The Library of Lost Interests, 2

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!

Meetings with RR Skinner

 

Photo of RR Skinner provided by Patricia Proenza in 1988

                                    

Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

-- Quoted by RR Skinner

What follows (in the following posts) are the events and narrative of meeting RR Skinner; our first meeting was in 1974, the last meeting was in 1986. This is taken from notes I made after these meetings; they were marathon sessions of talking with (mostly listening to) Reg, including what he told me about himself, his life, his family, and his observations on life. When I told Reg in 1985 that I would like to write about him he gave me a thick manila envelope containing copies of his various essays written over a thirty year period, I returned these papers to him later. The manuscript that I wrote became "Meetings with RR", it’s 125 pages of double-spaced text; it is unpublished and probably will never be published.

RR Skinner was born on  03 July 1909; he died at Bognor Regis on 31 December 1999 (these dates may not be accurate). From age eight to eleven he did not attend school because of frail health, he had a tubercular bowel and spent these three years in hospital or convalescing at home; this was a time of relative isolation and solitude. After returning to school he found that he couldn't pronounce certain words because of a stammer, but he overcame this through an effort of will. He was the seventh of fifteen children, plus two adopted children. Reg's mother, who ran and ministered her own spiritualist church in Bethnal Green, London, believed that her son would be the next world-teacher and she raised him for that position (this sounds terribly inflated today but it was also the aim of the Theosophical Society to find the next messiah or world teacher, a Buddha, and the person they eventually found was Jiddu Krishnamurti who eventually renounced this idea). In a letter to a friend RR's mother said that the child she was carrying, the future RR Skinner, would be the next messiah. RR told me that his ability to vet people was part of his training at his mother's church, it was his training to be a psychic and spiritual teacher. Many years ago I attended a few spiritualist meetings, these aren't seances but church services, sometimes these services were held at rented spaces in office buildings, and once at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah or, at other times, the Spiritual Science Fellowship, both located in Montreal; there is usually a non-denominational religious service, including hymns, followed by the medium addressing the congregation and communicating messages allegedly from the departed to their family members. I believe RR's mother, Elizabeth Mary Eagle Skinner, was the main influence of his life.

Oral history is an important source of information on the past; some of us, but not many, listen to the old folks and write down what they say. My mother spoke to me often about our family history, in fact it’s what we talked about the most and, now, years later, I am still impressed at the accuracy of what she remembered; I still have notes -- written on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper -- recording what she said about our family's history. Part of my interest in family history is that my mother would mention relatives that I had never heard of and I wanted to know who they were, how they were related to me, what was my place in the genealogy of the family, I needed to make sense of what she said; I was the youngest member of our family and I wanted a record of what people said, what people did, and who these people were; I knew even then that no one lives forever and this might be my only chance to record what happened in the past. This wasn't for entertainment, it was to make sense of life by writing things down, writing as a way to understand something; and writing is a way of finding order in things, of putting things into their proper order. I am neither obsessive nor compulsive but I am serious and I know that I have a calling to write poems and a great need to make sense and order of this life, to remember the ancestors, and to record the events of my own life; towards this end I have kept a diary everyday since January 1965 and I have written books of poetry and literary criticism. This has been my life’s journey. From my interest and research in family history I have compiled our Morrissey family history; and I have written about my paternal grandmother, and her central place in our family, in Remembering Girouard Avenue. 

Address of RR's sister, Rosemary Skinner on RR's appointment card;
I was leaving for Ireland and RR suggested meeting his sister,
but this meeting never happened. Summer 1978.

After the flood

 

After the flood

What some people dispute about climate change is whether it is caused by people or that it is a natural phenomenon. Whatever the cause we've had a climate roller coaster this summer. Forest fires, heat waves, and recently a downpour of rain here in Montreal so great that our infrastructure was not able to deal with it; in this part of our neighbourhood, many houses and apartment buildings had flooded basements. Right now the City is removing piles of wet garbage, broken gyprock, flooring, soaked furniture, papers, books, computers, microwaves, and just about anything else you can think of, all of it destroyed in flooded basements. I arrived home on the day of the rain ready to use a bucket and remove water from our basement, but it was a lost cause, the water poured in from a basement shower drain and toilet. I was not alone, for the following week, when driving on adjacent streets, there were huge piles of flood damaged stuff at the end of many driveways. As the week progressed the piles of wet garbage grew larger.

So, as I was throwing my papers from the last ten or so years into contractor bags, my soaking wet archives including letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and photographs, I wondered at how neat I had been, labeling every file folder, placing them in now soaking Bankers Boxes, and I thought what nonsense had propelled me into saving all of this stuff? But the fact is, the more I bagged the more relieved I felt, getting rid of this stuff, these many boxes of papers, now I wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible not just because they were damaged and I wanted to get our home back to normal, but because I wanted to discard the mania of saving all of this stuff. And then the thought that I've been a fool, thinking this stuff had any value and that I could somehow defeat time by writing everything down, in diaries and poems and letters, and saving all of this junk. These papers would have been in my literary archives, the latest and possibly last accrual, but even these papers would have eventually ended up in the dust bin which is how the cosmos works, everything returns to nothing, and it does not favour permanency. I think of the Doukhobors who, finding one of there own has gone over to the side of materialism, no longer a "spirit wrestler", will burn down that person's big house and, they thought, restore the person to a spiritual sense of life. But, at the end, does any of it matters? We are all headed to nothing from the nothing we came from, leaving behind a few words, chalk on sidewalks, or a fragment of a poem, and even that is being optimistic, the rest is like Shelley's "Ozymandias". I am too old for this folly, or any folly for that matter.