by Alex Pugsley
I guess I haven’t made contact in a while. Too much here. Too much going on. I’ve received stacks of wonderful gifts from you: photos, books, musical scores, demo recordings, cassette tapes, all these pieces of your life you’ve sent, and here I’ve been wasting too much to write back. I’ve more than once wanted to reply and it’s not that I haven’t been thinking of everyone it’s just that I’ve been thinking of everyone.
I started to write a few things which I abandoned and never sent. I can’t seem to write letters anymore. We all of us used to write so many letters. So many feelings then, in the long ago, not really fully formed nor understood, from people who, in a very real way, don’t exist anymore. And somewhere, too, I suppose, are all the letters I’ve written. I used to live on those letters. I couldn’t keep from writing them. Now I don’t want to commit myself to words. Don’t like the sight of my own handwriting. Reveals too much.
Gail and Bridgette just left on the train back to London. They arrived here the week after Christmas, stopping by on their way somewhere, Grenoble, I think. So I’ve been playing host the last six days. I took them to a dessert evening organized by Ravi from Gloucester and Hislop-Hyphen-Harris, ten of us sitting round a draughty room in Trinity passing bottles of pink wine leftwards to each other. Ravi from Gloucester got very drunk and excited, rubbing his hands, prodding Bridgette to ask if I were gay, and sniggering about Trevor-Roper and Mensa and roasting people in bronze bulls.
“Brideshead Retarded,” as Bridgette described it. She was a big hit, incidentally. No one dared take on Gail and her loony, leftist blather but Bridgette captivated. Here they were expecting some farm girl from the Colonies, not Thoroughly Cosmopolitan Bridgette. She really is the most exceptional bitch, you know. But I like her now, once she feels she knows you. She loves to perform, as if she’s only vaguely aware of her effect on people. I don’t mind it so much anymore. I have a personae with her that has nothing to do with the way I act with anyone else. But she seems to like it, so.
Walking back in the drizzle, I got in an argument with Gail and a married couple from Indiana. Gail was ranting, in her exasperating semblance of logic, about the State of Britain when the married couple from Indiana made some facile comment about France not being German today because Napoleon sold Louisiana. I said Napoleon would have sold Quebec just as fast and it went from there to the Seven Years War, the Boer War, the Munroe and Truman doctrines, the Mountbatten Plan, all the way up to Reagan. I don’t know why but I am always forced into the role of Stodgy Traditionalist with these people and I got very oracular and declamatory: Cyrus Reaching for the Sententious Phrase and Hating Himself For It. All of it left me feeling, surprise, surprise, ill at ease and vaguely bitter.
I’m afraid I still have trouble liking Gail. It’s instinctive. She’s very agitated about something that has nothing to do with me. I know it’s been a big relief for her to decide she disapproves of me. And Aubrey, she talks about you all the time. I think she was wildly in love with you, wildly envious of you, and wildly resentful of all of it. There’s some ugly, dominating urge at work which is near to a very renewable supply of anger and distrust.
Before they arrived, I’d been ending up in different libraries, Bodleian, British, and ghosted in and out of London doing research at the Public Records Office. Whole lives, epochs, buried in shelves and shelves of documents, this muddle of lost histories. Gail is right, of course: Britain’s fucked, the class system, the universities, the institutions, fucked a long time ago. Britain is Johnny Fartpants and agro and hillsides blowing with Twix wrappers.
Strange insularity here. I’ve been back in Cambridge a while but still feel displaced. I’m left pretty much on my own and I haven’t been getting much sleep. It seems to snow and rain continuously. It’s cold all the time. I’m cold all the time. I’ve fallen into strange rhythms. Before Gail and Bridgette came I think I’d gone three days without speaking to anyone. Sometimes it’s very hard, talking to people. But voices. For the thesis I have a few progressions I have a hunch might fit together. And this bright glimmer of another thing that belongs to something bigger. Mostly my work has felt like a series of conjectures in search of an argument but I am publishing an essay, an offshoot of the dissertation, in The Historical Journal which is a big deal for me. It’s called “Context and System,” context being what you’re born into, system what we make of it, contexts essentially always beginning and systems always failing, and it draws on ideas from M.A.K. Halliday’s work in open dynamic systems. Very worth reading, by the way.
I haven’t figured out a good way to consolidate it yet, and it gets pretty notional and abstract, and not the sort of stuff you enjoy, but a core idea is that every moment can be said to occur twice: first as it happens and again as it is registered in a recognizable structure of experience; just as this sentence lives now as I write it and again as you read it. Complexities arise when elements derive meanings from each other while serving two systems simult—just sec! Someone at door!
It was Ravi from Gloucester apologizing with Slivovitz! Don’t know if I go for all that soteriology stuff you were talking about on the cassette tape. Isn’t every day a religious experience? And I’ll support Wallace Stevens before the Sons of Judah or the Fathers of Rome. “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.” It’s certainly easy to get in a rush about establishing connexion, especially between things you feel haven’t been connected before, then everything is lucubration and you’re into that late-night Il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti scenario. Except now? Starting to feel drunk!
I agree with your Karin-Common Room thesis by the way. For all the reasons you said. We were so close, all of us. Didn’t you get the feeling if she loved one of us she loved all of us? I felt interchangeable. I was spending more time in her head than my own, referring, deferring everything to her. I was always catching meanings where there were none, others I knew I’d missed. What did you call it? Let me get the tape. Fuck. Just spilled Slivovitz all over this. Really drunk!
And, yes, I do remember the last time I saw her. It was the Prince’s Inlet Race, some summer Saturday, the woodsmoke of vanished afternoons and all that Wordsworthian garbage. I was a little worse for wear, exhausted with travel, upset I’d missed you in Halifax, headaches from the sun and drinking, the whole afternoon was a haze of sunshine and drinking. She was among the Jeremies, as you say, the Bohunks and Boydens. “He’s really nice, really,” said Babba, trying to draw some sympathy from me amid the mayhem on board. (Babba’s wonderful. She knows I’m alive and won’t let me forget it.)
Karin and Boyden were circling the boats after the race. I’m not sure if she saw me first but I remember their motorboat idling in our wake as I crawled up from below. She called out hello and said my name, the syllables sounding so strangely on her lips. It was a moment, anyway. Embarrassing, awkward, full of reversing perceptions. I was too drunk to sort through it and am still. She said a few things lost to the wind. But I understood the tone: solicitous, sympathetic. The last I remember, they were turning back to Chester, Karin holding the windshield, Boyden in sunglasses beside her, flaxen hair blown about by the wind.
12 January
Snowing again. I see I still have this. I’ve lived a few days since then. Bad Days. Fever. Chills. Swollen Glands. I’ve been in bed most of the time. Being ill like this, this constant nausea of failure, crying for no reason, I feel I’ve betrayed myself. So while everyone here watches “Sons and Daughters” as their Pot Noodles simmer on hot plates I try to remember phone numbers I used to know when I was young in Halifax before I was sick. However. Don’t know if I answered all your questions but I will send this to you and hope it reaches you, wherever you may be. I am sending to the Australian address, care of Mr. Van Der Hoof, as it’s the last address I have. I’m not sure why you want to go to Australia. Why does everyone go to Australia? Is Australia really so essential? Aust
ralia. Really? Why, Australia, why? But best of luck on the worldwide travel plan. I guess there are moments when I feel I want to clear out myself, wander to the unimaginably far distance, into the dust and heat, wreck myself on an island, crash into a train, fall into the sea. Still. Soon it will be spring and everyone will be reborn.
Cyrus
~
Wallace Stevens was one of a sacerdotal three for Cyrus—the others being Simone Weil and I.A. Richards—and many were the afternoons spent debating the relative virtues of such a threesome. Before we return to the symphonic tone poem which is the end of my relations with the Mair family and my last, real Halifax day, I’d like to make known a last little factoid, somewhat spooky, somewhat salient. Many years after the events herein depicted, when I was no longer young, in fact when I was down-and-out after having been fired from an appalling television series, I wafted into a second-hand bookshop on Salt Spring Island. There, beneath two volumes of a Chinese-English dictionary, I exhumed a book called Parts and Wholes: The Hayden Colloquium on Scientific Method and Concept. This was a little-known, ultra-esoteric academic title from 1963, hardbound in a blue-and-orange dust jacket with light sunning on the spine and foxing on the endpapers but overall in Very Good condition except for those pages marked up by the previous owner. The book was, of course, one of those scattered into the world ex libris Mair and so pre-owned and selectively scribbled-in by my friend. Paging through one of its essays, “How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?” by I.A. Richards, I encountered a phrase—A poem is an activity, seeking to become itself—underlined in ink and connected by a swooping arrow to a jotting in the margin, “Absolutely what I was saying Tuesday to McKee! Also common life people cf. SW.” The handwriting degenerated, a trifle loopily, into illegibility in the next few words, so I’m not sure what else was being glossed, nor what those initials denote, but that line about poetry I’ve thought about often. Because while I write about the guy with some diffidence it is my considered conclusion that for Cyrus Mair each person is an activity seeking to become itself and I feel he looked on in some wonder at the poem each of us might become.
~
My first thought, when I had a moment to properly look at him in the sunlight and snow of South Street, was that Cyrus Mair had gone back in time. It’s true the tousled blond hair, so plentiful in youth, had sparsified in the manner of a Notting Hill investment banker, and he was unshaven, with a scant growth of beard, but his face was sunburned and clear, his eyes bird-quick, and he was so slim and looked so young he seemed to have become his own younger brother. The shirt he wore was standard white, the tie purple silk, the suit charcoal grey, and wrapped around his throat I recognized his woollen Peterhouse scarf—a gift from Babba on his acceptance to Cambridge’s oldest college—a smooth-cornered, blue-and-white striped affair, very close in colour tones to the flag of Finland, and which, at six feet long, had a maddening habit of snagging in the bi-folding doors of a telephone booth or catching beneath someone’s shoe on the stairs. The blue cashmere coat I’d known for years. It had belonged to Cyrus’s late father and, as earlier described, Cyrus as a teenager had taken to wearing it in all seasons. It was too big for him then and too big now, one sleeve drooping so far past his wrist only his fingertips were visible. He was so attached to this garment that I wondered if he’d begun to fairly live out of it—for its pockets abounded irregularly with day-old sandwiches, toothbrushes, smudgy fountain pens, and other non-sequiturs—and really it wouldn’t have surprised me if, from its innermost folds, were to flutter out a black-capped chickadee. In his right hand, he lugged a dilapidated and heavy-looking briefcase and, as he set it on the sidewalk, one of the snap-locks popped open. Cyrus frowned at this change in its fortunes and was making a move to fasten it when a great sneeze shivered through his shoulders. So I asked if he was all right.
“I’m just—” He sneezed again. “Trying to feel all this.”
“Sure you’re okay?”
Cyrus remained stock-still, blinking and squinting as if something were interfering with his vision. Opening his eyes very wide, he lifted a hand to his eyelashes and, with forefinger and thumb, pinched away a lengthy strand of light hair. He stared furiously at this a split-second, as if it were some unknown, semi-precious filament, then spun it between his fingers and let it fall to the sidewalk. As it vanished into the slush, I felt a drop of perspiration trickle out of my underarm and down the side of my ribs.
“I’m fine,” said Cyrus. “Sometimes people—people sneeze sometimes when they walk into direct sunlight.”
“So where’ve you been—Cambridge?”
“Sort of. Been travelling.”
“Where?”
“In some distant deeps and skies.”
“Was it Leipzig? I hear people go to Leipzig.”
“I’ve heard of those people. What the fuck’s with those people? The Germans have a name for those people.”
“When do you go back?”
“Today. Later.” He spun his fingers in a vague circle. “Soon.”
“You’re on your way to the airport? Where’s your stuff?”
“Don’t have a lot of stuff.”
“Who needs stuff?”
“Other people have stuff. People from Leipzig have stuff.”
“Briefcase,” I said. “That’s all a guy needs. You can give away your stuff, you can change your name in Tucson, but you keep your briefcase.”
In front of the Hotel Nova Scotian, around the statue of Edward Cornwallis, were scads of seagulls, and not a few dozen but a few hundred. They were assembled all over the snowy park as if they’d chosen to have an impromptu Annual General Meeting on the nearest expanse of land. They were facing west, wings tucked in, and Cyrus was staring at them. “What the fuck’s with these seagulls?”
“It’s disgusting. Why aren’t they in the ocean chasing kelp?”
“Damn right.” Cyrus grabbed a swoop of snow and started packing it in his hands. “You know what I think about that?” He reared back and biffed the snowball into the flock. Six or seven gulls started into the air, gliding and wheeling in a loose figure eight, all but one returning to the ground. The airborne gull flapped awkwardly before floating higher in the sky, higher even than the uppermost floor of the Hotel Nova Scotian, all the while squawking and shrieking in a sharp repeating pattern. It sounded like the High F sequence from The Magic Flute was stuck on repeat. Cyrus stood watching this gull with some solemnity, then whirled around, seized his briefcase, and set off along the sidewalk’s curbstone, swinging his briefcase like a yodeler with a milk bucket. Of course I’d seen him a hundred different ways, in a thousand moods and modes, and in our lives between us ten thousand moments had passed, but to have my friend materialize on South Street was more than unexpected—at the same time the unexpectedness was absolutely in keeping with his trick of singularity. So I stayed a moment where I was, open to the music of the afternoon, listening to the street-salt crack beneath his shoes, and watching the gull somersault out to sea in a sudden squall of wind.
~
Cyrus I found on Barrington Street talking on a payphone. Rather he wasn’t talking, he was listening, and after a moment he crashed the receiver into its cradle-hook. Staring fiercely at the push-buttons, he brought to his eyes a rip of paper and checked a scribbled number. Not finding his change in the coin return, he rummaged some dimes out of a pants pocket, jammed them into the slot, and dialed another number. He waited. He glanced at the window display of Phinney’s Musical Instruments, a once-splendid, now drab-and-poky department store, then shifted his interest to a nearby plywood construction wall. It was busy with bulletins of all kinds, among them a silkscreened print for a NSCAD graduation show, a Rickenbacker For Sale flyer with tear-away phone numbers, an advertisement for an upcoming Thunderhouse Blues Band reunion, and, just visible amid all the paper fragments and rusting staples, the remnants of an original Four Bands for Fiv
e Bucks poster from the Changelings’ first gig. While he waited on his call, Cyrus skimmed these notices, shadows of rising heat shimmering behind him on the ironstone of the Phinney’s building. I studied these vapours, trying to figure out where they were coming from. It was as if something were burning somewhere, or some substance was being liberated as a result of something burning—and lost in my memory was a word for such a process—but Cyrus slamming down the receiver had the effect of returning my attention to him.
“Who you calling?” I asked.
“Wrong number.”
“Who you trying to call?”
Cyrus scratched under his chin. “My thesis adviser.”
“Isn’t it late in England?”
“I mean the vice-provost. There’s been a problem. In the commissary.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Everyone’s normal. Except for these—” He waved his hand to indicate the rest of the street. “These fucking Scandinavians!” Happy with this improvisation, Cyrus pulled a silver flask from a coat pocket.
“These fucking what?”
“That’s the name for those people. That’s it right there.” He twisted the top off the flask. “I mean where do they get off coming here with their plans for social change? They come here, devising their alphabets—” He chugged from the flask then offered it to me. “You can’t walk a mile in this town, you can’t buy a fucking cupcake, without some Scandinavian trying to feel you up or get at your ski pole.”
I took the flask and drank. “We getting day drunk?”
“Try and catch up. Just try.”
“How much have you had?”
“I might’ve drunk a bit. But hey, I can quit anytime I want.” Cyrus grabbed the flask and regarded me. “You know there’s a guy on a soap opera who looks exactly like you.”