From Word To Word

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard makes this intriguing statement: “Each one of us should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows.”

He says this as he is discussing the image of the road, as he tries to articulate how the road appears to the one who imagines, to the one who daydreams, to the one who remembers the past like a dream.  He argues that those who dream the road, dream it as something dynamic and active, something that carries them along with its own pace and its own cadence. and he cites George Sand and Jean Wahl and Henry David Thoreau as being among those who have dreamed of the road in this way.

I am arrested by this image of the road.  For whatever reason, perhaps because the automobile distances me from it, or perhaps because I am conditioned to overlook it as mere infrastructure, the road has remained almost exclusively an object for me.  It has played an intellectual role in the sense of being the space beyond my door that nevertheless leads to my door, the space of encounter and of invitation, the space of the other, but it has never existed for me in itself, as image, as dynamic and active participant in the journey and in the encounter.

Bachelard’s attention to the road in this respect returns me to Michel de Certeau’s discussion of walking in The Practise of Everyday Life, where he argues that walking a space, discovering its by-ways and shortcuts, in fact recreates that space for us according to its own contours, in opposition to the spacial structures that are imposed on us.  Though de Certeau’s understanding of walking is much more explicitly political, and though it does not itself raise the idea of the road as image, it seems to me that his roads are perhaps open to the kinds of imagining that Bachelard is describing.  Perhaps the recreation of space through walking is not exclusively a function of following the informal paths but a function of following all of its roads and paths with an attention to where they are taking us, with a concern for what they allow us to imagine.

This kind of space, these kinds of roads, would indeed be worth speaking about, would indeed be worth mapping, as Bachelard describes, but I am not sure how to begin such a project.  I could write a detailed catalogue of the places that I walk, something in the mode of Georges Perec, but I am not sure that this would do justice to the imagistic element that Bachelard is describing.  I could also write a moment by moment account of my walking, producing something closer to James Joyce’s Ullysses, but this does not seem quite right either. Of course, it is possible that there is no form that is adequate to this speaking, at least not in every case, so I will offer only the following few lines as the barest gesture to speaking about the roads that draw me along:

The city’s roads turn ever inward,
Draw us through their intimate places,
Give us dreams of an unremembered history.

Dave Humphrey just directed me to a post by Seth Godin on how unemployed college students might create for themselves a kind of informal post-graduate program.  I love this idea, even if my own such program would differ substantially from Godin’s in its content.  I am very enamoured with the idea of engaging in a program of intentional learning that does without the institution and without grading and without imposed curriculum, though I would detach this program even further from the necessity for employment than Godin does.

In any case, I thought I might list the elements that I would myself include in such a program.  Feel free to suggest things that you think I may have missed.

1. Volunteer for a local non-profit organization.

2. Have a regular walk through your neighbourhood. Try not to avoid eye contact with your neighbours. Explore the shortcuts and the back alleys.

3. Organize and facilitate a regular community event: an art tour, a pick-up sports night, a film festival, or a knitting bee. Keep at it, even if nobody comes at first.

4. Begin practising one new skill: gardening, cooking, sewing, woodworking, or whatever. Do not start by taking a course. Just begin and learn as you go.

5. Read at least one non-bestseller book a week. Operate on the no-crap principle. Read slowly. Read well. Think and talk and write about what you have read with someone else. Do this over coffee in the morning or over wine in the evening.

6. Watch at least one non-Hollywood film a week. Have it replace your normal television screen time. Do this with someone else if possible.  Have an actual  conversation about what you are watching.

7. Create at least one polished piece of writing a week, whether it be a letter, a blog post, a newspaper article, a poem, a shortstory, or a contribution to your favourite wiki. The goal is not to publish. The goal is to articulate your thoughts clearly and artistically.

8.  Apprentice yourself to someone part-time for free: a butcher, a stonemason, a chef, or a landscaper.  Keep at it for at least a few months.

9.  Have coffee or dinner weekly with someone who you could call a mentor.  Listen attentively.  Say only what is necessary.

10.  Have coffee or dinner weekly with someone who would call you a mentor.  Listen attentively.  Say only what is necessary.

11.  Start doing without some indulgence.  If it is easy, start doing without another.  Repeat until you start to feel at least a bit deprived.

12.  Try to begin a correspondance with a well-known figure whose thinking or art  has inlfuenced you.  Assume that this is possible until you learn definitively to the contrary.

Well, there you have an even dozen elements that I would include in a post-graduate unschooling program.  I may post other elements in the comments if they come to me.  Feel free to do the same.

My famiy and I are spending the weekend at the house of my Aunt and Uncle and two cousins, and yesterday afternoon we took a walk through the large wooded property that they own.  As always, I was looking for native edibles, and I was treated to a natural buffet, or I would have been if we had been walking a month or two from now.  We came across Wild Strawberries, Wild Raspberries, Swamp Red Currant, Gooseberry, Wild Plum, Mapapple, River Grapes, Fox Grapes, and three kinds of Vibernum that I was not quite able to identfy, though only a few of the strawberries could actually be eaten yesterday.  I dug specimens of the Wild Plum, the Gooseberries, and the Mayapples, beacuse they were growing in such profusion.  They will make great additions to my garden, and they will also serve to remind me of a day that my family went grazing in the woods a month too soon.

Next Saturday, June 13th, at our next Dinner and a Doc, we will be screening The Boys of Baraka, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.  The film follows a group of boys from the ghettos of Baltimore as they travel to a boarding school in Kenya, and it explores the effects that such a change in environment and education might have in the lives of urban youth struggling with poverty and crime in American cities.

If you would like more information, here are some links to the trailer and to an interview with the filmmakers.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I was looking through my old notebooks for a quotation that I knew I had read in university, and I came across a literary discovery that I had made during that time, one that still amuses me. It is a line from Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, where fools who think they are wise are described as strutting about “like apes in purple and asses in lion skins.”

“Apes in purple” is a reference to an old saying that takes various forms:  “An ape is an ape, though it is dressed in scarlet,” or “An ape is an ape, though it wears a badge of gold,” or, as in this case, “An ape is an ape, though it is clothed in purple.”  Erasmus discusses this saying at some length in his Adages, where he quotes the adage as “An ape is an ape although she wears badges of gold.”  Lucian provides perhaps the first literary example of  this adage in his Adversus Indoctum, and it has been used literarrily at least as recently as Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape.

“Donkeys in lion skins” is a reference to a story in which a donkey escapes from his master, finds a lion skin, and uses it to frighten people until his bray reveals his true identity.  Erasmus also discusses this image in the Adages, suggesting that it originates in a story told by Lucian in The Fisherman.  He also notes that it was used by Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus, by Lucian in Pseudologista and the Philopseudes and by Eusebius of Caesaria in Adversus Hieroclem.  A slightly different version of the story also appears in Aesop’s Fables.

It is only in Praise of Folly, however, that I have ever run across a mention of the two figures together, which makes Erasmus, at least in my estimation, the likely source for C. S. Lewis’ ape and donkey characters in The Last Battle.  In Lewis’ version of the story, the donkey does not himself choose to wear the lion skin and to impersonate the lion-king Aslan, but is convinced to do so by the ape, who sets himself up in fine clothing and wields power through the false king that he has created.

Lewis also deviates from the form of the source story in that the donkey does not reveal his true identity through his own bray.  Instead, the real Aslan arrives, and the other characters are forced to choose between one or the other without ever really having seen either, making the story less about how fools should keep their mouths shut and more about how foolishness and wisdom are sometimes difficult to distinguish, especially when issues of faith are concerned.

In any case, I have not before or since seen anyone make this connection between Erasmus and Lewis, and I would like to think that it is a literary discovery all my own, however unlikely this might be.  There may even be a paper to be written on the subject, though I am not sure that anyone would be interested to read it, and though I am very certain that I lack the time to write it.  Besides, I love these little literary coincidences when they remain just little literary coincidences.  I like them much less when they become papers.  So, perhaps it is best if we just keep this between us after all.

I listen to only a fraction of the music that is on my shelves, particularly now that I have children who go through phases of listening to the same album over and over again, so I decided to go through my collection and listen to some of my old favourites yesterday morning, since it was too cold and rainy to do anything outside anyway.  I had already selected some Count Basie, some Mississippi John Hurt, and some Robert Johnson, when I saw The Juliet Letters, which is a collaborative album by Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet.  I have already mentioned this album once, in my post on developing musical taste, and I praised it then for its lyrical originality, but I must confess that it is something like two years since I have actually listened to it.  I decided to rectify this situation, and I found myself delighted with the album all over again.

Though the idea of a collaboration between a pop musician and a classical string quartet would seem to have as much potential for disaster as for success, The Juliet Letters is much more than a mere curiosity.  It is a concept album that uses Shakespeare’s Juliet as a metaphor of a world in which circumstances sometimes overwhelm fragile human relationships, and each song represents a letter that explores this theme from a particular narrative voice, man or woman, old or young.  The result is a tremendous variety of narratives, lyrical styles, and musical sound.  Though there is a definite musical and thematic unity to the album, no song is like another, and the album itself is unlike any other I have heard.

I had intended just to have it playing as I prepared for the day, but I listened to it from the couch in its entirety, jacket notes in hand, and my kids listened also.  I am not sure why The Juliet Letters was never able to find a wider audience, but it certainly deserves a place in your collection.

The image of the threshold, as the literal limit of the house and as the metaphorical limit of the self in respect to the other and to death, has long been a preoccupation of mine.  I first encountered it in the work of Martin Heidegger, in either Poetry, Language, Thought or in  On the Way to Language, I think, though I do not have the inclination to go check my notes at the moment.  He says something like, “The threshold is always stony, because it bears the doorway, because it sustains the middle in which the outside and the inside penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between, and pain has petrified it.”

I was arrested by this image of the threshold and by Heidegger’s characterization of it as a place, not where the inside is separated from the outside, but where the inside and the outside penetrate each other.  I saw the threshold suddenly as representing the philosophical limits that preoccupied me, between life and death, between self and other, between home and world, and this image made me realize how the separations marked by these philosophical limits were penetrating each other, bleeding into each other, petrifying their own limits with pain.

I became deeply involved with this image of the threshold, and I began to find it everywhere, in everything I read.  I started making note of these references in a file that has taken several forms over the years, including a shortish novel and a longish poem, neither of which are presentable at the moment, mostly because I am constantly finding additional references that I keep appending to them in a haphazard way.

Even during the short time that I have been writing this blog, I have run across several instances of the threshold image in my reading, and I was tempted to write about them each time but was never sure how to introduce the subject.  There seemed no way to explain adequately how important the image of the threshold was to me except to rehearse each instance of it that I have come upon, except to offer each iteration of the writing it has prompted in me, except to provide the kind of comprehensive introduction to the subject that would grossly exceed the limitations of this medium.

I have often reflected over the past months, however, that the absence of the threshold image has made the space of this blog misrepresenative of me, at least in this one significant respect.  Though the threshold is an essential part of how I understand many of the subjects that I have already discussed, such as the relation to the home and to the other, I have left it almost unmentioned, because I did not know how to introduce it satisfactorily.

Several weeks ago, however, I was reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou with Tom Able, and I came across a passage that invoked the image of the threshold in a remarkable way.  As soon as I read it, I decided that I could no longer avoid some sort of introduction to the idea of the threshold, and I have been trying to do so ever since, writing draft after draft of this post, but producing nothing very satisfactory.  So, rather than struggle any further, I will let what I have written to this point stand, though I find it almost entirely unsatisfactory, and I will try instead to begin working out the image of threshold through the passage that Tom and I encountered in Buber.  I quote it in entirety, despite its length:

“The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality.  He knows that this mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and he senses the meaning of this.  It suffices him that again and again he may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which he may never tarry.  Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for him an intimate part of the meaning and the destiny of this life.  There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in him again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself.  What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there he recognized true necessity: fate.”

The threshold that Buber is describing here adds a new dimension to the image for me.  Previously, I had primarily conceived of the threshold in several respects, as the limit between life and death, between myself and the other, and between the public and the private, though there are many less significant aspects of this image for me also. Buber, however, is using the image of the threshold to describe something that is different from all of these things, though I think that it is strongly related to them as well.  His threshold is between the world of the It and the world of the You, between the world as I experience it as an object and the world as I engage it as a relation.

His argument is that it is not possible to exist solely in the ideal sanctuary of the You-world, but that life is a constant oscillation between experiencing the world as It and encountering the world as You.  For this reason, freedom does not consist in being able to remain in the world of the You, because this is always impossible.  Freedom consists in encountering the world of the You and then returning to the world of the It, again and again, continually.  In other words, freedom consists in the crossing of the threshold, even and especially because this crossing must always be repeated.

The pain of the threshold, the crossing and recrossing, is where freedom is found, because the unholy and indigent land of the It-world constantly drives me to cross into the sanctuary of the You-world, and because the You-world constantly drives me to prove its spark in the It-world.  To be free, it is not necessary to dwell in the sanctuary, only to set my foot on its threshold, again and again, though I know that I may never tarry there.  It suffices to cross and recross that threshold in such a way that the spark of the sanctuary can prove itself in the unholy and indigent land.

This freedom of the threshold, Buber suggests, is a freedom to face the necessity of the It-world in light of recognizing fate in the You-world.  Though I cannot live continually the fatefulness of the You-world, once I recognize it, I need no longer fear what appears to be necessity in the It-world.  This implies, in terms of my own understanding of the threshold image, that though I am incapable of living what lies beyond the threshold of death, and though I am incapable of living what lies beyond the threshold of the other, the fatefulness that I recognize on these thresholds allows me to return to life and to myself without fearing what appears to be necessity in them.

In this way, I experience the fate of fatefulness of death and the other as a kind of anticipation and projection, as a kind of fear and anxiety, as a kind of hope and desire.  My relation to death and to the other becomes, not an absolute crossing of the threshold, but a crossing in advance that returns me to life and myself in freedom, that returns me with a desire to cross these thresholds again and again, to occupy them, to petrify them with the pain of my crossing and my occupation, in order to have the spark of the You kindled in me continually and to have it proved in me continually also, in the unholy and indigent land.