“A Wood-path” by Bliss Carman

 

Veeto in 2015

At evening and at morning
By an enchanted way
I walk the world in wonder,
And have no word to say.


It is the path we traversed
One twilight, thou and I;
Thy beauty all a rapture,
My spirit all a cry.


The red leaves fall upon it,
The moon and mist and rain,
But not the magic footfall
That made its meaning plain.

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course, October 2024

 On 11 October 2024. 

Mount Royal Cemetery, 27 November 2012

 

My father's grave before a monument was installed

"Between Chaston and Green"

The garden, 19 November 2024

It’s the same garden but it changes, it’s a living entity subject to the changing seasons, weather, and time of day. It was Clause Monet who showed us how the sunlight at the different times of the day changed our perception and our emotional response to the same environment, the paintings in the Série des Cathédrales de Rouen is a good example of this. And so with each changing season it’s the same garden but it's like a different garden, that’s how it appears, but it’s still the same garden, changing, growing, this place of peace and quiet in the city. 

"Come to me here from Crete" by Sappho

 

Come to me here from Crete,

To this holy temple, where

Your lovely apple grove stands,

And your altars that flicker

With incense.

And below the apple branches, cold

Clear water sounds, everything shadowed

By roses, and sleep that falls from

Bright shaking leaves.

And a pasture for horses blossoms

With the flowers of spring, and breezes

Are flowing here like honey:

Come to me here,

Here, Cyprian, delicately taking

Nectar in golden cups

Mixed with a festive joy,

And pour.

Louis Dudek's Continuation and The Beatles "Revolution 9"

 

Morgan's Department Store, downtown Montreal, 1955 

Continuation is an assemblage of random and seemingly unrelated statements, mundane or philosophical, epigrammatic and often unrelated to other statements in the same poem. I doubt many readers (or Dudek’s friends) understood, or even liked, what Dudek was doing in Continuation; similarly, The Beatles song, "Revolution 9", left most listeners bewildered, the song is repetitive, disturbing, and makes no rational sense and yet, ironically, even paradoxically, it makes perfect sense as does Dudek’s Continuation. Most of The Beatles’ songs are popular music, none are as idiosyncratic and experimental as “Revolution 9”; indeed, this is a piece of music, of voices and sounds, that suggests the overwhelming banality of everyday life.                  

Both “Revolution 9"  and Continuation seem anomalies in their creators’ bodies of work; neither bring the audience much immediate pleasure until some sense or meaning is found in the work; both are more cerebral, more intellectual, than is found in most music or poetry. “Revolution 9” has  a vision of the meaningless of life, life is overwhelmingly banal, purposeless, and filled with small talk and trivialities. Remember the existentially bleak lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby”, existence has failed, there is nothing to believe in, and life is without purpose or meaning; this is a long distance from typical Beatles music. But it is also the human condition found in another Beatles' song, “A Day in the Life”: 

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream

Meanwhile, Continuation is a departure, a deepening, and an extension of the form and content of Dudek's previous books, for instance Atlantis (1967); form and content are extensions of each other.  Atlantis, and Dudek's other travel-centered books, are connected to place, to geography, to consecutive thinking, while Continuation is connected to mundane existence, it is a stream of consciousness that exists in the realm of thought, it is bits and pieces of existence strung together, more Mallarme than Pound, maybe some Joyce and Woolf, but Pound is still present. Both “Revolution 9” and Continuation have moved away from the narrative function and into observation and statement, to isolated thinking, to non sequitur statement rather than aesthetic artifice; there seems to be little distinction in the importance of one thought over another; they are cut-ups, experiments in process, collages of ideas. Both are the thought processes of consciousness in the darkness of a sound proof isolation chamber, speaking to itself; it is close to being theatre of the absurd.

Note: Listen to the "Ideas" programmes on CBC radio for a discussion on Number Nine, https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16012646-nine-a-number-synchronicity

On Walking

I am a walker, always walking alone, usually taking one of two or three possible routes depending on how I feel, weather conditions, and how much time I have for a walk. Sometimes I take photographs on my walk, my solitary walk; it’s all I do for exercise, but it’s also time for thinking. I am told that to be healthy one needs to lift weights, go to the gym, do yoga, tai chi, do jig saw puzzles to prevent dementia, don’t eat salt, avoid sugar, don’t smoke, don’t drink, eat a Mediterranean diet, and more, and I’d like to do these things, but all I do is walk. 

                                            

The hidden trail in November

It’s good to be alive/ on a fall day/ with the sunlight in the yellow leaves/ and the smell of fall/ in the air . . .      7 November 2024