Then we guide our minds—the docent, her supervisor, my friend and I—to another time without concrete. Her colleague tells us what he sees: wetlands, tule, creeks completely full with dappled salmon, people.
A path has no beginning or end but in the direction you take it. You don’t have to follow an animal if you know where it is going, her colleague says. Only wait in the right place for it to arrive.
One August when I was nine years old, crossing from Experiment Bight to Nels Bight on the northern-most coast of Vancouver Island, our man from Burwash Landing spotted wolf tracks in the sand. He guided us, crouched and then on our bellies, to the lip of the dune from where we could see a she-wolf leading three pups at a trot down the beach.
—a community theatre called / The Community Theatre, a blackbox // theatre called / The Blackbox, Provincial law / courts, the city art gallery, // the city museum, a military / museum, an old indoor / hockey rink called Memorial / Arena, the main rcmp // detachment and city jail, / the downtown branch of / the Regional Library, the city / Mental Health and Substance Use // Clinic, The Wine and Fruit / Museum and The Rotary Centre / for the Arts which includes // an artist run / gallery, a theatre, dance / studios, arts admin offices, / a handful of artist / studios and a coffee // shop—
I’ve thought of those wolves so often I’ve not been able to write them down.
Until now.
“A story is a simple thing,” my friend Moshe once told me. “Just tell it.”
Tule. Dappled salmon. Merlin. Can you see them? In this phase, they are hidden like the new moon. Like a thimblerig. A card trick. The ćĺaĺqʷḿ sticks behind the back. Which hand?13
“Increasingly,” writes Karen Barad, “I find myself drawn to poetics as a mode of expression.” 14
—a youth theatre / space in one alley, a couple // of private galleries, a shuttered night- /club, and a mid-sized // hockey arena named after / a credit // union with a restaurant / called after // a borough of New York City / and a vip lounge // sponsored by a Canada- /wide realty company—15
Traffic exists. Slow traffic. Slowness exists; and sidewalks, bikes exist, bikes and traffic; pedestrians, sidewalks, shopping bags exist; slowness, sidewalks, traffic—
I’ve never heard a resident of this city use the term “cultural district” without sarcasm.
Mostly, we don’t use the term at all.16
In the summer, the city wheels out a few upright pianos for people to plunk out wobbly melodies. Someone is playing “Karma Police” as we depart.
Several large concrete representations of fruit line the pedestrian alley between the Rotary Centre and the Blackbox.
On the nearby hills, the semi-arid shrub-steppe carries on its gathering of sagebrush and grasses.17
[break]
When I close my eyes in the courtyard between the Rotary Centre and the city art gallery, the sky is a dull solution of silver bromide. As I walk with my eyes closed, the day appears to brighten and brighten through my eyelids.
What we see as light and colour is the expression of several relationships: photons from the sun with the reflective surfaces of our environments, with the rods and cones of our eyes, with the neuropathways in our brain.
I read about these relationships in a book on the discoveries of cognitive science and their implications for philosophical traditions.
The book was written by a famous cognitive scientist from the United States and a philosopher with whom I once spoke when I was in graduate school ten years earlier. We were standing before our respective urinals, legs braced in that way that betrays a particular concentration. I mentioned John Dewey’s aesthetic theory. He nodded.
Another word for this kind of phenomenon is coincidence. From coincidence might come something new: colour for example, or this anecdote. Brought together, the elements do what? Collaborate?
At first my hand is on the shoulder of a young Iranian-Canadian sculptor with a rare blood disorder. He’s several inches taller than me, 6′2″ maybe, thin but broad shouldered.
Recently, he’d installed a series of geometric shapes on my living room wall. The shapes are made of translucent, pastel-coloured bendy straws and translucent scotch tape. Affixed with Velcro, the straws appear to be growing like crystals from the white paint and drywall.
While he mounted the sculpture, we talked about the maintenance of his blood and the limitations it put on travel, how his blood is always a factor.
As we walk he drinks coffee with one hand, eyes closed, his other hand on my shoulder.18
By 1654, John Milton was completely blind. He titled his most famous poem of that period, “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”—a delightfully multivalent phrase that turns on both the light that vision afforded him and its diminishment, as well as the metaphor of his life and life’s work being kinds of light.
A later editor retitled the sonnet, “On His Blindness.”
By 1977, Ronald Johnson had completed a deep erasure of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost, which he published as Radi os.
The term “radio” comes from the combining form of the Latin noun “radius,” meaning ray or beam. Such as a ray of light. A sunbeam.
There’s this thing I like to do. Just to get a sense of who is here. We close our eyes and then we say our names. I say my name and then you each say your name. If you think you’re the last person you’re probably not. We’ll get through this quickly.
I’m closing my eyes, I promise.
My eyes are closed.
Ronald Johnson’s book of erasure poetry—in which new poems are discovered19 in existing texts by cutting away most of the original text—has four customer reviews on Amazon and a 100 percent, five-star rating.
A cookbook, The American Table, also attributed to Ronald Johnson, is a collaboration with illustrator James McGarrell; it has ten customer reviews and an identical 100 percent, five-star rating.20
As if in anticipation of this confluence of poetry and meals, the final line of “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” reads, “they also serve who only stand and wait.”
[break]
Some people like to be read to and other people do not.
Until the age of six my eldest daughter enjoyed hearing novels read aloud. Then she didn’t like novels at all. Then, at the age of ten, she started reading them to herself, silently, in her head.
I heard somewhere that Jorge Luis Borges, whose progressive blindness reached maturation at age fifty-five, thirty years before his death, had a rotating crew of young people who read to him at the library in his mother’s home in Buenos Aires.
Some critics feel that Borges’s blindness prompted him to develop intricate, imaginative worlds.
Such is the double bind of the mythologized blind: unseeing and all-seeing at once.
If my daughter reads silently in her head, then where does Borges read in the voices of young readers?
In