’s what writers play with. It’s their construction material. The bricks and mortar of the story that will get the pen smoking, or in this era, the keyboard.

I think that writing should come with a hazardous material caution manual or sign. “WARNING, WRITING CAN LEAD AN INDIVIDUAL TO A FEELING OF BEING LOST. IF EXPOSED TO WRITING CHAOS, PLEASE WRITE IN YOUR JOURNAL IMMEDIATELY. WASH CHAOS OUT WITH AT LEAST AN HOUR OF EXERCISE PER DAY. TALK TO SOMEBODY YOU TRUST. WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. GIVE IT TIME. HAVE A BEER OR TWO BUT NOT MANY MORE. MOST OF THE TIME.”

I’ve also both heard about and experienced the problems that arise when writers try to write about emotional experiences they are undergoing in the present. For example, if you’re going through a divorce, it’s difficult to use those experiences and the emotions in your writing until the sensations particular to that situation, have had time to settle and work themselves out.

Or, using the wood metaphor, until the wood has had time to dry. When it’s at its best to get your wood fire turning your stove pipes red. Otherwise, the wood is too green. So can your present emotional experiences be too green. It takes time.

Emotional chaos can come to anyone from a whole variety of experiences. A new job, the death of a loved one, a lost relationship, a new relationship, a loss of faith, a new faith, or from those places that have long been locked away. The hinges coated with rust and the door heavy with moss and age.

However, when a writer gets it sorted out and can begin to write about it, then the writing will be the real thing. The blood will be on the page and what reader can resist reading stories written in blood?

And writers have an advantage. They’re used to dealing with creative chaos. They can write it into something meaningful to themselves and to others. Get the mangy old lion cornered.

When creative or personal chaos strikes me, I look at the sky, the mountains, the trees and the ocean or lake and I see how immense this universe is. It’s easy when you live in Cape Breton to see this immensity of the universe. Then, if I’m lucky, I can allow myself to let go and be gracious about the chaos that is supply teaching for my usual rascally rabbit muse. And I write.

As they say, the tree that bends, lives to grow another day, or something like that.

According to Grinder, (whom I am going to have to wake up today, before the rain turns the snow into mush, and then the cold turns the mush into )*(&^&^%^$% ice), “The snow blower whose shear pin breaks is a snow blower who will live to blow snow for another day.” I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

And where is our soul while all this is going on? Don’t worry, it’s safe, even if it has to go into hiding for awhile.

John O’Donohue, Irish mystic and Connemara poet, wrote:
“The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery--when the spiritual search is too intense and hungry, the soul stays hidden. The soul was never meant to be seen completely.”

Tolstoy wrote in his book, Anna Karenina: “He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul was overflowing with a thirst for knowledge.”

So hang in and believe that some day it will be a bloody wonderful story.                      

                                                ***

Speaking of chaos, have you been listening to some of our skilled politicians lately? The ones who seldom spin a lie, but rarely tell the truth? Now there’s a Zen koan for you.

Some folks, when they read my blogs, might wonder why I give objects names. For example, I call my bike “Buddy Lee”. He’s a ‘he’ because his name is Buddy Lee. Nothing anatomical.

The bike I left in Ontario, I named “Pixie Lee”. She is now leaning against a cold concrete wall in a friend’s home in Kingston. May the force be with her. May she be ridden again.

I got the name Pixie Lee from my ‘Familiar’. That’s how Sue referred to our little black cat, Spooky, who seemed to be able to read my mind and I hers. At the time, I was trying to think of what to call my Ontario bike, but was coming up with some crummy names. One day, as I was leaving to go for a bike ride, Spooky, who always liked to meow at me, and who was sitting on top of her favourite perch, our kitchen’s garbage pail wash water container, meowed as I left. In the meow I heard her telepathic suggestion, “Name your bike ‘Pixie Lee’.” The name stuck so I kept it. May Spooky rest in peace.

I call my snow blower “Grinder” and my current truck, “Basque”. My previous truck I called “Clarence” and the truck before him, “Rusty”. A not very creative name, I have to admit.

I bought Clarence on a whim and prayer and drove him home through two thousand kilometres plus of blizzards and ice. Therefore the name  “Clarence”, taken from the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

I bought Basque the time we were in Cape Breton and needed to return to Ontario one winter, and drove him through a hell of a winter storm. I had a broken foot and couldn’t use Clarence’s clutch pedal. Sue, at the time, had a severe concussion and Clarence, who hated tobacco smoke, had arrhythmia or some other kind of heart/motor/electrical problem. I had to trade him in for Basque. I think he understood. He presently sits in a field in the back of a car lot sharing the space with hundreds of other abandoned vehicles. I wonder how many have personal names?

  Nowadays, we humans are often not referred to as persons. We are ‘consumers’. We are ‘human capital’. We are ‘human resources’. We ‘network’. Corporations pay taxes and do philanthropy. Not people.

I name my machines to counteract this labelling by going the other way. Giving machines human names. As though I’m using language flea spray. Repelling these, ‘as we move forward, consumer, indexed, money crunching word bugs’.

I hoist my swear finger above my head. My pinky wiggling and jabbing at those who treat humans like machines. Who do it without blinking an eye or showing shame or guilt.

A wise man once said, “As a man thinks, so he is.”

George Orwell wrote that language can be used to shape human thinking. And it’s an excellent way for tyrants to make us see ourselves as cogs in a massive complex system, way too mysterious and complicated for our little spark plugs and computer chips to comprehend.

And if we think of ourselves as consumers, capital and resources, then how much respect are we going to show to other humans? What are the odds for the plants, animals and birds?  How can they withstand words and phrases which are repeated and repeated and repeated to thicken and blacken the ledger books and hearts of those with the infinitely deep pockets?

  “Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.”

                                                                                            Freidrich von Hayek

AND

“It does not require many words to speak the truth.”

                                                                                                  Chief Joseph Nez Perce

AND FINALLY

“Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children.”

                                                                               Sitting Bull