Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

As Loki Steers Us

7:00 AM

Sitting in the tub, an hour to go, I see nothing but rough water ahead.

11:18 AM

Loki is steering us, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern toward England, with their letter from Claudius to the King of England, “purporting the immediate death of Hamlet. Do it, England!” And yet Hamlet has swapped his name for theirs. No one knows what’s really going on.

The unnerving ride of the present makes us want to run for cover, to lock ourselves inside Candide’s garden, with his wise dervish on the outskirts of Istanbul. But how can we separate ourselves from the earthquakes and the Inquisitions, the global warming and the Vikings with their double-bladed axes raised?

We look up into the sky and see Loki twirling Gullveig’s heart in his hands, like Satan in the Garden of Eden, or like the Vikings eyeing Lindisfarne, the Russians eyeing Crimea, or China eyeing Taiwan.

We see the mercenaries in the Sahel, the gangs in Central America, the hatred of the Hutu for the Tutsi, and it all seems as inextricable and inexplicable as Azerbaijan eyeing Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Armenians call the Republic of Artsakh, which is destined to remain high in the hills somewhere, beyond our comprehension or power to effect a positive outcome. These conflicts are far away, but it feels like they’re aiming at our heart, which feels like an apple Loki’s eager to bite.

And yet isn’t this a logicval outcome, given that while we may feel a world apart, we are in fact an integral part of the world system. I look around me in the gymnasium and see students from all over the earth. They’re busy writing, trying to figure out the world and their place in it. The gym itself is located in the city-state of the The University of British Columbia, itself in a city named after the British Captain George Vancouver. We’re literally minutes north of the greatest military power the world has ever known. In last 200 years we’ve gone from submission to London to submission to Washington. And I don’t mean this is a purely negative sense, but also in a poetical one: our mission has stayed the same: capitalism, wealth, power, democracy, and freedom.

Lister Sinclair put it succinctly: Canadians “lie between the grimmest and greatest of the Grim Great Powers.” And yet the description applies to many, not just Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders (the other two peepers of that Anglo beast with five eyes). It applies to anyone who feels caught in the history the British and the Americans have created.

Looking to London, one might ask, Despite all that Empire has done for Canada, what has it done for the world? In what way did the British paint the world red, white, and blue? We can applaud their vision of a free and prosperous society, of democracy and law, but can we applaud the control they exercised over this freedom and prosperity?

Looking south from Vancouver, it looks like the masters have taught their previous subjects well.

7:01 AM

Above New York scream a squadron of heartless birds

with bright red eyes, flying above a great hole in the ground.

Lady Liberty still lifts her arm in a violet, violent sky.

Her crown, like a multi-pronged antenna, buzzes with news of Super Hornet and drone,

Strike Eagle and Phantom, Demon and Raptor, jets that make Nazguls seem clumsy and predictable.

And in the harbour sits the next generation of fighters: the F-35 and God knows what next,

wrapped in black covers on the deck of the super-carrier, the USS George W.H. Bush.

The super-carrier weighs in at 101, 000 tonnes, is over three football fields in length, and can carry 90 jets.

The super-carrier is a flat deck for Nazguls,

harriers that lift off like bees to swarm the command posts and strafe the villages,

while the big guns aboard the Super Hornets, flying at almost twice the speed of sound, drop their payloads of death.

So many forms of mechanized death.

Was it for this that she opened her arms to the world?

My head drops into the sudsy depths. My lips, my nose, they all go under. I see Loki deep in the well of ancestral memory, the blood-brother of Odin, the eternal shape-shifter conniving to kill the noble Baldr.

A slim white forefinger dips into the water, curls slightly beneath my chin and lifts it up out of Mimir's well, the watery gulf in which I see the endless night, the apocalypse which happens over and over again, the rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem, the centre gone and the widening gyre. The fatal dance of Kali in the vast cemetery of the world. The endless drumming of Shiva, Black Sabbath, and Gorgoroth. On the playlist “The Battle of Evermore” is playing and the ring-wraiths are riding in black.

Sing as you raise your bow
Shoot straighter than before
No comfort has the fire at night
That lights the face so cold

Oh dance in the dark of night
Sing to the mornin' light
The magic runes are writ in gold
To bring the balance back

The song ends, trailing clouds of peace and glory, taking us from war and fear to a mystical flight, after all. As Wordsworth wrote, The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar. And yet as Led Zeppelin reminds us over and over, the song remains the same, and the same old battles will be fought again and again.

The next song on my playlist, “Immigrant Song,” confirms this: we may have come from a land afar of ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow, yet we bring with us the hammer of the gods. We drive our ships to new lands, to fight the horde, to sing and cry, Valhalla, I am coming…

And yet Sylvia refuses to play along with this blatant display of violent drum-driven John Bonham machismo. Abruptly, she stands up in the tub and points eastward, quoting,

At last the sun is shining
The clouds of blue roll by
With flames from the dragon of darkness
The sunlight blinds his eyes

She lifts my face toward the light bulb floating in the sky like a giant sun hovering over the blue sea, but in the depths of my mind I see the ancient fleets, old and new as the fleets that set sail from Sparta, setting off from Vaxholm, Pensacola, and Murmansk, diving under the water and lifting into the skies above Saigon and Bagdad, Tbilisi and Bakhmut. I quote back to her:

The pain of war cannot exceed
The woe of aftermath
The drums will shake the castle wall
The ringwraiths ride in black

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To what dark god do they pray each morning, when the Nighthawk lifts her Nazgul wing,

and flies at sun’s zenith unseen across the deserts of Persia?

To what ancient doom do you lead us, Demon and Raptor, Zircon and Satan,

with your payloads of plutonium, zirconium and death?

Oh, war is the common cry
Pick up you swords and fly
The sky is filled with good and bad
That mortals never know

I look out from the Battery and see the Vieille Dame with her torch still burning.

Her hand still stretches toward the heavens, to fire the imagination and light the passageway for the huddled masses, the wretched, and the poor.

And yet, Oh Merciful God in the thundering clouds, who lit the napalm flame and exploded the door?

Is it possible to slip away, deeper into this sleepy tub of mine, to float slowly away from sense, from the world of real things like iron and plutonium, and to say with Apollinaire, “Que c'est beau ces fusées qui illuminent la nuit!” / How beautiful these guns that illumine the night!

Can I allow myself to write The Tale of a Tub That Escapes Its Own Meaning, a tub that floats and flies and has singing maidens above it high in the misty air? Is it possible to break free from Alberich, and drift with the mermaids, singing each to each?

I’m sure that Swift would let these girls into his tub. Certainly Snorri would. How could he resist

these sensuous maidens singing in the old tongue

the tight girls unbraided     blond in the airström

in the swift waters running swimming undaunted

as the bodices fly open flitting through the branches

of the caesura dividing    and the declension confusing

lured by the alliterations and allusion adjoining

the girls who are now hovering high in the ceiling

singing a chorus from Wagner a wager with heaven

I sing along with them, warbling lines from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of the Morals of the Gods, telling the Rhine maidens that the gods don’t have any morals. I tell Sylvia that they’re like companies: they do whatever they want, like Ronald Reagan or the George Bushes.

But the Rhine maidens aren’t interested

in that same old Chomsky rag raging in the wind that deafens.

So I push off from the shoreline, from their slippery shrugs, grasping my own personal Rhine maiden by the wrist, and brining her back down into the sudsy water.

Her lithe slippery body slides over mine, as I clasp her tight to my chest (her breasts are naked and soapy) as we drift westward, far from Reykholt, taking with us Snorri’s tales of the Aesir and the Vanir to make the final leg of our sea-journey to L’Anse aux Meadows, and then further south to Vinland, a third possible touching down point of the Vikings, although the location seems more mythic than factual, to find the truth about how we got to where we are.

11:20 AM

We’ve all heard the stories about fishes and beavers, barbarous forces pushing us west, and religious persecution, as if we were all victims of one kind or another. As if we we were Hutterites and Quakers. Yet there are darker, wolfier reasons for our vast migration. Reasons that have more to do with Vikings and Valhalla than Pilgrims and Providence. Sturm und Dagger reasons. 

Reasons that go back to the conquests of the Romans and Greeks, and even further back to the conflict between Umma and Lagash in 2525 BC, to Sargon’s conquest around 2300, and to those of Naram-Sin, who expanded the Akkadian Empire to its greatest size, and who reigned until 2018 BC.

Time-wise, Narum-Sin lies exactly 2018 years before the advent of Christ, which plays into the apocalyptic temporal logic of Yeats’ “Second Coming”:

somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Reasons one might call, The Ancient Doom.

Of course there were good honest folk, caring mothers and fathers, dutiful sons and daughters. Yet in general it seems less a story of holy puritans escaping tyranny than hungry peasants perfecting it. Why did we think the land was ours? Because we could conquer it? Because our civilization was superior? Didn’t many of us came to Botany Bay and Virginia as slave-dealers and gun-runners, petty thieves, and whore-stealers? Criminals or gentlemen, we brought in our burning pockets the old fire god, call him Satan, Loki, or Balrog, and let the cross-cultural anthropologists debate the details.

7:15 AM

The watery fields off the port bow are turning a burnished yellow in the sunset, and aren’t quite so rosy anymore.

The open stretch of water resembles lines of wheat undulating in the hot August air, waves of burning air turning to the heavens above.

Beneath me I feel a rumbling and rolling, the engines of the Gulf Stream rumbling like Gothmog, lord of the Balrogs:

The waves of pilgrims and progress are sent westward, like a Trojan horse, but without a prophylactic, thrusting westward, further than Odysseus, into the New World, ever uninvited, whether to Lindisfarne or Ca-na-da, 'the village' on the coast of the Saint Laurence, our greeting cards a fleur-de-lys and a union jack, arquebuses, and blankets for Pontiac.

It took me about three hours to get Sylvia to see that I wasn't crazy. She kept telling me that the fantasies of myth and literature have nothing to do with the realities of politics and history. It took a great deal of fighting over the strawberry flavoured soap before she was willing to question whether or not the unreality of myth was itself a myth.

At what point does exploration, a variant of the epic journey, become exploitation? When does Odysseus become Alexander? When do Columbus and Magellan become Cortez and Pizarro? And what sorts of reasons do we give to smooth the transition?

11:23 AM

 A formal mode of dominion was perfected by the Spanish, who would tell the Natives (in Spanish) to swear an allegiance to Spain and the Pope. They would read their “Requerimiento” like a traffic cop’s greeting card, to make sure the Natives understood what would happen to them if they didn’t submit:

I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.

7:14 AM

I feel the rambling and rolling beneath me like the waves beneath Loki’s boat

the icy tug of the northern waters and the anger of the gods above

as we set off with Fenrir the Wolf, and Hel, and all the grim crew

climbing toward heaven to tear it down

with engines of war forged in the furnaces of the east

or, as Snorri told it 800 years ago:

There sails from the east a ship   shades from Hel

over the ocean stream    steered by Loki

in the wake of the Wolf    witless hordes rush onward

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Next: 💍 All Shook Up 

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