From Word To Word

I have to confess that I have no regular walk.

I do walk, of course, almost everywhere, so there are many places where I walk regularly, paths that connect my house to the local farmer’s market, to the little grocery store down the street, to my church a few blocks in the other direction, to the several parks that distract my children most mornings. and to the many other places that I inhabit frequently. None of these constitute a regular walk, however, not in the sense that I have found to be so important to others over the years.

For example, my favourite books as a child were C. S. Lewis’ Narnian books, and when I had exhausted them, I went looking for everything else that Lewis had written.  I started reading vast quantities of literary criticism, theology, and apologetics, all well before I could know what any of it might actually mean.  In the midst of all this, I also read Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and a volume of his collected letters.  In both of these books, he talks about his regular walks.  Often taken with others for company, these walks did not necessarily have a set route, and they rarely had a destination as such.  Their purpose was not to arrive anywhere in particular, but to provide the opportunity for thinking and for conversation.  They were less exercise or transportation than a unique space where the life of the mind could be practiced.

Though this was the first time I had heard of walking in such a way, I have found similar practices among many others of the authors whom I enjoy and respect, and my imagination has joined these figures together into some sort of ideal figure of the walker: part G. K Chesterton, idly slashing at trees with his swordstick; part George Grant, finding religious epiphany while passing through a farm gate; part Ernest Hemingway, tramping country roads and forests; part Hugh Latimer, discussing theology while climbing Heretics’ Hill; and, most recently, part Henry Koch, collecting seeds from the trees along his path.  The regular walk, as practiced by this ideal walker, becomes a kind of intellectual and spiritual discipline, a kind of devotion.

Certain aspects of this walking do come to me naturally.  I have no trouble undertaking a walk without any particular destination in mind, and my walking is not often tempted by anything resembling urgency.  I do not jog.  I do not stride.  I do not hike.  I hardly even walk.  I amble.  I stroll.  I saunter.  I ramble.  I perambulate.  Yet, I do not walk in this way as a regularity, as a part of how I am.  I do it only on occasion, usually at someone else’s suggestion.  Though my wife has something like a regular walk in this sense, I do not.  This is my confession, and it is a confession, I think, that is a symptom of my larger discomfort with a certain kind of reflection and meditation and solitude.  I am not one to make resolutions, but I feel the need for a regular walk, to be regularly apart and reflective, to recapitulate the discipline of the walkers who have preceded me.  I desire this devotion as my own.

Dave Humphrey recently responded to my post on defining a philosophy of the table, a subject that we have since discussed in person also, and he raises some points on which I would like to expand.

First, he rightly notes that I fail to recognize how a philosophy of the table always remains opened to a possible future because it always remains unfinished.  Perhaps there is something about the nature of my own habitual concerns that I too often neglect this future moment, even as I attend insistently to the occasion of the present moment and to the memorial of the past moment.  I do agree with Dave, however, despite my negligence, that it is essential to a philosophy of the table that it be turned toward the future, in the expectation that the conversation will not ever have been completed, in the anticipation that there will always remain more that will need saying.  If it is necessary to honour a present and to memorialise a past, it is also necessary, as an essential correlate of these activities, to anticipate a future.

This anticipation is not for the next instalment or for the next issue of a discrete philosophical event, but for the continuation, always desired and always uncertain, that I will speak with you again.  It is an anticipation that says, even before our present conversation has ended, even before we have parted, “I miss you and what you have to say to me and what we are together.”  It says, “Let us come together again soon, though I know it is always possible that we may never be able to come together again.”  It has something of Levinas’ “adieu” to it.  It says, “Go with God, and may God return you to me.”  Just as in a memorial of the past or in an honouring of the present, it refuses to understand itself as a philosophy that is distinguishable from those who share in it.

Dave is also right, therefore, to see this mode of philosophy as a gift, with all of the implications and the questions and the problems that this word bears and has borne as a subject of theory and philosophy over the centuries.  There is too much that could be said about this gift and this giving, and I would say it more poorly than others have done before, so I will only avow that we know, you and I, what this giving is, not to theory, not to philosophy, not to ethics, not to theology, but to us.  As I find myself saying continually, it cannot be separated from us.

This is why I do not believe, as some of my acquaintances have argued, that my definition of a table philosophy functions to privilege orality over textuality, or presence over deference.  Quite the opposite, a philosophy of the table sees no difference between the spoken and the written, so long as the are exchanged as gifts according to the bond that is between us.  It takes no interest in how the other is as such, only how the other is for me, as a gift, according to that bond.  It privileges not the spoken or the present, but the shared.  It insists only that our speaking and our being be between us, that this sharing be what defines it, that this giving be both what closes it as a protection around those who are gathered in it and opens it continually to the approach of others who wish to gather also.  It says both, “Let us remember and celebrate and anticipate what we share here,” and also, “Come, join in our sharing.  There is room for you here also.”

I had a student submit an assignment on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales the other day that is among the most original submissions that I have ever received.  It takes “The Knight’s Tale” for its topic, the story of Arcite and Palamon that Chaucer retells from Boccaccio’s Teseide.  Rather than assuming the form of a linear text, the assignment is presented through Facebook, each of the various characters having a profile, and it uses the program’s various functions to relate the events of the story.

In the capacity of a teacher of English Literature, I am mostly concerned, of course, with whether this approach to the assignment is effective in saying something useful about Chaucer’s text, but as a observer of contemporary media practises, I am far more interested in its implicit comparison between two modes of textual interaction.  There are some obvious differences between the two that are mostly consistent with a shift from an early-modern cultural aesthetic to a postmodern one: the displacement of a unified  narrator with multiple narrative voices; the rejection of a reliable narrative position in favour of unreliable narrative perspectives; and the shift from an external narrative position to internal ones.  The result of these shifts, according to standard postmodern theory, is a story that is necessarily less unified and less coherent but also more reflective of the multiple ways in which a story is lived and told and experienced, because they replace a single subjective voice with a multiplicity of voices that puts in question the stability of the subject as such.

These kinds of observations have often been made before, and I feel no desire to recapitulate them any further, because the distinction that interests me most between the two stories does not lie in this postmodern shift in cultural and aesthetic sensibility.  Rather, it lies in the technologically driven shift in how the reader is constructed.  The knight, as the narrator of the story in Chaucer’s text, is ostensibly performing for other characters who are as much literary creations as he is, but his performance is also a part of a larger performance by the anonymous narrator of the whole text and of an even larger performance by Chaucer himself, both of whom are in fact literary creations as well.  These performances assume readers who are apart from the text, an audience that certainly performs the text for themselves, but who cannot stage these performances for the literary creations of the text.

The Facebook adaptation of the story, however, constructs its readers, not as an audience apart from the text, but as fellow performers able to participate in the text directly in ways that are not distinguishable from the rest of the performance.  It opens the possibility that readers might interact with my student’s characters in a mode that my student could not control and that either readers could not distinguish from his text.  These additions to my student’s text would not function as commentaries or supplements, but would become an essential part of the story being performed.

These kinds of additions have always been possible, of course, through multiple authorships and other authorial complexities, and they might even be said to be unavoidable, through the essential indeterminacy of the authorial function, but it has never before been possible for a story to incorporate its readers essentially and indefinitely into its own text.  Though the reader always played a performative function in relation to the text, it has never before been possible for the text to be structurally inclusive of this function in an essential way.

The implication is that the reader is, in fact, no longer a reader, but is only another literary creation who can participate indistinguishably in the performance of the story itself.  The reader is no longer separable from the author, even if the reader does not in fact add anything visibly to the story, because the reader must have a profile to read another profile, must actually be inscribed into the other profile in order to be a reader of it.  To read the profile, the reader must already be written into it, must already have contributed to the authorship of the story.  There are no readers, on Facebook, only authors, only literary creations who perform a story that they can never comprehend in its entirety.

This conclusion accords well with my intuitive sense of how new media is functioning.  I suspect that it offers the unprecedented opportunity to be writers of ourselves only at the cost of discouraging our opportunity to be readers of others.  They make imperative the development of reading practices that choose to read as such, for the sake of reading, in order to honour the act of reading, though these practices will almost certainly take the form of a discipline that cannot avoid being called religious.

I have been reflecting on whether there is anything definitively different in the kind of philosophy that I have been advocating in this space and in others, the kind of philosophy that finds its place at the table and over the stove and in the garden and on the front porch, the kind of philosophy that does not artificially separate itself from the rest of everyday living. While it is obvious that this kind of thinking occurs differently, I wonder whether it proceeds differently, whether the difference in its practice results in a difference in its conclusions. In other words, does the rhythm of the household and the neighbourhood produce a philosophy that is different in substance from the philosophy that is produced by the rhythm of the academic institution and the professional thinker?

The following are some ideas that might contribute to a discussion of this question.

1. The questions posed by a philosophy of the table are always undertaken in the context of relationship if not of friendship. While neither relationship nor friendship is foreign between professional philosophers, of course, institutional philosophy rarely appears in these contexts. Except for the kinds of exchanges that sometimes occur in an interview or in a discussion session, the relationships that might exist between professional thinkers are most often obscured in what these thinkers produce. A table philosophy, however, simply cannot exist apart from the relationship that defines it. Apart from this relationship. it ceases to be what it is. It proceeds solely from the space created by crossing of our gazes.

This does not mean that the product of professional philosophy does have among its sources the conversations of friendship. It merely means that these conversations are most often covered over when professional philosophy produces itself as such. Where a table philosophy need have no product beyond what is produced in the relationship between the thinkers themselves, a professional philosophy appears only in a product that always distances itself from the relationship and usually marks this distance deliberately.

2. A philosophy of the table, as the preceding distinction indicates, also differs from a professional philosophy in what it produces. Where the aim of professional philosophy is almost always contribution to a body of knowledge that is supposed to be held in common, a table philosophy has as its aim only to produce change in those who are gathered around the question. Its product is a different thinking and a different acting in its participants, and the body of knowledge to which it contributes is only the shared memory of the conversation, always ongoing, among them.

The product of an institutional philosophy almost always appears in a form that is defined and reproducible: a book, an article, a paper, and interview. It almost always has the appearance of a finality. It appears as definitive. The product of a relational philosophy, however, never appears in this kind of form. It appears only in its multiple and provisional and undefinable influences on those who share in it. Accept that it causes people to think and be differently, it has no product of any kind. It can never be reproduced. It can never be published. To try and reproduce it in these ways would only be to remove it from its context and submit it to the structures and conventions of the institution.

3. An institutional philosophy also gestures differently from a philosophy of the table. The characteristic gesture of a professional philosophy is the citation: a reference to the established body of reproducible knowledge, appearing always in a present tense. “Kant writes,” or “Heidegger argues,” or “Derrida demonstrates.” A philosophy of the table, however, has as its characteristic gesture the shared memorial: a reference to the undefinable and unreproducible history that lies between the participants, appearing always in a past tense. It says, “Do you remember when we were talking on your porch last fall?”, or “This topic has always preoccupied you ever since that first discussion group, hasn’t it?”, or “We’ve always agreed on that point.” This gesture to a shared past is not just a remembering. It is a memorial. It does not merely recall the ideas that were shared. It also celebrates the relationships and the times and the places and the activities that defined these ideas. It refuses to make the ideas separate from the relational contexts that produced them.

These kinds of memorial do appear in a professional philosophy at times, of course, and I count some of them among my favourite philosophical writings. However, even in these cases, institutional philosophy does not produce the effect of a memorial, at least not to me, who did not experience the people and the occasions being memorialised. Jacques Derrida’s memorial in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas moves me very much, both intellectually and emotionally, and it may even function as a memorial for those who knew them both and shared with them, but it can never be for me a memorial in the sense that I am describing. A philosophy of the table, however, cannot help but be such a memorial. It proceeds solely by means of these gestures to its own shared past, recalling and celebrating and mourning what has passed before, becoming ever more complex as the conversation winds through the years.

4. An institutional philosophy also differs from a table philosophy in that it is to a much greater degree produced for the occasion rather than by it. In almost every case, a professional philosophy is produced in advance to be delivered as a polished discourse for a particular occasion. Even in those instances that have the appearance of being improvised, like an interview or a question period, it is always the case that what is produced on these occasions is produced largely for rather than by the purposes of these very occasions. In contrast, a philosophy of the garden and the kitchen is produced largely by the occasion and by the season and by the task being accomplished and by the people present and by the weather and by the topic that circumstances have suggested and by what is being eaten and by everything else that makes that moment irreplaceable. This kind of philosophy takes the moment into account in order to honour the moment, not in advance of it, but in the midst of it. It does not permit itself to be abstracted from the occasion on which it finds itself.

I could perhaps say more, and I am tempted to do so, but I wonder how others might respond to what I have said so far. I am aware that the distinctions I have made cannot be maintained absolutely in every case, that institutional philosophies do include and have the apperance of including elements of a table philosophy, and that table philosophies are constantly situated within contexts that are at least partially produced by institutional and professional philosophies. Though I think there is a useful distinction here, I am interested to see whether others think so as well.

The Senior High class I teach at my church met at our local coffee shop this morning, and we got on the topic of found fruit, which is a term that is often applied to the fruit that can be found and harvested for free in urban areas.  For example, I have for years been harvesting apples and pears from behind one of the city community centres where there had been an orchard when the building was still a nurses’ residence for the local hospital.  I also pick serviceberries and elderberries from various housing developments around the city, and there are places where I can also find wild grapes, red currants, rose hips, and raspberries.  Then there are the various neighbours who have planted fruit trees but do not harvest them and let me pick grapes and cherries and whatever else.  All this saves me a not inconsiderable amount of money, and it also lets me use what already grows around me and would otherwise go to waste.

Picking found fruit in this way seems very natural to me.  My parents often took my brothers and me to collect windfall apples from the side of rural roads, apples that could not be eaten but were great for making applesauce.  We also picked the berries that grew in the housing developments where we lived over the years.  When I was first married, I discovered and began picking the wild grapes that grew near our apartment, and I was eventually joined by several of the other residents for the yearly harvest. Though I have moved from these places, I still return to them to gather fruit each year, and I am taking cuttings from some of these plants for my own garden.

Though this behaviour seems very normal to me, however, my students were clearly a little disconcerted with the idea.  They wanted to know whether I had to pay people, which I never do, or get their permission, which I always do unless the fruit is on public land.  They also wanted to know whether this kind of fruit might be more likely to carry bugs or diseases.  The whole thing seemed a little inapropriate to them, something like sneaking into a movie theatre or hacking a computer.  It might be possible, they seemed to imply, but surely there was something about it that was immoral if not actually illegal.

This response, now that I think about it, was a predictable one given our culture’s ideas about property.  We have so internalized the notion that everything is and should be owned and that everything does and should cost something, that we are immediately wary when something appears to be unowned and available to be used freely.  I have seen very similar responses to open source software, for example, or even to the neighbourly gesture to shovel a driveway.  We assume that these things can only be free to hide another kind of cost.  We assume that everything must have an owner, and that what is owned by one person would surely not be freely given to another except as a kind of advertisement or loss leader.  What is freely given or freely found, we believe, will be of worse quality and will obligate us in other ways.  We worry that the real owner of these things will appear and demand that we pay for them in one way or another.

We feel this way, unfortunately, because it is too often the case that what is free does indeed come at a hidden cost, but this should make it all the more necessary that we actively use those few things that are in fact freely found and freely given.  To pick and use found fruit, or to use open source software, or to lend tools freely between neighbours, these become ways, not only to save money, but to maintain economies that do not circulate around money at all, but around the local community and the local environment.  They become ways to value things apart from the dollar value that might be attached to them.  They become ways to understand value differently, to reevaluate, to value more highly what is given and discovered without any value at all.

This past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc was an interesting one, though not for the reasons I expected.  I had intended to make tomato soup, since last Saturday was tomato sauce day, and I expected to have a fair number of tomatoes remaining.  In the event, however, we used all the tomatoes but had perhaps a quarter of a bushel of red peppers left, so I made roasted red pepper soup instead, a recipe so good that I will keep it and make it again when I have a chance.

I had planned to screen Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick and Katerina Cizek, and I will likely do so next month instead, but we had only a very few people come, and the consensus was that we wanted something a little different, a little less intense.  So, we had a look at my collection and decided to watch Touch the Sound by Thomas Riedelshiemer, a film that explores the music of Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist who is also deaf.  What I saw of it, between putting children to bed, was quite interesting, and everyone seemed to enjoy it very much.

Though I usually try to have some discussion after the film, people mostly dissipated fairly quickly, helping with the dishes or going their way, and I found myself on the porch instead, smoking my pipe with my brother and conversing about music and sports and the preserves that he was stealing from me in order to supplement the diet of a starving artist.  We talked very little about the film, but our conversation was good and fitting with the rest of the evening: not what I expected, but good in any case.

Dave Humphrey likes to say that we are the festival, making reference to an idea from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.  He means by this that the festival only occurs in the way that it does, only occurs at all, in fact, because we go to it, participate in it, and, in short, make it what it is.  I had something of that feeling on Saturday night, that those who attended made it what it was, which was something quite different than I had expected.  The event became what it was quite apart from anything I had planned, and what it became was good in its own right.  It was good because those who came made it what they needed it to be.

I promised some months ago that I would write a series of posts on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as I reread it and took notes from it, but I have always seemed to have more pressing topics at hand, and I find myself having finished my second reading of the book without having posted about it at all. I am not entirely without consideration for those who may be reading this, so I will not now try to write in one post all the things that I should have written in several, but I will follow one series of ideas that impressed me with their relevance to the internet as a means of social interaction.

Debord argues that the dominant mode of production speaks a language of spectacle that comes to mediate social relationships, transforming the prevailing mode of social life so that it appears as spectacle itself and seems to justify the language, the conditions, the aims, and the products of the existing system. The society of the spectacle is thus a society where social life is mediated in such a way that it can be produced and consumed as a product, where social life becomes increasingly subject to an economy. The power of spectacle over the individual, therefore, is a function of the individual’s acceptance of the economization of social relationships, which means that resistance to the society of the spectacle will always take the form of a resistance to the economization of social relationships.

This argument, even in the reductive and inadequate way that I have summarized it, bears interestingly on the phenomenon of social media networks and other means of social interaction through the web. These technologies function in precisely the way that Debord describes. They impose themselves between people in order to mediate their relationships with a series of images and spectacles that are designed, explicitly, to reduce the elements of social interaction to forms of data that can be digitized, transferred, measured, economized, and controlled. Rather than having a series of complex and unique relationships, for example, these technologies reduce everyone to friends, to a number on the screen that can be counted and compared with others, to a collection that can be amassed like possessions and counted like currency. Rather than having my own complex identity, I am forced to choose my religion, relationship status, and everything else from options limited by drop-down menus. My life, the lives of my friends, and the relationships that we have between us become reduced to a spectacle, to a product for our consumption. Rather than living our social relationships, we consume them for our amusement, in the sense of amusement that I defined some time ago.

I do not mean to imply that that all social relationship conducted through these technologies is necessarily produced and and consumed as spectacle in support of the dominant modes of production, but I do mean to imply that this is indeed very often the function of these technologies when they are used uncritically. It is necessary, therefore, that we be actively looking for ways to use these technologies against themselves and to conduct ourselves through them in ways that contest their tendency to reduce social interaction to measurable data, to economy, to spectacle, to consumption. We need to approach these technologies, not in order to use them, but in order to misuse them, in order to abuse them, so that we can begin to resist their function as spectacle as far we are able.

This abuse and misuse would, of course, look different from person to person and from situation to situation, but it will be possible to develop, refine, annd share techniques for this kind of intervention, not just with web technologies, but with any of the technologies that have come to mediate human relationship.  In my own use of the web, for example, I habitually decline to use drop-down menus or, when I must, I select options that are clearly untrue of me.  I complete forms in ways for which they were not intended.  I use softare to block advertizements.  I write and read the web at length.  I try to do both critically.  I avoid the viral.  I revel in the idiosyncratic.  I try to use means of communication that permit greater flexibility and choice. None of these choices makes much of a difference to the web itself, but they do make a differance in the virtual place that I create for myself from the web.  They allow me to limit the mediating influence that these technologies might have on the relations that I conduct through the web.  I hope they are a place to start.

I had two experiences of sharing yesterday that, while seemingly different in many ways, taught me something about how it is possible to share or introduce a place, a subject that has been turning in my head since I returned from Manitoulin Island.

My friend Chris Land came by with his young daughter in the morning, and we had a chance to walk to a downtown used bookstore together in the afternoon.  Chris is not from Guelph and had never been to this particular bookseller, so I showed him around the shop a little, and we spent some time browsing, occasionally noting a book to one another or asking each other’s opinion on a title.  Chris bought Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was a fairly revolutionary text for me when I read it in university.  I bought two collections of essays: George Orwell’s Inside the Whale and Other Essays, and William Styron’s The Quiet Dust and Other Writings, neither of which were known to me before I saw them on the shelves.  We both left the store well pleased with our purchases.

In the evening, I went to help my mother move a desk from the house of Bob Brown, a mutual friend.  While we were there, Bob took the opportunity to show me a little of his unique garden.  It was not the first time that I had seen it, since the Browns allow me to pick their grapes every fall, but I am almost always picking when Bob is at work, so I have never heard him explain how unique some of the plants in his garden really are.  He cultivates only those plants that are native to southern Ontario, and he tries to include as many uncommon species as he can.  Not wanting to take these plants from the wild, he notes where developers will be beginning a new project, and takes any valuable specimens from these areas before the bulldozers arrive.  From among his many interesting edible specimens, too many to mention, he was gracious enough to give me some mayapple plants (podophyllum peltatum) for immediate transplantation, and to promise me some pawpaw tree seedlings (asimina triloba) for transplantation later in the fall.  Of the two, mayapples can still be found wild in various places in Ontario, but pawpaws are almost never seen this far north any longer. Along with the sandcherry bushes (prunus pumila var. depressa) that I am trying to force grow from seeds, these new plants will make an interesting beginning to a garden of local and edible plants.

In each case, I would suggest that what was being introduced was, more than anything else, a space, a specifically local space, a locality.  In the first instance, I was the guide; in the second, I was the guided; in both, what was actually exchanged between us was a familiarity with a locality, a familiarity both with the space of a bookstore or of a garden, and, through this locality, an increased knowldge of the broader spaces of literature and of southern Ontario flora.  The sharing is not really of literature or flora, of course, not as a whole, not even as the whole of what might be shared.  It iis the sharing only of those aspects of literature and flora that appear within a particular locality, a locality where one is familiar and is will to familarize another.  In the same way, my opportunity last week was not to introduce the Humphreys to Manitoulin, or even to everything of Manitoulin that I know.  Rather, it was an opportunity to make them familiar with a place where I am familiar, in order to introduce them to the experience of Manitoulin that is particularly mine.  They may gain a broader knowledge of Manitoulin through this experience, but this is not primarily what is being shared.  What is being shared is my familiarity with the locality.

I would argue that this understanding of sharing has implications far beyond physical space, because I think that it characterizes, or at least should characterize, every instance of sharing that takes the form of an introduction.  In terms of pedagogy, for example, I think that it is far more useful to understand the teacher’s function to be sharing in this way.  Clearly, despite frequent pretense to the contrary, the teacher is never able to introduce students to the entirety of a subject.  The teacher is never able even to introduce students toa ll of the possible knowledge of a subject that the teacher has to sharet.  The teacher is really only able to introduce students to a locality within a subject, a locality with which the teacher is familiar, a locality which the teacher can make familar to the students also.  This kind of teaching does not pretend to somehow cover a subject entirely, but to familiarize a locality of the subject in such a way as to cast light on the whole, which will always remain beyond mastery of both teacher and student.

In this sense, I familarize Chris with the bookstore so that he can carry out of it something that was always larger than the bookstore in any case: the text.  Bob familarizes me with his garden so that I can carry out of it something that was always larger than the garden in any case: the plant.  Without these localities, and without a familiarity with them, taught and learned, there would be nowhere to begin discovering the things that we need to carry with us.

My family and I have just returned from Manitoulin Island, where both my parents were raised and where both sets of my grandparents still live.  We stayed at my Mother’s place in Providence Bay, an old family house that she purchased a few years ago as a kind of cottage and will now be using as a full time residence and a place to run art workshops and summer programs.  She calls the place Providence House, and she was gracious enough to let us use it for a week and to bring along our friends the Humphreys.

Manitoulin is a deeply significant place for me.  I spent almost every summer there as I child, either at the farm of my Grandparents Hill, which is just outside of Mindemoya, or at the hunting camp of my Grandparents Gordon at Carter Bay, which is on the south shore of the Island east of Providence Bay.  I am by no means a farm boy, but it was during my summers on the island that I learned to ride the workhorses by leaping onto their bare backs from the apple trees, to drive a tractor poorly, to help birth a breach position calf, and to mow more hay than I care to remember.  I am no more a naturalist than I am a farmer, but the island was also the place where I learned to identify some animal sign, to distinguish one tree from another, to cut trails, and to fish.  My most vivid memories are of picking raspberries from along the dirt roads, of fishing in the little Mindemoya river, of wandering among the dunes at Carter Bay, and of reading in the old stuffed arm chair at the camp, the night already black, the moon hidden by the trees, the only light coming from the coals of the open wood stove.  It is into these memories that I always return when I come to Manitoulin.

It has been meaningful to bring others, first my friends, then my wife, then my children, and now my friends’ children, as I have returned to these memories over the years.  The island that I can introduce to them is not the same as the one of my childhood, of course, but it connects to that childhood in strange ways, and it connects to the person I am now as well.  It is no longer possible to get fresh fish from the dock at Providence Bay, for example, because there are no boats that still fish from there.  It is no longer possible to get icecream at the dairy in Mindemoya, because the dairy has now been demolished.  It is still possible, however, to find fresh fish, even if it is now sold from a truck in the grocery store parking lot, and it is still possible to get icecream made by the local dairy, even if it is no longer quite as local.  These things are still important to me now, though perhaps for other reasons, and it was a real pleasure to share them with the Humphreys.

It was also a pleasure to begin building some entirely new memories with my family.  I returned to Carter Bay to take some photos with my eldest son after the Humphreys had left.  While we were photographing, we met a woman on the beach who was able to confirm my uncertain identification of the sandcherries.  We collected several handfuls of them, my son biting into them, making faces, spitting them out, then biting them again, while I filled my shirt pockets.  We also caught crayfish.  We threw rocks from the tall stones into the water.  We found a stick that looked like a sword.  We saw a bear on the road.  Most importantly, when we returned home, we turned the sandcherries into a startlingly red syrup that went beautifully on icecream before bed and only slightly less beautifully on pancakes in the morning.

It is these kinds of memories that have made Manitoulin so important to me.  I feel it most strongly now, just after I have left it.

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the garden with my eldest son. We were staking tomatos mostly. I was holding the twine for him; he was cutting. I was tying up the tomatos; he was clipping random plants. I was weeding; he was adding specimens to the snail house that he has constructed out of an old planter.

As we were working, a neighbour of ours, who used to play the piano at the church where I attended as I child, and who taught music lessons to my wife for several years, wandered by on his way to the library. He stopped to talk, and I noticed that he was holding several critical commentaries on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is often issued separately from the text that it is supposed to preface, and which is one of the very few works of criticism that I can say I actually enjoyed reading. We talked very briefly about the commentaries, most of which he disparaged, and about Milton’s poem itself, which he praised very highly.

When he had resumed his walk and I had resumed my gardening, I was left thinking about how strange a thing it was to find someone who was actually reading Paradise Lost, not to teach a class, not to complete an assignment, not to pass an exam, but just to read it. The same observation could be made of just about any canonical literary work more than a few decades old, of course. It would have been just as strange if my neighbour had been reading Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene or Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. What was disconcerting about this observation, however, was that it revealed how much I had myself begun to regard these texts as confined to the realm of the classroom. It was not only my cultural expectations that had been surprised by his reading practise but my personal expectations as well. I suddenly recalled how powerfully I had experienced Paradise Lost myself, and I was alarmed to see the extent to which I had allowed myself to confine it to an artificial role in an artificial curriculum. I had forgotten why I had read Paradise Lost in the first place, forgotten why I still believe that others should read it, but I have remembered now, so let the next few paragraphs stand as the beginning of a self-correction.

To read Paradise Lost is to experience words as force and as power. I am awed by its pompous, thunderous, resonant, grandiloquent voice with the same kind of awe that I have for Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Blake’s illustrated mythopoetic creations. It is not necessary to like these works only to experience them. They hold something audacious and fearful. They do not hesitate to speak on behalf of gods and devils, to claim the place of the prophet and the seer. They place themselves apart, in the space between heaven and hell, earth and sky, good and evil. They speak a language that others fear to speak, a language of angels and demons and spirits and heros and immortals.

To write and speak and create and compose like this is presumptive in the last degree. It is to assume the role that all creators secretly desire and yet fear to hold. It is to be as like to God as God will allow. It is to invite adulation and ridicule. It is to be called a prophet and a heretic. It is to be consigned to the space between spaces that is opened up by their creations, to inhabit this space that is nowhere, to be considered a little lower than angels and a little higher than fiends.

When I read Paradise Lost, whatever its literary successes and failures, it is because it allows me to stand in this place too, even if only for a moment. It is because it can make me recall this place, years later, in the heat of the sun, standing among the tomato stakes of my garden. It is because Milton’s garden of poetry and myth makes my own garden somehow wilder and stranger, somehow truer and richer. It makes this garden of mine, for an instant, strain beyond itself toward the space that separates it from the divine.