Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 3

If Edwin my eldest brother had ever been born

 


 If Edwin my eldest brother had ever been born, he would have been a year older than me. My father, a medical student, had his study beneath the stairs, his window a basement window and his specimens sealed in jars:            —a tiny fetus in a translucent sac            —a small fetus, pale-fisted, white            —Edwin            I point him out to my friends. "Look, that's Edwin, my older brother, if he'd been born."I think he would have been taller, thinner than me and with short hair. Edwin going before me, growing taller, moving through the neighbourhood. He'd score goals, talk to our neighbours at their side door. I know Dad would have taken Edwin to the golf-driving range, then let him come with to the pub.            Dad sawed down a club for him in the garage, then taped up the handle, my father showing him how to hold it: line up your thumbs like this, Edwin.            Down at the other end of the street, "Hey, that's Edwin's younger brother, okay, you' re it, one one-thousand, two."          A miscarriage. They tried to have Edwin before they had me. It was like he went away to a foreign country and though he was alive, we never saw him, just knew what he was like. And that baby in the jar, was Edwin before he was born, and what he left behind him when our thoughts of Edwin grew bigger.            I miss him. I think of all the times we could have had, all the things I could have asked him. What would it have been like to have him in the next room with his door open doing homework?            I don't know what happened to him after we moved to Canada. My father didn't have a study until we moved again and there wasn't a shelf below the window like before.          I still imagine Edwin back on that shelf with some kids looking in. They go the street and play football until they're called home for supper. 
___________
I wrote this text when I was in my late teens and it formed the content of one of my first serif of nottingham chapbooks. My grandfather used to sometimes call me Edwin because that was the name of a kid who lived next door to him in South Africa, where he lived. My father really did have jars of fetuses in his downstairs study, though I suspect they were all animal fetuses. He did have a real human skeleton, though. My mom also did have a miscarriage before me. So, all of these things became mixed together and part of my childhood thoughts which I allowed to freely wander into this story.      

SPARROW and birds at Cootes Paradise

 

Because of time, I left my bones outside my body. The future requires no bones. Birds: hollow bones. Me: hollow body. I squeeze through the present and into what hasn’t happened yet. I leave the present behind but bring the past. Tinnitus of the insides, a ringing bell. Hard not to imagine the ears as the plumage of caves. A bird flying from the east, a bird flying from the west, each down the tunnel of an east or west ear, meeting inside. This is the present, more or less as the Venerable Bede wrote about sparrows.

It seems to me as if you were sitting at your dinner tables warm in the hall, and it rained and it snowed and it hailed and one sparrow came from outside and quickly flew through the hall and it came in through one door and went out through the other. Lo! During the time that he was inside, he was not touched by the storm of the winter. But that is the blink of an eye and the least amount of time, but he immediately comes from winter into winter again. So then this life appears for a short amount of time; what came before or what follows after, we do not know.

My sister-in-law used to walk beside my father-in-law and out of nowhere say, “I have no bones,” and become floppy, requiring him to hold her up as if she really had no bones. I don’t know what holds me up. Time. Moving forward. The wind going into my ears and telling me things. My head a dining hall for thanes and sparrows. My bones, piled outside in the winter snow, as if enough firewood for only a few days.  

______________

Translation adapted from https://thijsporck.com/2020/07/27/from-bede-731-to-bone-1991-2004-a-sparrows-flight-through-the-ages/

______________

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JUDAS

The sky is luminous yellow and we’re all at the table with potatoes and wine. Everyone’s arguing and why won’t Jesus overthrow the state?—we don’t need heaven on earth but better civil society. I kissed Him and an otter entered into me and is doing flips. It’s like an orgasm 24/7 in there. This is the secret. There’s an otter inside everyone and it makes them come 24/7 just like the sun and the moon, the stars and all those unexpected holy rivers.

The Shamir

The creature, no bigger than a grain of barley, has six eyes and can eat stone. After all, it helped Solomon build the Temple and etch sigils into the priests’ breastplates. But even a tiny creature can peer into the sky. The moon is out but tonight its light is weak and the stars are visible, the vast array of constellations seemingly asking to be connected, each to each, in patterns. Ursa Minor. Orion. Cygnus. The scorpion. The stars are there, or were there, twinkling ruins of what was, of time and the inevitable—inexorable— inconstancy. Ghosts of fusion. 

The creature does not look at the stars but instead fixes its minuscule eyes on the vastness of empty space, that place where there is nothing, or where nothing is visible. In time, even this nothingness will expand. Where is that region of the universe where nothing changes, where there is constancy? In the mind of this creature, there is no place of rest or of certainty. It can conceive of what could be termed Platonic ideals but knows that even ideas fade. Memory. Boundarylessness. Confusion. Death. Temples fall. Emptiness expands. What is distant becomes more distant. Change itself changes. Temple eater, wall biter, chewer of stone, time has a heart and its blood is knotted.

_______More about The mythical worm that could eat stone and helped Solomon build the temple.

A by Fire

Think of a safe place, they said in mindfulness class. Think of a compassionate friend, one who is wise and supportive. I became safe in the red chair by the fire, covered by a blanket knit by my grandmother. Friends, grandparents, spiritual figures, mentors—who would offer compassion, energy, illumination. A huge letter A, tall as a ten-year-old, Times New Roman, black, sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire. Anything is possible, it said. Did light shine like wings around it as if it were a medieval saint—“outer glow” in Photoshop? No, it was crisp as if letterpressed into air. Anything is possible, it repeated and I understood that this A was the beginning, that language meant that I could explore, that it opened the world to possibility as if I could see the bones under the flesh of the world. An energizing breeze blew through the open centre of the world and I felt the same openness in my chest, as if my ribcage had opened like wings. I could see texts undulating in the air around us. The A and I could join these texts, could read these texts, could write them.  What gift does this compassionate friend give you? they asked. What do they give you? The A passed me a smaller A, an A that fit into my palm. It was an actual A but it was also all the A’s in all the texts that were possible. We breathed, the A and I, through the open centre of ourselves. 

Likingkindness

 

what would you like whispered 

in your ear the rest of 

your however-long-it-is life

heart light like an open flower or fridge?

 

the secret to whispering in your own ear is

face the wind or leap off a cliff 

though it’s hard not to shout

 

may I know the difference between

balm and bomb

especially at the airport

 

may I know that

I’d be an ant or a colony of ants

if I felt more loved

 

imagine your own ear as a horse’s ear

long, labial, expressive, 

lilylike across from another ear 
on the distant side of the long head 

 

may I be imperfectible, blotchy

waxen as the inside of a horse’s lilylike ear

when it’s too hard I say

likingkindness, likingkindness to all things

 

which season feels the most shame

is it summer, autumn, fall or winter?

(see what I did there)?

 

spring when shame blooms

ants crawl around your heart

make you feel like

ants are crawling around your heart

 

if I were a horse, what I’d whisper is

you were never more brown than 

when jockeys told you that thing when you were a foal

you were never more brown than now

 

 

LETTER TO YOU AS IF YOU WERE KAFKA

In this letter, I’m going to pretend you are Kafka. Nocturnal. Secretive. Intense. 

Pained yet quietly open to the joy in the world. 

And tonight, I saw—or didn’t see—something which reminded me of you. After midnight as I walked the dog I saw a figure on the path. The forest was blue bright because of the full moon; even the shadows were blue. The dog howled and began to run, but I called him back. I couldn’t tell if the figure was coming towards us or away. We kept walking and the figure appeared to stride off into the trees. Maybe it was a trick of the turning path, but when we rounded the bend, it was gone. The dog nosed disconsolately for a minute then gave up. It was unsettling, alone at night in the woods and this figure appearing seemingly out of nowhere. What was it?

As I’m writing this, I feel as if I’m missing out on the other writing I could be doing.  

Remember that summer we watched the waves fall onto the shore, the tide coming in, the waves becoming closer and closer, so near to the sandcastles we’d made until you couldn’t stand it and so you ran up to them and smashed them all. 

Kafka wrote a famous letter to his father, filled with bitterness and recrimination. He never sent it, but it’s become posthumously famous since Max Brod saved his friend’s writing from his wished-for-fire. But I like best Kafka’s letters to his partners, such as Milena. There’s often an intimate joy and the sense of loving attention, to the world and to Milena. 

I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care, the balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes (the vegetation here is strange; in weather cold enough to make the puddles freeze in Prague, blossoms are slowly unfolding before my balcony), moreover this garden receives full sun (or full cloud, as it has for almost a week)—­lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you, recently you wrote about not being able to breathe, that image and its meaning are very close to one another and here both would find a little relief.

That’s how I would like this letter to feel. Dispensing with protective or habitual distance, if we could speak earnestly and straightforwardly, even if we don’t agree. If it could be based on listening, really seeing each other, and authentic connection. I think so much pain and confusion could be aleviated if we only had the feeling of being seen.

After returning from the walk, I lay down and dreamt that all of the ink from all the world’s writing was distilled into a vast tank, like liquid night. Then someone was dropped in and their body stained blue as they struggled to breathe. They pressed against the glass as if a desperate sea creature. Later, there was a war and the tank was tipped over and ink floods into the fields and streets. All those words—serifs, ascenders, bowls—released into the world.

*

Yesterday, Zoe Whittall posted on Twitter that a friend had reminded her “gay bars used to end the night with three slow songs so we'd go off into the night after swaying around holding each other and I think we should bring back that tradition.”

And I responded, ‘I think all gatherings, meetings, grocery shopping trips should end this way.” 

I used to be invested in irony and was quite cynical, though I might have said something about engaging in the absurdity and contingency of everything. I’d shy away from direct expression (where is the complicating nuance?) and anything that could smack even slightly of sentimentality. But now I feel like saying “Fuck that shit.” My friend and collaborator Lillian Nećakov and I were discussing why we and many of our peers both are writing about death, and have an interest in “deeper thinking.” Is it the times or our age—sixty or more? 

I believe the hands of the clock are too close to midnight and anyway, this kind of post-ironic honesty is a response to how capitalism erodes our values and sense of self. I’m trying to think without the carapace, to speak from the squishy, undeflecting, unguarded self, hoping that I’m able to withstand whatever the consequences are. I both feel that I’ve been around long enough to be strong enough for it and that I’ve learned from many brave souls, speaking from many places of alterity—queer, disabled, BIPOC—telling what is true for them. 

*

A wolf in front of me. I wait. A forest grows. A wolf and me and the trees. I wait more. The wolf is bones. I will not be late to the chess game.

*

Do I believe that words are enough? Words spoken to you or words written, would they change things, be helpful? Change is more of a process, I believe. The formation of a new pattern. How many days does it take to form a habit. Answer (backed by science!): sixty-six days. (I’m beginning to feel like I’m channeling the second-personing of the letterwriting Rilke.) 

Perhaps a thought finds in way into your thinking and, like a computer virus, begins to replicate, working in the background, making changes that may at first be invisible. The thin edge of a wedge doesn’t break the rock but after some time and some worming, more of the wedge wedges between the rockflesh and splits it (so it “bursts like a star,” to quote Rilke.) A single statement may have echoes. And perhaps the attention, the care, the seeing is the first thing that makes a difference, allows the exchange to take root. A letter is read, maybe only partially, then it is put down. But then picked up again, either literally, or in the mind. 

*

In his “Archaic Torso of Orpheus,” Rilke exhorts, “You must change your life.” Err, ok. Easy peasy. I’d never thought of that. I’ll change it, right away. Thanks, Rainer. Of course, we wonder “change how?” And rather than just following instructions, the phrase become more active because we consider what it means. If it even is—like I’m doing here—possible to be told to change, as if thinking something can make a more fundamental change possible. But at least for this letter, what comes before this iconic and often motivationally-memed line is important. Translations vary but the point is:

for there is no angle from which
it cannot see you.
You must change your life.

 or

for here there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life.

The torso of Orpheus sees you wherever and however you are. Is it a shaming gaze mean that you cannot continue to get away with your bullshit? I imagine a judgemental God with an eye like a cue ball, having no pupil, it looks (and judges) in every direction. 

I think it means that “you are seen”—that your being and your experience are witnessed. I love that the torso of this famed Greek figure has no head and so it “sees” in every direction without eyes. It radiates corporeal human life, from one living thing to another. Never mind the cerebral cogitation of rationality, this “being seen” is elemental. It is from this place that the exhortation to “change your life,” comes. From a deep, indeed a fundamental, understanding, of the human condition (and this six-pack Greek demi-God is definitely conditioned!) I’d say from a place of love. An atheist Antinomian grace. You are always already everything.

It is from this place that I’d like to write this letter to you. The real you, not the Franz Kafka we both needed it to be addressed to. I wish it could beam out in every direction, not in words but with a sense that you are seen. You do not need to change your life, you just need to see it. To see below the white-capped water of its surface and know your innate value. To call yourself beloved, to feel yourself beloved on the earth.

THREE SIDES TO EVERYTHING

In this essay I will. “In” this essay implies an inside and an outside, some kind of boundary. As if the essay were a Boston Cream and it contains filling, a payload made of words. But the essay is both inside and outside. Or at the very least, an inside and its skin. 

Some years ago when I went to see an internist, my son said that every doctor who isn’t a dermatologist is really a kind of internist.

A dictionary is a hole in all the words it isn’t. 

And an essay is a hole in everything it’s not. Strange how the puddle is the exact size of the water as well as the hole. And what’s this duck doing here?

But this essay hasn’t been written. It is, as they say, early days. And these early days—the sun shining in the front room, the dog curled beside me on the couch, outside some guys in reflective vests doing something to our street—aren’t part of the essay. Yet.

What is it to have lost many relationships with friends and family. It’s not so much a Boston Cream, than a kind of grief. There’s the presence of their absence. Lost for many reasons. Time, distance, death, illness, disagreement, hurt. I’m a hole in everyone I’m not. Or everyone is a hole in everything that isn’t me. Certainly these losses are holes in me, holes that are not just empty, but filled with loss. It doesn’t feel like relationships are ever truly gone, but rather replaced with these feelings.

We know who we are not only because of our little dog, but through the broader triangulation of all our relationships, both past and present. Some are still active, and some continue in the way of half-lives, still radiating. An essay is its words just as we are our relationships. An essay is also the words it is not (cf. relationships.)

I’ve also lost many of the ways that I’ve thought and experienced life. I’ve lost my former self in many ways, but gained this other, this Gary 59.0—I’m fifty-nine as I write this—always a Beta version, functioning with a few glitches, but for the most part operational. The earlier operating system no longer functions as it once did. It’s changed. I’ve had to acknowledge that some things are lost. Or weren’t how I thought they were. Or, in some cases, hoped they could be. I create meaning  by what I’m not, this trace that I’m formed around.

We lost that third boy we expected to have—we thought we’d seen him and his boyhood on the ultrasound, but a girl was born. We also“lost” our nephew in the very best way—she’d been a niece all along and it was our great delight for her to finally be able to be herself. But these aren’t losses, and certainly not griefs but happy replacements—futures we didn’t anticipate but celebrate and which entirely eclipse the world we once thought we’d have. Did I imagine being in Hamilton, Ontario for the last thirty-two years—was that my future? No, but even so, my life fits me like a puddle. In this scenario, I’m the water or the hole. The duck. 

Like the dictionary, I’m choosing to gather, to notice, record and consider only some things and leave out others. 

2.

When I went to see an internist—because I was feeling exhausted—he asked a series of questions that were clearly about determining if I were depressed. In his lilting Irish accent he asked, “And so what would you do if you won the lottery?” I had just returned from a family holiday in Ireland where we stayed at a charming cottage near the Cliffs of Moher. “I’d move with my family to Country Claire and buy that cottage and spend my time writing.” “Ah no, for much of the year, Country Claire is too rainy and cold, it’s Tuscany where you want to be. There you’d be, in a villa on a hill and all those travelling by would point up at you and say, ‘all those novels, how does he do it?’” 

Tuscany or Country Clare, I’d take either. Burnt umber and sunshine, or mist and deep green. Or Hamilton, Ontario where no one walks by pointing at me and my ostensibly productive novellife. 

I read about how to insert filling into a donut. The usual cake-style donut isn’t appropriate, rather you need to use a yeast-based rising donut so that there is a hollow inside. Then it is simply a matter of using a cream-filled pastry bag with “a small round decorating tip (a Wilton #12 would work well for this). Poke a hole in the side of each doughnut and fill with pastry cream. The doughnuts should be served as soon as they are filled. They are best the same day they are made.” 

The Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli cites an “unknown genius” in the epigraph to her essay on  Joseph Brodsky: “There is nothing more productive or more entertaining than allowing oneself to be distracted from one thing by another.”

I imagine taking a “donut” and inserting the extra “ugh” like orthographic filling, plumping it up like asides such as this one, filler perhaps, but enjoyable if you like that kind of thing.. Sometimes almost the entire point. 

3.

There are friends that I haven’t spoken to in decades yet still consider friends. School friends, old girlfriends, those who more rightly might be considered acquaintances. I watched for news of them on social media or more directly, through mutual friends. Why haven’t we spoken? Sometimes distance, opportunity, change: they might have lack of interest or consider we’ve “grown apart.” A few because of a disagreement or bad feelings, but not mine. I tend to feel that once I’ve made a connection with someone, looked “into their soul” as it were, however provisionally, it is impossible to stop knowing them, or in some way, caring about them. How deep is the commitment? In truth, it is more a feeling than action. There are those I feel this connection with but still do little to interact with them. So many souls, so little time, energy, or organization.

4.

My in-laws’ friends are dying. This is also my parents’ experience, too, though they speak about it less. They all are in their 80s as are most of their friends. As a consequence, the news is often about cancers, heart attacks, and strokes. Sometimes after years of struggle, sometimes shockingly suddenly. They no sooner hear about a diagnosis than a few weeks later, they learn that their friend has died. My mother-in-law used to joke that her mother-in-law who lived until her late 90s and seemed always to be attending funerals, only went because of the free food. Last night she said, glumly, that she now understands. Three friends had died this past week. Her life is filling up with funerals, never mind free food.

I remember the days when it seemed all our friends were getting married. Then a few years later, having children. Then the ups and downs of careers and children and now a wave of retirements for our older—or luckier—friends—teachers, crown attorneys, and so on. Also parents getting sick or dying. Announcements of children getting married, grandchildren being born. Our friends getting sick. I see where this is going. 

My parents and my in-laws have friends that they’ve known for seventy or more years. Despite immigration, the world changing, families re-aligning, war and illness. When my in-laws chose to renew their vows in a beautiful backyard COVID-complicated ceremony attended by their children and grandchildren, my father-in-law’s very ill best friend managed to attend. They’d known each other since they were boys. Sixty years before, he was one of the witnesses to the marriage. How moving that he was able to once again witness his best friend’s marriage sixty years after, before passing away soon after.

5.

Midafternoon and the light is pearlescent, the sun shrouded in clouds. I’m back in the front room with the dog curled beside me. I’m not eating a donut, but a hamantaschen, the traditional Jewish triangular Purim pastry. Though the pastry is usually dry and isn’t, shall we say, exquisite, it’s eaten because the three-sided shape recalls the three-sided hat of anti-Semitic villain Haman from the Purim story recounted in the Megillah. Eat the rich. Destroy the pastriarchy. Sometimes the filling is jam—apricot or prune are big favourites—but I’m having my preference: poppyseed paste. Is this supposed to represent Haman’s slurry of a villainous black brain inside his hat? Is it a lesson that hate can taste good, or that victory and schadenfreude (in this story, the Jews won) can be sweet? 

6.

It was someone’s Bar Mitzvah and there was a room under the bimah, the raised stage where synagogue services take place: the ark for the Torahs, the podiums for the rabbi and the cantor and place for others involved in the ritual. Sarah and I were both twelve and we went into the room beneath all the adults and kissed. It was the first time I’d kissed anyone or was kissed, except for that one awkward time when I was seven and the down-the-street-lady kissed me on my neck and, with her perfume and warm wet lips, got me worked up, some combination of excitement and shame. But Sarah and I kissed. The next day, we tried to go to a movie on the bus but discovered the movie wasn’t playing. I don’t remember what happened next, but that was the last time I saw her. Later—ten years later?—I heard that she’d died in a car accident in a snow storm. When we kissed, I was too young to know what I felt, but now I look back with kindness, sorrow and compassion for this girl, this tender moment we had, one that, slight as it was, I still think about it, this early learning. Two kids sharing such such fragile tenderness, delicate and sweet. 

A donut is an inside, an outside and a hole, which can be inside or outside, depending. Almost everything has an inside, and outside and a between. 

But why donuts? Because of pleasure, the discursive, and discussed below, the Jewish pastry used as a euphemism for the female Garden of Eden, to paraphrase Noel Simon. 

7. 

Jean Cocteau wrote that “A great literary masterpiece is simply a dictionary in disorder.” But a work of literature doesn’t use all the words of the dictionary. Is it possible that by looking at the parts of the dictionary that were not used, you could reconstruct the literary work? The work is both the words that were used and the words that were not used.

Or to put it another way, everything that Gertrude Stein’s dog doesn’t know isn’t Gertrude Stein and so by knowing what the dog doesn’t know, you could figure out who Gertrude Stein is. By knowing something about the hole, you know something about the donut. More and more, I’m figuring out who I am by figuring out who I’m not. 

It’s a kind of dead reckoning, a system of navigation that doesn’t rely on absolute position but on. figuring out where to go and where you are by measuring the distance and direction from where you’ve been. 

Who I am is both inside and outside my life. In my life. Around my life. Through my life. During. Despite. Because of. What, I wonder, is the apt preposition?

HITLER’S MOUSTACHE, MY GRANDFATHER’S LIP

 

In the hallway just outside the preschool, pictures of past synagogue presidents. First names: Jacob, Jacob, Louis, Max, Adolph, Jacob, Adolf, Max, Moses, Adolph, Samuel, Sam, Aaron, Joe, Joseph, Moses, Leo, Adam. At a certain point, the name Adolf falls out of fashion. 

At another point, Hitler’s moustache and my grandfather’s traded places. Did they pass in the street and one jumped off the upper lip of the other? Did the Führer sneeze during a salute and my grandfather, hiding in an alley, sneezed at the exact same time and so the trade was made? Such mysteries can never be known. Eventually, my grandfather and the new moustache emigrated to South Africa. My grandfather’s original moustache hid beneath Berlin on Hitler’s lip, then was blown away with the rest of Hitler’s face as the Allies entered the city and Hitler shot Eva Braun and then himself.

The idea that a growth of hair could have a name is strange but also telling. Van Dyck, Fu Manchu, Charlie Chaplin. Did my grandfather initially adopt the look because he was emulating the Little Tramp, Oliver Hardy, a truncated Groucho Marx? Pratfalling his way out of history, somehow escaping what he knew was soon to occur?

The Nazi moustache on my grandfather’s lip made calls on the wall phone late at night when my grandfather would sleepwalk into the kitchen. Germany. France. Argentina. Brazil. Can a moustache cry? A moustache can cry. It can also move money from one offshore account to another. It spoke to beards. To pointed sheets. To shoes whose shine reflected a vast network of stars and small planes which flew overhead. Sometimes it would sing sweet German songs.

Mein Liebchen, wir sassen beisammen
Traulich im leichten Kahn;

My sweet one, we sat together,
We loved one other in our light boat.

My grandfather’s original moustache woke up several years after Berlin was divided between east and west. It barely remembered what had happened. It would play chess in the park. It got foam from Viennese coffee on its hairs. It read newspapers in the library. It spoke to emigrees.  

The name Adolf appeared more in 1937 than at any other time. It was used infrequently until about 1920. After 1937 there was a steep decline, another small peak in 1964 (the year I was born) and then a more gentle decrease, although its use has continued to rise until the present day.

According to Wikipedia, my grandfather’s “toothbrush” style of moustache first became popular in the United States in the late 19th century; from there it spread to Germany and elsewhere, reaching a height of popularity in the interwar years, before becoming unfashionable after World War II due to its strong association with Hitler. The association has become strong enough that the toothbrush has become known as the "Hitler moustache.

One story attributes gasmasks as the reason Hitler trimmed his more fulsome Kaiser-style moustache. As a soldier in the First World War, his mask did not seal and so he had to trim his facial hair until it achieved its iconic shape. Another attributes a stay in Liverpool, the “lost years” of 1917-18, with his sister-in-law Bridget. Apparently they argued over many things including his unkempt facial hair and so she cut it.

The preschool in the synagogue is in Temple Anshe Sholom, the oldest Reform Synagogue in Canada, founded in the early 1850s by a small group of German Jewish families who settled in the city of Hamilton. My children attended this school in the 1990s. It was run by a woman called Celia Berlin and so I called the protective divider between the hall and the school, the Berlin Wall.

I remember standing on a gentle hill in Ireland in soft light with my father. A small white car drove by. A VW. My father said his father would never buy one because it was German. When I was a teenager, my father bought a Mercedes. It was a beautiful and well-made car. The doors closed with a precise click. “To keep in the Zyklon-B,” I said.

Hitler’s moustache eventually emigrated to Canada with my grandparents. First to Moncton, New Brunswick, then to Vancouver and finally, when my grandfather was ill, to Ottawa to be with my doctor father. I remember hearing my grandparents coughing when they woke in the morning. Both had been heavy smokers. And no wonder, my grandfather owned a tobacconist’s shop for many years. My grandfather sitting on a bench by an outdoor hockey rink, Hitler’s moustache fluttering slightly in the cold breeze. My brother skating. Then my grandfather and the moustache listening to me play Bach on alto saxophone in our kitchen. My grandfather’s watery patient eyes. Did the moustache make late night calls from Ottawa? Did it attempt to gain support for taking over new countries, or for the rebirth of the will? It seemed meek, listening to the Bach sarabande and the bouree, the gavotte and the gigue. Then my performance of The Pink Panther. 

Once I was in my bed reading The Count of Monte Cristo when my grandfather’s moustache came in the room. I recognized it as it stood in the dim light near the door, even though it had not been on my grandfather’ lip since before I had been born. Before even my father had been born, before my grandfather escaped to South Africa. “Does the other moustache know you are here?” I asked. It had travelled from Berlin and somehow found me, my grandfather, and Hitler’s moustache. “Shh,” it said. “I don’t want them to hear.” Then it began to quietly sing the Sh’ma. The central prayer of Jewish identity.

 In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis tried to hold a rollcall to determine who to send to death camps. The guards insisted the Jews count faster and faster until finally, as an act of resistance, they sang The Sh’ma.  Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw tells the story and begins, "I cannot remember everything. I must have been unconscious most of the time.” 

There is a long tradition of magic in Jewish tradition. One scholar notes that still, even many modern Jews employ practices that are quite like protective charms. Observant Jews wear tefillin for morning prayer—small boxes held to the upper arm and forehead by leather straps. Prayer scrolls in a special case mounted on the doorframes. Both contain prayers including the Sh’ma.

As soon as I was old enough, in fact, even before, I grew a beard and moustache. Both were protective charms. Magic to protect me. From fear. Time. Society. Not growing.

Wikipedia again: During puberty, the first facial hair to appear tends to grow at the corners of the upper lip (age 11–15) then spreads to form a moustache over the entire upper lip (age 16–17).

This is followed by the appearance of hair on the upper part of the cheeks and the area under the lower lip (age 16–18) which eventually spreads to the sides and lower border of the chin and the rest of the lower face to form a full beard (age 17–21).

The moustache showed me stars out the window. Constellations which appeared in northern skies. Then we planned how it might return to my grandfather’s lip, how we might vanquish Hitler’s moustache. Not with a razor or clippers but with cunning and careful planning. How should the moustache feel? What should we say? Who should we consult?

Nazis who wore Hitler moustaches include Karl Maria Demelhuber, Sepp Dietrich, Irmfried Eberl, August Eigruber, Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, Franz Ritter von Epp, Christian Wirth and Kurt Zeitzler. Many others have worn the moustache including Fred Trump, prominent Israeli politicians and Robert Mugabe.

My granny and grandpa’s bed was against the window. My grandfather wore an eyemask to keep out the beams of the streetlights. In sleep, my grandmother looked like a child, worried yet earnest. Years later, when she was dying of cancer, I sat by her bed to say what I expected would be my last words to her. Because of her illness, she had been unresponsive, seemingly unable to understand or communicate. “I love you,” I said, though I was embarrassed. She smiled as if she understood.

The moustache and I crept to my grandfather’s side of the bed. There it was, Hitler’s moustache. Even in the half light, I could see what I had not been able to. There was something not right about the moustache on my grandfather. “Should we wake him? Should we tell him?” “Let him sleep,” the moustache said. I followed instructions. We each had our jobs. The moustache would leap onto my grandfather’s lip after I’d finished.

I slowly lowered my fingers over my grandfather’s face and then took a firm hold of the moustache and pulled quickly as if removing a Band-Aid. Then I ran, the moustache in my hand. I ran down the stairs out the front door and into the street. I ran towards the park, gripped a rock and putting the moustache on the end of a slide, pounded. Pounded. The metal of the slide clanged loud in the night, a muted bell. I pounded the moustache with the rock again and again. Again and again. The moustache had been flat but become even flatter. Did I sing the Sh’ma Yisroel? I said nothing. 

THE GHOST OF TWO EYES

They said my right eye was “lazy,” as if there was something slothful and so a bit decadent or indulgent about that eye. Oh, they could fix it alright. If I didn’t start using it more, they’d patch over the left, more achieving eye and make that right one work. boyo. Later, it was determined that the back of my eye was not spherical like a marble but egg-shaped, like the dip in a spoon. It couldn’t see properly, no matter how hard my brave little eye tried. It was astigmatic and everything was fuzzy. Even with glasses, they couldn’t completely correct it. Unless, they said ominously, I lost my good eye, and then measures could be taken. They never said which measures or why they couldn’t just correct the eye now. And so I’ve never been able use binoculars or 3D glasses in the manner in which God intended. Or those antique stereoscopic things where two very slightly different images (the left-eye and right-eye view) of the same scene make the combined effect into 3D scene.

*

I’ve just turned 59. LIX in Roman numerals which perhaps better convey the one-less-than sixtyish feeling that I have. I’m nearly there. About to turn a corner. Open a door. About to step over a precipice and hurtle…where? I’m not sure. Into being older? Old. Is it to a place where I’m less worried, where I’ve arrived beyond some concerns I had throughout my younger days? I suppose I’m feeling that the end is in sight, even if I’m lucky and it is thirty-something years away. In truth, I’m liking this life, where I’m at, what I can do, and I want more of it. I want it to continue. Yeah, me and (almost) everyone else. 

I once told my wife that I wanted to grow old together. We have. Now we’ll grow older.

*

I was thinking about the stereoscope because I misread a word in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and in Sebaldian style, realized how it was a good metaphor for the past. Or memory. Or history. Our two views: how we saw something then, how we see it now. Or maybe, how our view of the present is affected by the past. We see the same image but from two different perspectives and it literally creates greater depth. This is either a good thing or a kind of illusion where we are tricked into thinking our view is closer to reality. Two different views blended as if they were one and we lose the ability to see the two distinct components.

*

I’m beginning to think of the past—my past—with tenderness. Like it was an old dog. It waddles. Its eyes water. It leaks. I remember its leaps, its appetite, how it barked and protected us. The time it got away and worried us. The times it crapped on the floor. On the bed. I’m getting sentimental about even the bad things. At least they were my bad things. I’m lucky that nothing truly tragic or traumatic happened. Just loss, sadness, worry, a slow accumulation of troublesome experiences or knowledge, the ground slowly shifting rather than a sudden earthquake or tidal wave. I sense something like an accumulation of debris, sediment—fine sand with occasions sticks, stones, old tin cans—shifting around, forming dunes and undulations. It slows me down, but it is much less sharp that the rocks which of it was formed.

*

I never dated as an adult. My wife and I first began seeing each other when I was eighteen and she was twenty and we never stopped. Or, rather we got married a few years after we met and here we are, forty years later. We met at university and she tells me that she’d seen me around residence. Before we’d even spoken she’d had a dream where hundreds of people were being led somewhere and it wasn’t good. We were in the line. It was an Irishy hill, grey sky, mist, a drystone wall. We picture it now as the Mourne Mountains. The dream-me led us away from the line and to a patch of brilliant sunshine. We sat on the wall in this bright warmth under a large and iconic tree.  We were two people, coupled by our escape. A few years ago, when I went to Ireland, I bought her a tree necklace which now she always wears. 

*

Or she did. It got lost and so, I had to buy her another identical one. I visited a giant thousand-year-old bell in China some years ago. It looked in perfect shape so I asked about it. It was a perfect replica. In China, I was told, they don’t think of a recreation as any less authentic than the original. It carries its spirit. Ship of Theseus: solved. 

*

Regrets? Yeah I’ve had a few. Thousands. Mostly, I’d like another chance at some things which I was too anxious, or impetuous or unprepared for, so I could really appreciate them, enjoy them. But that’s hindsight. Mine isn’t even 20-20 with corrective lenses. Unless I lose my good eye then I could be 20. Just 20. But you can only know what something was, what it will mean to you after it was, and not during. If there’s too much, “oh this is something I’m going to remember forever,” you aren’t entirely in the moment. You’ll only remember your advance memory of it. If I could only live my circumcision again so I could really be in the moment. It recalls when I was playing squash and teh ball would arrive in the perfect for me to slam in with triumphant and stylish bravado. I’d be so aware that this was a perfect opportunity, I’d flub the shot.

*

A qualification about my ability to save our lives and escape that long forbidding procession of people going over the hill. I’d say, for the first ten years we were together, I had no idea what I was doing or how to live, so I just clung to my wife as if she were a liferaft. Gradually, I learned and we learned how to guide and support each other.

*

The first time we spoke was when someone suggested she talk with me because I’d explain the concept of “existentialism,” which she needed to learn for an English class. I wasn’t able to explain. Our first date, we went walking in a cold mud-filled field. We took our shoes off and stepped through the mud until our feet became name. Was that existentialism?

On our fifth date, we went on the rickety old The Flyer rollercoaster at the Canadian National Exhibition. It was the 80s and Beth was wearing a floofy sweater. I had braces for the second time. I turned to say something just as the ride began and I got my braces caught in the elaborate fabric of her shoulder. She thought I was just scared, but I was trying to extricate myself and my braces for the entirety of the ride as we went up and down and around.

I think I read an essay where this happened to Umberto Eco.

*

I wake up and think about the time he somehow convinced me to cross a river barrelling through a steep gorge with my 7-year-old son. The park ranger was shouting for us to stop. But I’ve put my wallet in my shoe and thrown it across the river already, I said. We begin to cross the river, lost our footing, swam like mad and both made it to the far shore. We survived. We might not have. It was extremely dangerous and I was the one in charge. But I’ve had this retrospective fear, this charge of “what was I thinking,” so many times, it has lost much of its piercing terror. 

*

When that same son was fifteen, our family was swimming on a Hawaiian beach. We hiked down a cliff to a remote beach because it had black sand and was a nudist beach. The sand was amazing but, much to our sons’ disappointment, the naked people comprised only old hippies with sagging scrotums that looked like hackysacks in a long bag. 

We went for a swim but then the tide began to go out, and the waves suddenly became huge.  We were being tossed around, pulled from shore. Beth is a strong swimmer and she made it back to the beach, albeit deposited unceremonious on her bum, her bathing suit filled with sand. I was struggling and unable to return to the beach but then I felt strong arms around me which lifted and swam me in to shore. My son, recently qualified as a life guard. He’d rescued his little sister and then came back for me.

*

Some of the fears I’ve had over the years, have gone underground, have become part of what I am, part of who I am. Like toxins, my body has worked to process them, to integrate them, to neutralize them. I know they affect my thinking and behaviour. Some experiences never go away and are always a ghost inside, haunting you. Whistling or howling, giving your guts chills. 

*

When I first went for glasses, my father, a young man at the time, tried on several pairs himself. He found some that were just like his boss’s, a more senior doctor. These are the ones you should get, Gary. And indeed I did get them. I once told a therapist this, and we thought it was telling: issue around the separation of father and child, the possibility of being who you really are, the expectation of parents and so on. Now, I see my father as young, with all the fears and worries of a young man trying to establish and prove himself in a serious career in a new country. Of course, he shouldn’t have tried on the glasses himself and made me get them, but after fifty years, perhaps I’m ready to see this moment with compassion. And with distance. I’ve had plenty chances to become who I am and who I want to be. My parents did provide me every opportunity in other ways. And maybe there was more to this memory, or perhaps it wasn’t quite as I remember it.

It’s entirely different than the time I tried on some jeans in a store in London, England and the store cleck said, “Perhaps the young gentleman is too husky for those dungarees.” Details like that you don’t forget.

*

In Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, my mom used to campaign for the Aliance Party. It stood for what it sounded like—an alliance between the Catholic Republicans who wanted to return Northern Ireland to the rest of Ireland and the Protestant Unionists who were in favour of continuing to be part of the UK. Our neighbour, Dr Heel, an entomologist, made a huge A for alliance on his front lawn by letting the grass grow long in an A shape, and cutting the rest short. He wanted the overflying British military helicopters to see. Another neighbour, Molly, used to call Roman Catholics “Rice Crispies,” because of initials R.C. And whenever anyone woke late she’d say, “The dead have arisen and appeared to many,” which is a line from the Gospel of Matthew describing an event after the resurrection. One time, my mom—who had a South African accent— while knocking on doors for the aliance party was asked, How long have you lived here? She explained, proudly, ten years. Well, the Protestant woman said, we’ve been here for three hundred. Come back when you’ve been here as long as us.

*

It’s been one of my favourite lines of poetry since bpNichol quoted it in a second-year creative writing class of his that I took at York University. “Goodbye like the eyes of a whale say goodbye, never having seen one another.” It’s W. S. Merwin. I never thought of this line as sad until my friend Elee said so.  Incidently, blue whales’ eyes—and I do imagine a blue whale here—are surprisingly small for such a large creature. For example, their penises are sixteen feet long, but their eyes the size are quite small. I wonder about these eyes: they saying goodbye to each other, these grapefruit-sized eyes which have never got to know one another, living in two solitudes on either side of the massive head? I imagine the whale as having access to two mysterious and separate parallel worlds, the left and the right, tied together by the braid of its giant cetacean brain. The brain connects just like a stereoscopic image. Each eye relies on the other to explain its side of the world.

*

It couldn’t have been later than Primary 4 when I joined the entire Dunmurry Primary School to sit on the gym floor to hear a bible story, told with the aid of a felt board and felt figures. A felt camel. Felt shepherds. A felt baby Jesus, a felt 33-year-old Jesus. Mary and Joseph in flowing robes. A little felt manger. A felt Pontius Pilate. Was there a felt cross? Felt beads of blood and felt nails? I do remember the felt figure of Jesus being moved in procession, carrying his cross. And when they said, “The Jews killed Jesus.” I looked around to catch my younger brother Kevin’s eye. He was the only other Jew in the school, as far as I knew. What should we do? Be cool. Say nothing. And so I did. 

*

“The eye you see is not an eye because you see it;
it is an eye because it sees you.”  ― Antonio Machado

Are there any creatures which can see their own eyes? Many have eyes on the opposite sides of their head unlike others such as humans which have both eyes pointing in the same direction but from slightly different horizontal positions for both depth perception and peripheral view. Imagine Wayne Gretsky with eyes on the side of his head like a whale. Now one of the great ones, skating between the waves, deking out the limitless sea. And then there are the horizontal slits of the pupils of goats, made, so I understand, to better see across the length horizon. Permanent landscape view instead of portrait.

*

This schoolyard carol parody from my childhood when there were few television channels, only the government’s BBC and the Independent Television Network ITV.

While shepherds washed their socks by night
While watching ITV
The angel of the Lord came down
and switched to BBC.

Another schoolyard memory, this from the private school. Inchmarlo, I eventually attended. A game where a boy wedged himself face forward in a corner and other boys lined up behind him. The goal was to push the first boy from his position and take his place. Each boy pushed on the one in front of him, trying to squeeze him out. The pressure on each other was enormous, especially those near the front—the combined force of all those boys, like a reverse tug-of-war. 

*

We had little red hymnbooks which fit perfectly into our black uniform jackets. If you were quick you could pull out the hymnbook, hit a boy on the head and return your hymnbook to your pocket before a master saw you. I was never caught. Eventually, because I was Jewish, I asked to be excused from morning Chapel where the hymnbooks were used for singing. I was directed to wait in the dim boy-scented cloakroom among the coats, snacks (rock cakes!), and outdoor shoes. With me was a pale curly-black-haired boy with a network of purple veins over his thighs. Julian. The only other Jew in the school. We became friends of a sort and I’d go over to his house to play chess.

*

I feel a bit badly having told the story about my dad and the glasses. There's always two sides. I was recently thinking of an incident around this time when we were in a restaurant airport and, across the room, a man in a wheelchair had turned bright red. He’d stopped breathing. If I recall recall correctly, he was choking. My father leapt up, ascertained the problem, unblocked the guy’s throat so he could breath again. I remember being amazed my father’s rapid dance of symptom-taking. Airway, pulse, pupil dilation, lips and tongue swelling. I’m not sure what else he checked, but I was thrilled by the quick grace of my father a young doctor, that he could rise from his sandwich and instantaneously switch into doctor-mode, following this emergency protocol and literally save this man’s life. 

*

In bpNichol’s writing class, I doodled as I listened. One day I drew an image of two eyes. The right with a single pair of legs, the left with two pairs. The first eye held the other on a leash. A human eye leading a dog eye. I’ve begun to think of this image, over the years, as my logo. I like its tricky wink to hierarchy, as if one eye could be led by another, as if it could be a pet. What exactly is going on here? Is it a trompe d’oeil, a visual pun, or something from a folk tale? And here it is at the end of this essay as if it always belonged here, as if the metaphor of stereoscopic eyes on the past had already literally been embodied by me forty years ago. Is this the revisioning of history, something just to the left, just to the right of the truth and yet somehow connected, relational? The I of the present, the Thou of the past.