by Rudy Wiebe
Paris, Texas: “I wanted to see her so bad that I didn’t dare imagine her.… I didn’t want to use him to fill all my emptiness.”
All I want to do is to get home, however, I know when I am there I won’t want to be there either. Being near but still impossible is worse. So, I guess, really, I want to be in some place that does not exist. Where is it? Meanwhile I am always only with myself, now here in this luxurious Edinburgh, Scotland double bed room in the Ailsa Craig Hotel. I do seem to be here … now. Certainly alone strangely inside her name
DAILY PLANNER 1984: October Wednesday 3
Express bus Edinburgh–London, leave 9 a.m. arrive 6 p.m. Brief terror strikes but I grab my backpack, get to Hampstead Hostel room 6 bed 26. I hate arriving, yuk
October Friday 5
(Dad’s Birthday) Woke up wishing A was beside me. Her smiling face, first giggling then we would get serious and kiss each other, slowly, a tongue in the ear listen I have to cut these thoughts or I get more depressed. Check stores, get Underground pass.
FILE FOLDER / STUFF
Single page:
So you are now 49. I can’t really say happy birthday; when you look inside you’ll see why; but I do think of you. You are my father, even if I can’t penetrate your personality most of the time, at any level leave alone with some depth. And even if in a lot of ways we are profoundly different, we are also, fundamentally, the same. And please remember I still, and hopefully always will, do love you.
Your son, Gabriel
And I do remember: you did. All your life. And more; you came and showed me your love eleven very long years later, October 4, 1995, within the time when I awoke and saw 5:16 shining on the alarm clock beyond Yo’s head deep in her pillow and 7:09 when I awoke again. You were standing, your body profiled against intense, concentrated light, and I jerked upright for joy, in exploding happiness—you had been gone forever. Seeing you there I collapsed on the bed, and you lay down beside me and I wrapped your long hard body in my arms and cried, We didn’t know where you were! Your strong arms held me so tight, you whispered, It’s okay … I’m okay … you know that, I’m all right.
And then it was 7:10 in the morning, October 4, the day before my sixtieth birthday.
O my vanished son: did you send me a birthday card with those words in 1984? I don’t think … I don’t remember. There seems to be nothing more about me in these boxes—or I haven’t found it. Yet. Did you copy these considered notebook words into a card? Were they in a card wrapped with a gift other than words? Why are there so few facts about us, you and me being together, in my memory, why do I find so little, why do I need these blue words? It seems sometimes when I have the most hope that Yolanda told me you had already wrapped a present for me in July before you flew to Amsterdam “to get away.” Did you? She was to give it to me on my birthday in October—did you do that? What did the card look like? Yo would know—in your file folder pages these words seem to have been written in London—but Yo, her incredible memory …
What is the past? No more than what we together remember; we are what we remember, our memory? A fine word for a Gabriel wordlist; but you never wrote it out. Why not? The compact dictionary—where is the one you carried across Europe in your knapsack: on Sept 3, 1984 in Hotel Orpheus you wrote “Note: This silly dictionary I use gets me nowhere”?—“memory” in a compact would certainly list eight to ten meanings, all fumbling with “the mental faculty of retaining or recalling past experience.” So what is “past experience”? No more than whatever facticity I retain, that is the facts (from “factum”: to do), the acts that haven’t somewhere disconnected into nowhere from my “mental faculties,” as your last, harrowing, act will never, ever, disconnect? Only whatever pictures, whatever papers you scrawled over with indecipherable words that I can still dig out of boxes? Facts: only things done—or things thought as well? Even desperately imagined? Dreamed and remembered like your confessions? Our mutual past now only everything only I have not forgotten? Is that forgotten forever? What if others—Dennis—Miriam—someone like Joan or … remembers? But you were alone, as I am now most often, and completely, what if no one else was there to perhaps remember and you are gone? Come, O come …
From what’s left in these boxes—by chance? by your deliberate doing?—your visit to Ailsa Craig seems no simple, factual act. Far more than the literal travelling, the bus, the sea, the town, the great rock, the ruined fortress and white gannets, the Girvan dock, they seem to have made you lunge about, staring at whatever confronted you scrabbling in old libraries, in even older books, grasping for whatever you could clutch of language and image, lurching into words from diary to notebook to pocket loose-leaf to paper scraps to birthday notes. As if exhaustion were breaking you into pieces; but nevertheless leaving some thin string of word evidence.
Evidence. There is a long scar on my stomach; evidence: something was done there. What? When? Of course I can glance down at that unerasable memory grown and still growing in my very body, my fingers can feel the thick gnarl of it through my shirt … but
The fact is, your body also had a grown scar. The inside of your left arm. A scar I made on you, I remember exactly how and when and where it opened—a fact I cannot and will never forget—but could an Orange Downfill remember? These irreducible words shoved on top of each other in boxes stacked in this basement room? Words like rocks layered thinner than shale, your unique writing so sparse and repeating, such an impossible narrowness of everything you lived the length of each enduring day: whole days unmentioned, a bare hundred words per day at most, scratches so close to nothing of your actual lived life, no jokes, no drinking laughter with friendly “good ol’ boys” in edge-of-the-earth Girvan, Scotland, overlooking the Ailsa sea she has never seen. Reading what you wrote is like trying to track the footprints you did not leave in the gorse of that rock because on the second day you found you could not step into the boat to go and climb it. Did you already sense you never would, that Ailsa rock? You travel a long night and day to get there, study it from far and near, circle its crashing surf for an entire day, a rock that sometimes appears to be a half-submerged head, sometimes a prehistoric stone hammer, but then you escape—deliberately?—to books only; to any available libraries for more re-tangled words; eventually to the films that will pass by before your eyes at their own dogged pace whether you notice/think about their existence or not. On this remaining paper your last three months of 1984 are these few repeating, so often lamenting words in a coil Quecumque Vera notebook and a shirt-pocket UofAlberta planner.
Erbarme dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zaehren willen
Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears
My tears. Gabriel: whatever your prayers, whatever your life, you were a complete gigantic rock rooted in the ocean bed of earth, a living volcano from the molten centre of life whose immense mountainsides we sometimes could not recognize for what they were when they groaned up out of the sea before our eyes. They were—they still are—massively invisible to me. But the core, your eroded core, is here thrust up out of these boxes; and even more my memory. Here it is. I grasp it.
The hard, loving embrace of two men erbarme dich, o mein Gott
POCKET LOOSE-LEAF NOTES (no dates)
London movies seen: The Company of Wolves / Jazzin’ for Blue Jean / Sola—120 Days of Sodom (grotesque, left after 15 min.) / Psycho / Oedipus Rex / Once Upon a Time in America (who cares? these aren’t people) / Medea / Paris, Texas / The Leopard (what an elegant way to die. The games we play till we turn to dust. Who can live young and happy if you see the darkness all the time) / Kaos (humanistic film) / The Brood / Shivers / Victim / 1984
DAILY PLANNER 1984: October margin scrawls
London: Tom Kelly—Irish Amnon—Israeli Peter—Perth, Australia Drunk—Greg? check out flights to Amsterdam best of all Przemyslaw—Poland whose life is such an agility of wits, improvisation, forget yesterday it’s today, hunnnn—such an enormous laugh
October Tuesday 9
October Wednesday 10
Meet Przemyslaw and go to Canada House to find out about possible immigration—looks tough. What can I do to help him. And do I want to be bothered—go buy more records, maps—Great Gabe, nice response—great human you are, the one friend you found. Movie: Young and Innocent Hitchcock, early film
Letters from parents & Mir at Can. House. Two completed months of nothing—well—this is what it will be may God be damned. Expect nothing when I come back
AIRMAIL LETTER, QUITO
Sun, Sept 16/84
Dear Gabe!
This is great—me writing to you at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London from Embajada de Canada in Quito, Ecuador! How’s the travelling going? Do you like travelling alone? To tell you the truth I don’t think I could do it—I’d get too lonely & feel more scared of things, ie I’m quite brave in a group but not alone. With Sylvia it’s very good, I can’t believe how much has happened to us already & we only left Canada a week ago …
… after the 2nd bus from Lima broke down in the mountains Syl & I and Chris a British guy we met and a Peruvian woman and her son, also on the bus, got a collectivo (like a taxi) and raced to the border. We got there at 10 to 6 but they wouldn’t let us across—though we had 10 minutes to spare—so we laid our sleeping bags on the cement floor of the empty customs buildings & the five of us slept there …
… Quito spread across the mountains is beautiful … Syl & I found a great apartment … So now things are starting to get organized here—all I have to figure out now is “What’s my thesis”!
I hope and pray everything’s going good for you. If you ever feel like coming down, there’s room in our apartment for you—in fact after Xmas when Syl leaves for Canada I’ll need another roommate! Hey?
I love you + think about you a lot, love Mir
POCKET LOOSE-LEAF NOTES
Oct. 10/84 See pictures of N. Kinski’s marriage to older man—I obviously don’t know her … and A is just as beautiful … but it is the beauty that drives me. Yet I cannot continue to be in love with an image. I have to love a real person. Please—bitte—give me the chance to care for, to open up with a real feeling person. Can such a very young person bear to hear all my troubles. If I dared face them
Bitte let Edmonton not continue the same way. I thought I left to get away from A but really I wanted a total change in the situation. And in Germany suddenly for a few days, sort of like revelation, it did. A dream there, but could I face it? Not really. Can/how/will Germany continue in Edmonton after months of
Ailsa, my Fairy Rock, my Elizabeth of the Ocean: I know now I have mucked around for the last years because I’m so much in love with you. Do you have a large heart—like your mother
Please answer me. There is/can be no other, if I look at others I feel I’m sinning in regards to you. I am still a virgin because you’re the only person I can ever imagine being close to in any physical way. Please do you still feel your Frankfurt/Mainz/Heidelberg heart, the hope
DAILY PLANNER 1984: October Thursday 11
Hoped today to be in Marnhull, Hardy’s Marlott in Wessex where Tess lived—no, I lie in London with a fever, sore throat. Lonesome heart—rain. What to do—crud, I hate myself—I don’t do anything! What stops me Go see Bergman Persona, magnificent Liv U, then Polanski The Tenant again, dark Isabelle Adjani. Polanski said: When I met Nastassja Kinski she was 15, but she was a woman. Woman and child at the same time, the perfect Tess.
Child and woman? If only
Wherever I am, all I ever do is wait for … So okay! Now I wait for the 17th, I’ll see Emma Kirkby then and for the 18th I’ve booked my flight home (Whatever that is)
Written across March–August in “Year in Sight”
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? H
ave 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?”