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Spring, 1982 photo by Robert Chatfield |
Harold Rhenisch Essays |
Fall, 1998 photo by Diane Rhenisch |
This page collects two essays by Harold Rhenisch. The first, and more recent,Up Against the Wall, honours the Canadian poet P.K. Page. The second, First Words , originally published in Event magazine, laid the foundation for all of Harold Rhenisch's writing since 1985. A third essay, Poetry and Magic, can be found online at the Salmon Bay Review.
Up Against the Wall, or, Learning to Live Without a Map
When presented with an impenetrable wall, there are many possible approaches, short of retreat in the fog: you can scale the wall with crampons and ropes, ever mindful of boiling oil; you can paint over the wall, then walk into the painting; you can adjust your imagination so that the wall is no longer there. P.K. Page taught me how to do the latter. Her teaching career spanned a few months in the early winter of 1978 in a second year Creative Writing workshop at the University of Victoria. The impact of two of her incidental statements from that time changed my life.Firstly, P.K. put me in my place. At that time when I was first beginning to consider that to become a poet might not be a promethean presumption I would force myself to sleep no more than six hours a night in order to have the time to read. And read I did, about thirty pounds of books a night -- enough to stuff a queen-sized pillow case to bursting. I was not selective, but tried to read everything, and at breakneck speed, too: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Pound, Hemingway, Beowulf, Bergson, Euripides, Rilke, Kant, Rimbaud, and a thousand others, fifty versions of Snow White, and whole shelves full of musty anthropological journals that made me sneeze as I read between the scurrying book lice. I added each book like a butterfly pinned and mounted in a glass case. It was an honest attempt at international travel, but it had a crippling flaw: I understood hardly a word I read. I was barely conscious after all. During that time I wrote a very mythic poem in which the trout in a stream became trout, stream, and poem all at the same time. I had written myself into a mental country I did not recognize. I wanted a map. I was surrounded by bush. "What is reality?" I asked Derk Wynand that day. Poor guy. About all he could do to that question was raise his eyebrows and look troubled. "I'm serious," I said. "I know," he answered. "But I don't know what it is." Then he added in what tried to be a reassuring voice, "Keep looking." I recognize that country pretty well now, but there still aren't any maps. I know now that they would just get in the way, but back then, by the time the February rains hit town the whole attempt at absorbing world literature and philosophy left me feeling like I was standing at the bottom of a seamless stone wall three hundred metres high and vanishing into fog. That rock wouldn't budge and there was no way to get over it. That's where P.K. stepped in. I was writing sprawling mythic poems, bright in imagery and for the most part totally incomprehensible. "Harold," she said. "You have to understand: no poet ever wrote a poem by working hard, but by being incredibly lazy. Poets sit around doing nothing for a long, long time. They are very irresponsible. Then a poem might come." I left town for a week, went to the mountains, and went fishing. The poems came.
Secondly, P.K. showed me what my place was. In the midst of all my dread seriousness she introduced me to the poems of Lorca and Rosenblatt, bright, sunny, and musical, all painted in clear, bold colours in direct sunlight. It has become a kind of oracular cliché that no-one can teach anyone else to write and that the most that young writers can hope for is a benevolent mentorship, yet it's not mentorship that P.K. gave me. She gave me a glimpse of wisdom that only revealed itself to me years later. Trying to define wisdom would be like trying to define reality (oh no), yet P.K.'s words do, I believe, spring from it: "Anyone who can write a poem," she said. "can also paint a picture. The two arts come from the same source." To me at that time, with only a rudimentary sense of form, music, and imagery, this contention seemed not only foreign but peculiar as well. I took it as a statement of personal philosophy, applicable to P.K.'s gifts, but inapplicable to my own. Well, two decades have come and gone. Whenever I find myself caught by the temptations of philosophies and grand systems, lose my path in their gridworks and find myself standing below that massive granite wall or in a blinding, plutonium sunlight as the sun reflects equally off every droplet of fog, I remember P.K. If laziness doesn't get me out of there, then drawing does. For someone caught up with words to a rather extreme degree, to give words all up and intuitively follow the same designs through the world without their latitudes and longitudes is a delicious and healing luxury. It is like coming home. It is like sweeping the light clear of obstructions.
P.K. has not been my only guide in literature, of course, yet in all my years in the Interior of British Columbia, a little removed from literary society and often glimpsing it only out of the corner of my eye as it goes by the orchards and forests with trumpets and red velvet capes, with psaltery music and jugglers throwing oranges, and leather-gloved women carrying proud, fierce hawks on their wrists, along with the faith of a few distant poets the company of artists and the imagery, inquisitiveness, and inclusiveness of visual art have sustained me. 1996
First Words, reprinted from Event Magazine.
On those rare occasions when he speaks German, a language he abandoned forty years ago, my father becomes cultured, measured and articulate. Learned on the farms of the Okanagan in the 1950's, his English is limited to what that colonial land had managed to express. It is a language of rough jokes, a simplified vocabulary, and few if any tools for cultural expression. This is my first English. Artistic and philosophic vocabularies can be developed from it, but to do so they must approach dialect. It seems unreasonable to expect that words can remain forever constant, forestalling all the disparate needs of language by focusing creativity into emotion and imagery. At the moment, to those who live here in this Edwardian twilight, art is the emotional response to landscape. In any way to build upon this response means to express the most complex thoughts in the most simple, even stunted, vocabulary. Even Plato became so frustrated with sanctioned poetry that he created an entirely new art, philosophy, out of words and chatter, that playful banter with Socrates under the olives.Even the farmers I live and work among survive not by their orchard work, but by words: everyone is always stoppin in on everyone else and interrupting their work: leaning against ladders or pickups, stepping in for coffee. It keeps you sane in a place and occupation that neither allows nor accepts other forms of mental expression. Everyone resents the time lost, everyone inflicts it on everyone else, and everyone longs for it: laughter, the sharing of opinion, concern and insight, and gossip. It takes the place of art and journalism: a system of continual renewal and re-evaluation, in which everone is working to place themselves in an ever-changing context. Before action comes words -- commerce between people. In my opinion, the differences from the revolutions of socratic thouht are slight and reflect only the organizational differences between Greek and English in general: while Greek is structured around expressions of what are to us nonexistent comparison and dissimilarity, English delights in cumulative re-statements of terms.
The fruit industry in which I work has lived under regulation, control, and subsidy for fifty-five years, and has boomed and foundered again and again because of it. Apples are a colonial, hence cheap, product, for export, now run out of its traditional markets by the new colonies of the Third World, but without anything long-standing or more sophisticated being built up to take over. Without a sophisticated system of art and philosophy a colonial, import-export mentatlity has remained our only matrix. The Edwardians came here to produce from contact with the land a surplus for sale on a distant market. The end weas to gain enough money (a foreign product) to ensure both continued participation in a distant culture and contact with the soil. With my poetry I am their heir: I remain here, and send my poems out in the mail. But as I've learned from gossiping on the farms, an intelectual life depends upon the commerce our langauge can provide and develop between people. Their mustultimatly be a speech, a means of philosophic or artistic expression, that will be as alien to someone, say, from
Vancouver, as the work of any poet from Vancouver is, sadly, to just about everyone here. As it stands now we export a Harrowsmith image of the land -- recognizable and of use to foreigners: tourist art, for people moving past at great speed. A new language is not something easily exported: people are not interested in folk culture, but in ideas of folk culture -- that is, they are interested in their own culture and the windows it can provide into the world. It is difficult to recognize the unfamiliar.
Ultimately, this country must develop dialects, and from them independent traditions of thought -- which start with language. And we must give up the crippling notion of export, in which all our wealth is sent away -- sold; the colonial notion that finds justification and worth only through the acceptance of our products on a distant stage, instead of seeing them as the expressions of our mental commerce amongst ourselves, for ourselves. Art must come out of our coffee breaks and our fear of the mountains from which we can't part, or it is our signature on our notice of eviction. Simply by having written words we cannot return to the land except through words, which have removed us from it. Thus, to remain here and to develop from our history, we must make new words. At the moment, our language is idle.
If even Plato could turn away from poetry to make it new, and if the colonial Greeks coudl phrase the most complex philosophies and cosmologies into language so simple you would never have believed it could hold them, and so gave us the gospels, we can do the same thing right here, right now: whenever a convention is set up, it means there is an empty field somewhere, or an old city in ruins, where you can look up and see the stars. If you whisper even one word there, all the others come, and the whole world comes alive -- a field of heavy-sseeded grasses surging in a cobalt wind, or a crowd pushing in a sagging door shouting for a glass of beer. The world is always willing to embrace us. 1985.
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