Crossing the Mountains

Tags

cancer, father's death, grief, infertility, ivf

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense.
...
You will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

-Excerpts from “On the fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos”
 By Basil Bunting

I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, in a land of mountains and ocean.

At a seminar I attended years ago, the professor spoke of the idea of an “internal landscape”.  He spoke of how, having grown up in the prairies, his internal landscape was characterized by endless horizons and vast stretches of sky.

For me, it was mountains and ocean that shaped my consciousness.

Growing up out west, the moods of the landscape held me fascinated.  Sunny days were dazzling, the mountains and the ocean sharp-edged, as if formed from cut crystal, the vegetation seething with the dark green of ancient knowing. Equally fascinating were the days when clouds streaked across the folds and crags of the mountains and blurred the line between ocean and sky.

This marked my early, visceral connection with the spiritual. It has stayed with me since.

But there was another side to my spirituality as well.  My Anglo-Indian ancestors had lived in India for generations, and I grew up with colourful family lore.  One of my favourites tells of how my great grandmother encountered Death at the bedside of her ailing daughter, my great aunt.  Nor do I mean the abstracted idea of death, but rather Death, personified as a wizened, brown-skinned woman in a white sari.

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Inheriting Remembrance

Tags

alfresco dances, anglo-indian, British India, colonial India, India, the Indian Railway

Memories the size of a pocket instamatic photo.

This is a piece that was published several years ago in a non-fiction anthology, under one of my other writing names.

Inheriting Remembrance

We immigrated to Canada when I was three years old.  I have a handful of memories—each the size of a Pocket Instamatic photo—of my formative years in India, and a teacup’s worth of sensory impressions.

I also have several suitcases of memories that don’t belong to me.

Those memories—fragile, crumbling, second hand—are my legacy.  They’re all I’ve got to link me to a world that has now disappeared—the Anglo-India (sometimes called British India) of the early and mid-twentieth century. Grounded in a hybrid, Anglo-Indian culture, those memories are also unique to the experiences of their original owners.

In Search of Lost Time

childhood memories in India: soft focus and blurred around the edges. Here, I'm playing dressup in one of my mother's shawls, since I was too young to have an actual sari.

I have to admit, I haven’t read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (the literal translation is “In search of lost time”–I love the poetry of that title), but I have gotten to the beginning of the first chapter. While this isn’t much, relative to the entire, multi-volume, 1000-page plus novel, it does mean that I’ve read the 60 pages or so of prologue. Unfortunately, I’d have to track down some altogether too elusive time in order to get further, as the narrative unfurls at a very different pace to what we’re accustomed to today and the work is a rather long one indeed.

Still, the prologue is a wonderful read. In it, Proust captures and evokes the limitations of memory in a way that often made me chuckle with delight: he speaks of how his family would go to a small town, Combray, for the summer, and his memories of it are vague and distant. A common enough experience–we all no doubt have distant memories of some childhood vacation spots.

But then, he digs deeper, reaching around to the limitations of his recollection and attempting to encapsulate those limitations in words and text. He speaks of how he clearly remembers the corridor and his darkened bedroom, in this childhood getaway home, but how everything to the side of the corridor is dark, murky and unformed, because he cannot remember them. The image of a small boy in his bed, lying in his room, and the corridor beyond, surrounded by dim nothingness is a powerful one, that finds its echo in the marvellous dream worlds evoked by Inception and even the memory made real of the dead wife Reya, in Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, who is doomed and tragic, not necessarily because Reya was tragic, but because that is how her widower husband remembers her: memory as reshaping one’s sense of reality.

Flying Horses

Dulac, Flying Horse; I think this is public domain. If not, let me know, and I'll take it down.

My dad had an assortment of stories he used to tell my brother and me when we were kids. There was one about a king and a magician, which recently found its way into Konstantin’s Gifts, my upcoming release from Crow Girl Publishing:

One of the stories his sister had always loved best had been about a proud king, who had summoned a magician to his court. When the sorcerer and his assistant arrived, the king led them to a stable, where a magnificent black stallion was kept.

“You are the fifth magician I have brought here,” he said. “I command you to make this horse fly.”

The magician was all too aware that the other four magicians had failed—just as he was aware that what the king asked was impossible.