by Rudy Wiebe
yet don’t even know what I’m going through.
And I’ll never talk to you about it because
I can’t. I just wish I could talk to her. Right
now the only person I can talk too is god but
he does not seem to be listening or he just does
not care, he can be anything / too me he’s deaf
Love Gabe
“Love Gabe.” Yes. And Yo so deeply disturbed she copied … but Hal—the exact memory of his flippant words suddenly stabbed him—“Ach, puppy love”—puppy … o forgive me—on the brink of sixteen talking “too deaf god.” Too deaf indeed.
SPIRAL NOTEBOOK (1): January 28, 1983
“We want to touch, and a culture that has placed a ‘taboo on tenderness’ leaves us stroking our dogs and cats … we are starved for the laying on of hands.”
Feb. 18, 1983
Interesting to note the types of movies I have seen in the recent past. One type I have obviously pursued is the little girl film, Cat People, then Christiane F. and lastly Beau Pere. They all have blatant, exploitative parts, however there is much more that I like, not just the child-woman parts, it’s the dream-like quality, the camera moves in a dreamy-drugged atmosphere, so lyrical, beautiful
To dream, yes …
Sunday, Feb. 27, 1983
Lunch at church. Sat beside joking Grant, Ailsa off at the kid’s table (Denn, Colin, Joanne etc), sad eyes that don’t meet mine when I dare glance …
Ailsa at eleven. Slender as a tiny Romanian gymnast.
March 13, 1983
How can one go from complete happiness to complete despair in less than 8 hours. Perhaps because neither moment is “complete”—at church I saw A watch Mir put her purse around my neck, then hand me her books so she (Mir) could put her coat on. I held the books like girls do, folded tight against my chest. A was watching me and laughed; I was putting on a show for her, the closest I can get—One should not have any great expectations about life—esp. possible romantic love. Perhaps I am just reveling in my despair; it is something I love and hate at the same time.
If you are reading this, which no one but myself should be, forgive me. We are all just human and even my confessions are not all that true. Can anyone be objective when feelings are so
Even your private written “confessions are not all that true”?
March 21, 1983
The joy I had at Aspen Creek at Christmas and New Year’s did not last … The only thing that lasts is the long sleep. I weep
If this book just sits and no one knows it exists, it does not matter what I’ve written
O, it does matter. Particularly because you did not destroy it: you left it for us to read.
July 3, 1983
World Universiade, Gymnastics, here at UofA. Nadia C. was back in Canada, so close I could have walked up and spoken to her! She’s coach of the Romanian team, sitting there on their bench. She looked exactly the same. I felt rather indifferent, considering that during Montreal Olympics 1976 I developed an enormous crush, in fact it was the first one to overtake me. Despite her, this time gymnastics was humdrum, until I discovered a CCCP, #169, Elena Veselova. The smallest Soviet, always off by herself, alone, always looking sad. Took pictures, close with zoom. To do all that her perfect body must feel hard as just a little girl chewing her fingernails
No.
July 18, 1983
I’ve been looking at pictures of myself from grade 3 or 4, I’ve noticed that I am a cute little kid. For a few years then, just after the crew cut, just before the awkward adolescent years I looked really cute. Then I noticed I had the same kinds of feelings towards this “Gabriel” that I have towards young girls. I think if I had met me when I was that age I would have liked myself.
However he is me. Can it be that these girls are just extensions of myself (ie. my love for myself), or rather a love for the forever unattainable/changeable of what once was … what really makes up a person’s soul … what?
August 20, 1983
Looking at this notebook I get the impression that I am not getting anywhere. In my next book—I should just stop with this one, start again, clean—in my next notebook I should write more openly … get into a routine of writing, 15 minutes every day is certainly enough to tell what little I have to say
It is a quarter after 2 in the morning and I cannot sleep. I’m ridiculous, the silly desires that occupy my mind are such trivial stuff. I know from years past all things will pass, even slender little A (my feeling for) will go. I wish I could arrive someplace really real but looking at my past, I will never get anywhere, can’t run anywhere what to do I can’t even have the patience to write down my too bad for the reader
Gabriel: no more. I need sleep, tomorrow Owl will pull me even farther into the forest ravines towards the University, I’ll be limping by then, the High Level Bridge, the unending river—and here’s a folded letter.
The one from Kathleen, October 29, 1985. Impossible to forget … impossible.
Dear Hal and Yo—
Bob told me that one of your kids had died + I wanted to let you know that I’m thinking of you. It’s always hard to deal with the death of someone close, and suicide is a form of death that leaves a lot of guilt behind. People that I know have died that way, although never close friends, and one always wonders what could have been changed or done differently. I don’t know if my brother ever told you—he wouldn’t—but I tried to kill myself when I was 24, and I’ve been suicidal since then once, this past year. My experience is that it’s a very internalized kind of solution to what seems like an unbreakable continuum. In my case a lot of my feelings had to do with anger and power, but by the time I was actually planning what I was going to do, I was so far inside my self that I really don’t think anything or anyone outside me would have made much difference. The second time, this year (it seems decades ago), I recognized what was going on + I could take steps to deal with it, but I wouldn’t have had that recognition without the first experience. What I think I’m trying to say is that once that solution becomes attractive, it’s hard to get out from under it, even if you love your family + your friends, and your son may have just not had the experience to handle it, to resist the attraction. My brother felt that to choose your country place could have been an expression of anger towards you, but I don’t think so. I think it was a choice of security and reassurance, for support in the face of a major unknown, an experience that was still really frightening even once chosen and fixated on.
Oh, grief and regret are a hard, slow process always. Please take care of yourselves, and take heart: don’t lose that wonderful warmth I felt in your home the one time I was there. This is an awkward letter, because I don’t really know you well, and tragedy is so difficult to approach in our culture. And mourning. All people can say is time will help you get over it—please, I’m not trying to say that!—but please accept my best wishes, my hope for good in the future.
—Kathleen
You met us once, Kathleen, and such a letter. Blessed are you, wherever you may be.
And my beloved son: you left your Spiral Notebook (1) a third blank, and started Spiral Notebook (2) after you stopped your studies at the University of Alberta. But the school’s motto, Quaecumque Vera: “Whatsoever things are true,” remained there on the cover. Did the second notebook move help you to get somewhere “truer”?
SPIRAL NOTEBOOK (2): August 21, 1983
Aspen: creek, running into North Sask. River west of Edm;
a translation of the Cree name for the tree, wapus ahtik: whiteskin (Tyrrell)
Flip, flip to the middle.
January 1, 1984
New Year’s eve/day party at cabin: A has grown. Changed. She is no longer the silent little girl tagging after D & C, the child who will not sing after one false start. At the cabin she stated frankly, catching my eye for a second in the crowd, ‘Why not, be different!’ Yes, she is. We all change. Even memories
one generation passes away and another generatio
n comes
but the earth abides forever
Good. Flip.
Friday March 16, 1984
it is 12:30 in the morning, waste time reading my notes over the years till my laundry is finished in spin cycle. My feelings go back a long way … not very coherent … my feelings so often dictate what little I do. I want to have reason before passion as my motto, and yet how can I help it, I see her lovely face and I’m gone awww Laundry rough spin in the middle of the empty night.
Next page.
April 14, 1984
carol: - a song of joy or mirth
- a popular song or ballad of religious joy
- to sing, esp. in a joyful manner—
Whom then will you cry to, heart?
Your path more and more lonely
dragging on toward the future,
toward what is already lost
Flip.
June 16, 1984
I’ve had one beer too many. Denn and parents are touring Europe beyond The Wall and I sit alone in our family house. It’s not that it’s so bad; just I want to be happy, but for some reason I can’t. Anything that happens I feel as loss. My sole success is nothing. Digging my own hole. If only I could cover myself up …
Then, as a ghostly shadow, haunt that 50s house I know like the inside of my hand, into the entrance, up the stairs and into the doorless kitchen with all the cupboard plates and cups exposed into the living room I see out as they see in into the bedroom where I set up the bed frame and turn each bolt tight with a wrench, there is a cut in the headboard and I point at it with my screwdriver and she nods, This is the bed I’ve slept in all my life, and I carry the floppy mattress in past the dresser with the Garfield bank and brushes and everything already neatly arranged on it, such a lovely thing to struggle with and lay it down for her into the base of the bed beside the chair which holds the person holding the MJ poster, the person whose slender body will lie asleep on this mattress I lay down for many more …
What can you do with beauty. You can look it in the eye. What can you do in the void. what does it matter what moves me here, there, anywhere. I can’t even say something, clumsy writer that I am. What is there to say, leave alone write. Well, I guess that’s it then Period.
Flip.
July 22, 1984
“why would I want to phone you”
These words are written in your Daily Planner 1984 as well; same day. Words Ailsa said to you that Sunday? Not you as a “ghostly shadow,” it must have been to physical you, at church, when you’d been alone at home for two weeks, the Sunday before the Tuesday you took a taxi to Edmonton International Airport and flew to Amsterdam. What did you say to her, in church? Anything? And on that long flight through night into morning, alone with several hundred strangers, did you anticipate the despair?—the joy?—of that Germany meeting our two families had so carefully planned; where we would be together for a few days without amiable Miriam to divert issues—meet without any possible distraction or security or evasion of home or church? No wonder terror struck you in Frankfurt. No wonder Ailsa’s hand reaching for yours crashed you.
Memory like a crab clawing itself out; everything we did to each other. Over years.
Loving Lord Jesus Christ, have pity on us poor sinners.
You were eighteen, leaning over me, the yellow
chainsaw in my hands, the snarling cutter-bar
Your left arm was pushing the notched aspen to drop
it exactly right. Slowly the whiteskin leaned, leaned
down the July air into a green crash no one heard as
I pulled back and sensed a touch, just barely a steel touch
on flesh, the tanned skin below your left elbow
opened and you made no sound as I screamed
Every contact, for the lover, raises
the question of an answer:
the skin is asked to reply.
In the back seat of the car roaring over gravel we held
each other, your head against my shoulder hard, then
in my lap. I would not let the knotted handkerchief
go, not too tight, not too loose, the right side
of your head on my thigh, the coiled skin of your ear
your tangled hair. The town doctor already waited
in the entrance and you disappeared
I cannot continue to be in love
with an image. Is it that I want to be
someplace that doesn’t exist?
On the smooth highway back to Edmonton you
talked, you laughed so amazingly complete with
happiness, your sewn and bandaged arm a commitment
between us, a summer of healing to come
On that road I told you about the worn hills
along the Oldman, brittle grass and sky white
as spring skin
October 14, 1984: what I want to do is get myself
together for my Oldman River quest, April 28,
1985. There is no physical space in this world
that I seek; is it in the itch of the mind?
Always places named, dates detailed, every
word bearing its inevitable past exact
as an artichoke unlayered of each edible
leaf down to that ultimate taste at the core
You considered every word large, you held each
quotation in your hands, unleafing, dipping each
in the acerbic relish of your imagination until it burst
on your palate but it was never enough, this wringing
of words, never exact enough for your taste
always at their core they were elusive, yet you
could not trust yourself to abandon them, and your teeth
sank deeper, deeper into your hunger, you would find that
understanding sweetness, gnaw that ultimate hunger, god
damn it you would
I said, I get obsessive about
things. She said, I know
What did she mean
In the unrelenting spin of a pickup motor among
the whiteskin trees above Aspen Creek
which flows into the North Saskatchewan River
which is later joined by the Sturgeon and Dogrump
and Turtle and Battle Rivers and eventually by the
South Saskatchewan, which has already merged with the Red
Deer and the Bow and your Oldman, and grown together they
wash down the Grand Rapids into Lake Winnipeg fed by
the Red and Assiniboine Rivers which joined each other
where you were born, a blur of crocuses waiting for your
opened eyes, and the last great swamps of the Nelson River
and finally vanish forever in muskeg and
the passage of geography and stone and time ebbing
into Hudson Bay, into the frozen Arctic Ocean, the
colour of your ashes an incarnation of the ice
and the darting fish and seals and belugas
and polar bears and gravelly tundra where caribou
hunch to calve every spring and dawn lightens
the limitless ice, its pressure ridges
rammed into immense castellated islands
by every new-moon surge of the sea
as controllable as your relentless
hunger. Breathing in that steady
motor did you see the coming
thunder of angel wings
who when I scream
would hear
Yo is cleaning, so much dust in a very large area,
as always things have to be clean
always such a desperation of dust, and then
two arms are around her, clasping her so tight
the mop clunks to the floor, such a hard body
pressed against her back, such a powerful hug she
feels instantly who it is. I miss you
so much, she says. And again, Why did you
do it? And again, So much. After brea
thing for
a time she asks, Are you happy now? She lifts
her hands back to his head, his ears, his hair is short
with a touch of curl and remembering she says, Show
me your hands. The elegant fingers slightly double
jointed and longer than the palms, the lines a map
of prairie rivers she has known since the moment
of his birth.
SATURDAY, MAY 1, 2010
The second long day of their hunt for the Orange Downfill in the ravines and deeper river valley randomly bent, gouged by glacial water through flat, sprawling Edmonton. April had faded into the first day of May. Warmer afternoon light brightened over them as they trudged up an inclined scar scratched into the south valley cliffs. A century ago it might have been the narrow bed for a cable railway to haul people and goods up and down from John Walter’s ferry strung on a cable across the river, but now they had to force their way through its brush, the traffic on Walterdale Hill Road roaring down just beyond deadfall and leafless bush on their right. Cars and buses and vans and pickups … remorseless pickups.
Hal’s body was dragging slower and lower and Owl kept exact pace with him, both saying nothing. But Yo’s piano had begun singing in the valley search, and now words settled gently on the notes:
… when peace like a river attendeth my way,
when sorrow like sea billows roll,
whatever my lot … whatever my …
And abruptly they were out of wet, snowy brush and facing the five-road intersection at the height of 109th Street. Inevitable Edmonton skyline: brilliant sunlight in the bluest air to the thin eastern glaze of oil refineries; around them waiting and surging traffic, pavement and massive machines and stink. They crossed right with the light and walked down, so gently easy now, down, the bent sidewalk to the south-east steel massif anchoring the High Level Bridge: fresh black paint, a commuter cyclist smashed there a year ago.
And grey and black straight ahead, one kilometre of concrete and riveted steel stretched over trees towards the running water against the opposite bank: eighty-five metres high. A staggering depth. The tops of the trees far below here, and that distant, it seemed motionless, snake of grey water blank as mindless fear and thick enough to conceal any thing, slip it beyond imagining under the ice of the Arctic Ocean, truly a Yo song for singing “… O my soul it is well, it is well …” so step up on the bottom rail, lean out, fold your body forward over the top rail. It is well.