Photography – Page 9

Reading into writing: Two years of roughghosts

Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight there is a view, at the tips of the fingers an object—that’s where I’m going.

At the tip of the pencil the line.

Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.

– Clarice Lispector, “That’s Where I’m Going”

Today is the second anniversary of the rather haphazard and ill-defined birth of roughghosts. The evolution of this space that I tend has far exceeded my expectations. When I look back at my very first post, a quick note to self, I talk about having long put aside the desire to write so as to live a little first, acknowledging that life had given me more material than I was comfortable addressing–a theme I’ve revisited since. My first year of blogging saw a collection of random observations and occasional book related posts develop into increasingly structured book reviews interspersed with the occasional reflective essay. Looking ahead to my second year I had hoped to broaden my reading while privately I was more actively playing with ideas that I hoped would eventually lead to a serious creative effort of some measure. But as much as I had been filling notebooks, I was writing more about wanting to write as if wishing could make it so, rather than believing that I would ever offer something beyond the confines of this blog.

For me, my blog, no matter how seriously I consider every word I offer here, no matter how many hours I spend constructing essays or reviews, has always been a twilight place. It belongs to neither the day nor the night but sits at the intersection of the two: a place where I can imagine that I am not quite exposed to the full light of day, a place where the darkest truths remain unspoken. For that is the realm of real writing and what am I, editing my efforts and posting them myself, but pretending to the art?

I know, of course, that this is not true.

The past twelve months have changed everything, and in more ways than I might ever have imagined.

Writing is the conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcising, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who or what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soil: from forgetting new shapes sprout. . .

For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations—the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows—to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.

– Breyten Breytenbach, Intimate Stranger

Last year, on July 7 to be exact, with the majestic Table Mountain rising in the background, I started to write the essay I had been toying with for over a year. It was my last full day in South Africa and looking back over the preceding year I envisioned this grand narrative that would guide my writing, shape the story I wanted to tell. On July 27 a pulmonary embolism caused me to go into cardiac arrest. I stared into the abyss, metaphorically speaking, that is, because I have no memory of the event or of the days immediately before or after, but I do know that if my son had not been home that night I would not be here.

And I know that every idle word to page before that moment was precious more than wishful scribbling. To write, honestly and openly, was now critical.

My path from the confines of my blog to the publication of my first piece of essay/memoir writing earlier this month has been quite remarkable. Doors have opened, starting with Douglas Glover at Numéro Cinq where I am proud to be on the masthead. I have since published reviews for several other sites or publications and have more forthcoming, and I have another piece of creative writing that will be in the Seagull Books Catalogue this fall. It does mean that my attention is necessarily diverted from my blog at times but I will link to new pieces as they appear and have created a page of links to outside writing. I never would have dared to dream that I would need such a page at this time last year. Nor did I imagine that I would now call myself a writer.

I derive a great deal of satisfaction from the challenge of writing longer critical reviews. To read and engage with a text at a deeper level opens an entirely new appreciation of language and literature. It fuels and, I hope, enhances my own ability to write. And over the past year I have been fortunate to become acquainted with some truly gifted thinkers and writers who inspire and encourage me, as well as building stronger intellectual and readerly camaraderie with fellow bloggers.

I don’t know where fiction is born, but I am certain that the best essay/memoir writing does not have its roots on our brightest days. Rather, it emerges from the shadows, when we are wounded, grieving, shaken to the core. We write to make sense of pain, of confusion, of loss. We write out of the darkness toward the light. We write in the in-between spaces—daybreak, twilight—find the patterns, themes, edit, shape, refine and edit again, careful to leave room for tension, friction, the beating heart.

And, of course, we write because we have to.

Here’s to a new year, so to speak.

Immersed in the moment: Incidents by Roland Barthes

In his Publisher’s Note to the French edition of Roland Barthes’ Incidents, a collection of essays published shortly after the theorist’s death in 1980, François Wahl suggests that the four very different texts assembled form a coherent whole because each piece “strives to grasp the immediate”. These are not theoretical or critical investigations in any sense, rather, in each text, Barthes is immersed in the moment, observing, reflecting, and recording his reactions. There is an unchecked flow and intimacy, by turns nostalgic, sensual, and melancholic but always tuned to the instance of occurrence: to the incident.

These are works that invite the reader to engage with all five senses, mediated through words and memory–they are not formal pieces but rather take the form of journal entries, diary writing, and fragmented travelogue. Barthes writes people and he writes place, never really entirely at ease with too much of either. Delight, boredom, and sadness filter through his reflections creating an immediacy that is at times startling. He is not writing for posterity, he is writing for himself.

The collection opens with “The Light of the South West”, an evocative essay/memoir, a personal tribute to the south west region of France. He writes about the experience of traveling south from Paris. Passing Angoulème he becomes aware that he is on the “threshold” of the land of his childhood. It is the quality of light that defines the place:

. . . noble and subtle at the same time; it is never grey, never gloomy (even when the sun isn’t shining); it is light-space, defined less by the altered colours of things . . . than by the eminently inhabitable quality it gives to the earth. I can think of no other way to say it: it is a luminous light. You have to see this light (I almost want to say: you have to hear it, hear its musical quality). In autumn, the most glorious season in this land, the light is liquid, radiant, heartbreaking since it is the final beautiful light of the year, illuminating and distinguishing everything it touches. . .

He goes on to turn his attention to the elements of the south west that resonate with different aspects of his childhood, to reflect on the way that memories formed in childhood inform way we remember the places associated with that time, the magical spaces and the difficult times will each carry their own tone, their own qualities.

The title piece is the earliest in the book. Recorded in 1969 when the author was in his mid-50s, “Incidents”, as the name implies, captures moments from an extended stay in Morocco through an incidental series of fragmented encounters and experiences. Here, people form the scenery; with a special attention reserved for young men. Barthes demonstrates a a particular eye for detail (and somewhat of an obsession with hands) in these passing observations, combined with an acute sensitivity for scents and colours. The vibrancy, shades and contrasts of the country come alive. As a reader you become aware of the blinding light, the dark shadows–they are not described, you sense them in the background.

A young black man, wearing a crème de menthe-coloured shirt, almond green pants, orange socks and, obviously, very soft red shoes.

A handsome, mature looking young man, well dressed in a grey suit and a gold bracelt, with delicate clean hands, smoking red Olympic cigarettes, drinking tea, is speaking quite earnestly (some sort of civil servant? One of those who track down files?), and a tiny thread of saliva drips onto his knee. His companion points it out to him.

Some young Moroccans–with girlfriends they can show off in front of–pretending to speak English with exaggerated French accents (a way of hiding the fact without losing face that they will never have a good accent).

The art of living in Marrakesh: a fleeting conversation from open carriage to bicycle; a cigarette given, a meeting arranged, the bicycle turns the corner and slowly disappears.

The Marrakesh soul: wild roses in the mountains of mint.

The third essay, “At Le Palace Tonight . . .” is a tribute to a Paris club in a converted theatre. He describes the ornate detail, the mood and the atmosphere of this place where he seems to almost prefer to be an observer, watching the dancers and the human interactions rather than taking part. And as in the first essay, we find once again a wonderful evocation of light, this time light as informed by the interior of a structure:

Isn’t it the material of modern art today, of daily art, light? In ordinary theatres, the light originates at a distance, directed onto the stage. At Le Palace, the entire theatre is the stage; the light takes up all the space there, inside of which it is alive and plays like one of the actors: an intelligent laser, with a complicated and refined mind, like an exhibitor of abstract figurines, it produces enigmatic shapes, with abrupt changes: circles, rectangles, ellipses, lines, ropes, galaxies, twists.

This collection closes with “Evenings in Paris” a series of journal entries from 1979 that open with words Schopenhauer wrote on a piece of paper before he died: “Well, we’ve escaped very nicely.” The Barthes who comes through in this selection is tired, often impatient with colleagues and irritated by noise. A certain loneliness and dissatisfaction underscore his descriptions of dinners with friends, failed attempts to win the affections of the younger men he covets, and an unresolved mourning for his beloved mother. Most nights he finds himself heading home alone, half despairing, half relieved, to settle into bed in the company of Pascal, Chateaubriand, Dante, or the echoing ghost of Proust. Although he still enjoys longingly watching attractive men, he has little patience for crowds or social functions. This is a heavier, more emotionally intense offering, the intimacy of “the immediate” weighs heavily as Barthes commits his thoughts to paper, unaware in the writing as we are in the reading, that he is nearing the end of his life.

And, because he is recording the ordinariness of the daily encounter of the self with the world, there is the possibility of shock waves that ring down the years with a new intensity in light of the incidents (that word again) that have unsettled Paris in recent years:

The guy who sells Charlie-Hebdo walks by; on the cover in the publication’s idiotic style, there’s a basket of greenish heads that look like lettuces: ‘2 francs the head of a Cambodian’; and, right then, a young Cambodian rushes into the café, sees the cover, is visibly shocked, concerned, and buys a copy: the head of a Cambodian!

Not without a little social commentary, even in a deeply personal journal, Roland Barthes, remains ever relevant down the years.

Reading Incidents is, in itself, a sensuous experience, it is doubly so in this edition from Seagull Books. With a sparkling fresh translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan and illustrated with the evocative photographic images of Bishan Samaddar, this collection of writings becomes one that can, as Barthes himself would have intended, be savoured.

Beginning to find my voice: Reflections on publishing a piece of essay/memoir writing

We should only believe in our feelings, after the soul has been at rest from them; and express ourselves, not as we feel, but as we remember.
– Joseph Joubert, Pensées

Late last month I wrote about voice, about how I have recently been focusing more attention on voice; not only in literature, but as it pertains to meaning, sounds, and silences. I was, at that time, anticipating the publication of my first piece of non-review writing–not the first that I have written, there is a related piece, a parable, that will appear later this year–but rather the first to be published.

I was extremely anxious in advance of the release. I knew that I would be laying forth an aspect of my experience of being in the world that few people were aware of. I am not talking about my queer identity, that is something I have spoken of from time to time although it rarely impacts the books I chose to read and write about. I am referring to the fact that this short essay addresses my complicated relationship with my body in very bold terms.

It can be found here. (The journal that published my piece is under reconstruction so I have reproduced the essay below.)

Now that the piece is out there, granting me the necessary distance, I am extremely pleased with the results. It is raw and honest, but I feel comfortable that I have touched the heart of my experiences while maintaining a healthy and comfortable boundary. I am not a fan of confessional memoir/autobiographical fiction that tends to the revelation of excessive, unguarded intimate information. It is a delicate balance to measure vulnerability and self respect when writing about the personal details of one’s life. And, I would argue, it is essential to remember that there are limits to what we can ever really know about ourselves and if we remember that we can more honestly write from the heart.

I have found that I am most comfortable leaning toward a more spare prose the closer I come to the self in my writing. I am hoping that it is a style, a voice if you like, that I can build on. But a detailed account of my life is not my goal in writing–my interest is more philosophical in nature.

I have to say that I am overwhelmed by the positive response to this piece. It is far beyond anything I could have hoped for. And I feel very excited about where I can go from here with further explorations. So much of my reading and the conversations that I’m having in the virtual sphere seem to be converging at this moment. Or perhaps I am simply in a fertile state of mind. It is not, however, an overnight phenomenon, these ideas have been growing for a long time, knocking around in awkward, unfinished form. I am grateful to everyone who has offered inspiration, support and encouragement to this point. I trust they know who they are.

May the conversations continue.

As published on Minor Literature[s], May 6, 2016.

Your Body Will Betray You — Joseph Schreiber

“From the inside out, but from which inside to which outside?”—Róbert Gál, On Wing

This is not the story of my life but the story of my living it, of my being in it.

And that’s a different story altogether.

I am, for lack of a better term, a differently gendered man. No, maybe there are better terms, more common terms—transgender, or queer, perhaps. I use these too. At least, when it’s expedient to do so or when I choose to take my place under a larger umbrella. But by their very inclusiveness, these terms are rendered senseless. Defining the self for one’s self requires an explicit ownership of the language employed. The words I embrace are mutable, evolving, even in the act of committing them to paper or speaking them aloud. Labels can only take us so far.

History is subjective. We can only know what we think we know.

And that isn’t very much at all.

This is what I do know:

I lived, for almost four decades, defined by the parameters of the body in which I was born. I recall the sensation of harbouring a fugitive being—an early social memory (at four? Five? Six?) This someone inside me was not with me, he was me. I saw him in my eyes and I wanted him gone. I wanted to be the girl my mother longed for—the one whose gender mattered solely because her first child, the sister I never knew, was stillborn.

I was not a tomboy. I did not wish to be a boy. I wanted to be the girl I confronted in the mirror, the one whose authenticity no one else questioned. I imagined that feeling female was something you learned, like tying your shoes or riding a bicycle. Yet, although I passed in the world of girls and women, this passing was a measured performance. The rules remained opaque.

The company of boys and men became a refuge—the space where my otherness was validated, where no one would ever question whether I was really female. Sexual attraction to men was a precious counterpoint to my persistent gender insecurity. Never mind that the romantic encounters between men in Mary Renault’s historical fiction held a far more desperate appeal that anything encountered in the pages of a typical boy-girl romance. I reasoned that if I had a boyfriend, I must truly be female after all.

I married young and disappeared.

You have to understand, when I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s in rural Canada, no one talked about ‘gender identity’ at all. And they certainly never suggested that it could differ from biological sex. Even now many choke on the concept, quote Bible and verse. My upbringing was liberal, neither fundamentalist nor homophobic, but still, my ‘out of placeness’ was my own, the faint light in the dark room. An old story, but I had no idea that there were others like me.

Self-defined gender insecurity continued to haunt me. It prescribed my path. Twice I walked away from graduate studies, turned down admission to law school, all because the more I exercised my intellect, the less energy I had to devote to maintaining the fragile equilibrium of being female in the world. I retreated to the most unequivocally female spaces I could imagine. Eventually, against my natural instincts, I decided to have children, and that was the beginning of the end—the beginning of the end of my ability to hang on to any reconciliation of my internal identity with the life I had constructed.

I fell apart.

Only in cobbling myself back together, in the aftermath of a breakdown, could I finally openly face the two fundamental notions that had driven me into mania—sexuality and gender. I realized that they were not going away, and that one could not make sense without the other.

Please note, in today’s world where trans* is appended to all manner of identities, where sexuality is no longer narrowly delineated and gender is something to defy, it may seem impossible to imagine that I could crack my head against the wall for so long before the light broke through. But mine was a different time.

I found myself in the library with a copy of Transgender Warriors and learned, for the very first time, what a few years of testosterone could do to transform the outside and fuel the inside of a female-born man. I understood, in that instant, that there was no other option. I finally had a name, a label for myself, and everything else started to fall into place.

I am not reckless. I knew there would be compromises. I knew what surgery could offer and what, at best, it could only approximate. I knew that the scalpel exacts more than its pound of flesh, that healing well is not the best revenge, and that there would be limits to the choices I would make. But none of that was on my mind as I waited for my first injection of the right hormones, the ones I had been craving, body and spirit, for so long.

That was fifteen years ago now. I was forty years old. And in puberty—even when you are old enough to know better—everything seems possible.

Today:

On the street, I am invisible.

To see me, you would never suspect the truth of my history, the convoluted path to the dream of my genesis. Even those who do know, if they didn’t know me before, don’t ever think of me as any different from any other man.

I just am.

And yet I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

For a long time I believed that what I had rendered visible was the true me, the authentic self made flesh, but it’s not that simple. There is an inherent groundlessness, an embodied inauthenticity at play.

I am always in the process of coming into being.

The (meta)physicality of it all:

I hold a life contained within a life—a life disjointed and hybridized, receding and resurfacing against the passage of time. That other life never leaves me, but with distance I can touch it less and less, as if it never was mine. Now it feels as if it belongs to someone else. It belongs to those who hold it in their memories—my parents, my siblings, my children—but what, if anything, does it mean to me?

It’s as if I own the inside, but not the outside, of the first forty years of my life.

So what do I have now? A more coherent existence, absolutely, but with the knowledge that a fully whole experience is not something I will ever have. My body is disfigured; not by choice or wilful design—it is simply the best I can achieve. And in the end as in the beginning, the body is only an echo of what I am, a reminder of what I have been.

You can change your face but your body will betray you.

The further I proceed, the more I realize that I will never arrive. Transition is an experience that is always in the reframing and redefining of boundaries.

Borderless, I am forever a migrant—endlessly coming into being.

Being cannot be measured.

Being cannot be reduced to the change of a marker on a passport.

On the street I am invisible.

And here lies the crux of the matter. Invisibility, once achieved, is deemed to be a mark of success. That’s what a person in transition means when they say: I pass. To pass is to be seen, without question, at one with a gender identity that feels true. And it is more than an ability to disappear in a crowd. There is an internal completeness that comes with the hormones and the pronouns and the new name—a levelling, a sense of peace.

But the body, the body is another matter. Only now, the axis of discord has shifted.

For those of us who traverse the visible lifeline from female to male, there is a sacrifice. The journey is forever written on the body, no matter how far one is able or chooses to travel. We are at once dramatically transformed and decidedly unfinished or differently designed. Scarred. I accepted that cost, assumed it would not matter.

Fifteen years on, it matters. At least, it does for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I made no mistake. This is the only path I could have taken once I found it on the map. I am infinitely happier, more settled than I might ever have imagined I could be. But if I long for anything, it’s the life I never had, the boy’s life—or any life, male or female—that might have been coherent, sex and gender, gender and sex. As much as the two are divided, the physical and the psychological, they are not separate in the living, in the experience of being. We exist as embodied minds, or if you prefer, embodied spirits, in the world.

Pre-transition, there was an internal fracturing of being. I struggled to align the outside world with the inside space I inhabited. I was an awkward misfit. Nothing made sense. Even the glam rock and punk of my teen years offered little more than a glimmer of hope before fading away. For years I fancied myself a Cartesian dualist. The ontological reality I experienced was akin to being tethered to a body that could never be a home. Over the years I began to talk about this body, to describe it as a distinct entity. I would catch myself at moments feeling like I was consciously moving my hips and propelling my legs forward, like an injured person re-learning how to walk. I floundered in pregnant form. By then I was at a complete loss.

Recognizing myself as transgender, that is, understanding that the real me was the male identity inside and learning that the outside could be modified to conform, was sufficient to see me through a divorce and launch me on my way into a new life. In the early years there was so much to look forward to, so many changes, and so much random strangeness. Puberty at forty is intense and wild and weird. For years I threw myself into work, measuring my worth by the title on my business cards, and finding validation in the sole corner of my life in which no one knew my past.

My transition was a textbook success. Or so it seemed.

I made no close friends, took no lovers, dared not risk the delicate balance of finally existing as a man in society. I sacrificed newfound authenticity for another superficial truth—one coherent with an implied history that would not threaten to expose me. The wall I had once constructed on the inside, I reconstructed on the outside.

Now I have dismantled and deconstructed it again.

But I still find myself troubled by a restless inauthenticity of being. It worries its way into the tension between my desire to blend and my need to be true to a life lived against the grain. It is looking for a voice.

On the street I am invisible.

I am. And I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

Here I am writing about my life, opening up the veins of the story without fleshing out the details. I have offered scraps and fragments, just enough to begin to frame a question, to try to begin to articulate my hybridized experience of living—then and now.

This is a sketch. That is all.

I am forever in the process of writing myself into being.

Postscript:

If the apex of manhood is to stand to pee, the nadir of manhood is to be gay and to understand that you will always arrive short-handed.

The bride stripped bare by his bachelors. Even.

January 2016: A slow start to my reading year (and why does that bother me?)

The first month of 2016 has almost slipped away and I am feeling overloaded. Too many stressors have collided to take a curious toll on my ability to read and blog. My reading continues to be fractured. Books are not the same refuge they were a few months ago. Not that they don’t keep arriving (or rather following me home) and haunting me as the stacks pile up, staring at me, daring me to read faster. But my reading is slow, and the books I had expected to venture into by month’s end have not yet been cracked.

And then there is life, the one that doesn’t exist in books, the one that can’t be shelved or put aside for a later date or, as much as I would love it sometimes, be tossed into a pile to go out to the next charity sale. It is hardly a surprise. Over the past month I have had to face some extraordinary challenges on the home front – some new, some long standing, and others simply arising from the financial reality of owning a car and a house, both of which are well past their prime. Some matters have been resolved – one mechanic and two plumbers later – I just have to figure out how to pay for them; others are less concrete, more emotionally corrosive and resolution is not in sight. If another well meaning person says, “This too shall pass,” my reaction may be less than generous.

Copyright JM Schreiber, 2013 The last time I had a month with two separate plumbing calls I took this shot to celebrate the joy of a clear drain that had been blocked for more than four weeks. — Copyright JM Schreiber, 2013
The last time I had a month with two separate plumbing calls I took this shot to celebrate the joy of a clear drain that had been blocked for more than four weeks.

Through it all I have been reading but by some weird twist of logic my attention has been drawn toward much more intensive review projects. Blogging is fine but for each review I write I spend 4-6 hours, so when I encounter an ambitious, complex, postmodern novel like Klaus Hoffer’s Among the Bieresch, forthcoming from Seagull Books; I can’t resist the desire to read into the varied subtextual materials, especially the works that I don’t know well and – with luck – explore the novel in a space with greater critical elbow room and a much wider audience than my blog commands. There’s a voice in my head that says “Are you out of your mind?” and, maybe I am but, at this moment, I seem to be most comfortable burying myself in demanding critical projects, losing myself I suppose. At the same time, I am also spending more time on my own writing: a personal essay I hope to enter in a contest and a piece of experimental prose.

Tell me then, what is with this book blogging pressure I feel? It’s not a numbers game. No one is going to disown me if I don’t read and review two books a week. Reading and writing about books is supposed to be fun. And, heaven knows, the spaces I that want to write for, on or off my blog, are literary acts of love and, as such, there’s typically no money involved.

So blog posts may be slower for a while. I am reading. I am writing. And I am dealing with all the messy business of living.

Closing out the old year with December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter

So, my first post of 2016 is a look at the last book I read in 2015. In truth I read it throughout the last month of the year, although not a little each day as intended, my father’s illness has interfered with all of my best laid reading plans of late. However I could not allow the year to draw to a close without finishing this book of calendar stories marking a passage through the month of December in the unique and inimitable style of Alexander Kluge, complemented by the haunting wintery forest scenes captured by Gerhard Richter.

This slim, elegant volume is my first encounter with the work of the German writer and film maker Alexander Kluge. The 39 stories, many less than a page long, are presented in a straightforward manner with a humour so subtle and wry that it simmers below the surface, blurring the perceptual line between history and speculation. Kluge offers a chronicle of an alternate reality so close to our own that it can catch you off guard. A flimic sensibility permeates each entry.

December is divided into two sections. The first part contains a series of dated entries, one story, or a cluster of stories, for each day. The years assigned to the dates vary. Many of the scenarios are set in or around the years of the Second World War. Others tend to be placed in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century. But there are forays far back into prehistory and looking off to a distant future. Characters wander in and out from historical factual reality, war themes of conflict and destruction recur, as do images drawn from concerns about climate change and the fallout from the economic collapse of 2008. The ageless question of the nature of good and evil is a prevalent theme – “evil proves to be good displaced or straying in time” – as is the measure of the passage of time itself, whether measured on a global scale or at a much more personal, intimate level:

“The uncertainty, above all the lack of influence on whether and when someone will be struck down by the war, makes the soul bold. There is nothing to be lost any more.

So, after an air raid in 1944, which went on for hours, Gerda F. did not save herself up any longer. No thought of waiting for one of the returning warriors, whom she still knew and who would ask for her hand. She didn’t want to get to know any better those left behind in the armament factories of the place. All were looking for closeness. She took a man who was passing through town up to her room. They never saw each other again. There was nothing about it that she regretted.”

The second, shorter section is titled “Calendars are Conservative”. They form a series of reflections on the way time – days, months and years – are recorded, calculated, and, as in certain situations such as during the height of the French Revolution, manipulated and distorted. The revolutions of the earth on its axis and the passage of the planet around the sun may be measurable with relative consistency, but that has not kept humankind from trying to understand, articulate and contain the progress of time, again in both the macro, political sphere and in the individual philosophical context:

“What manifests itself in my story, the story of a living person, is not COMPLETED PAST (what was, because it no longer is), also not the prefect tense of what has been in what I am but instead the OTHER of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

To spend a month, dipping in and out of the stories, anecdotes, and reflections Kluge has assembled to mark the end of the year is a treat. Although the images are often sombre, the atmosphere is contemplative. Gerhard Richter’s accompanying photographs enhance the measured tone. If you have ever experienced a day of heavy and unexpected snowfall, those days in the Northern Hemisphere that can bring all but the most essential services to a halt, granting a welcome reprieve from school or work for many; you will know how time can slow to a leisurely pace while the thick blanket of white muffles the day to day noise of the city. That is the sensation captured in the muted monochrome images of snow laden branches in silenced forests. This is the December we hope for but, caught up with the demands of year end and pressures of the holidays, frequently fail to achieve. A time to contemplate the past, for better or worse, speculate about the future and pull another calendar year to a close.

Translated from German by Martin Chalmers, December is published with the expected fine attention to detail by Seagull Books.

The dying gold of ruined stars – Poems: Book One of Our Trakl by Georg Trakl

“Sun, autumnal, thin and shy,
And the fruit falls from the trees.
Stillness dwells within its blue rooms
During a long afternoon.”

– from “Whispered during the Afternoon”, Georg Trakl, translation by James Reidel

Many years ago when I was in school, poetry, in so far as we were introduced to it, was almost exclusively the works of English language poets. In high school I fell under the spell of the English Romantic writers and that was the beginning. Over the years though, I would be inclined to think that most of the poets I have become obsessed with wrote in English, that is, until I began to read more translated fiction. With that my attention shifted, or to be more precise, my horizons became broader.

This year, a German book enthusiast I have come to know through the “internet of book discussions”, the corner of the web I inhabit, introduced me to Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Somehow he had escaped my attention before. Of course, when you come to read poetry in translation, the question of the translation itself becomes critical. Typically, when more than one translation of a poet’s work exists I try to access and compare a few. But when Seagull Books released the first installment of a three part series of Trakl’s poetry, I did not hesitate to order a copy, sight unseen.

Poems: Book One of Our Trakl is a new translation, by American poet and translator James Reidel, of the poet’s first collection, simply titled Poems (Gedichte), which was originally published in 1913. In his note at the opening of this volume, Reidel recounts that he has endeavoured to preserve the same concentrated mania that marks the works of the 19th century poets Trakl would have read: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hölderlin and Poe. He says:

“I want to actually channel Trakl, his craft (with its implicit painterliness) and work ethic, to have him, so to speak, absorbed in the right dosages he – as a poet, pharmacist and addict – intended.”

Reidel does go on to add that to emulate Trakl’s delivery in English, the rhyme scheme of the original poems is often necessarily sacrificed, but the contortions required to retain rhyme can trivialize a poet’s spirit and tone.

In an essay in the online poetry journal Mudlark, Reidel expands on his Trakl translation project. He provides an overview of Trakl’s short and tragic life, as well a discussion of his approach to the translation, and a selection of his translations presented with the original German. A poet himself, Reidel brings a sensitivity and insight to his reading and approach that I, as reader, value:

“I have found that when you read Trakl in the original German, you get a snapshot of what is there. When you go back, you get another view. It may be sharper or less so, and with the feeling that it is intentionally less so. This can be frustrating for those who speak and think in English, that lawyer of languages. There is no fixed point to reading him or rendering him. This makes any book of translations simply a collection of snapshots of a particular reading at any point in time. Another way of rendering/reading a Trakl poem is through the barrel of a kaleidoscope, where one can only fix on a view when one stops or when the glass bits sometimes jam. I do this.”

Born in 1887, into a prosperous Salzburg family, Trakl was a precocious child, creative and intelligent – by his early teens he was experimenting with lyric verse that showed great promise. He could, however, be withdrawn and prone to depression. He was exceptionally close to his sister Margarete (Grete), a musical prodigy with whom he is thought to have engaged in an incestuous relationship. He began publishing poems in 1908, in Vienna where he had gone to study pharmacology, a tempting profession for one who already had a tendency towards addiction. As a budding poet, he enjoyed early success and mentorship during the following years, ultimately attracting the discreet patronage of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the outbreak of war forced him into military service. Relying on his training as a pharmacist he hoped to avoid direct combat, but the trauma of trying to attend to desperately wounded troops without adequate supplies would drive him to attempt suicide. He was sent to a military hospital in Kraków for observation, but suffered a relapse and was found dead of a cocaine overdose on November 3, 1914. He was 27 years old.

Patterns of Decay (c) JM Schreiber, 2011 — Patterns of Decay , Copyright JM Schreiber, 2011

This first volume of Trackl’s poetry, beautifully bound and presented by Seagull books, readily lends itself to an immersive reading from beginning to end. The autumnal themes that feature so strongly make it an even more evocative read for someone like myself at this time – that is, in November in the northern hemisphere – but autumn is rendered almost metaphorical in his verses. Nature figures in his work, rendered through rural and religious imagery; however nature, for Trakl, is one which couches death and decay as an intrinsic element of its stark beauty and haunting appeal:

In the evening, when the bells toll of peace,
I follow the birds in their glorious flights,
Long multitudes, like pious trains of pilgrims,
Disappearing into autumn’s clear breadths.

Wandering through the twilight-filled garden
I dream following their brighter destinies
And feel the sundials barely move any more.
So I follow their journeys above the clouds.

There a blast of decay makes me start to tremble.
The blackbird laments in the leafless branches.
The red vine totters on rusting trellises.

While like a dance of death of pale children
Around the dark weathered rim of the fountain
The blue asters toss shivering in the wind.

– “Decay”

These are quiet, brooding poems that show a clear obsession with decline. They speak to a young poet struggling to capture the gloom in his own soul, consequently the poems have a very immediate and personal feel. Are they depressing? As someone who has had his own lifelong challenges with mood dysregulation, I find his words oddly comforting. I am not equipped to offer a critique of poetry, I am afraid I can, in this case, only speak to what I feel. And I don’t believe I am alone in registering a profound personal response to Trackl’s poetry. In his short life he produced a small, but vital, body of work that would have an important influence on other German language poets including Paul Celan, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke; and draw the ongoing interest of poets, translators and readers outside of German speaking countries that continues to this day, just over one hundred years after his death.

For my part, I can only eagerly look forward to the upcoming additions to Our Trakl.

To write one’s self: reflections on the stories we have to tell

Don’t write yourself
in between worlds,

rise up against
multiple meanings,

trust the trail of tears,
and learn to live.

– Paul Celan

I have resisted the act of writing my self. Writing about myself. The conceit of imagining that my own experiences hold a value, interest or point of connection for others. I wanted to tell stories, inventions, creations that were removed from the inexorable ordinariness of my own life.

I am not sure I have that gift. I fear that all the stories I have that are worth telling are real. Not true stories. I do not believe there is an objective truth to the stories we tell ourselves or others. But they are real.

For many years I worked as a storyteller. Not in the conventional sense of the word. I worked with survivors of acquired brain injury and their families. Whether I was meeting with clients, advocating with professionals or leading support groups stories were my medium. I had hundreds of stories, I had a facility for remembering the broad details of the experiences of our clients and their families. Tales of courage, tales of horror, tales of the ordinary and the everyday. I was able to pull out an example whenever I required one to offer warning, hope, validation. And I was able to do so without revealing identifying details.

As always I was the master of ambiguity. After all that was how I engaged with the world myself. But what is essential in a professional capacity is crippling in a personal sphere.

I have touched at the edges of my own stories, in so far as I am learning to articulate them, in this space from time to time. And I am beginning to wonder whether it is a folly for me to assume that I have the capacity to make up stories, to entertain with carefully constructed lies.

Or if this mess of a life that has piled up in front of me like heavy wet snow against a plow has to be cleared, examined, transformed into words on a page before I can even begin to figure out if there might be something here that someone else might want to read.

In the coming days I will officially be two months out from the night a blood clot very nearly took my life. My chest still feels tight, bruised and cracked ribs are slow to heal completely, but I can finally get out and walk with comfort – something that was still impossible a few weeks ago. Rat poison is my friend.

I took my camera out into the neighbourhood this afternoon. The foliage is turning colour, the sky is crystal blue, yet I found my attention turning to the cracks in the road, the fallen leaves in the gutters. I photographed the little things that caught my eye and tried not to think too much.

Reflection: Fishing for memories denied

It is rare that I indulge in sharing a significant quotation simply because it speaks to the space in which I find myself but I keep returning to these words from Intimate Stranger by Breyten Breytenbach (Archipelago Books, 2009).

“Writing is fishing for memory in time. Viscous. Time black. Sometimes you see it flitting just below the surface – memory – miming time. Memory takes on the blackness of time. Memory will be time surfacing. Use word as bait. Beat the water. Beat the weird beat of baited words. Bloated. Wounds. The bleeding words like wounded boats on a black sea. Let the fleet wash up. The coast is the beginning of the sea’s wisdom. It comes with the territory.

Words have their own territory, they return home as in a song. The fish only discovers the water once it is removed from it. This land is a memotory.

But not peaceful. Memory as trigger for territory and tongue. The mind is full of bloody pieces staked out by tongue. Is there room enough? Memory killing memory.”

This book, a selection of meditations on reading and writing, was waiting for me when I returned home from the hospital just 10 days ago. I have been keeping it close and dipping in and out of it. Breytenbach is a South African poet, writer and painter but his life, his work, his vision is borderless. In this collection he offers practical advice, shares poems and reflections on the power of the word, drawing on his own experiences as well as the wisdom of a legacy of gifted writers.

Memory is the foundation of writing. One draws on experience when putting pen to paper – poetry, fiction, memoir alike. And it is memory that is weighing me down, threatening to drag me beneath the surface; a memory that haunts and obsesses me because although it involves me, I will never access it.

I have lost a space in time. Like a bruise it bleeds beyond the boundary of the injury, reaching backward and forward from the instant a clot in my lung threatened to stop my heart. Days are absolutely gone, the day or two before the incident, the day or so in ICU and the first days after waking. But I can’t let the blackness go. I cannot let it wash out to sea. I want to hold the moments, hours, days in my hands but I cannot. They do not belong to me. They are about me. They will never be mine.

I have read my discharge summary until I know it inside out. I have pestered my anxious son with questions. What was it like to find me in distress? How did you get to the hospital? How did you feel? Stupid questions. I am struck with shocked disquiet to realize that my family did not know if I would survive.

If I had not survived the blackness would be complete. Viscous. Time black. Inanimate from my perspective. My own memories lost. The sole distorted possession of those who knew me, no longer mine.

Sands are shifting. I have some fishing to attend to before the next high tide.

Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape, South Africa Copyright JM Schreiber 2015 — Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Copyright JM Schreiber 2015

Looking back over my shoulder at three weeks in South Africa

It is coming up on two weeks now since I left South Africa. I was missing the country before I left; I am missing it now. When I passed though customs at the airport the official who stamped my Canadian passport sighed and shook his head. “Everyone is going to Canada these days,” he said. What could I say? Only that morning I had only read a newspaper article about young South African families eager to find a new home abroad – the US, Australia, Canada.

I suppose if I was raising young children in a city where so many single family dwellings have the appearance of bunkers with high walls, spiked gates and coiled razor wire, I too would be looking to distant shores. Over the course of my limited stay in Cape Town I regularly walked between my B&B in Sea Point and the downtown core. The occasional house perched on the slopes of Signal Hill without such enclosures was a source of fascination. What manner of brave or reckless soul lives here?

A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber — A sign on a narrow cobblestone street In the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

I can’t say that I felt uncomfortable as I wondered the streets or rode the buses. I did quickly learn to make prudent choices, especially after a couple of unnerving encounters set me off my guard. My bad. I don’t make the same mistake twice. Aside from a night out with a friend in Green Point, my stay in the city was quiet, skirting most of the major tourist sites, sticking to bookstores, museums, galleries. Despite the cool weather tourists flocked to the Waterfront and Table Mountain but no one chanced more than a passing glance while I sat mesmerized by the full 30 minutes of William Kentridge’s installation The Refusal of Time at the South African National Gallery. I seemed to find hollow pockets in the city, safe but open empty spaces. And it felt right. I had come to South Africa, after all, to find myself.

What I found surprised me and is only beginning to take form in my thinking now that I am back home. My interest in South Africa is a curious blend of sociological, historical and literary factors but it has always been mutable and undefined. It just is. It stretches back to the early 1980s when I first encountered South African ex-pats while I was at university, continued forward, from the outside, as the world watched the steady and difficult move to independence. Being able to visit the country and, for the most part, simply talk to people and observe has marked the beginning of a process of reconciliation for myself – on a deeply personal level on the one hand, on a socio-political level on the other.

Eastern Cape morning - Copyright JM Schreiber — Eastern Cape morning
– Copyright JM Schreiber

With respect to the former I will simply say that my decision to actually visit South Africa this year was sudden and born of the intense loneliness that sweeps over me regularly. One day when that wave crashed upon me I stopped and realized that the one person in the world that I really needed and wanted to talk to, the sole person who could understand the strange mixture of illness and queerness that I have been struggling to sort out lately, lives across the globe – in South Africa, Eastern Cape province. And, with some money I had needed to access that was not worth reinvesting at today’s interest rates I had enough to get there. So I went.

Arriving at my friend’s home in a small village perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, I was stunned by the beauty of the unfolding landscape, green flecked with the orange of aloe in bloom, the wide open blue skies, and the crystal brilliance of the waves crashing upon rocky shores. I was at peace. I felt grounded. I felt I had come home to somewhere I had never been. My friend and I settled into a comfortable routine as if we had known each other forever. Although at ease in silence, we never ran short of things to talk about. When it came time for me to prepare to head back to Cape Town, her dog worried after me as I packed my bags in the same way that my own cats had fretted over my suitcases back in Calgary. In a little over a week I had been accepted as family.

Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape - Copyright JM Schreiber — Indian Ocean, Eastern Cape
– Copyright JM Schreiber

Oddly I never felt lonely in South Africa, even though I spent much of my time alone. Strange that that feeling oppresses me in the city that I have lived in or near for most of my life, or this country where I have lived for over five decades. At one time I was immensely proud to be a Canadian but I feel increasingly discouraged and estranged from this land. Oh, of course, it has its beauty and, compared to so much of the world, its benefits are innumerable. But there are concerns, inequities, a steady erosion of freedoms, unresolved historical debts to our First Nations and now a rapidly declining economy against a growing racism and xenophobia to think about.

While I was in South Africa, whenever anyone would ask me where I was from, eyes would light up and I would be met with statements like: “Ah Canada, that’s like the perfect country, isn’t it?” Perhaps I am less than patriotic (which is in itself a rather Canadian thing to be), but I felt it was worth engaging people in honest discussions. After all in early June the final report of our very own Truth and Reconciliation Commission was released. For over 100 years First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were routinely removed from their homes and placed in Residential Schools. The cumulative impact of the abuses, trauma and cultural disintegration has been significant and devastating for Aboriginal communities. If I wanted to engage in conversations about colonial legacies it is not to compare or absolve anyone. But no country is perfect. The question for a citizen is, what am I willing to speak to? I can only speak to my experience in Canada and listen to South Africans. Which is a good start.

Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town - Copyright JM Schreiber — Sunset over the Atlantic, Cape Town
– Copyright JM Schreiber

But not even two weeks home and I feel shiftlessness starting to seep in again. On the positive, I returned to the promise that some healthy changes may be emerging in the life of my troubled son, opportunities that might not have arisen had I not put a continent and hemisphere between us. And on my last full day in Cape Town I sat in the Company’s Gardens and finally began to write in earnest in the notebook I had been scribbling in throughout my visit. That has continued. Yet I am aching for that indefinable other that drew me to South Africa in the first place… the landscape, the people, my friend, the oceans.

Yes, the oceans. Landlocked here in a vast country that spans 5½ time zones, it really is little wonder I feel so alone.

Further notes from South Africa: Wildlife and quiet times in the Eastern Cape

I have been in South Africa for just over a week now. It’s been an amazing opportunity to meet people and observe the country on its own terms. The closest I have had to a typical tourist experience has been our day trip to Addo Elephant Park. Nothing quite prepares you, on your first visit, for the sight of these huge majestic beasts looming ahead on the road, appearing out of the bushes. And there is so much more to see than elephants. We were stoked to encounter two young rooikatte along the roadside. These lynx are a rare sight at the best of times and we were able to sit and watch them for 15 minutes.

Elephant – Addo Elephant Park, South Africa

The value of taking time to relax, soak in the countryside, meet fascinating individuals and spend quality time with my friend has been exactly the medicine I needed. In a few days I will make my way back to Cape Town for the much more urban, cosmopolitan side of my stay which will, in its way, be quiet and introspective. Cities can be good for being alone too.

My endeavour to gather more South African literature to bring home is going well. So far I have collected a stack of second hand books from a little shop in East London here in the Eastern Cape and have another stack waiting for me back in Cape Town. I have been digging through my friend’s bookcase for titles to look for here or back home and last night I was thrilled when my favourite author, Damon Galgut, won the Sunday Times Literary Award for South African fiction for his novel Arctic Summer. So, a fine literary excursion to date.

South African sunset - All photos copyright JM Schreiber — South African sunset – All photos copyright JM Schreiber

Otherwise it has been a relief to step back from my normally heavy engagement with news and social media. I did read with dismay about the terrorist attacks in France and Tunisia. I was relieved that my American LGBT brothers and sisters have achieved a long overdue milestone. But I came to South Africa in large part to put as much distance between myself and my life at home as possible for a few weeks and, for now, watching waves crash on the shore or sitting on the stoep and watching the sky burst with colour in the evening or listening to Breyten Breytenbach reciting poetry in Afrikaans is therapy of the best kind.

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