BOOKS BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS
FICTION
The Coming of Winter Blood Ties
Dancers at Night: Stories
Lives of Short Duration
Road to the Stilt House
Nights Below Station Street
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
Hope in the Desperate Hour
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
Mercy Among the Children
River of the Brokenhearted
The Friends of Meager Fortune
The Lost Highway
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul
Crimes Against My Brother
Principles to Live By
Mary Cyr
NON-FICTION
Hockey Dreams
Lines on the Water
God Is.
Facing the Hunter
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Murder, and other essays / David Adams Richards.
Names: Richards, David Adams.
Description: Essays. | Includes poetry by the author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190077786 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190077794 | ISBN 9780385666558 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780307376077 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8585.I17 M87 2019 | DDC C814/.54—dc23
“Playing the Inside Out” was originally published in Playing the Inside Out/Le jeu des apparences © 2008 by David Adams Richards.
Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions
Cover design: Andrew Roberts
Cover image: Echunder/Shutterstock.com
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
The gunslingers are always the age we were then—twenty-one or thirty-nine
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This book is dedicated to my late friend the poet Eric Trethewey, and my sons, John Thomas and Peter Anton, with much love.
IN MEMORY OF ERIC TRETHEWEY
You phoned the last night you were alive
To ask if we could take a drive
Into New Orleans sometime.
I said yes, let me first get to Virginia.
You who could be as fierce as a pit bull
Left abandoned,
Or as gentle a poet as God intended,
Never quite understanding the world
Where you seemed suspended,
Fumbling for keys to some kingdom
Controlled by a sombre attendant.
When Kelly phoned the next day
To tell me you had gone,
Found dead on the floor of your kitchen,
I remembered how the phone had
Rung once more that night later on.
“Oh,” I said to Peg. “It’s Rick again—
I will talk to him tomorrow.”
The best of us are left fumbling for keys
To doors that remain locked
On this life we borrow.
This poem
Is addressed to you, my friend
For your courage, love and sorrow.
CONTENTS
Cover
Books by David Adams Richards
Title Page
Copyright
Disclaimer
Dedication
In Memory of Eric Trethewey
A Note from the Author
ESSAYS
Murder
Caligula, Legere and the Nature of Power
Smoking
Literacy
We Told Them They Were Building a Dream
Northern New Brunswick
The Shannon: A Short Story
Children
Driving at Night
Lee Could Not Have Spoken
The Turtle, the Handbook, the Dark Night Air
An Anecdote
Drive-in Theatre
POEMS
Alden Nowlan (1933–1983)
The Winter Testament
The Winter Testament 2
Newcastle, Winter of 1956
November 1977
The Spring Testament
Peg at Seventeen
Circus
A Trip to the Outer Island (The Poet as Gunslinger)
The Journey
Parting at the Station in Vöcklabrook
We Hit Bilferd
The Lilliputian Looks Up
The House
Autumn Testament
Travel
Networking
Old Poets Are Dogs
Betrayal
The Man Who Loves My Children
When You Get Back from Sicily
Love
Emperor and Poet
The Greater Testament
ESSAYS
Playing the Inside Out
August 1955
Scapegoats
Hunting
East of Eden
Land
I suppose I could speak of beauty
I Went Down to Meet Alden Nowlan
The Alcoholic Vision
Brave as Any Man
Gretzky Gave Us Everything He Had
In Defence of My Grandmother
Reflections from the Pools
Knowing Canada: A Rural Perspective
We Walked the Camino
Thanks To
About the Author
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Some of these essays were written thirty-five years ago, some just this year. Some have previously appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and some have not. Most have not been previously published, though I did have a short book of essays published in the 1990s called A Lad from Brantford, and have taken a few essays from that.
Playing the Inside Out was formerly published in book form by Goose Lane. I have included some poems. These also span nearly three decades and most have not been previously published.
MURDER
IT WAS A JULY NIGHT AND I WAS TRAVELLING HIGHWAY 11, along the Miramichi R
iver in northern New Brunswick. Along the way I picked up a hiker, coming from town. It was dark and warm, and the stars seemed endless; endless enough to make us reflect that anything we did couldn’t much matter to the wide universe. And this in fact is what the hitchhiker reflected upon as we drove.
That we didn’t matter very much at all.
So I agreed. (It is a fairly prevalent idea nowadays. It is part of the irony of the times, I suppose. That is, that any office or opinion we have is, by way of irony, lessened; and nothing much matters.)
He was a nice fellow, a First Nations man who was travelling home to his reserve. I believed he simply wanted to make conversation. “Dust in the Wind” was playing, a song by the group Kansas—their lyrics stating that all our dreams are futile, for we are only dust in the wind.
He concurred. “That’s right—boys, oh boys, look at them stars—people think we matter, but we don’t matter much—”
His voice belied the import of the statement, making it homey and wise and innocent.
I agreed that when you consider our galaxy and try to comprehend the billions of others, you realize we are very tiny indeed.
However, there was something else I had noticed. It gave a curious feeling of aggrandizement to say we didn’t much matter—a feeling of actual importance in not mattering. We felt enlivened by the prospect that we were nothing. For a while it filled up a need in us. In fact it must have filled up something to be able to say it with so much contentedness.
Infinitesimal specks of nothing that we are.
The hitchhiker said after a time that he was an atheist. That he had become one because the church had hurt his people.
“The church turned me into an atheist” is what he said.
The song had stopped.
I did not dispute this. That the church—and many other things—had hurt and displaced his people. He was telling me now that he was not a Christian and did not believe. I shrugged. I was not in the mood for an argument. And it never much mattered to me what a person is or was. That in fact is my stance, and always has been, and too, at times, I am still not certain what I am.
Still, I began to realize that in saying we did not matter because there were big stars in the sky, we offered some kind of acknowledgement to at least one line: “For as heaven is above earth so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
I was reminded of this as my friend spoke, and wondered if I could convince him of its veracity. Because I had gone through at least a few of the same things he had. Not to change his opinion any more than my opinion.
So for argument’s sake, let’s say the line is true—that as heaven is above earth so is Christ’s thinking above ours. That would put us on the plane to use a scale—of, say, a snail. (Just for argument’s sake.)
As heaven is above earth so is our thinking above that of a snail (I am not intending to cheapen the snail by saying this). However, be that as it may, we still look upon a snail as pretty important. We do not want the wilful slaughter of snails. Or at least most of us would frown at the wilful slaughter of snails. Some of our more conscientious eco-activists would say, in a perverse way, the snail is rather more important than we are.
What does this have to do with my First Nations friend and me driving alone at night, on a secondary country road, with a mile or more between houses?
Quite a bit, actually.
If Christ’s thinking is that far above ours, are other lines Christ uttered true also?
Well, to put it all in some context, likely they are; and very likely they were given to us to reflect upon and keep with us no matter what.
So then let’s acknowledge another line:
“Even the hairs on your head are counted.”
Or
“Not a sparrow falls that isn’t known.”
Studying these lines, do we see a contradiction with the immenseness of Christ’s thinking? Or do these lines support his reasoning?
That is, if even the hairs on our heads are counted, do we matter if the universe is so vast?
Well, we must matter a little for even the hairs on our heads to be known enough to be counted by someone whose thinking is as vast as the universe itself.
This in fact is what my friend and I had dismissed a few miles back. And both of us were pleased in some way that we had.
But as my new friend spoke of his life—and it was a horrendous life—it made me think of these two sentences spoken by Christ, about the hairs and the sparrows. For when my passenger spoke in his Micmac accent, he spoke of a humanity that had betrayed him, and yet his voice was still filled with disarming gentleness.
He pointed to a star and asked, “So then—who is their God?”
But what he was actually saying was—we were so tiny no God would bother caring about us. That is, that the tininess caused our insignificance to God. That is, he was saying even if a God did exist, we were too tiny for him to care about.
Many scientists would be willing to say the same: that the universe is so grand that we do not matter. A scientist might then point out star number 9020—and smile at our stunned embarrassment over her brilliance; because she can show us a wobble or a shadow and tell us a planet exists 204 million light years away, which then proves how insignificant we are.
But after work, when this scientist is in her own home deciding how to prove 9020 matters to her own inestimable work and the research grant she desperately needs, she comes very close to saying that both she and the star 9020 matter very much. So if she matters, the planet she is rotating on must matter somewhat, as well.
And in fact she is right—for I am sure, to take a leap of faith, she was meant to find that wobble and was meant to determine how incredibly important it is. And I believe that it was known by some universal force she would discover what she discovered when she did.
If we talk about sparrows and hairs on the head, et cetera, we are speaking of something very important: the sanctity of life inherent in the count, and our own lives as being sacred. And in some way it must be true—for why would Christ ask us to think of our lives in these particular and peculiar minuscule terms unless it was to instruct us about something very important?
I mean, wouldn’t we think of more significant things about ourselves? Our strength, our wisdom, our beauty? We should not be thinking of little hairs at all, should we?
But this peculiar notion of what to count is in every way an exquisite judgment not only about us but about the world, the universe and the wobble.
That is, if Christ’s statement about hairs on the head was frivolous, we would all soon recognize it as frivolous. He would have been laughed out of town. But if the hairs on our heads are counted, we can be assured that everything else about us is counted, as well.
But I think this is a more important matter than just one of what is being counted. For isn’t Christ’s message meant to be much more—an actual psychological transference from our own small physical realm into some far greater existential plain of cosmic awareness? Why else would it be said the way it is said if this was not true? Is it the cosmic awareness of Christ, and the awareness of our own link to the cosmos, that Christ is asking us to contemplate in one single hair?
So when Christ said this two thousand years ago, wasn’t he giving us a glimpse into our divinity, and to the nature of the entire universe, by using a hair?
And if the physicist Leonard Susskind, in his argument with Stephen Hawking, is right about black holes, he has said almost the same thing: that no information is lost, that all information about our universe is somehow not destroyed or forgotten, at the event horizon.
In effect, was Christ not telling us this two thousand years ago?
This gives us a primitive glimpse into our nature, where we in fact do measure up to the galaxies, the universe and the wobble.
To make us holy o
r to see the holiness attached to the augment that is “ourselves”—even if it is only for the briefest of moments in our lives. That is, though we might go days or months without thinking of the hairs on our head or our arms, tiny and transparent in the sunlight, once we realize this about ourselves we have realized it. And Christ wanted us to realize it! So then is this an affirmation of Christ? That is, we affirm the genius or the greatness or the transcendence of so many others—can we at least speculate about his greatness by saying that his observations were if not holy, which I believe they were, then at least profound? That is, I have always argued from this point. If you cherish the thinking of Aristotle then you must Christ as well. And Einstein himself would be the first to tell you so. For even if you think he is not divine—he is such a profound thinker no one in the world should ignore him.
The First Nations hitchhiker was very happy to get a drive. It mattered to him that he did. So he mattered very much, and so did the hairs on his head, and it becomes more significant as this story goes on—so mattering is relative to the circumstance we are in.
After a while I was not so sure we were right a few miles of dark secondary road back. That is, perhaps we weren’t meaningless—and the ability to look at these wonderful stars actually proved it. For perhaps something far greater than ourselves allowed us this glimpse.
The road we were on wound its way through spruce and over small bridges, a single lane of asphalt highway that for anybody from a city would seem the edge of the world. But a world I have lived in most of my life.
My Micmac friend had just gotten out of jail a few hours before, and he told me he was going home to do a job. He was very charming in a self-effacing way.
“How could any God care about us—my life is nothing,” he suddenly said.
Of course I told him he mattered.
He shrugged and said that I did not know him or his hardship. So for a while we were silent.
Yet I thought, if our world is an insignificant blue dot at the tail end of the Milky Way, why is our dilemma never an outward one but an inward one? As his seemed to be at that moment. Why was he so riled at the world he had just called nothing at all and quite unimportant? And why was everyone else’s dilemma much like his—that is, an inward one?
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