by Dennis Lee
and it is a rash passer who does not see himself on the go half out of his
mind with the need to fail and be hurt,
for these were brave men and subtle women, spritely lovers
who could not love themselves and it is
hard that we have only
one life for mostly we cannot command the courage outright to exist
and the months slip by and still we have not started,
and every year attaches itself behind and we have more to drag.
Faced with the onus of living our civilisation, here, in this time,
do we also single out leaders because they will
dishonour us, because they will diminish us?
And they act our hearts’ desire for always they are
bulldozed by yankees, menaced by slant-eyed gooks and happily there is
no hope that we might come to our own
and live, with our claimed selves, at home in the difficult world.
8
I come to the square each time there is nothing and once, made calm again
by the spare vertical glory of right proportions,
watching the wind cut loose as it riffled the clouds on the skyline, framing
the towers at noon,
catching the newsboys’ raucous cry of race in the streets and the war and
Confederation going,
smelling the air, the interminable stink of production and transport and
caught once more in the square’s great hush with the shoppers, hippies,
brokers, children, old men dozing alone by the pool and waiting,
feeling the pulse in the bodies jostling past me driving to climax and
dollars and blood,
making my cry here quick and obscure among many in transit — not as a
lyric self in a skin but divided, spinning off many selves to attend each
lethal yen as it passed me — thinking of
death in the city, of others’ and also my own and of many born afterwards,
I saw that we are to live in the calamitous division of the world
with singleness of eye and there is
nothing I would not give to be made whole.
Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau
you came this way and made poems out of your body,
out of the palpable void that opened
between the bones of your spine — if you weren’t just
making it up, you thought,
and humbled yourself again.
But your friends could only see that you were a genius,
and humiliated by their nonchalance as they strolled through space, as if
they belonged, as if their tickets had been accepted,
you turned back and fingered the precious emptiness, feeling inside you
the small incessant gush of the cardiac lesion.
And often you left the room when the party was
reaching its climax, and you had been foremost in repartee, Garneau
and fell crouching upstairs in a sweat by the bed, sick with repentance and
stammered out holy names,
destroyed by what was quick and sexual in Montreal.
But you lasted ten years more, in a suave vertigo
assaying the void with your nerve-ends, watching your
friendships go numb, your poems, nursing
the adorable death of the Son in your own imperious cells, a man made
empty for love of God, straining to be only
an upright will in the desert, until at last the world’s hypnotic
glitter was made single in the grace of renunciation.
But the kids, and the calm, and the endless parade of lethal desirable things
divide us as they pass by with clowns, the tawdry
yammering goes on inside and it yanks us here and every
whichway, we are on all fronts and forming
new precious attachments and
often they stun us till what is authentic is obliterated and heeding it or
even locating it becomes one more hangup, all that great
longing keeps banging back against the miscellaneous clobber of day to day.
And by these distractions we are saved, for there is a barren route that the
blood knows,
and the obscure inklings of the implacable imagination declare it,
lonely among bedclothes before the light on Tuesdays;
and though I will not speak of where I have not been it is
the graveyard of many for want of the lore of emptiness,
which once was a sane thing, but now of those who begin
their lonely inward procession I
do not know a chastened handful who survive.
Catatonic exemplar,
cardiac, scrupulous, hagridden — you, Hector,
our one patrician maker, mangled spirit,
you went all out for fame and when you knew you would not survive in the
world you turned to sainthood,
and you beat down the thought for the pride and retreated to
Sainte-Catherine, you watched your blood lap wide on the lake at sunset,
thinking of John of the Cross, patron of void, thinking of Jesus,
and you watched the ferns come shouldering up through your body, the
brutal ferns in spring, it was all
detachment you hoped, it was
exquisite penetration, it was
fear of life, the mark of Canada.
And now across
two decades and two nations de Saint-Denys-Garneau, my blessed stricken
original, still haunted by the
space between your ribs, maker and friend and comfortless, my
lone heroic starter, out of my own wrong start I
keep my distance and praise.
The crowds gust through the square, the crowds and the refuse.
The luminous towers preside.
Of high detachment there are many counterfeits;
the world is itself, though sundry.
And I will not enter void till I come to myself
nor silence the world till I learn its lovely syllables,
the brimful square and the dusk and the war and the crowds in motion at
evening, waiting to be construed
for they are fragile, and the tongue must be sure.
9
Here, as I sit and watch, the rusty leaves hang taut with departure.
The last few tourists pose by the Moore and snap their proof that they
were also alive.
And what if there is no regenerative absence?
What if the void that compels us is only
a mood gone absolute?
We would have to live in the world.
What if the dreary high-rise is nothing but
banks of dreary high-rise, it does not
release the spirit by fraying its attachment,
for the excellent reason that there is no place else to go?
We would have to live in it, making our lives on earth.
Or else a man might go on day by day
in love with emptiness, dismayed each time he meets
good friends, fine buildings and grass in the acres of concrete, feeling the
city’s erotic tug begin once more, perpetually
splayed alive by the play of his bungled desires,
though some do not salute the death of the body
before they have tested its life, but crippled they summon together
the fury from within, they tilt at
empire, empire, lethal adversary;
but I am one who came to
idolatry, as in a season of God,
taking my right to be from nothingness.
Across the square the crisp leaves blow in gusts, tracing
the wind’s indignant lift in corners,
filling the empty pool.
People plod past through the raw air, lost in the
ir overcoats.
I hunch down close to my chest and eat smoke.
But when the void became void I did
let go, though derelict for months
and I was easy, no longer held by its negative presence
as I was earlier disabused of many things in the world
including Canada, and came to know I still had access to them,
and I promised to honour each one of my country’s failures of nerve and its
sellouts.
To rail and flail at a dying civilisation,
to rage in imperial space, condemning
soviet bombers, american bombers — to go on saying
no to history is good.
And yet a man does well to leave that game behind, and go and find
some saner version of integrity,
although he will not reach it where he longs to, in the
vacant spaces of his mind — they are so
occupied. Better however to try.
But we are not allowed to enter God’s heaven, where it is all a
drowsy beatitude, nor is God, the realm above our heads but
must grow up on earth.
Nor do we have recourse to void.
For void is not a place, nor
negation of a place.
Void is not the high cessation of the lone self’s burden,
crowned with the early nostalgias;
nor is it rampant around the corner, endlessly possible.
We enter void when void no longer exists.
And best of all is finding a place to be
in the early years of a better civilisation.
For we are a conquered nation: sea to sea we bartered
everything that counts, till we have
nothing to lose but our forebears’ will to lose.
Beautiful riddance!
And some will make their choice and eat imperial meat.
But many will come to themselves, for there is
no third way at last and these will
spend their lives at war, though not with
guns, not yet — with motherwit and guts, sustained
by bloody-minded reverence among the things which are,
and the long will to be in Canada.
The leaves, although they cling against the
wind do not resist their time of dying.
And I must learn to live it all again, depart again —
the storm-wracked crossing, the nervous descent, the barren wintry land,
and clearing a life in the place where I belong, re-entry
to bare familiar streets, first sight of coffee mugs,
reconnaissance of trees, of jobs done well or badly,
flashes of workday people abusing their power,
abusing their lives, hung up, sold out and
feeling their lives wrenched out of whack
by the steady brunt of the continental breakdown;
finding a place among the ones who live
on earth somehow, sustained in fits and starts
by the deep ache and presence and sometimes the joy of what is.
Freely out of its dignity the void must
supplant itself. Like God like the soul it must
surrender its ownness, like eternity it must
re-instil itself in the texture of our being here.
And though we have seen our most precious words
Withdraw, like smudges of wind from a widening water-calm,
though they will not be charged with presence again in our lifetime that is
well, for now we have access to new nouns —
as water, copout, tower, body, land.
Earth, you nearest, allow me.
Green of the earth and civil grey:
within me, without me and moment by
moment allow me for to
be here is enough and earth you
stranges, you nearest, be home.
Notes
Some of the references in Civil Elegies are highly local. The following notes should clarify them.
1. — The Square: Nathan Phillips Square, a large plaza in front of Toronto’s New City Hall, at the junction of Queen and Bay Streets.
— The Moore, the Archer: the abstract sculpture which Henry Moore created for the Square.
— Revell: the Finnish architect who designed the New City Hall.
— Chartier: in 1966 Paul Chartier tried to blow up the House of Commons in Ottawa.
4. — Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau (1912-1943): Quebec’s first modernist poet. There are phrases from his Journal in the fourth and eighth elegies.
5. — The Golden Horseshoe: a name given to the megalopolis at the western end of Lake Ontario.
— Paul Martin: the Secretary of External Affairs under Lester Pearson.
