Montreal and Vancouver, the two best cities in Canada

Here are final photographs of honey bees in Vancouver, this time on the UBC campus overlooking Chancellor Road near the Chan Centre parkade.

What we love about cities in the east, history, access to culture, a feeling of man's presence for decades and in some instances for centuries, is not found in Vancouver. Of course, there is "culture" here, but the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, are all superior to the Vancouver Art Gallery and comparing them isn't fair. You don't go to Vancouver for "culture." Vancouver is a very young city compared to most eastern cities.

Only a "young" place, Vancouver and British Columbia, would have on their license plates "The Best Place on Earth." On the other hand, on Quebec's license plate you'll find "Je Me Souviens" which means "I remember myself," and refers to remembering the past, looking backwards, the ethnocentric side of French Quebec which would sacrifice the future in order to hang on to the old, the past, what has been, what never was, including all the perceived injustices, the desire to separate from the Rest of Canada, and so on. BC's license plate is young, naive, and annoying; Quebec's license plate is representative more of people off the Island of Montreal; Montreal has always been a city of tolerance of other people. 

There is a connection between Vancouver and Montreal, maybe it's a spiritual connection. You'll find evidence of spirituality just about anywhere you go in Montreal--it is, after all, "Ville Marie," the City of Mary--and spirituality seems to emanate from the very heart and being of Montreal, past, present, and future. Visiting Montreal you'll see Mount Royal with an illuminated cross at the eastern side of the mountain, the Oratory, St. Patrick's Basilica, the many churches that are found in every neighbourhood, and so on. Vancouver's spirituality is in nature, whether the mountains that can be seen from just about any part of Vancouver, the mild climate, the ocean, Pacific Spirit Park, Stanley Park, honey bees in lavender beds on Cornwall Street or at UBC, there is a quality of spirituality here that comes directly from the close proximity of nature. 

Dream Journeys: The Journey Home

The Cedars, 1983

The Journey Home

1) On my Fifty-Second Birthday

I have returned, on foot,
to the Cedars, the country house
where I lived almost twenty years
before returning to the city.
It is cold outside and the yard
is littered with cardboard boxes
and broken farm equipment.
As I approach the house
I wonder how the new owners
will receive me: perhaps
they are still angry
at discovering thousands
of bats living in the attic, as they
complained about this
after they moved in.
How could country people
not have expected bats
or even mice
in a country house?
But they seem not to notice
my presence, and they appear
nice enough. I am like a ghost here
walking from room to room
while these people
talk, eat, and are oblivious
to me. These new owners
have put in big windows,
the rooms are larger now,
walls have been removed
and a smaller, more efficient
wood stove installed.
The house is messy,
beds unmade,
some rooms not used at all
just containing junk.
This is my old home,
but there is nothing left
of my having lived here.

Visiting the Mystic Beast in 2010

Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

The "Mystic Beast", from the rear of the building.

What I call the "Mystic Beast is a Northwest coast Nimpkish wood sculpture of a human figure, made around 1893.

Since last May, I've been living on the campus of the University of British Columbia. One of my "neighbours" is the Museum of Anthropology, with its world famous display of artwork by indigenous people from the coastal area of British Columbia.

It was back in the early 1990s that I discovered, at the MOA, a sculpture I called the "Mystic Beast," and in 1997 published a book of poems with this title.

Living on campus has been an extraordinary and moving experience. I have never failed to be impressed by what I have seen, the people I have met, and just walking on the campus, which I do every day, is a wonderful experience.

The other day I was out in the morning and took these photographs at the Museum of Anthropology. I had planned to visit the Museum as it has been renovated, new exhibits put on display, and so on. It had been suggested to me that perhaps the Mystic Beast would no longer be on display, but there, in the window at the rear of the building, was the Mystic Beast.

I don't identify with the Mystic Beast as much as I once did, but there is still a part of my soul, my inner being, that resonates to what I see in this sculpture. He is not a "fun guy," but someone resolute in surviving this life, someone who has had to find strategies for survival and live "undercover," someone for whom understanding the shadow aspect of the psyche has been essential. You can change, you can even be "reborn," you can meditate and do Tai Chi, you can have your satori or your highs however induced, you can put in your years of therapy, but some of the essential aspects of the personality stay the same. You can revision your past and I suggest this is not a bad thing to do for some people. You might even look back at the old self, one day, and wonder how you could have been that person. But at the end of the day there is still a part of us, the part we have struggled with for so many years, that remains the same.

Honey bees on Cornwall Street in Vancouver

Walking on Cornwall Street, in Vancouver, someone had an enormous display of lavender growing by the sidewalk. I tried for years, with little success, to grow lavender, and here in Vancouver you see it growing in abundance and without any special care as far as I can see. The curious thing about this particular lavender is that it was full of honey bees, they were having a great time collecting nectar and pollen. Based on the number of bees, which isn't evident in the photographs, there is probably a local beekeeper to whom these bees belong, or they are from a hive located in someone's attic, or a tree not far away. At any rate it's possible someone will have quite a lovely harvest of this honey.

Many cities are now allowing some urban agriculture, trying to blend in rural and city occupations. I am of two minds on this. In many English villages or towns, keeping bees, gardening in an allottment, or keeping pigeons, is fairly common. However, I wouldn't want chickens next door to where I live, we hear of diseases that come from birds in too close proximity to humans. I certainly wouldn't want pigs or sheep next door, avoiding the noise and smell and dirt of livestock is one advantage to living in the city. We've worked hard in western society at achieving a level of sanitation that has resulted in standards of health never seen before. However, it seems to be fashionable to be in favour of keeping domesticated animals in people's backyards today, other than dogs and cats, and this strikes me as  rather silly affectation, or ignorance on the part of, some middle class people. I still remember when many people had a dog that ate table scraps (God forbid!), which is a dog's natural diet, and you opened the front door in the morning and let the dog out for the day, he'd return about 5 p.m. and you didn't know where he'd been. Our dog, Buddy, visited Willingdon, our grade school one day and ran through the halls with Mr. Pitcairn, the principal, running after him. I remember keeping a low profile that day. But, despite this about people's dogs, no one kept chickens or livestock in their backyard. Isn't that right, Veeto?

Note on Poetry: Soul

                                                                It strikes me that so many

                                                                people writing poetry,

                                                                who claim to be poets,

                                                                lack the one essential

                                                                for all poets: it is

                                                                to have a poet’s soul.

"Holy Wells" in Ireland and Montreal

Recently, on Ireland's RTĒ television, there was a presentation on "holy wells" in that country. A "holy well" is not only a place where you can get water, it is also a sacred place. Many holy wells were originally sacred among pagans and then, when Ireland became Christian, the population assimilated the wells into their Christian faith; this is a fairly common occurrence, churches were built on the remains of pagan temples, and pagan or Celtic holidays were reconfigured into similar Christian holy days.

The history of holy wells reaches back to pagan time, perhaps 5,000 years, a time long before Christianity reached Ireland. There are approximately three thousand holy wells in Ireland where they are known as places of healing; one might visit a holy well to ask for help with a specific problem, or to give thanks that a problem, whether physical or spiritual, has already been resolved.

The holy well is a visible and physical manifestation of mythological, or archetypal and spiritual thinking; it a place where nature presents evidence of the existence of the divine in our lives.

I have been interested in holy wells for many years. The discussion that follows on holy wells also gives some background to the Prologue to Girouard Avenue as well present information on holy wells in our environment. Here is the Prologue in its entirety:

1. The Ancient Well of Ara

There is a well in Tipperary
visited by my ancestors
before they left for Canada.
They said, “This is a place
of sleep and dreams—
drink from the well
and know the mystery
of life.”

Looking down to the water
at the well’s bottom,
they saw the reflected sky
the size and roundness
of a coin with the emblem
of a bird.

On Main Street
where the well
is located, not long
after ships left harbour
and famine crossed the land
a wooden top was fitted
to the ancient well,
the water cold and still
beneath the earth’s surface.

2. The Forgotten Spring

In the big city, at the beginning
of a new millennium, in a park,
the corner of Doherty and Fielding,
where water gathers on the path,
asphalt lifted, broken,
a place always wet
as though it rained last night
although it didn’t, with a seven story
apartment building on one corner
and low-cost apartments across the street,
where six young men stand and talk
on a Sunday morning in summer—
these are not the ancient fields
but a city park where water
rises on either side of a path
from an underground spring,
reminding us of what we used to know,
but have forgotten—the water
insistent, forceful, always desiring wholeness.

Before writing this poem I read very briefly about the ancient well Ara, located in Tipperary. That a wooden top had been placed on it, sealing the well, seemed a good metaphor for the ending of one age, the age of shamanic and visionary consciousness, the age of Bardic poetry and an apprehension of reality that includes that which might not be visible to the naked eye but still exists on some other level of awareness. That age, when the Other World could be more easily penetrated to, ended for most people and emblematic of this ending is placing a top on the well.

Having said all of this, it was interesting to hear on this RTĒ programme that some Irish who were leaving for North America visited, before they left, a holy well. I don’t know, in fact, if this is what my own family members did before coming to Canada in 1837, but I envisioned them doing just that. Creativity, imagination, this might explain my having written this about them, but there is also ancestral memory, whether it is in our physical makeup or in our personality, our genetic makeup, or what have you. I place this “coincidence,” this synchronicity, to ancestral memory.

The next section of the prologue moves us from 1837 to present times. It is over 150 years later, now we are in Montreal, and street names in this area of Nôtre Dame de Grace (NDG), a predominantly English-speaking neighbourhood in westend Montreal, reflect the Irish presence that once existed here. Nearby is Loyola College, founded by Irish Catholics, but since 1973 Loyola has been a part of Concordia University. Many Irish moved to this part of the city so their children could attend Loyola High School and then Loyola College. However, most of the Irish who lived here in the 1940and 1950s have moved away. This neighbourhood was their destination back then, from working class Pointe St. Charles, Verdun, and Griffintown, to Nôtre Dame de Grace, and now the children and grandchildren of these people are scattered across Montreal, Canada, the United States, and beyond.

I used to walk up Belmore to Chester and then continue to Fielding, and walk along the grassy meridian at this part of Fielding. Across the street is Ignatius Loyola Park that covers two city blocks, so it is a huge expanse. Then I would walk by the corner of Fielding and Doherty and one spring day I noticed water running from the park, it ran down an asphalt path from where the baseball diamond was located and into a sewer on Fielding. The asphalt was lifting as water would run along it, and I wondered about this water and where it came from. I remember seeing this water, and there was a lot of it, and noticing how the asphalt bulged and cracked due to the water running under it, freezing, then lifting up the asphalt as it thawed. Every spring there was water there, and it wasn’t from snow melting, it wasn’t run-off from snow melting in the park. Eventually I found the source of the water, it came from a spring locatged behind the baseball diamond on the Doherty side of the park. I intuitively understood what I had found and the significance of this water, this spring. As I walked passed it I knew I was in the presence of more than just water, I was in the presence of something holy.

(You can see this area: go to Google Maps, search “Doherty and Fielding, Montreal,” and then do a “street view” and you’ll see the repair work to the sidewalk due to the run-off from the well.)

There are many underground streams in NDG--they have all been paved over--and the foundations of many homes are being repaired due to damage caused by water from underground streams. NDG was once a place of farms, for instance Benny Farm which became a housing development in the late 1940s for soldiers returning from World War Two. Where we lived on Montclair Avenue had been apple orchards until the house where we lived was built in the late 1940s. Family members used to go for walks along the old Western Avenue (now Boulevard de Maisonneuve West) which was a dirt road, that was back in the early 1940s; they’d walk from Girouard to Hampton. Near where I grew up on Oxford Avenue, along Côte St. Luc Road, we used to play in the fields where apartment buildings were later constructed; until a few years ago there was an old farm house on the corner of Dufferin and Cote St. Luc Road. When I was growing up we were always looking for some nature, some fields, to play in; there were lanes to walk in, behind people's homes, and it seems there was still quite a bit of undeveloped property back then, but you had to work to find it.

I was aware of underground streams in this area of Montreal, all of them paved over or buildings constructed over them. This particular well in Loyola Park, what I have called a holy well, had managed to penetrate the earth covering it and for some years, at specific times of the year, water would run down the asphalt path. You could see the water coming from the earth and others knew of this well. Indeed, a few years ago, when walking through Loyola Park, and passing where the well was located, I noticed that the City of Montreal had made this specific area, where the well existed, into an ecological reserve, they had put a fence around it, planted flowers and some other plants that thrive in wet areas, and encouraged the return of nature. Not much came of this as water was abundant in spring but by the middle of summer it would dry up. It also upset local residents who were concerned that mosquitoes would lay eggs in standing water, they were concerned with West Nile disease. Apparently, some of these people went with buckets and removed the water that was present. I don’t know if there is much left of this well-meaning, but failed, experiment by the City.

What constitutes a "holy well"? We used to drive some distance to an artesian well by a roadside, there were usually several other cars parked there and people filling large containers of water from this well. At first glance, I don't think of that well as being "holy." I think two things can make a well "holy," either found together or separately. First, there is some agreement, some consensus among people, that a certain place is holy. Perhaps miracles can be attributed to the place, or some other supernatural occurences that help form an idea among people that the well has extraordinary powers. Second, a place, a well for example, may be located on a ley line, a place where earth energy may be more abundant than at other places; this example doesn't rely on any consensus of opinion. Perhaps you have walked in nature and suddently felt that you were in a place that was different, more serene or imbued with a quality of silence, or that created a quality of silence in your own mind, and that this space was somehow sacred. I have encountered these places, for instance St. Patrick's Basilica in Montreal is one such place; another, more remote, is an abandoned farm on a slight hill near where we used to live. When I would visit this place I knew that there was something different--spiritual, sacred, holy--that wasn't present elsewhere.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

17.

I am in a flat with an old friend,
who looks the same as she did years ago.
There is a young man with long hair,
his name is “Morrissey,”
shorter than me, with some
dental problem in the front teeth.
I think he may read the news on TV.
We talk and when we separate,
I give him my business card.
He is wearing blue jeans
with a dress jacket and white shirt.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

15.

Returning home, the car’s gear shift
comes off in my hand and trying to repair it,
I crawl into the car’s body and discover the car is a wooden vessel,
a web of slats covered with plywood, almost paper thin
for lightness. I arrive at Oxford Avenue where I grew up;
at the front door a man’s corpse sits in an upright position,
as though he had died in the midst of pausing
to think or remember something. When I return that evening
he is gone and I am relieved: But who was this corpse?
Could he have been Father, or someone I have forgotten
or never knew, the white sheet a shroud, like a body
found in the frozen north, preserved by the cold,
lips pulled back in the permanent grin of the dead,
like a wolf’s grinning yellow teeth.



16. Five Black Horses

It was a demonstration of something, the severed
horse’s head on a chair and the four black horses
standing facing the audience. Behind the middle horse
a man took a hammer and drove a bolt
into the horse’s neck; at first, the horse stood as before,
we were all calm, including the horses,
and then the animal fell to the floor.
The other horses were to follow.

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Miami, Florida, 1930s

13.

I am told my father has just died.
He was alive all the years
I thought he was dead.
For fifty years I grieved
and regretted his death.
Now, again, I have missed him.


14.

A cat has been a nuisance,
pissing on  the walls, shitting where the children play,
noise all night; the Italian landlord next door is dealing with it.
He has a big knife and has cut off the cat’s paws,
and then cut further up the leg. 
Someone holds the cat for him.
He may even have skinned the cat,
and planned to leave it alive to suffer.
We are in his car and I am pleading with him
to kill the cat, pleading kill the cat, end his suffering.
His daughter is also pleading with him to kill the cat,
“Daddy, please kill the cat. Please, please kill the cat.”

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Church in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, QC, July 2009

11.

"Down Under," as they call it,
a woman has been dragged to the floor,
her clothes torn and dirty;
a man, dressed in a blue satin suit,
like a French cavalier, watches me.
I phone the police and wait and wait.
Then I leave, go to some building
where I am with my father-in-law;
I ask him what he would do
if this man arrives here, he says
he would not let him in the house.
I am on a busy street, I am waiting
for the man in blue. Finally, he arrives
at the head of an entourage,
half-naked women on horses,
clowns, acrobats, dwarves, fire eaters,
it’s a parade that only I can see.
I hold up my hands, fingers outstretched at them:
I yell “Die! Die! Die!” as though deadly energy
will come from my fingers.
They are a lot more powerful than I am.
I feel insignificant, alone against this man
and what he represents.


12.

My son tells me he wants me as a “friend”.
I reply, “I am your father, not a friend;
a father is better; I love you as a father,
a friend is less than a father.”

Wolves at Alexis Nihon Plaza

The numinous world is all around us, waiting to break through the unconscious into our awareness. It is like these plastic wolves, found in the window of a dollar store in Alexis Nihon Plaza in Montreal. There the wolves wait, actually quite attractive figurines or statuettes, but still nothing all that special, and yet they are a reminder of the numinous order to things. The numinous--archetypes, metaphor, symbolism, mythology--are always present, always waiting to enter consciousness, always just under the surface of consciousness.

Jungians have always been fascinated by popular culture, which can be an expression of the human psyche and what it contains, represented to us in the everyday--in the quotidian--where it is an expression of our social and cultural concerns, our psychological and spiritual concerns, our collective concerns, unadorned by the aspect of high art that is deliberate and sometimes exclusive.

These wolves remind us, even if it remains unconscious, of the part of the psyche that cannot be tamed, that is always only once removed from primeval and atavistic aspects of consciousness.

I remember, years ago, reading Albert Schweitzer's On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922), it was on the reading list for the high schools of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, and then a few years later I read A Heart of Darkness, published twenty years earlier, by Joseph Conrad, both books set in Africa. The first, a benevolent expression of Christianity (the work done at Schweitzer's Lambarene mission) in Africa; the other, how western consciousness is affected by shadow content. Both books are fascinating explorations of European consciousness relocated to a foreign environment. Conrad's vision is more relevant for us as it shows western consciousness when removed from the supports offered by western society, by western mythology. Today, and for the last hundred years years, these supports have been removed for many people in western society. We consider this the decline of western civilization, and the old civilization is indeed in decline and has been for many years, but we also live in a dynamic and vital post-modern world which adapts to change and is capable of re-visioning itself. What most people don't realize is that a new mythology has been created, new psychological supports have been created, that the numinous can never be far removed from consciousness. That we aren't fully aware of these new supports--a new mythology for living--isn't evidence that they don't exist; it is evidence that they are active, vibrant, and relevant. For many people this is a difficult time in which to live, it demands something most people aren't prepared to do, and that is to become people who are conscious and aware.

Note: When I wrote this I could still be a detached observer of things; no longer. The supports of western civilization are being destroyed by people in the west, it is called being woke, but they are not really "woke" or awake, or even aware but they are full of self-hatred. In their rush to destroy the society and culture that educated them and gave them the affluent life that they enjoy, they forget the many achievements of western society. If this is the new mythology of western society, then I didn't see it coming. These woke people want to destroy western society, tear it down, even to the basic unit of society that is the family.  (19 February 2023)

Sailboats at Kitsilano

Years ago, I bought a painting from Nellie McClung, who was not only a wonderful poet but also a talented visual artist. My spirits are always lifted when I see her painting, "Sailboats at Kitsilano," in a room in our home. One afternoon in the mid- or late- 1990s we visited Nellie at her home. In one room, it was the first room on the right as you entered her east end Vancouver home, she had some large paintings leaning against a wall and we looked through these. I decided to buy "Sailboats at Kitsilano"; since she had lost some money to an unscrupulous acquaintance we agreed that I would pay her on the installment plan and I enjoyed our correspondence over the next six months. The painting was unsigned so Nellie signed it with her forefinger using paint from a can of house paint. A few weeks ago, all these years later, sitting at the beach looking out at the sailboats, there was Nellie's painting. 

"Sailboats at Kitsilano" by Nellie McClung

You can read Nellie's chapbook, Charles Tupper and Me (2004) that we published for her at http://coraclepress.com/chapbooks/mcclung/charles_tupper_and_me.html.

Kitsilano Showboat at Kitsilano Beach

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

9.

Former Prime Minister Chretien tells me
he’ll do what he can for us
to hang onto the building,
but there are other people who want it.
Also he wants me to lose weight, improve my health.

10.

In a basement, flooded with two or three feet of water,
big shits like loaves of bread
float in the water and I try to break them into slices
with a paddle so that when my wife arrives,
walking in the water, she won’t step on the shit.
I try to stuff the shit down a drain

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

7.

I am walking along a street of ice and snow.
I stop and pay for a newspaper with tokens from the casino.
Then I am in a dentist’s office full of Americans,
all smiling and young, in cubicles.
The dentists in their white jackets
are all eager to work, even when
a small black dog tries to get into the building.
I open a door and a stag is there
also trying to get in.
I try to hold him back, but he’s large
and incredibly strong as he breaks through the door.
Now he’s in the building, in the hallway, in a room.


8.

There are three of us sky diving,
holding hands forming a circle.
We are not falling, instead
we are ascending the sky.
As we rise higher, the physical body
feels not only healed, but ecstatic
in freedom from earth and an aging body:
I did not want to return to this life
I am living, I did not want to return
to the old life. I weep as I feel complete joy.

Clouds on a Vancouver beach

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

5.

I am a student again. I sit in the back of the classroom
with some women around me.
When I leave I put on my coat and think
I could offer to drive one of the women home, but I don’t.
Then I am at a banquet and someone is telling the poet George Johnston
that the university will name a building after him.
Jeanne, his wife, is there and she says she could cry hearing this.
George is wearing a very white shirt, he’s shaved off his beard,
and I embrace him, congratulate him on the building with his name.
Later, I ask the woman “Was George a student at the U of T?”
and she says he was and that’s why a building will be named after him.



6.

I return to 4614 Oxford Avenue to visit our old home.
I am in the flat when the present tenants arrive,
I point to out to them the leaves I’ve just raked,
how I’ve improved the lawns.
In the living room there are four fireplaces:
three are new, gas or electric. We visit other rooms.
I’ve forgotten my camera. I tell them who used to live in this building.
They seem to remember the people who lived upstairs,
they may have committed suicide in the 1980s.
I go for a walk, and it’s all traffic rushing by.
An old woman holds up her hand and crosses the street.

"Waves" and "Waves (2)"

At Jericho Beach, Vancouver, on July 9th, 2010.

Trees on UBC Campus (1)

Dream Journeys: Psyche's Night Journey

Church in Ste-Anne de Bellevue, QC, 2009

3.

At the bottom of a garbage can in the kitchen,
the honeybees I left there fly out as a great black cloud.
I run to the living room and then close myself in a sun porch.
A dog, with a black face, joins me.
“They stung my face,” he complains.
Others join us and somehow we get rid of the bees.
Meanwhile, someone is sitting on the stairs outside by a pool in the garden.

4.

The key is broken to the old Volkswagen,
but it still starts the car.
I am with people I don’t know
and we arrive at someone’s house
after driving along a street in the city;
I tell a woman, “You can be selective
and find a country to live in,
like finding a place in the city.”
We sit in her house, she is a retired academic.
I look around and when she returns to the room
I ask, “How did you continue getting so many perks
even though you are retired from the university?”
When I am in the car, leaving, a young girl
comes over to say goodbye and we kiss on the mouth,
her tongue is, momentarily, in my mouth.
I am in a car, or on a couch with my wife,
and want to make love, but a man enters
and we must discuss business.

Dream Journeys: "Psyche's Night Journey"

1.

Grandmother’s home has wood paneled walls
and a claw foot bathtub beside the stove in the kitchen.
I weep regretting I hadn’t returned sooner or more often to visit her.
On the second floor daylight enters at the wainscoting;
on hands and knees I pull a piece of wood
from the wall behind an antique table,
there is a crack along the wall
where a wooden beam lets in cold air.
Later, walking along a narrow path
someone has dug through the snow
in the street, I see a man
walking in the same direction
watching me.


2.

At the bottom of the front stairs
at Grandmother’s flat,
there is a blue clock
which no longer works;
a key to wind the clock
is in a little black drawer beside the clock.
Upstairs everything is very plain and in proper order.
Mother is staying there and I ask her,
“Did Grandma leave any messages for me?”
Mother is annoyed by the question,
she says because of all of my questions
she regrets I came here.

Honey bees on UBC campus

Walking by the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus last week I noticed honey bees gathering nectar and pollen in the flowers (pictured above). Notice the large pollen sacs on the honey bees' legs. There were also a few bumble bees, and other bees, but the honey bee is always of interest and anyone who has kept bees has a fondness for them. Back in the mid-1970s my friend R.R. Skinner opened his hives for me to observe his bees. That was interesting and I knew right away that one day I would keep my own bees. On my visits to R.R. I would write down pretty much everything he said--I seem to have the ability of sitting and listening to people talk about themselves for many hours in a non-judgemental and fairly passive way--but R.R.'s stories about beekeeping were always interesting, including moving hives on his bicycle and overwintering a hive in his bedroom. Beekeepers can be quite obsessive about bees, and this obsession seems eccentric to people who have never kept bees. But one man's eccentricity is another man's normal life.



Above, the L.S. Klinck Building on the UBC campus.

It was in the early 1980s that my friend, the poet George Johnston, sat down with me and went over what I would need to establish my own apiary. I ordered some beekeeping equipment through the mail but also drove to Bedford, Quebec to pick up boxes of bees. That's how you buy honey bees, several thousand come in a wooden box with a wire mesh front and a queen bee contained in a small box inside the larger box. You literally dump the bees into a hive like bits of Styrofoam; however, the queen bee is released into the hive only gradually so that she will be accepted by the other bees. How do you release the queen gradually? There is a sugar plug that the worker bees and the queen eat opening a space for the queen to emerge into the hive. If, for whatever reason, the worker bees don't like the queen, they will quite literally kill the queen, which means more work for the beekeeper as she will have to be replaced. There is also a smell to bees, it is feral and reminds us that bees are never domesticated, only contained. I went with George, and possibly with George Elliot, about whom George has written some memorable poems, to beekeeping seminars across the border in New York State. These events were always memorable and enjoyable to attend. I also remember, one time, driving home from Bedford with boxes of bees and beekeeping equipment and the brakes failing on the car... somehow I still made it back home, maybe fifty miles distance. That was interesting...

I used to have about ten hives that I kept in the field, near some apple trees, about a hundred feet behind The Cedars, our house on the Trout River in Huntingdon, (more correctly, Godmanchester) Quebec. I had a big hand-turned honey extractor that I bought second hand, but like many beekeepers I preferred making comb honey. Comb honey is cut directly from the frame, it's honey the way bees make it in a hive, but it also means you've destroyed the comb the bees have made, while with liquid honey you can recycle the frame with the comb on it because all you've done is cut off a surface layer of wax before extracting the honey. You extract the honey by the centrifugal force of spinning the frames. There's money in bees wax that can be made into candles and pollen that some people believe has health benefits, but this should be qualified, if you want pollen for allergies or whatever, you need local pollen since your allergies are to local plants, not pollen from China that has dubious if any value. Beekeepers have always known that bee stings can help relieve arthritis, and this seems to be getting some press in recent years; however, I remember R.R. suggesting that the bee sting acted as a kind of accupuncture treatment, and maybe this is a correct explanation for this .

Unless you've kept bees you may not understand the happiness one can experience opening hives on a hot summer day. The bees are probably fairly passive on such days, but a whiff of smoke passed over the top of the frames seems to keep them busy and diverted from the beekeeper's activities. Never wear perfume or any other scent to an apiary, I've had a nasty experience being stung by doing that. I kept bees for about ten years and was put out of business by mites from across the US border infesting my bees. Don't worry about killer bees, thirty years after I began beekeeping I still don't see them as a problem here in Canada. I remember, as well, lying in the grass near the entrance to the hives and watching bees coming and going, what a wonderful sight that is! They're bringing in nectar, their pollen sacs are full, and some bees are removing dead bees; in the fall the drones, male bees that inseminate the queen on her single maiden flight, are being expelled. Don't forget, all worker honey bees are female. Lying there, in the grass on a summer day, that's when you realize the genuine affection one feels for the honey bee.

Ten Notes on Thomas D’Arcy McGee

Thomas D’Arcy McGee

1. Thomas D’Arcy McGee wasn’t a poet, like W.B Yeats, who was also involved in politics. Yeats was a distinguished poet and later, after Irish independence, he became a Senator in Ireland. McGee is a political thinker and activist who also wrote and published poems. Yeats: poet first; McGee: politician first. 

 2. Most of McGee’s poems have little interest for us today; if they do interest us, it is because they were written by Thomas D’Arcy McGee. 

Here I am visiting McGee's mausoleum at Cote des Neiges
Cemetery in Montreal. 

3. McGee makes several very contradictory changes in his life: he was a liberal in Ireland, then a very conservative and reactionary Roman Catholic in the United States, and then a liberal again in Canada. These are all opposing and difficult to reconcile positions. 

4. McGee pointed out that most Irish immigrants in the mid-19th Century did better in Canada than had they gone to the United States. My own family, like many others from Ireland, flourished in Canada. Canada has been a country of opportunities for us. 

5. Psychology, per se, had not yet been invented during McGee’s life. McGee’s psychology seems to have been dominated by the early death of his mother and the subsequent rejection of him by his stepmother. McGee had an unfortunate personal trait of attempting to ingratiate himself with those he felt were his superiors. Perhaps this was caused by his early home life. 

6. McGee was obviously a highly intelligent man—perhaps he was gifted—a man whose career before coming to Canada was distinguished by his writing, his work as an editor, and his political activism for Irish independence. He rose quickly in his career as a writer and orator for his political causes, he was more famous before coming to Canada than most of us realize. 

7. McGee’s assassination, by Patrick Whelan of the Fenian Brotherhood, helped to mythologize McGee’s life. 

 8. I doubt that most of McGee’s poetry has anything other than historical interest. Just compare him to other poets of approximately that time, compare him to Emile Nelligan, the Montreal-born poet. Nelligan’s poetry has depth and sophistication; for the most part, McGee’s poetry doesn’t. 

 

9. What is McGee's achievement? As a politician, he achieved what he worked towards, which is Canadian Confederation, but having achieved that he was also personally less and less popular with his constituency. 

10. Few things help to mythologize a life better than an untimely death; in this case McGee's assassination differentiates him from just about all of the other politicians at that time. The details of his death are that in April 1868, after speaking late into the night in the House of Commons, he returned to the humble rooming house where he lived in Ottawa, here he was murdered by Patrick Whelan. A few days later, over forty thousand people crowded Montreal streets as his funeral cortege passed. This was the beginning of his transformation from historical personage to mythological character. In this, he does what few poets, or politicians, achieve: he is remembered.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, April 21, 2010

In this row of four mausoleums, located at Montreal's Cote des Neiges Cemetery, Thomas D'Arcy McGee's mausoleum is the second from the right. Several years ago McGee's mausoleum was renovated, perhaps by the Canadian government. This visit was on an overcast day--on April 21, 2010--not far away, I found wild flowers (mostly triliums) beginning to flower.

I've written here before about McGee, he was a great orator, one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, and a poet.