Come Back (15 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Sun. Oct.14/84 Go to corner of Hyde Park in morning. Walk around, a sunny warm day at last. My body is starting to go to seed because I can’t take care of it, don’t feed it very well. I dislike tremendously living in this condition. My hair continues to fall out: I’ll be totally bald by 25. My chances of winning A get slimmer at the same time. The sun shines through the peak of the band shell where I sit. Leaves are falling around me
I heard a leaf fall when I died
Who wrote that?
I heard that once, I think, at Aspen Creek. I’m listening—too much ugly city noise and my mind always stuck in the same stupid roundabout. Are Hardy’s words true, does one love/feel more at a distance? Oh I hope not; I want to feel it close. Surely something can happen in my life as it does in others. Well, if anything, I can always go back to the old routine of church, arty conversations with Joan, and glimpses of A a short distance away time goes on and soon this too will pass because lives do
change the N Kin character says “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it before,” meaning tried to see things from another person’s point of view. I’m so tired of seeing with my but then I do not excite myself, only others can excite oh bla bla bla Is Hardy right, does love end on contact. I pray and hope not can it the English leaves keep falling I can’t hear them yet they’ll be all gone at Aspen Creek
October Monday 15
Cinema bookshop, then St. James Park to read. Peter from Perth and Amnon from Israel leave: even short forced relation changes sadden me, though I realize I don’t really care for those two. Go to NFTheatre but decide not to see Maria Callas in
Medea
again. Her long, devastating face. Walk at night, Waterloo Bridge, no rain but cool. Victoria Embankment the heart of the great Babylon London Paris
einsamkeit
forests of people laughing worse than forests of trees two more days I did hear a
AIRMAIL PAPER
,
both sides scrawled
Gabriel Wiens London, England
Oct. 15, 1984
Dear Mir,
I have to write to you, even a short note, because I know a letter from here would thrill you. I received your letters, and it is extremely pleasant to realize that people care enough to write.
And it’s not that I don’t want to write letters, it’s just that I hate writing letters, and, possibly more to the point, I really have nothing to say. My mind works so slowly
crud! this is already getting nowhere and so I’ll have to start again, then again, till I finally quit and mail nothing.
Anyhow. You ask if I’m lonely travelling by myself. Well the truth of the matter here is that I expect aloneness to be my native state. I have always been lonely; however, I have not always been alone. When we were kids you and me were never alone, remember we were always together, but when one grows older we’ve been apart so much, college, university, you now—well—the being alone part does cause problems, especially when travelling. Both lonely and alone. Quite frankly, Mir, I don’t know how you do it so well. I absolutely hate
Well, London is a nice enough place. I could enjoy living here, with a flat of my own like a few Canadians I’ve met, for a period of time. But London is a dump in many ways. There is nothing particularly marvellous about this or any city, not the ones I’ve seen.
This brings me to the point of the letter and my trip. I’ve found out that no place (physical place) oh bla bla bla
what bla am I
blaing to say
Lets face it, I’ve been trying to find some sort of emotional relief for myself somewhere in this world. A physical place will not do it. It will either be done through mental means—i.e. through thinking things through—or with other peoples’ companionship.
I hate this writing, but you’re going to get this sucker anyway
I could say that I’ve always envied people—like you—who are so stable and always resourceful. I am driven by obsessions, very simple obsessions but they control me nonetheless. On this trip I realized they aren’t justified, because what really exists? Do you think about all the stuff you fly over, bus past, what you see in Peru and Ecuador is really there? Have you actually touched/smelled, or do you just see, hear, breathe for a while and accept whatever and walk away? Are the things still there, really, after you are gone? How do you know? Even if you take a picture, as I do once in a while and a long time later develop it, it shows only what was there while I—awww—
You and me, and then Denn too, we had such fun together. I could say I would like to have spent more time with you in the past, and also in the future. But lets face it: how many of the things we would like ever turn/return into reality (whatever that is). So I won’t say it; why say lies. But this does not mean that I don’t want to.
I do say I’d love to come to S. Am. to you, my sweet sister, you have it so together, but I don’t have any money and the prospects for getting more are dim
right now. And you be careful, all those Latino machos.
Sorry, I’m so long and just send you this piece of junk but
Love Gabe
**note: I shouldn’t send you this crap this is terrible only the second letter if I mail it
DAILY PLANNER
1984:
October Tuesday 16
Old people sit in St. James Park and stare straight ahead. Could one do that for a lifetime? How long is that? A pigeon—dove?—circles me but I have nothing to offer. What can people do with each other / what have any of us to offer, really
*rent paid till night of 17th CDN$1 = 62.5p
POCKET LOOSE-LEAF NOTES
(no dates)
Movie
Nosferatu
(Herzog) again just to see Isabelle Adjani walk through the town square. No real sound, only voices, dancing. Then
The Tenant
:
“If I cut off my head, is it ‘me and my body’ or ‘me and my head’? What right does my head have to call itself me?”
“And anyway, what right do I have to call myself ‘my self’?”
Yes, I’ve decided. What I want to do in Edmonton is to get myself together (physically, emotionally, financially) for my Personal Oldman River Quest (too obvious for future readers; well since there never will be one except me who gives a flying
Oldman River, south Alberta April 25, 85–May 4, 85
Is this all I live for. I hope not, but it will be my guiding force for the next months in Canada. However I must face it. No physical space/place in this world is what I seek, but, as Nabokov writes: “not an
escape
(which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter floor of existence), but rather
relief
from the
itch of the mind
” (I hope)
DAILY PLANNER
1984:
October Wednesday 17
At last at last. 7:30 concert in St. John’s Smith Square, 2nd row aisle seat, baroque church unbelievable as heaven.
Bach Mass in B minor
, soprano Emma Kirkby, marvellous dignity and natural elegance. She can be full of womanly compassion and also such delicate delight. She immerses herself in the music, she sings with exquisite perfection. What a divine voice, what a lovely person.
Kyrie eleison Christe eleison Dona nobis pacem
Lord have mercy Christ have mercy Grant us peace
October Thursday 18
(England–Netherlands–Arctic Canada) Piccadilly, platform 6 first train 5:55 Heathrow 9:00 KLM Schiphol 13:00 CP 373 to Edmonton 60 p and 13 pds left + $120 Amer. Ah Gabe, you’re going back home—What does that mean?
People behind me speak Spanish, where are you Mir?
Thought: what if I were to have an accident and not wake up for 20 years. What would it be like to wake up 20 years later and feel that no time has passed but
everyone else—including me—is actually that much older. Hnnnn how lovely
Lovely indeed. Dearest Gabe, a simple Rip van Winkle hesitation: twenty years en route over Arctic Canada. It is October 2004. Ailsa is thirty-three.
So: after two final weeks of again mostly waiting, waiting in London, a few beers with your Polish friend—no mention of him after the guilty (and still letter-less) embassy—“a few (unnoted) Canadians,” books, maps, records, and movies meticulously noted, at least seventeen movies in fourteen days,
Tess
and
Paris, Texas
× 2,
The Tenant
× 3. And the ultimate Emma Kirkby, beautiful woman and artist, your darling classic Bach soprano, you pay to change your airline ticket home by a day to see and hear her in the sublime four-towered baroque church of St. John’s Smith Square, an architectural magnificence unimaginable for a Canadian grandchild of Russian Mennonite village refugees: in over two hours of baroque Latin prayer she sings either (Soprano 1) three duets or (Soprano 2) one solo and one duet. No matter, even as she sits above you waiting to sing she is all you could desire in a woman, inarticulately all. And of course forever beyond you; untouchable. A great gulf, fixed, and you are completely satisfied. Like Tess; whose place you do not visit in Marnhull, though it is only a brief bus-ride to Dorset. You lie inert—conveniently ill?—in London, you could be lying anywhere wasting in desire, eventually you scrawl in the margin of your planner, “I’ll go with a car one day in the future.” And then,
more eventually, you hoist yourself out of bed onto your feet, you walk across the street to a ridiculous movie shed and face 107 minutes of contrived horror to see the electronic shadow of a beautiful woman pass from the screen, again, mere seconds, and then you stay another 125 minutes for the same image of the same woman to, among other acts, seem to sleep with a death-conspiracy haunted man; again.
My haunted son. Twenty unconscious years. Could you not at least dream—act—a few present seconds into beauty? They were there; daily you recorded a foretaste of some of them; why could you not believe, and act?
To wait can be the ultimate act. And you did wait, so much and so often. But then, finally, you would not.
In the last pages of the pocket loose-leaf you took on your Scotland trip you carefully added up—perhaps in the (for you) devastating luxury of the world’s only Ailsa Craig Hotel, already anticipating, dreading, the coming back to Edmonton—plodding backwards over your endured European time of “what pray god am I doing here”:
Days
Oct: 18 Sept: 30 Aug: 31 July: 8 = total 87 days
—incl. London 21 Athens 25 Germany only 3 + bits of 2
Below these numbers you add:
Have I screwed up. Have I blown something that might have been. Oh please. I can’t stand it
Early evening April light slanted through the barred basement window, revealing as sunrise. Somewhere a piano was playing, Yo, there were notes but no tune … gradually Hal recognized his own wrinkled skin: hand and arm blotched and hairy and underlaid with vein-worms. Here it was still, his seventy-five-years-of-dying body, still so relentless, feeling itself into its particular, inescapable existence, his prickly right foot, his thinning gut, his
What right do I have to call myself “my self”? If I cut off my head, am I “me and my body” or “me and my head”?
He was alone in his basement. Bent like a question mark on a worn wooden chair, the one Yo salvaged from the college throw-away heap in Winnipeg and he fixed the back of it forever—well, until now—a man-made thing so simple to fix, just glue and two screws. Sitting in the surround he had scrabbled out of Yo’s carefully ordered papers, books, boxes. 4:37 p.m., if she came down the stairs and saw this mess she would be laughing at him. Until she recognized what all it was. The laughter of recognition so different from that of humour, of irony— stupidity. 4:39 p.m. He had to risk his guilt and The Coffee Shack, should have half an hour ago. Blessed be Owl.
“There were four ravens today up there,” Owl said.
“I didn’t look. Up is hard for old people.”
“Four,” Owl said. “Real loud, right across there on top of Ten Thousand Villages, jumping on the front there and yelling at each other.”
