Season of Mourning

Niccolò dell'Abbate 16th Century, Louvre

 

It is an unspoken covenant between
grandmother and granddaughter, the
daily after-school call, born no doubt of
their intimate history when in the first
decade of her young life it was grandma's
arms that enveloped her after school.
Distance has made the invisible silken
strand of connection -- tender yet strong
as a spider's skein -- no less compelling.

Watcha doing? elicits the identical
quotidian refrain: not much. But it is
intensely cold, windy, damp and so did
you wear your winter boots and jacket?
represents another facet of the formula
of this relationship. Nope, the laconic,
expected response. And the vital news of
the post-school snack emerges: a pomegranate.

That mysterious Eastern fruit, its amazing
structured, celled interior surfeit with
faceted ruby jewels like those in a treasure
chest discovered in the fabled caves of
Ali Baba. These glistening sweet jewels to
be consumed, not worn in brilliant splendour,
arrayed upon the white, swan-like necks of
beautiful Harem girls. Careful you don't
squirt your eye, grandmother urges.

Damn! granddaughter informs, just squirted
my eye. Language, chides grandmother.
Then in the silence asks do you know the
Greek legend of the pomegranate? Have you
met Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and
her daughter Persephone? Do you know where
the seasons come from? Have you studied
Greek mythology in your school curricula?

To the last query: yes, some, in drama class.
To the previous: no clue, as they claim in
teen vernacular. But you can ask about
vampires, we know about them, grandma.

Grandma sets about enlightening her child
in the delights of tragedy and mystery, grandeur
and petulance, power, esteem and comedy, all
residing in the arcane minutiae of a folk
panoply of gods, their overweening pride,
bumptiously covert antics, vain jealousies and
curiously oppressive sexual adventures.

How an abduction of a beloved daughter
led to a grieving mother and a deadly chilled
season of mourning, when no flowers bloomed,
no crops grew, dark wailing veils hung from
trees and the brows of mothers alike, and all
life was suspended in unappeasable grief. The
redemption of compassion that would bring
spring back to the world, and the single seed
of a pomegranate that consigned a daughter to
dark Hades and a coldly possessive yet loved
husband to satisfy both life and death.

 

 

Illusions, Delusions, Allusions

He had a habit of never wanting to pay the full freight for his reading material. So his large and growing library of books are mostly of second-hand vintage. Not that he isn't particular about the shape they're in. He will buy second-hand books only if they're in fairly pristine shape. He does have his standards. He has been known to relent, however, if he comes across a publication he recognizes as hard to come by, one that has been well leafed, but that he decides he must have.

The copy of Inshallah, the novel by Oriana Fallaci, was in prime shape. Clearly, whoever originally owned it took good care of it. That is a presumption that might of course not be the case. It might have been bought with the thoughtful intention of reading it, but placed on a shelf somewhere and forgotten, until someone got tired of looking at it, dusting it, and gave it up to a second-hand book shop. It might have represented a gift that was unappreciated; the giftee having no intention of reading it, and that might have preserved its appearance.

Whatever the case he was intrigued by the very concept of Oriana Fallaci having written novels. He 'knew' her only by reputation, as a bold, enterprisingly fearless news interviewer. She would undertake to strive for interviews with dictators, tyrants, champions of justice, prisoners, activists, royalty, to question them audaciously and report in her own inimitable way on the results of those interviews. Her formidable reputation for honesty and clarity won her a large following.

She was granted interviews with reclusive personalities not given to permitting themselves to be interrogated and reported upon by others of her profession. Iran's revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini, for example. She was given exclusive rights to publishing details that were withheld from others. She had always captured his imagination, a woman in her prime and beyond, once beautiful, obviously aware of her beauty and its effect on people, but utterly devoted to her craft of revealing the truth to her readers.

He thought he knew as much as there was to know about Lebanon, that once-proud country with its fabulous landscape and multifarious populations. As much as anyone living in the West might, acquainted through the electronic media with expatriate Lebanese whose unquestioned mastery of comedy or drama or literature gave them a wide audience. Of whom his parents were so proud.

And the sinister, dark side of the country with warring sectarian violence and brutal abductions and assassinations. Reading Fallaci's novel, was a revelation, an introduction to Gehenna-on-Earth. Little wonder, he thought, his parents refused to discuss the country. He was not more than one-quarter of the way through the novel, yet. Its bleak, dark message of failed humanity should not have bothered him as much as it did, but it did.

And odd thing to happen, he couldn't understand why, when he'd originally leafed through the book carefully before committing to its purchase and he hadn't come across what had been inserted in it, until the packet fell out, last night. A kind of booklet, (Pictures to-day ... treasures to-morrow - Available at all Tamblyn Drug Stores: Tel-Vision Prints) as it were, with photographs fastened within it.

The pictures were old. He could see that immediately; black-and-white; hairstyles and clothing divulging their agedness. Reminding him of the old photographs in the family albums his parents had collected of people he had never met and never wanted to meet, but meaning something to his parents, obviously.

When he turned them over, the dates were there, place-names and peoples' names. Taken in 1952, at an RCAF base in Chatham, New Brunswick. And among the names of people, there, incredibly, was his own name, scrawled alongside the others. He quickly turned the photo over to more closely scrutinize the faces of three men standing, two women and two children in the foreground, kneeling.

He had no idea who they were, although there was a sense of familiarity, looking at them which he ascribed entirely to similar photos he'd seen in his parents' albums with war-time base housing in the background, and civilian personnel in the foreground. And there, labelling one of the middle-aged men, was his name.

Who were the photos representative of? How peculiar that an uncommon name like his was present in such an unlikely place. Related, he wondered...? Not likely, none of his people had ever been there to his knowledge, nor with the RCAF. He turned to the novel flyleaf, but the presumed name of the original owner had been too carefully blacked out.

The Known World

 

How can it be plausible that people
can discover functional merit and purpose
in preying upon others in the curse of humanity's
propensity to the practise of slavery? That African
tribal chiefs sought profit by selling their rival
clans -- men, women and children as livestock
to be herded into caravans by Arab traders or
to European slavers to die agonizing disease-
afflicted deaths, their frail black lifeless bodies
strewn upon the deep seas as fish fodder.

An ancient, hateful tradition predating
written memory, where the victors triumphed
with the processions of shackled, miserable
vanquished, the conquest of humanity, the dire
misery of hopeless enslavement, the generations
born into inhuman bondage, their lives borne out
in witness to the celebration of the free, the
mourning of those imprisoned in serfdom, no
purpose but to serve a remorseless master.

A man whose daunting philosophical genius
awed with the elegance of his intellect, but was yet
a slave, subject to the imperious whims and commands
of his moral, creative, cerebral inferiors themselves
impervious to the degradation and misery they
sustained. The harvest of human bodies for
righteous duty to those who presumed it right and
proper to prosper from their purposeful enslavement
has stained humanity throughout the shameful ages.

As it does to the present, where the indigent
and the vulnerable, the young, the fragile and the
unprotected are abducted and violated. there is no
universal conscience, no inborn genetic code to
instinctively cause aversion, no god of divinely
merciful dimensions to demand the cessation and the
release of the indentured denied their equal portion of
humanity's dignity, purpose and freedoms.

All is chance, geography, fortune, good or ill. And it
is a decidedly ill wind that lights the embers of human
avarice, ambition and pitiless aspiration to assemble the
users, abusers and the soul plunderers toward the purpose
of hegemonic upheavals, the spoliation of children,
the harsh domination of the defenceless. 

 

Doppelganger

He always notices what I wear, most of the time, anyway. I am well aware there are certain outfits he prefers over others. It's the way he looked at me. Although occasionally he emphasizes his disapproval by suggesting I might have succumbed to dressing ‘like an old woman’. When that happens I rid herself of the offending garments, but it happens rarely. When I dressed this morning I thought the combination of the Harris tweed flounced wool skirt paired with the hooded bomber-style jacket might not be too appropriate for a woman of advanced years. Then I shrugged off the doubt, it was my style, and that was that. And he liked it, that too was important.

We both think of ourselves as young, why should we not? We’re in good health, despite a few setbacks. And we’ve always been active in the physical sense of using our bodies sensibly, not gradually succumbing to the sense that they will become larger, slacker, less responsive and therefore unreliable so why push them beyond their obvious lack of durability and endurance?

In particular I always thought of us as being fairly indestructible. Oh, I know, that’s the province of the young, the arrogant and the self-involved. There’s that about us, too, of course. We’ve always taken pride in our physical fitness, our enquiring minds. I’ve always looked younger than my age. Our daughter has inherited that. But not our granddaughter; at 14 she could easily pass for 18. It’s both negative and positive; more on the negative side of the equation, I feel.

Up until a year ago I felt invincible. Took pride that neither he nor I had any chronic conditions, took medications of any kind to control the imposition of a health condition, some kind of dreary disease. And then, everything seemed to change, and at such an astounding rate it left me feeling inordinately vulnerable. My ego did a crash landing and I clung to my husband for assurances that I would still be kicking around for awhile.

We’ve got a little companion dog. She’s eighteen years old now, considerable for a little dog. A while ago we became aware her hearing was becoming impaired, and her sight as well. She became easily startled. She was diagnosed by her usual veterinarian with a slight heart murmur. He would keep an eye on it, and on her. Then she began behaving peculiarly; very standoffish. She began to refuse her meals and it was difficult to tempt her with treats, she would disdain them, too. She began this odd pacing routine, looking out into space, sleeping poorly. We became alarmed. Until the vet diagnosed her with a mouth infection. Since she was a puppy my husband had taken care to brush her teeth on a regular basis. For all of that, her teeth began to decay, her incisors to loosen and eventually fall out. Not to worry, we were informed, it was normal for her breed and domesticated dogs had no real need for these teeth, given their domesticated diets. A course of antibiotics cleared up the problem and her normal behaviour was re-established.

I began to realize that she and I were alike; both getting older and suffering from the normal breakdown of our organ and body function and cognitive abilities. My hearing too has suffered the last few years. It’s beyond irritating to have my daughter, who speaks far too quietly on the telephone, suggest I could make good use of a hearing assistive device.

I’ve been scheduled for eye surgery after having been informed that a hole has developed within my retina as a result of deteriorating vitreous causing a tear. And just recently I was discharged from hospital after an emergency admission caused by low haemoglobin levels occasioned by a bleeding ulcer caused by the activity of H. Pylori. It was there that the attending internist and cardiologists discovered my high cholesterol levels and alarmingly high (their words) blood pressure.

But I still look far younger than my age.

And there was this man, confronting me at the supermarket. Odd how often that happened, elderly gentlemen doing their shopping, and no female companion in sight, stopping to pass a few light-hearted remarks with me. I was receptive, had never shied from conversations in a socially polite, public way. I like brief, friendly conversations, in fact. But also I like to control them.

He was not all that much taller than me, rotund which I am not, grey-haired and voluble. The words fairly tumbling out of his mouth. How, when he’d first raised his eyes around the meat counter and seen me standing there, the first thought that popped into his head was “what’s she doing here?”. The “she”, in this case, as he explained, being his cousin. Who lives in Toronto. Who, to his knowledge doesn’t come to Ottawa very often. But there she was, at the local supermarket he frequented. Only it wasn’t her, after all, but me.

I smiled. Indulgently, I thought, because he seemed so sweetly enthusiastic, earnestly trying to convey to me how incredible this was, how wonderfully peculiar he thought it to be, to discover, presumably close to where he lives, someone who looks exactly like one of the members of his family. I could not find it in me to match his enthusiasm, nor to even come close to it. I did manage to say, however, how odd that was. But, on the other hand, I added, looking directly into his watery-blue eyes, one often hears about the stranger-look-alike phenomenon.

“Exactly!” he enthused, obviously delighted to have discovered in me a sympathetic ear. And then he went on to describe to me in hurried sentences that seemed to run together in a flurry of disorganized thoughts how once, in Toronto at Bloor and an intersection where he had arranged to meet a friend for lunch, he saw that friend, approached him to draw him into their planned enterprise, only to discover it was not his friend at all, but an amazing look-alike. He had prevailed upon the look-alike to wait with him for a few minutes. That was long ago, he said, wrapping up his tale, and his friend and his friend’s look-alike have been friends, ever since.

Would I want to befriend, or even see or meet someone who looks exactly like me? I mused briefly to myself. Myself responded as I thought it would -- resoundingly indifferent. If someone existed in a city where I too once lived, who looked exactly like me, might it not be equally possible that through some telepathic phenomenon we could commune? I slapped that sarcasm down; doesn't do to become too cynical now, does it?

It felt to me as though, standing beside this man -- listening to his glad tidings of extraordinary happenings in the world of serendipity, nodding my head, smiling in response to his avalanche of pleased reminiscences -- as though I was in fact indulging a child. It occurred to me then that while I had a shopping cart brimming with colourful fresh fruits and vegetables along with other foods with which to stock my pantry, there was no sign of his own shopping cart. I was in the supermarket to do my weekly shopping. What was his purpose?

To confront women with improbably intriguing little fantasies? Eliciting their interest through a remote kind of flattery? Could he not see from the quantity of the groceries squatting in my shopping cart that I was indeed shopping for more than one person?

He was fairly hopping with the excitement of his revelations. And I thought to myself, if his cousin looks anything like him, how could she possibly have any resemblance to me? My ethnic origin is evident in my looks, and this man is quintessentially Canadian in appearance. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he was anxious to hear me ask his cousin’s name? Give him some indication that I cared, was interested to know more about her, to meet her? To discover what kind of personality she had?

I did, finally, ask how old she was. He gawked at me, after receiving the question. “Why - uh - she must be about - let’s see here, now - 59 or thereabouts?" Looking at me as though for approval in his guestimate. “Oh, I said”, hearing an aloof tone creep into my voice; kind of superior sounding, I thought, “I am 74 years old.” It’s true, I turned 74 a week ago.

My hair is not grey, nor is it white, it is a glittering silver. My face is not very wrinkled, and in fact I’ve red cheeks, burned by the icy winter wind slapping them earlier in the day when we’d gone for our usual ravine walk before embarking on our supermarket shopping event.

He stepped back, a confused look overtaking his previous look of childish excitement at discovering this sudden link revealing itself in the pedestrian aisles of his (I assumed) local supermarket. “You…you’re very well pres…you look really good for 74”, he finished awkwardly. I smiled. Chirped “bye now”, and he repeated it, vanishing around the corner of the aisle we’d been standing at.

I wondered where my husband was. Likely, I thought, lingering longingly around the processed meat products he knows I will only occasionally relent and agree to placing in our refrigerator, for his guilty delectation.

Or, possibly, chatting up some woman shopper as he often likes to do. He’s also the kind of person who enjoys casual conversation with other people. Just like me. 

 

Quadrupedal Dependents

 

They anticipate us. Observe our body
language, keenly listen to the words we
articulate, recall their meaning, assess the
dimensions lying in the clues of our expression
and infer aptly what we have not yet deliberately
undertaken to convey. We speak separate
languages and consider ourselves immeasurably
more intelligent, for what have they created
other than a place for themselves, entirely
subservient to their masters, who have, in
their genius, created hugely in manipulating
the bountiful opportunities nature has
permitted us, her designer organisms, to
recklessly experiment to her detriment.

They, on the other hand, did after all, migrate
adventurously across the primeval Bering Strait
when such grand excursions were still possible.
They adapted, and altered into sub-species
becoming what we would much later find them
to be, malleable companions for the hunt, and
to offer forewarnings of dangerous intrusion. To
aid us in the business of acquisition, in
defence, offence - and ultimately - survival.

We retain their faithfully reliable presence,
a vestigial version of the utilitarian function
they once served. Their careful eyes regard us,
ears cocked to our command, prepared to act
and to react; eager to demonstrate a proficiency
no longer prized. They cleave to us, quadrupedal
dependents, their feral capacity deferring to
our service. Become our leisure and social
companions, the relationship suffused with an
emotion transcending interspecies
collaboration, trust and loyalty.

 

Beastly Afrika

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She had struggled to fall asleep. Thought she was ready to when she turned out the light, noting how late it was. She’d determined she would finish reading that book, and she did. Both sorry and glad that it was done with. But was it done with? Skillfully written, evocative of a past she hardly knew existed, gripping in its tale of human fallibility, it lingered with her. How could they? Enslave human beings, consider them to be sub-human because of their skin colour. Race, a different race. Ignorant beyond belief, there is one human race, regardless of the colour of some of the branches of that one race.

Everyone knows about racial discrimination, sure, and everyone is aware -- she always mused, dimly or deeply, depending on which side of the divide you’re on -- about the scourge of slavery capturing peoples’ lives in misery. But free blacks living in the State of Virginia after the turn of the 18th Century being slave owners themselves? That was a bitter truth she did not want to swallow, despite the authority of the book. That’s what had kept her from falling asleep. Until, exhausted with exploring the bitterness of acceptance, she finally did.

She had been curled up on her side, hard against Calvin, who, when she awoke, was snoring. Nothing could shake his undeniable skill in relaxing, to fall into deep, restorative sleep. Something had awakened her, and she turned over on her back, then winced as she felt sharp, thorn-like prickling in her left buttock. Realizing what it was, she crept her arm down, shifted slightly and gently pushed the little dog’s paw free of her. In a generous display of appreciation, Afrika snarled at her. He never took kindly to having his own deep sleep punctured, nor ‘his’ space interfered with.

And that set Silk off, it always did, as she reacted also to being disturbed. She leaped off the bed, and Aline was not sorry to see her go. Silk had a stupendously irritating habit as dawn sent its pale fingers to part the dark cloak of night, of stealthily sneaking toward the head of the bed and settling herself down near Aline’s head. If Aline did not wake when Silk felt it was the right and proper time for her to be let out for the day, she would slide her sinuous body gradually over Aline’s shoulders toward her head, suffocating her, waking her as from a nightmare.

Silk never did that to Calvin, and she could never figure out why. Calvin provocatively suggested it was because Silk instinctively sought out the subservient figure, not the superior one with authority, earning himself a well-deserved cuff at the head. Leading him to reminisce about his childhood, and his mother Clara’s propensity to cuff her wayward boys.

Neither Clara nor Calvin shared her pessimism about the world and the unwillingness of human beings to see one another as equals. Clara kept going on at her about her ‘grandkids’, and she responded by repeating her rote response to her mother-in-law not to hold out any hopes of grandchildren from her. At first Clara used to roll her expressive eyes to heaven as though beseeching God to put some common sense into this woman her feckless son had chosen from among all the other nubile and fecund women in the world. Now, Clara just assumed a pained look, and her head was downcast - not up to heaven - as though communing sternly with the Devil who had placed such errant negativity into her daughter-in-law’s stubborn head.

She heard Silk on her downward leap, because of the tiny clangor of the bell she had purposefully placed around the cat's pedigreed neck. Not that it did any good. Either Silk exemplified the feline species’ ultimate propensity for morbid carnage, or the local birds were deaf, the chipmunks too slow, the rabbits petrified to death by the violently-assured threat she represented.

She had vowed, when Calvin brought Silk home as an adorable button of a kitten that this would be a strictly-indoors cat. She would not, through her stewardship of this cat, be responsible for adding to the mass murder of songbirds. She sighed, thinking of her naivety and the indomitable determination of cats to elude, evade and ultimately escape limits humans attempted to place on their quotidian nomadic forays into the fearsome jungle of the night.

Before they had even become serious about one another -- and that, admittedly, was not all that long after they had met -- she had cautioned Calvin that she had no intention of adding to the world’s population of black kids in a world that hadn’t changed all that much in its fixation on the colour black as being inferior to white. That had stopped him in his tracks. For about sixty seconds.

He had grinned, and said their relationship was young, and he was flexible and she was a rational human being and things changed. Well, in the last decade not all that much had changed in the world, other than that they had by then been married for nine years, and Calvin now had a firm understanding of how serious she had been.

And he accepted that. For he did love her, just as she did him. Just as they would passionately and protectively love the children that would come of their union, if they - - she, relented. But she had not and would not. For, loving those children would present to her the excruciating pain of witnessing them growing into a world that was so socially imperfect every time she thought of it, she felt like retching.

She hardly knew why she read books like that. Always had. They fed her anger. But they also informed her, and she wanted to remain informed. She sometimes mused about how wonderful it must be to be able to immerse oneself as a creative writer into the history of one’s background, to amass the information required to expound without bias, and to present to the world a piece of creative literature that spoke for itself about the injustices that have changed only by degree.

She could hardly herself credit what history revealed and the present date consolidated. That Arab and European slave traders did not by themselves haunt Africa to assemble the richness of blacks that they could include in caravans and the bleak, dark, dank holds of ships on their ocean-crossing voyages of death and disease. They had the eager assistance of tribal chiefs who traditionally warred on their neighbours, shackled them and placed them in guarded compounds and then led them in sick and straggling processions through their native jungles to where the slavers assembled, paid for and took possession of men, women and children.

What was worse, that this did not just reflect a distant past, but continued to this day. The monsters of black Africa re-invented themselves as tyrannical rulers, brutal dictators, tin-pot princes of their realms whose people were treated no better than slaves, and many of them were slaves, indentured, owned by a heartless ‘elite’. Children abducted and taken into slavery, or used as underage and vicious members of militias, forced to perpetrate upon their own villagers acts of despicable human cruelty to harden them. Girls and women repeatedly raped and tortured. Even in what passed for tribal ‘civil’ society, cultural and traditional and very much accepted rituals that mutilated women and eventually caused their deaths. Rape of innocent girls by men in societies that believed sex with young virgins would render them immune against HIV/AIDS.

When she got into one of her miserable moods of utter hopelessness, Calvin would sit there patiently, calmly, and hear her out. As she repeated ad infinitum rages detailing atrocities he had heard before. He would smile softly, reach out his hand to cup her chin, and remind her that people of good will were busy changing all of that. That the world was steadily becoming a better place. Proof? Lately, he would hold aloft the ultimate triumph: the election in America of a black president.

He still did that, even though she kept responding with her own assessment of that little miracle; that White Supremacists in that very same country would work toward their goal of amending that little aberration and before long they would hear the news that America’s black president had been assassinated.

All these thoughts and more fleeting through her head. As she wondered if Silk could wait until she felt ready to get up. Wondered whether Silk was going to leave her an unwelcome gift to clean up. Throwing up part of a tiny animal or bird she had ingested. She’d have to call Calvin to get up and clean up the mess. She just couldn’t stomach it. She would, if Calvin weren’t around, but it was the week-end, and they were both home.

Afrika was still fast asleep under the duvet. Sensible little animal. He was a perfect specimen, a coal-black, curly-haired toy poodle. True, he had a nasty temper when he was annoyed, but he was also emotionally attached to her, anxious to have her pick him up, baby him, speak to him, snuggle with him. And the fact was, she loved Afrika, that little beast. 

 

 

Speak!

 

NGC 4755: A Jewel Box of Stars
Credit & Copyright: Dieter Willasch (Astro-Cabinet)
If we were not here to make note of the
passage of time would the concept of time
exist? It is a question very much like that
of a tree falling in the forest with no witness,
a blazing star shooting through the galaxy,
a monumental volcanic eruption. If time and
matter are fundamentally actions and reactions
existing in response to nature's primal awakening
and exquisite design who would know, note or care
as the nuclei of atoms swirl endlessly, form,
disintegrate and reformulate to nature's formula?

In the vast infinity of creation the elements
have allowed themselves free reign and uncommitted
time has assisted their development and their
entropic dispersal, their ferocity of determination
and surrender to decline. We know of a certainty
that we are here, inhabiting the immensity of
creation, our scale infinitesimally minuscule. Our
thoughts proof of our being, our vision clarifying
all that surrounds us. But what if there is fault
in the acuity of that vision, in our mind's perception?

Have we imagined the Universe, our fragile
existence, the endless, remorseless passage of time
slowly obliterating the familiar, recasting gaseous
vapours, degradation of matter, the fatigue of
material degeneration, circulating ice crystals
in atmospheric alliterations, the symbiotic affect
of organic matter, the exchange of the inorganic,
the powerful energy of sun-stars, the magnetism
that holds us in thrall to place, the anchorage of the
inorganic, the scaffolding of the stratosphere?