Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty 

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The exam is at 8 AM and it’s now 2 AM. The fingers on my right hand are twitching just thinking about it. English 440: The Foundations of Western Literature. The full-year course was taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one.

The Foundations of Western Literature. It’s one of those topics that sounds specific at first, but gets wider and fuzzier the more you think about it. For instance, Old Rex started the course with Odysseus and The Bible, but during the first week I wondered about what came before: Gilgamesh the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rg Veda and Egyptian poems to the sun. Old Rex ended the course with The Wasteland and A Passage to India, but by that time I’d already started in on Midnight’s Children and Breaking Bad. By exam week I was like E.M. Forster, railing against “that demon of chronology.”

Forster urges us to see writers not as products of a particular period of history, but as artists

at work together in a circular room. I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words, because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the furniture of the method we are discarding.

Forster says, “we cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream of time.” But what if we look at the stream in its twisting and turning, in its merging and diverging, in its sources of rain and aquifer, and in its flow into lake and ocean? Doesn’t that make the same mockery of fiction by periods?

And what does Forster have against furniture? Is he talking about Danish tables or sedan chairs? Is he thinking about some painting he saw illustrating the life of Bahadur Shah II, and is he therefore imagining himself in one of these chairs, neatly stuffed inside while dark and muscled men lift him from the bazaar to the Maharaja’s private chamber?

But are sedan chairs really furniture? Or are they some form of transportation vehicle? And if they can be used by E.M. Forster in a visit to the private chambers of the Maharaja, and in an 18th century lady’s visit to a gentleman and his magpie, why can’t they be used in Old Rat’s marriage in Dong Ho?

The further back in time we go, and the further afield we roam, the more we might go further. Not to find something strange and alien, but to affirm Forster’s notion that writers transcend time and space. That they all write in the same room, rather than in a glass penthouse, a Renaissance attic, and a distant upstream of times past.

And yet Forster says that “Four thousand, fourteen thousand years, might give us pause, but four hundred years is nothing in the life of our race, and does not allow room for any measurable change.” Yet if we go back 4000 years to Mesopotamia — where we got numbers & letters, legal systems & organized warfare, religious systems & astronomy — we see how the deep past is part of present culture. It’s why I write this exam, right now.

Pen in hand, I imagine that somewhere in this gymnasium a scribe is getting out his moist clay tablet and making cuneiform strokes with his stylus. Grooves for the rivers of time.

Even when the past is in broken tablets and fragments of dinosaur bones, it’s all still an outcome of the same ancient DNA. It’s all around us, deep in our bones and up in the sky, with the birds who retain an even greater share of the ancient genetic codes of crocodile and dinosaur. How much more then do we share with the first great civilization of Sumer!

In Gilgamesh we see our own ideas about justice, civilization, love, jealousy, honour, war, rebellion, angst, and the afterlife. In Tyrannosaurus Rex, on the other hand, we see how transient a fellow life-form can be. Here one period of a million years ago, gone the next.

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. (A Passage to India, Ch. 12)

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The details of Western Literature are many, but the strategy I use to explain it is singular. By which I mean individual, personal. By which I mean I’m going to see the literary currents of the past in terms of the currents of our cultural history. By which I mean Balzac and Homer, Old Granny Perkins and Peking Man.

My strategy in writing about Western Literature is at once universal and singular. The past, which no one owns, makes us what we are. What we are makes us who we will be. It’s all a historical line, whether of intellectual argument or practical life. For each of us the argument is detailed and complex, yet for each of us it goes from alpha to omega, from the beginning to the end. From where we start to where we end — whether in folded diapers or paper folio. With the proviso that, of course, there is in fact no beginning and no end.

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I was born in the province of Alberta, that conservative, oil-rich province east of the Rocky Mountains. A northern Texas, but with ski resorts and tundra. I was brought up in Calgary, a mere stone age throw from the strange Hoodoo formations left by some alien tribe. Calgary and Drumheller were just recently built over the mass graveyards of the dinosaurs who remain out of time.

Both my parents were brought up on prairie farms. My father worked nights in an asylum to get his business and law degrees. He started out negotiating contracts for oil companies in Southern Alberta, so that they could drill beneath the ground, into what remains of the ancient seas and lakes where the deer and the dinosaurs roamed.

But oil is compressed under the ground all over the world, so it isn’t surprising that the farm boy eventually went to work for a French oil company. This allowed our family to live in Paris and Geneva for several years. We were like a family of Triceratops having lunch with the Jetsons.

At the tender age of fifteen I was set loose in the streets of Paris, where there was no enforced drinking age. In Calgary I had to find a cowboy or a rig-pig with a pick-up truck who was willing to bootleg. In Paris I could just walk into a corner store. I’d come out beaming with a six-pack of dusky Kronenbourg or golden Stella Artois.

In Paris I learned that throwing rocks at policeman was a viable form of political expression, and that it wasn’t necessary for me to act like an idiot in order to impress girls (although I still acted like an idiot).

Coming back to Calgary from Paris wasn’t easy. One week I was having desert with a Russian girl on the Champs-Elysées, and the next week I was at a keg party in the sticks acting like an idiot. Here’s the Russian girl outside my school in Paris, and here’s me tearing around the forests on my Suzuki 90 a year earlier. I’m still trying to reconcile these two images.

After Paris I didn’t care about motorcycles. My body was in Calgary but my mind was in Paris. I was 17 years old and waist-deep in teenage angst. Seventeen! — they even have a magazine to remind you about all the girls you failed to impress.

Somehow I got my act together and completed several years of university, ending up in Vancouver to finish my B.A.

I love Vancouver’s mix of grit & polish, beaches & mountains, skyscrapers & funky cafes. And yet, having grown up in suburban Calgary, I can’t quite get used to the skid row, the random knife attacks, and all the drugged-out fucked-up angry people. Vancouver reminds me of San Francisco: a city of poets, cyber-junkies, and broken souls.

In my spare time I write stories about epic journeys and existential wastelands, about angels and devils that fight it out in my head, and about spies and sorcerers from faraway galaxies. I keep these stories in a blue binder, with the working title, Demons & Wizards. I taped an old Uriah Heep CD cover to the front of the binder, to remind me where I got all this nonsense.

The reason I’m so interested in demons and wizards is that I feel adrift in the world. I have far more questions than answers. Wouldn’t it be great if some magical being could pluck us from the cosmic tempest and steer us back onto solid ground?

But where is Shakespeare’s star, the one that “is an ever-fixèd mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken,” the one that “is the star to every wandering bark / Whose worth’s unknown, although its height be taken”?

As it is, we’re more like the woman in the long version of “A Lighter Shade of Pale”:

She said, “I’m home on shore leave” / Though in truth we were at sea / So I took her by the looking glass / And forced her to agree / Saying, “You must be the mermaid / Who took Neptune for a ride” / But she smiled at me so sadly / That my anger straightway died.

None of us can take the powers of the ocean below, or the skies above, for a ride. None of us can deny that we’ll be underwater soon, in five minutes or in fifty years, making common cause with the dinosaurs. Yet who doesn’t hope that a magical fisherman of souls will pull us up from the deep?

I wish all this religious stuff was true. But as I wrote elsewhere, I feel more like the fish floating below in the sea, while the gods above make bargains in a cracked and golden sky.

There are at least three reasons why I feel adrift. All of them have to do with being in over my head.

1. During my first year at university I took a course called Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West. This course explored a staggering range of ideas, from Plato’s Republic to Sartre’s Nausea. It was taught at eight in the morning in a small square room in the basement of the Physics Building at Queen’s University. It was taught by a visiting elderly professor from Paris, Brigitte Dupont. In 26 weeks Madame Dupont took us from myth to quantum mechanics; from Greek reason to war with Sparta; from the Chain of Being to the French Revolution; from evolution and DNA to an alienated Frenchman staring at a slithering black root he refused to call Satan. Madame Dupont’s course blew my mind. Everything I’ve done after it is a vain attempt to bring it back together again. Which is why I call my scribblings, ✏️ The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty.

2. When I was thirteen years old I was mesmerized by The Lord of the Rings. The beauty and the terror of Tolkien’s epic struggle between good and evil was later magnified by the movies, where the orcs of my imagination became Uruk-hai birthing from within the inner membrane of my nightmares. This nightmare required a saviour, a Gandalf who falls into the hellish deep yet also rises, stronger for his harrowing journey. Gandalf the White.

3. When I was eleven years old I went to a summer camp that was supposed to be all about the hero God Jesus. The counsellors professed to know all about Him, and all about angels, devils, and holy ghosts. I also wanted to know about Jesus, especially if He had something to do with fighting demons and orcs. Yet the counsellors also wanted to get to know the boys too, in the biblical sense. It was all very confusing. And disillusioning. I didn’t want anything to do with their interpretation of theology.

So I revolted against the entire system — Heaven and Hell, priests and politicians, and all manner of golden-tongued liars and institutionalized fantasies. I drank, took drugs, argued with Saruman, and wondered if the departing Elves didn’t have a point.

The heroes of fantasy became my personal heroes. At least the authors of these fantasies never told us their characters were real. It was because Tolkien never wrote a gospel that I willingly humbled myself before his writing. For me, Jesus became Strider, sitting hidden beneath a dark hood, the unrecognized King, in some dark corner of a bar. It was because Tolkien never expected me to worship the characters he wrote about that I believed in them. Likewise, with Heinlein and Asimov: however strange and tempting their tales, they never mistook them for holy books.

I swore that however much sci-fi I wrote I would never become like Scientology’s Ron Hubbard, and allow my fantasies to turn into theology. Least of all, a theology that had the word science in it. I boiled this down to a phrase: Old Mother Hubbard kicked the dog Ronald Hubbard into her cupboard.

Old Mother Hubbard reminds me of Madame Dupont, and of the square little room at the bottom of the Physics Building at eight in the morning. I remember her grey hair and thick glasses, as well as the way she helped us understand Plato’s cave, Pascal’s abyss, Locke’s sense impressions, Voltaire’s revolt, Mill’s optimism, and Sartre’s pessimism. She brought it all together somehow, in her old frame.

I wonder what Madame Dupont would think about the stories I write.

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