I, Bartleby
Page 7
On the SS Diderot Sigbjørn the imagined novelist writes that his character Martin wanted above all things to be loyal to Primrose in life and even beyond life, loyal to her beyond death. Primrose, he would write in La Mordida, without whom he could see nothing. At least nothing out there. In Haiti, she’d seen it coming: the breakdown in Cassis – he tried to strangle her – and was confined to the American Hospital of Paris. In Rome he was again confined to a sanitarium, and tried again to strangle her. He spent months in Brook General and Atkinson Morley’s in London before his final attack on her, wielding the broken neck of a gin bottle she’d smashed trying to stop him from drinking, till she fled and he downed a bottle of sleeping pills.
Sigbjørn and Primrose Wilderness disappear from the manuscript of La Mordida carefully typed by Margerie, which she gave to the archive in 1986, two years before she died. Someone has made Sigbjørn and Primrose back into Malcolm and Margerie, each speaking in first person, as in a stage play, their dramatis personae announced as chapter titles, their voices reading from their notebooks. But Sigbjørn and Primrose lived on in October Ferry to Gabriola, where they were neighbours of the imagined reclusive once-successful criminal lawyer Ethan Llewellyn and his imagined wife Jacqueline: sometimes when Jacqueline felt like talking to Primrose they’d take his instrument down to the Wilderness’, who lived in a similar cabin in a similar bay about three quarters of a mile down the beach, and with Sigbjørn, who was an unsuccessful Canadian composer, but an excellent jazz pianist. They’d all have a jam session: singing the Blues à la Beiderbecke, the Mahogany Hall Stomp and heaven knows what. Or they’d play Mozart, after a fashion.
Moccasin Box
If I, No Reply, write of Christine Stewart,
inside I lives the now Christine next to long-ago Christine who cut pens from goose quills, the Christine who wrote, The servant who receives fewer gifts from her lord is less obliged in his service, the Christine of Pizan, who built a city for the giftless. Bridges and rivers of Christines enclose I. Crossroads of Christines play I. A scriptorium writes I among riverbanks, ancestors, Christine villages, Christine tribes, as deserts and wars of I. The I is nothing. Can never be nothing. I and Christine run through lanes, alleys, arcades, shops, bars, offices, cemeteries. We intersect in Cul de Sac Cafe. We despise its twisted stairs to Pink and Sticky but own them anyway: A pronoun cannot but witness its world. The doorman poses like the exterior of an acoustic muscle. We have no money. We back out through our cloth music as in beat and grief of an unlivable category. In room after room we find men, women, and dogs sleeping. Space does not go on forever, she tells I, It crushes. It curves the domain in its foreclosure. Finally I and Christine jump roof to roof like terraced rice fields to a regulatory nowhere. Watch out for the doorman, she warns, he’s everywhere: an unthinkable distance that folds you up like a tight square.
We write plays and perform them in the street. I plays she and she plays doorman. We have no money. To make nothing. To become nothing, she tells me, I became I. We squat in Other People’s Houses while they work and shop. We cannot rest; their I-beds poke into us. We run to the not-town. I is flooded. I is rapt, she says, and usually chained to the Human. Throw these categories in that ditch.
We must be mute again, she says. Not like fields and trees but in a giant muteness, a huge forgetting of tiny chattering categories. We must flood and drown. We’ll outnumber. We’ll dump the churches, the lording of property and marriage. We’ll shit where we want and our shit’ll blossom the soil. We’ll roam with beasts and fuck whoever, whenever, wherever. Our babies’ll grow huge and strong playing in their volcanoes of shit and mud. We giants’ll be exuberant and solitary and generous. We’ll roam the whole Now. Lightning sky-clap will wrench our muteness, our stumble and stutter, to avalanche of words. Wrench us to song-grapple.
Here we come to Underbridge, Christine continues, the unwhere of the regulatory nowhere, the unpromise of the right-direction automobile. Here, in Between, we radiate and compose ourselves as nextness in a vast dense musicality of other dreaming unpromises. Ravens, coyotes, homeless, Big Gulp, toxins, free doom – we read unminded. Quilt under bridge. Seven men under bridge. Broken CD, Metro News under bridge. Shame, Cold, Boredom – language and languish under bridge where I and Christine build cities for the giftless.
Moccasin Box
for Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake
Drive north on any of Vancouver’s main streets, and the forested hulks of Grouse and Seymour Mountains lunge up a wall as your road disappears over a cliff edge into the inlet. In East Van the hulks dwarf false-fronted wooden stores reminiscent of frontier trading posts, laced together by electrical wires on leaning cedar poles. In the West End they loom over tower blocks and corporate skyscrapers, reminding the busy city, in its antlike toings and froings, of all it is not and can never be. All the more so because even the immense, implacable blue-green hulks are superseded by their crown, a pair of snow-covered peaks that Vancouverites fondly call the Lions.
With the cables of its Lions Gate Bridge, swooping from pylon to pylon, Vancouver ties itself to the Lions’ immensity.
Logs of wood and stumps of trees innumerable, Captain George Vancouver wrote in 1792, staring at driftwood on the delta of the Stó:lō, the river at the foot of these mountains, which did not lead him to the Northwest Passage. Trees, trees, and more trees on the wall of peaks blocking his way. Up the coast in the traditional lands of the Skwxwú7mesh, he found a stupendous snowy barrier lurching from sea to clouds and spewing torrents through its rugged chasms. He logged the weather: dark, gloomy, blowing a southerly gale, which greatly added to the dreary prospect of the country. Desolation Sound he called some of the coast: forlorn gloomy forests pervaded by an awful silence, empty of birds and animals.
Trees haunt the city: the old giants whose feet spanned a cart and horses – their stumps slimy with moss – still lurk in the salal and ferns of Stanley Park or up the slopes of Grouse Mountain in the Capilano Canyon, where they feed the roots of new giants several arm spans in girth. Their distant tops creak and moan in the wind. Myriad spiny branchlets of fir and long, drooping fronds of cedar catch shafts of sunlight and rake tatters of fog from the ocean. The air drips. Trunks, limbs, moss soak up the grind of city planes and cranes, holding in their cavernous understory the rush and trickle of the Capilano River, the peep of a nuthatch, the snap of a falling branch, and, high above, the combing of wind, the chortle of a raven.
Up above, high – sagalie, in the Chinook jargon Pauline Johnson used with Chief Joe Capilano, recording his stories of the Skwxwú7mesh people and the Sagalie Tyee. I imagine Johnson searching like I was for stories, not from invaders, but from here, stories from the first people of the immense mountains, the giant trees, the talking ravens.
The snow-covered Lions are not lions to the Skwx-wú7mesh people; they are the Twin Sisters who were lifted to the mountaintops by the Sagalie Tyee. It was they, so Johnson records in her Legends from Chief Joe Capilano, who brought the Great Peace between the Skwxwú7mesh and the Haida by the simple act of inviting them to a feast. Another legend tells how the Sagalie Tyee sent his four giants to challenge a swimmer, claiming they would turn him to a fish, a tree, a stone if he did not give way to their canoe.
Back and forth and right toward the giants’ canoe he swam so his child would have a clean life. The Sagalie Tyee made him Sl’kheylish (standing-up-man rock) to remind everyone: defy everything for the future of your child.
Thanks to the Sagalie Tyee, Shak-shak the hoarder suddenly found himself a two-headed serpent, one of his mouths biting the poor and one mouth biting his heart. He who pierces the serpent’s heart will kill the disease of greed – so said the Sagalie Tyee. A young man of sixteen remembered those words and brought down the monster.
A young woman could get help, too, from the Sagalie Tyee, if she wanted to know which suitor really cared for her. What if she were looking for other things? Like stories that had grown with the forests. Stories of women
who dared, women who blazed trail? Women who spoke? Would the Sagalie Tyee come to her aid?
The front desk casually mentions a pair of Pauline Johnson’s moccasins held somewhere in the library, she’s not sure where. A Special Collections librarian says she’ll look into it and disappears to inner chambers. Some time later she returns with a large metal-cornered box. We have no provenance for these, she tells me, unfolding tissue paper around a pair of pale leather moccasins covered with beaded flowers and bands of woven grass, the soles smooth as the bottom of a foot. Their ankle-high cuffs flop over next to tangled delicate lacing. Lack of provenance meaning, I suppose, that someone could have found a pair of moccasins in Johnson’s possession when she died which actually belonged to someone else – her sister, say, or a friend – and mistakenly passed them off as Johnson’s, or even that someone claiming to be a friend of Johnson’s had given them to the library when in fact they had belonged to the friend’s grandmother and never been touched by Johnson. I try to convince myself of this, but I’ve opened a box I can’t close: I’m certain they are Johnson’s. She’s supposed to be wearing them in this photograph, the librarian explains. She retrieves from an envelope a photocopied picture of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake in her Mohawk stage costume, which she made of buckskin, and we see her as through a window smoked up by a house fire, moccasins illegible.
In 1909 she retired from the stage at forty-eight to a two-bedroom Vancouver apartment three miles from Sl’kheylish, one of her favourite destinations in Stanley Park. Like everyone else she called it Siwash Rock, though siwash was an insulting term for an aboriginal person.
For twenty years she’d been Canada’s most famous author (known throughout the English-speaking world), constantly touring and living in hotels. Now her days turned around a small apartment on a treed street in a town clinging to the far edge of North America, a town barely keeping its own against wind and sea and the forested mountains looming in its face. Yet here she found something grander than ever: her Cathedral Trees. Every day, heedless of the rain or sea soaking her clothes, she would walk to Siwash Rock, and then to the nearby Cathedral Grove, one red cedar and six Douglas firs from the old-growth forest, people called the Seven Sisters.
To support herself without income from stage performances, Johnson wrote stories for Mother’s Magazine and Boys’ World, stories like “The Wolf Brothers,” “The Silver Craft of the Mohawks,” and “The Potlatch.” Her friend, Chief Capilano, whom she’d met at Buckingham Palace, came to visit, sitting in silence at the round oak table from her father’s house. After several visits he began to tell her stories she would retell as “Legends of the Capilanos.” Lionel Makovski of the Vancouver Daily Province began paying her seven dollars a piece to publish the stories in his weekly magazine, adding photographs to make them and Princess Tekahionwake his star attraction; elsewhere the paper had called the chief an agitator and blamed him for disputes and uprisings. Johnson then could not meet his deadlines; she cancelled appointments without notice; Chief Capilano died; and breast cancer spread into her right arm. Makovski himself became her writing hand as she dictated the stories from her couch.
An unsigned document in the moccasin box says that Makovski earned a lot of royalties from Johnson’s legends. He was a member of the trust that gathered them into a book to raise funds for her living and medical care. More than ten thousand copies were printed at that time, and the book remains in print. Johnson left Makovski the copyright to Legends following her death in 1913, as well as the moccasins she wore on her first trip to England, he perhaps then leaving them to the library.
She left her pens and the copyrights to Shagganappi and The Moccasin Maker to her manager and stage companion, Walter McRaye, who had started his career reciting Drummond’s habitant verses and who later did hilarious impersonations of celebrities. Dink, she nicknamed him. During their long journeys on boats and trains and stagecoaches, they invented together a family of travelling companions: “the boys” – four of them – who took their mattresses along and slept on the hat racks, and from there played tricks and commented on their friends. At Steinway Hall in London, the boys bought four tickets for Pauline and Dink. They amused themselves with a cat called Dave Dougherty, who slept in Johnson’s dressing bag; a bug called Felix Joggins, with his very trying wife, Jerusha; and a mongoose called Baraboo Montelius.
In 1915 the balance of the proceeds from Legends, after paying Johnson’s debts, was divided between McRaye and Johnson’s sister, Eva, who then divided her share between the cities of Brantford, Ontario (near Johnson’s ancestral home), and Vancouver, sending $225 to the World newspaper to spend on something of assistance to the arts or literary life of the city. Mr. Nelson, the manager at the World, was puzzled as to what to do, but at length hit on the idea of purchasing a Pauline Johnson room at the hospital which could be devoted to care of artists, actors, poets, newspaper people, and “others of allied interests who might be in hard circumstances (a not unusual condition in these occupations).” He was then “very much moved” by reading about the city’s 29th Battalion at the front, who were “lamentably short of machine guns where the enemy was well equipped with them.” The Vancouver boys seemed to be fighting with their bare fists. Why not buy a gun?
How very easy it is to rouse individuals around a sentimental cause. Only to suffer slow and miserable deaths or violent and brutal ones in the Great Ongoing Wars of humanity against humanity and humanity against the earth. Buoyed up by inner spirit or driven by drugged imaginations, people launch into their ventures with little idea of where they’ll lead. Or they launch in knowing all too well where it will end: their fate. Yet boundless and unpredictable beginnings save the world from its normal and natural ruin. Thus writes Hannah Arendt: in the fact of natality lies the root and faculty of action. We act, we speak, and each time make a beginning toward the possible, just as we entered the world from our mothers’ wombs.
The World launched a subscription. The money poured in. Children walked the thirteen miles from New Westminster to Vancouver and gave their carfare for the Pauline Johnson machine gun. By August 1915 the World had $1,000 (more than the annual wages of most working men), which it sent to Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes. The manager of the World was delighted that Lt. Col. Tobin of the 29th Battalion would receive a gun for his “gallant corps.” Would Tobin see that the gun bore the name Tekahionwake? Tobin wrote that American munitions manufacturers could not deliver the gun before January 1916; the Russian and Canadian governments took the firm’s total output, but he hoped to obtain two guns before the battalion left for the front or certainly shortly afterward. He promised to engrave Tekahionwake on one and send a photo, but in December 1916 the battalion was still without its Tekahionwake. In December 1918, the manager of the World wrote to Tobin wondering whether “the Tekahionwake which we gave to the 29th” could be returned to the World? “We are all so proud of our British Columbian men,” he wrote, “that I am hoping the story of the war, from the British Columbia standpoint – and with special reference to the exploits of the BC units – will be collected and become a textbook in our schools.” In July 1920 the World regained possession of the gun, and showed it with a poster saying it was first fired at Kemmel Hill, Belgium. During a raid, it jammed and Corp. Snowden tore the red-hot gun apart, fixed the feed-wheel pin, reassembled the gun, and fired again in less than ninety seconds. At St. Eloi, the Tekahionwake was manned by Ptes. McGir, Owen, Bourke, Annandale, Cooke, Davidson, and Williams (all killed later). At Ypres, three tripods were shot from under her.
I lay out my scraps of research – the haunting trees, Johnson’s walks to Siwash Rock, the things she left in her will, her stories (from Skwxwú7mesh Chief Capilano) of the Sagalie Tyee, the strange spellings of words in the Skwxwú7mesh dictionary, the 7 to be sounded as a glottal stop like oh-oh, the xw sounded like whispered wh in what. Puzzling over how the Skwxwú7mesh language might talk about the Sagalie Tyee, I find wa lh7áy’nexw is a Skwxwú7mes
h word for spirit. The dictionary gives no English pronunciation. I’m left to imagine what sounds I can. Kwelh7áy’nexw translates as spirit of the water. Spirit touches one and one goes numb: from the word tení7i7. To go on a spiritual quest for power: ts’iyíwen. Nexwslhich’álhxa is a spirit who cuts people’s throats, whereas ch’awtn is a spirit helper. Siw’ín’ is a spiritual power exercised through words, while sna7m is a spiritual power exercised through dancing and singing. I let the words figure my tongue. As though words were boxes, and, lifting their wriggling lids, I could find moccasins to slip on, become other than what I am: a taster of letters, a chaser of whiffs humming with threads to other alphabets, echoing glimpses beyond words, always a beyond – an end to a rainbow that flits away to a creak or a moan, a chortle, a rattle, a knocking heartbeat, gutwrench, the thousand bitmaps wired in my eyes from born-into wars owners ancestors conquerors cities. As though I could wear them like masks. Tree – Spirit – I tie with tongue taps, certain they exist somewhere with Forest Skwxwú7mesh Self Moccasin. Laces evaporate leaving foot tied to ear, mouth to armpit, eyes all knees and elbows adrift in my house of mirrors. Tap tap tap along the rhythms. Anyone there?