A Great Fall 

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Two weeks ago I handed in my final paper. In it I challenged Old Rex’s idea that Greece and Israel were the foundations of Western Literature. According to him, all the Great Thoughts flowed from there into the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nile and the Euphrates.

Whenever Old Rex said something like “The Jews invented monotheism” or “The Greeks invented the epic,” I grit my teeth and kept my mouth shut. The last thing I wanted to see was another older man take out his stick.

Besides, I knew my friend Juniper would jump into the fray and slay the beast. She always confronted Old Rex far more effectively than I ever could. She was a genius at the subtle sarcastic attack and the unforeseen frontal blow. She was also a girl, which made her invincible in these evil days of political correction, kickass grrls, and naked emperors.

Still, my silence in class wasn’t very chivalric, to be sure. I guess I wanted to save my own skin. I didn’t want to antagonize the one Old White Male who might give me a decent recommendation for grad school. Might being the operative word.

And yet I couldn’t hold back any longer. I held out for seven months, but eight was one month too many. I didn’t even decide to change course, from tacit agreement to open dissent. I just changed course. It was instinctive. I had to make my argument, even though I knew that Old Rex didn’t want to hear it. Even though it might tank my career, that was on the verge of beginning.

Couldn’t I for once have walked away from a male authority figure without challenging him? Couldn’t I have walked up to his desk after his last class and handed him a paper he actually wanted to read?

The simple answers to these two questions are: No, and No.

Let me explain.

My problem with authority is an old one, and runs very deep. It has three particular causes, and one cause in particular. This cause comes from one week during my childhood, when at the age of 11 I fell from the obedient sky. I fell past the innocent birds and onto the Alberta plain, where the king’s horses, the buffalo, and the dinosaurs roam.

Let me explain.

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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, and the dinosaur bones that still haunt the prairies.

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. This allowed the companies to drill beneath the ground, into what remains of the Cretaceous Seaway which existed for 34 million years, back when the birds and the dinosaurs roamed.

Eventually the farm boy worked for a French oil company in Calgary, which is how we ended up in Paris and Geneva for several years. Paris was a particular shock. Connaisseurs of baseball, the mall, hockey, the Dairy Queen, and ‘football,’ we were like a family of Triceratops visiting Madame de Staël at her salon on Rue du Bac.

At 15 I was set loose in the streets of Paris, where there was no enforced drinking age. In Calgary we had to find urban cowboys or rig-pigs with pick-up trucks who were willing to bootleg a bottle of cheap whiskey or cooking sherry. They’d hand us the bottles in slim brown paper bags. I remember them doing this with a tender, compassionate look in their eyes, as if they remembered what it was like to yearn for girls and yet be too young to buy your own liquid oblivion. They never asked for a tip.

In Paris you didn’t need to size up anyone outside a liquor store. In fact there were hardly any “liquor stores,” so to speak. In Paris you just walked into a corner store and came out beaming, with a six-pack of Kronenbourg or Stella Artois. Walking down the street, you started to think that Europe had its charms.

In Paris I learned two contradictory things: first, throwing rocks at policeman was a viable form of political expression; second, it wasn’t necessary to act like an idiot in order to impress girls. Yet it was difficult to change someone like me. Just ask my parents. I never learned to throw a molotov cocktail properly and I continued to act like an idiot in order to impress girls.

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 forest 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 bodily frame was in Calgary but my spirit 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 this city’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, oceanfront parks, cyber-junkies, skyscrapers, and disordered 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 who has found 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”? Some people say they’ve found this heavenly star, and that it’s all there in a holy book. But none of these people are astronomers.

It seems to me that we’re either like the man (in the long version of “A Lighter Shade of Pale”) who thinks we can be masters of our own fate, or we’re like the woman who doesn’t think so:

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 dinosaur, swimming in his underwater lake of bitumen.

Yet who doesn’t hope that a magical Fisherman of souls will pull us up from the inky deep?

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

Not that I’m complaining. I think life is a wonderful adventure. Even the fractures hint at possibilities of unity. Or, as Leonard Cohen put it,

There’s a blaze of light in every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

Cohen’s “beauty and the moonlight” continue to overwhelm me. I just have no clue what it all means. And I doubt anyone else does, despite their claims to holy books and capitalized truths.

You say I took the name in vain / I don’t even know the name / But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?

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

1. During my first year at university I took a course called The 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 democracy to Sparta’s war against Athens; 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.

Even if I were a sixty-something codger, with a web site and pension, I’d still be reworking my undergrad experience as if it was still happening, as if the book in front of my eyes was bought at the UBC bookstore, and as if I was still at my computer writing about Hamlet and Prufrock and the meaning of life. Or the meaningless of life, I’ll let Camus decide. 

Even if I were a sixty-something codger, with his golf exploits and his irritating stories about remote Italian towns, I’d still be traumatized by the combined effects of Madame Dupont’s Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West and Old Rex’s Foundations of Western Literature. I’d still be trying to connect the alpha with the omega, the bridge with the wrecks of my undergrad world. Even though each course had a specific focus, both of them are, at least in part, responsible for blowing my brain apart. Hopefully, I repeat to myself E.M. Forster’s mantra: Only Connect.

Which leads me to the second and third reasons I write about demons and wizards, and fantasy worlds of darkness and light.

2. When I was thirteen years old I was mesmerized by The Lord of the Rings. The beauty and 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. These nightmares required a saviour, a Gandalf who falls into the Hellish Deep yet also rises, stronger for his harrowing journey. Gandalf the White.

The third reason has everything to do with The Lord of the Rings, yet came before I had read the books.

3. When I was 11 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. They found all kinds of ways to get us naked. It was all very confusing. And disillusioning. I didn’t want anything to do with their interpretation of theology. The counsellors were themselves the orcs.

So I revolted against the entire system — Heaven and Hell, priests and politicians, and all manner of golden-tongued liars and institutionalized fantasies. By the age of thirteen I was drinking, taking drugs, arguing with Saruman, and wondering if the departing Elves didn’t have a point.

Even if I were a sixty-something codger, the only way to bring my brain back together is to imagine an infinite space, one so large that the fragments that exploded in every direction can be followed to the points at which they slow down, lose momentum, and stand still in outer space. So forceful was the blowing up of everything that my chaotic brain once held together that this imagined space would need to be the size of the universe. Or more than that, it would need to be the size of an array of universes, which when seen from a distance, are the size of a grain of sand on Praia do Cassino, a beach which stretches 254 kilometres along the coast of northern Brazil. 

The itinerant cartographer, determined to prove the tour guides wrong, keeps walking along the coastline, all the way to Venezuela, and from there to Cartagena, where he sits down under an umbrella and orders a rum and coke.

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The heroes of fantasy became my personal heroes. At least the authors of these fantasies never insisted that their characters were real. It was because Tolkien never wrote a Gospel that I willingly bowed to his pen. 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 presented them as 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 liberalism, and Camus’ optimism. She brought it all together somehow, in her old frame. I wonder if she ever got the credit she deserved.

She went to the cobbler’s to buy him some shoes; / When she came back he was reading the news.

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

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Next: 🎲 The Water Damsel

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