Opened last summer, here is the vertical garden on 09 October 2025. If the intention was to grow food then it looks like this was a failure; perhaps the growing areas could have been located closer together in order to use the limited available land.
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| John Betjeman |
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.
I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds
And shower him with them from the tops of stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.
There after supper lit by lantern light
Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.
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| The once prestigious Queens Hotel at the corner of Peel and St-Jacques; built in the 1890s and demolished in 1995 |
Is our Western society in decline, are we moving towards collapse? Oswald Spengler certainly thought it was.
In East and West (1963), C. Northcote Parkinson writes about “… the Western loss of confidence…”, and that this loss of confidence is a symptom of our decline. We aren’t only afraid to celebrate our victories, we’re embarrassed by them, we reject them and apologize for being who we are; now we agree with our critics and say “we must be terrible people.” It’s all topsy-turvy, what was condemned in the past is now the norm and what used to be the norm is considered reactionary and condemned; our culture is even considered dangerous and needs to be replaced. This is a failure of belief in ourselves and a lack of confidence in our history and culture. To quote, yet once again, W.B. Yeats’s famous lines,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Once, we were building a nation, building a railroad uniting east and west, defeating tyranny in two world wars and Korea, now we’re arguing about gender identity and disputing the value of our history; we have no great national projects but we have many people trying to pull down what we have built. We have separatists in Quebec who say that Canada is oppressing them and yet they oppress Quebec's English-speaking population; no one says anything about this, the politicians have no integrity, they want the French vote and to hell with what is right and what is wrong. And Alberta has made itself one of the least liked provinces with its complaining about the federal government; Albertan separatists have no idea what they are getting themselves into. In Canada we have no unifying national project, or values, that distinguish Canada and make it a place of the future. Now we’ve surrendered to feelings of guilt and appeasement to people who have no self-doubts; this lack of confidence seems to be a symptom of a collective depression; it’s just what Yeats was saying in “The Second Coming”. I don't know how we can restore our confidence, the Western world has become a society of arguing voices, agreeing with nothing the other side has to say, and even hating the other side; and there aren't just two sides, there are many. Until we have confidence, and vision, we will continue to decline. But right now we have no politicians who have vision or courage or integrity.
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| 1967 |
Opening boxes of old books saved from our flooded basement, it’s a return to the past, a return to what used to interest me. This includes beekeeping, honey bees, dowsing, divination, psychic healing, Biblical prophecy, British-Israelites, The holy bible, King James Version, the Great Year, remote viewing, and various ancient texts. It is all an infiltration into consciousness, flirtations, amusements, hangovers, expressions of absurdity, delirium, a hullabaloo that came and went but is still a part of my inner being.
Even back in the 1970s I read about biblical prophecy, what crack pots said would be our future, but these many years later the crack pots are still crack pots but their prophecies are the same, not revised, not changed, and they are happening as predicted. What I refer to, specifically, is a prophesied authoritarian and oppressive government; politicians come bearing gifts but the population will pay for whatever is offered—we’re already no longer free men and free women—and it is a very frightening dystopian future we are facing. Looked at this way, there is no political right wing and left wing; one side may be more benign than the other, but in either case there is still the loss of freedom, there is only the question as to how many of your rights and freedoms will be lost. All governments give you some dust with one hand and, with sleight of hand agility, they take from you what they want. You won’t get back what government has taken from you; they reach into your soul and pull out your inner being, like a rabbit from a hat. In other words, there is only who will oppress you more than the other and who will leave you alone. I want to be left alone.
I still have many books on beekeeping, I learned the craft from two friends, RR Skinner and George Johnston. I used to go to the Miner Institute, in Chazy, New York State, with George for all day classes on beekeeping; these two men—Reg and George, living on different continents—were mentors. I love the honey bee and I love observing them, being near them, these industrious bees who wish no one harm, who spend their days collecting pollen and nectar from wild asters and other flowers, and without them our crops would not be pollinated and we would eventually perish. By the end of summer they have worn out their wings which are visibly frayed and old.
What still maintains my interest? It is family history, gardening, and walking, that’s what’s left in old age. Here are some other books (saved from our flooded basement) that I enjoyed reading, books by the British writer T.C. Lethbridge. I bought some of these books in London, UK, in the mid-1980s; Lethbridge is one of those peculiar thinkers—he held prominence at Cambridge University (for thirty years Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and for the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)—an original thinker who couldn’t be contained by narrow thinking and who found his audience outside of the establishment. Lethbridge might be classified as an eccentric but he is also a model for original thinking, and there are few like him. It’s good to have people like T.C. Lethbridge, they have integrity and expand our idea of how to live in this society, they make life more interesting, and they are not politicians, they mean no harm. Here is Lethbridge on the educational system:
Many (poets) seem to be able to slip from one layer of the mind to the next without any difficulty. But then to be a real poet you have to sit and think. Few people nowadays have time to do this and would have to go on the dole if they tried to do it. It is the old story of Mary and Martha all over again, over and over again. Martha has no time to spare for thinking about anything of real importance. Our whole educational system is designed to produce Marthas. Mary made time to sit and think about what everything meant. So when she met someone who really knew something, she was able to listen and understand. This may be a parable, or it may be fact, it does not matter which; but the more facts educationalists try to cram into the heads of children, the fewer real thinkers they will produce.
--T.C. Lethbridge, A Step in the Dark, p. 127
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| 1965 |
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| 1972 |
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| 1969 |
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| 1976 |
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| 1980 |
A few notes:
--My poem, "The Great Year", is on the Internet Archive; it can also be found mentioned on this blog, https://stephenmorrisseyblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/great-year.html
--I suggest reading the King James' version of the bible; despite what some people say, that it is difficult because of apparently archaic language, it is actually not hard to read at all. You will not be disappointed.
In an old booklet of poems by the McGill Group of Poets, at the bottom of F.R. Scott's poem "trees in ice", Montreal poet Sonja Skarstedt writes, "I spoke to FRS at McGill in 1981 & he explained to me that he wrote this poem in memory of a time during his boyhood in Quebec City--he recalled the winters when he glanced out of his window & saw the black, bare branches encased in clear ice." So, now, anyone doing research on Scott's poems has this to include.
This untitled booklet has poems by the McGill Group of Poets--Frank Scott, AJM Smith, AM Klein, and Leo Kennedy. Maybe the booklet was used in a class on Canadian poetry, it doesn't have a publisher, a title, an ISBN, a date, and it is unpaged, but it is a good short introduction to the poems of these important Canadian poets.
Some books are like old friends, even if you haven't read them for years their presence still brings a lot of happiness. Holding these old books is to return to the past, when one was younger and enjoyed reading them for the first time; or just the physical presence of the book, the cover, the paper on which it is printed, the smell of the book that returns one to the past. Take, for instance, this Sherlock Holmes title, published in 1895, and inscribed "George Henry Donald with best wishes from G.C. Rankam 17/6/95"; I was afraid I'd given this book away when I reduced the number of books I wanted to keep; but here it was, among other books where it had been left, in a box. Another book, one that I taught, is The Great Gatsby (1925), teaching from this second hand copy, every page annotated, it is a book I still love; the carelessness of these people that Fitzgerald describes is more common than many of us are able to accept. I read Irving Stone's Lust for Life (1934), a biography of the artist Vincent van Gogh, when I was a teenager and later I read Vincent's letters to his brother Theo; these letters to Theo van Gogh are a description of Vincent's insights into art and his life as an artist. Apparently, it was Irving Stone's Lust for Life that brought Vincent to a wider audience, and fame, in North America. I was never as much a fan of Paul Gauguin as I was of Vincent van Gogh but I did read Noa Noa (1901), Paul Gauguin's "Journal of the South Seas"; this edition was published in 1957 by The Noonday Press, I bought my copy for only 65 cents at the now defunct NDG Paperback around 1985. I inherited Steel of Empire from my stepfather; written by John Murray Gibbon and published in 1935, it is a history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad’s expansion across Canada. These books that I have described were chosen randomly—they were the first books I took from one of the boxes of books where they’d been kept for the last two years after our basement was flooded. It's good to have them back!
It was +28 C and the asters were full of honey bees. Note: the accumulation of yellow substance on the honey bees legs are (what I call) pollen sacks: "Honey bees collect pollen in specialized structures on their hind legs called pollen baskets, or corbiculae. These are concave cavities lined with stiff hairs where the bee packs the collected pollen, mixed with some saliva, to carry it back to the hive. This nutrient-rich pollen is a primary food source for the colony's larvae."
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| I thought this squirrel was a part of the exhibit and then realized he was just visiting. |
According to Peter Ackroyd`s biography of William Blake, the first morning Blake was in Felpham, his home for two years on the coast south of London, “Blake came out of his cottage and found a ploughman in a neighbouring field. At this moment the ploughboy working with him called out ‘Father, the gate is open.’ For Blake, this was an emblem of his new life, and the work he was about to begin.” Blake perceived this experience as an auspicious sign from the universe, one indicating a future of openness, creativity, and the presence of the divine intervening in his life. At that moment Blake knew that he had made the right choice in moving to Felpham; the universe told him as much.
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Here are two boxes of Krishnamurti books, destroyed when our basement flooded.
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When our basement flooded two years ago I lost books, literary papers, archives, old family photographs, manuscripts, and old diaries. Losing these things was strangely liberating, I didn't really care as much as I thought I would. I had already begun discarding books; years before the flood I began downsizing my library; I kept poetry and books on poetics, biographies of poets, books on poets’ work, books of interviews with poets, and some other books that still meant something to me. But fiction was easy to discard, except for a few novels--Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, novels by Margaret Laurence, and other Canadian novelists--most of the rest were discarded.
Years ago I read all of Henry Miller's books, some were purchased second hand, some new, some remaindered, and some from antiquarian book stores. I read books that Miller recommended, for instance, the diaries and novels of Anais Nin and I heard her speak at Sir George Williams University; I read Blaise Cendrar and other writers that Miller knew. Read Henry Miller's The Books in My Life (1952); I am pretty sure that I discovered J. Krishnamurti because of Miller's essay on him in this book. I remember late one day, taking a city bus home, and meeting Louis Dudek on the same bus; he had planned to publish something by Henry Miller but decided against it; he writes, somewhere, that the big influence on his writing was Matthew Arnold and Henry Miller. He liked Miller’s conversational style of writing and that Miller was intelligent but not academic.
Also, I must have read all of the novels of Jack Kerouac, and then I moved on to other Beat writers, Corso, Burroughs, Michael McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Diane di Prima. It used to be that when I would read someone whose books I liked I read all of their work, their novels, poems, essays, letters, books on their writing, and biographies. And I’ll read the books they recommend or books that influenced them.
I began reading Jack Kerouac in the fall of 1969, around the time I heard Allen Ginsberg read his poems at Sir George Williams University where I was a student; by then, Kerouac had fallen into obscurity, he drank his way into oblivion, and then he died; by then the public had moved on from the Beatniks to the Hippies and left Kerouac behind. Back then, in 1969, I found it difficult to find Kerouac's books; today, they're in the remaining bookstores that we have. But now I have no real interest in Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. As bpNichol said to me, when he read his work at the college where I was teaching, Kerouac is for when you are young, when you get older you want something more substantial. I'm no longer interested in reading Kerouac's novels but I kept his poetry, I still like Kerouac's poetry.
I remember the evening of 21 October 1969, a dark and rainy evening, I was downtown on McKay Street when I heard that Kerouac had died. But death was good for his reputation as a writer, over the following years and decades his popularity has grown and his unpublished manuscripts have been published; books on Kerouac, biographies and memoirs, have also been published.
Back in the late 1960s there were still people around who had known Kerouac from his visits to Montreal. A professor and friend, it was Scotty Gardiner at SGWU, told me that he expected Kerouac to come for supper at a friend's home but Kerouac never arrived. It was the usual story of a drunk Jack Kerouac disappointing people and not caring, he could be belligerent and argumentative when drunk. Ginsberg also read in Montreal, in November 1969, and from where I was sitting I could see George Bowering in the first row with Peter Orlovsky. The years passed and Ginsberg returned to read in Montreal (I can't find documentation for this visit) but Ginsberg's readings were no longer important cultural events, it was golden oldies, and people demonstrated against Ginsberg's advocacy for adult men having sex with young boys. Ginsberg discredited himself advocating for this issue, he was not ahead of his time, he was out of touch with society, its norms, and values. Here is something ironic: a few days ago I read that when Ginsberg was young, he lived for a while with William Burroughs, and when he moved out he complained to Burroughs that he didn't want to have sex with some old man... Actually, Ginsberg said a lot worse about Burroughs' private anatomy than I will repeat. Ken Norris writes in a poem that, when he was young, poets were our heroes, and they were. A friend, Trevor Carolan, wrote on Ginsberg in Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock (Banff Centre Press, 2001). Ginsberg, like Kerouac, is a writer of one's youth, not one’s older years.
Our flooded basement:
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| Flooded basement, July 2023 |
