This is What My Brain Looks Like
On Covid in Canada Just Before the Polls Close in France
I disdain to amuse myself with the small rubbish of common diseases, with the trifles of rheumatism, coughs, fevers, vapours, and headaches. I require diseases of importance! —Moliere, Le Malade Imaginaire, 1673
Oh, for a prescriptive! Failing that, an explanation. I’m feeling the same as I do most days—the same more as less as every day—but the base components these last few, the hours, the minutes, the sticking click, click, click, every second ticked blow by freaking blow, life leaked out slow, dead slow, and stupid, flap flap flap nap nap nap, why? The French election? My senescence? Biden’s? Jetlag! Shitty movies, lousy food, recycled air. Turbulence every ten seconds. Changes in cabin pressure, sudden drops, back to your seat, please, 32 feet per second per second. Three airports, two continents, a door panel blowing off midair, belted in for umpteen hours. Ninety kilos of crushing CO2 guilt per person per hour. Taylor Swift: “The lesson I’ve learned the most often in life is that you’re always going to know more in the future than you know now.” So right, right? Breathe a little, it’s all good! Sorry, no, we don’t have tomato juice, but we do have a garden cocktail.
Upon landing, a long run on aching Achilles and wounded knee through First Nation woods.
Woods I grew up in. The aches roiling through the rest and the unrest, every joint compromised, every sleep corrupted. Too much wine. Too many votes for the far-right. Too many shorter-chain forevers off-gassing from my toilet paper, leaching from my touch screen and my aeropress, my contact lenses, my mattress, my dishwashing soap, my pizza box.
Why? Capitalism. Fossil fuels. Fossilized ideas.
Everything fucking aches.
Ah. Ok. Yes. Thank you. Explains a lot. Not everything. But a lot.
2.
As cities collapse and grow desolate when there is an earthquake and man erects his house on volcanic land only in fear and trembling and only briefly, so life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal. Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life? Which of these two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: life is the higher, the dominating force, for knowledge which annihilated life would have annihilated itself with it. Knowledge presupposes life and thus has in the preservation of life the same interest as any creature has in its own continued existence.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 1876
The flowering dogwood trees in this part of the world have gone completely insane. So, too, have many of the rose bushes. Other lifeforms too but these just stand out. The profligacy. The excess. Sure, it’s beautiful, but what’s with absurd number of blossoms?
What’s up, dogwood? What are you trying to tell us? The dogged woods of my youth did not look like this. Every year there was a flowering (sometimes two I’ve since read, though I don’t remember ever seeing this). A decently discreet number. A few here. A few there. Nothing like this. Is it stress? Or yet another annunciating sign? Is the Great One coming? Or the Really Big One?
3.
The Vancouver Special1 I lived in from 1965 to 1980, and again two years later—I’d probably still be living in its basement had my parents not sensibly pre-empted that possibility by downsizing into a one-room apartment a few months after my prodigal return—was on surrendered First Nation territory and had a flowering dogwood tree in its front yard.
That’s it above in the screencap, bereft of its pretty white flowers—the symbolic blossom of the province of British Columbia—in 2016, to the left of what had been, almost four decades before, my parent’s bedroom window. This was snapped by a Google Street View car trundling down Crown Street in August, just as the dogwood’s red berries were starting to ripen. The berries are edible, I’ve just read, though bitter, and best mixed with sweeter ones, which is what, traditionally, indigenous British Columbians (not the preferred nomenclature, as Walter Sobchak would tell us) knew to do. Or so, as I said, I’ve read. We ate huckleberries and salal berries but never dogwood berries. We ate the inner bark of salal and the pith of certain grasses. I once, on a dare, ate live ants. Pinched them wiggling between fingers off the trunks of ornamental trees on side streets near my elementary school and popped them in my mouth. But I never ate a dogwood berry. My sister remembers leaning out my parent’s bedroom window, grabbing a handful and flicking them, one by one, at the back of my head.
The tree is called a dogwood not because of any doggish associations but because of its twigs, which are smooth and straight, thus perfect for skewering meat. Skewering used to be called “dagging” or “dogging”. So a dogwood tree is a skewerwood tree.
Skewering is an odd word, especially in the crucifixional context of the dogwood tree, which, according to much lore, was the tree upon which the greatest mystery of Christian faith—the hypostatic union of the human and the divine—was realised.
In Jesus’ time, the dogwood grew
To a stately size and a lovely hue.
‘Twas strong and firm, its branches interwoven.
For the cross of Christ its timbers were chosen.
Seeing the distress at this use of their wood
Christ made a promise which still holds good:
“Never again shall the dogwood grow
Large enough to be used so.
Slender and twisted, it shall be
With blossoms like the cross for all to see.
As blood stains the petals marked in brown,
The blossom’s center wears a thorny crown.
All who see it will remember Me
Crucified on a cross from the dogwood tree.
Cherished and protected, this tree shall be
A reminder to all of My agony.
But that’s just silly. There are no dogwoods in the Bible. Or in Golgotha or anywhere else in the Levant. And I don’t remember anything particularly twisted about the dogwood in my front yard. The indigenous people of these parts traditionally used the straight, obligingly pliable stems for baskets. They smoked the tree’s inner bark and used the outer bark and its roots for tanning and dying, and the hard limbs for weaving shuttles.
Google took this shot in 2018. Where is the tree? Why was it removed like Beria from Stalin’s May Day podium? Where did it go? Was it diseased? Did it block too much light? The flowering dogwood is a protected tree in British Columbia. You can’t just cut one down. You can’t even pick its blossoms. Which, by the way, have a long history of medicinal use. They have been used to treat malaria. Applied directly to the skin, they heal wounds and cure boils. They cure headaches. They break fever. They increase strength. They lessen fatigue.
4.
Nation will rise against nation . . . there will be earthquakes in various places… And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.—Mark 13:8, 12
Am I missing something? I’ve forgotten what is important and how things work: earthquakes and volcanoes and my heart, how it beats, blood pumps in and out, oxygen is added, and carbon dioxide is subtracted. Then it stops. The uterus contracts, the cervix dilates. Veins thrombophlebitise. You pull a trigger, and a spring throws a hammer forward till it hits a primer; the primer explodes, igniting the propellant, which drives a bullet down the barrel. Electrons circle protons and sometimes neutrons, and the quantities of each determine atomic number and weight. But why? The moon travels around the earth, and the earth travels around the sun, but how? How are the seasons determined? Does the axis tilt? Hitler was shunned and persecuted, then somehow became Chancellor. Poland fell. Then what? How? When? Why?
“Though thou canst swim like a duck, thou art made like a goose.”
In the spring of 1611, the year Shakespeare finished The Tempest and returned to Stratford, the English explorer Henry Hudson and his young son John were set adrift in a small boat on the eastern shore of James Bay with nothing more than some powder and shot, a handful of pikes and an old iron pot. Hudson and his son rowed as hard as they could, keeping pace with the Discovery, but when the great ship’s giant sails were lowered and it shot away, the castaways’ shoulders sagged, and they stopped, watching helplessly as the civilized world and its rewards—glory, honour, immortality, fame—sailed past the slanting curve of the water’s end and out of sight, forever.
The Hudsons were never heard of again. Is this to be our fate, too? The great ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze, and we stand watching with our oars slack and our dicks hanging out till, at last, she fades on the horizon?
No.
The sail-crowded ship is gone from our sight, that is all, and just now appearing to others on a distant shore. The diminished size and total loss of sight is in you and me and not in her, and just at that moment when we said “She's gone,” those others, many of whom have already made the same journey, shout out with joy, “Here she comes!”
Hudson is a lousy model. His career as an explorer only lasted four years. Champlain is more our man. Both were sons of sea captains, set sail in search of a northern route, fought and friended First Nations and paddled the same waterways of New York in the same year (did they ever meet?). But poor old Henry was set adrift two years later, while Sam got in another quarter century and became lord and leader of the new world. Draftsman, painter, mapmaker—his maps, especially, magnificent—geographer, explorer, founder and governor of Quebec—New France!—and unredeemed scoundrel, who only escaped having his arms and legs smashed between each spoke of a wheel with a cudgel by heading out to sea under a false name—a name now possessing mountain, sea, lake, valley, town, village, bridge and shopping mall.
That same spring of 1611, a little earlier, just before Shakespeare put down his pen, Robert Parker printed the first King James Bible, and the ice began to clear around the trapped Discovery, an earthquake of 7.2 magnitude cracked the seabed floor on another quadrant of the globe—11 miles off the saw-toothed shore of Sanriku, on the northeast coast of Honshu, where Niko’s family is from, unleashing a 100 foot high tsunami that snuffed out 5,000 souls in a matter of seconds. In 1896, an eight-point-fiver struck 90 miles off the same coast. These are what we call deep focus events. A sudden release of energy in the earth’s crust. In the second quake the deeper water minimized the impact on shore, but 35 minutes later the largest tsunami in Japanese history, 125 feet high, crashed onto the beach at the same time as high tide. Twenty-six thousand people were killed, 9,000 homes destroyed. On both occasions, there were signs and signals. Eyewitnesses described a red light, like fire, in the morning sky. Animals and insects behaved erratically. You would think the inhabitants would have learned from these experiences, but apparently not. The problem is, we forget. We hold on to so much, but so much more disappears.
Pheasants’ song in the morning is not a warning, But should you hear their cry and wake, Expect the worst: an earthquake
On July 28, 1976, reports of crying catfish were heard in Tangshan, an industrial city of approximately one million inhabitants in Northeastern China. No action was taken. A magnitude of 8.2 struck that night. Two hundred and forty thousand dead. That same year saw the deaths of Zhou Enlai, Charman Mao and General Zhu De.
Cats and rats flee, dogs howl like ghosts and refuse to eat. Worms, tortoises and moles abandon their burrows, rabbits their warrens. Winter bats stop hibernating and fill the air, foraging instead of sleeping. Cocks crow and hens cackle as they fly onto roofs in the middle of the night. Bottom feeders and octopi float to the surface and die. Wintering snakes, toads and frogs reappear in the bamboo. Fish in aquariums line up in the same direction, leap out of their tanks or hide in the sand. Carp and catfish squirm. Sardines swim up-river. Restless cows break free of their harnesses. Pigs smash through their fences and attack each other. Seagulls fly inland.
Animals witness the death of their own kind and know to fear it and to transmit that fear to others, but only immediately and physically—instinctually, with their muscles, not with their minds. This I am sure you have seen. The defensive crouch, the speeding heart, the flood of blood. Birds at the window in mad flight, rats frozen to the spot, dogs, cowering, heads and paws turned to the sky, committed to submission. You see this especially—in massive numbers, entire populations—during earthquakes. Epinephrine and norepinephrine and cortisol. But to truly bear witness, to show by your existence that something is true, this is an exclusively human calling.
Kant, the great Chinese from Königsberg, was the first seismologist. His first book was a learned and ambitious treatise on the subject. He was the first modern to reject supernatural explanations and see them as the result of natural forces.
Today, there are more than 8,000 seismograph stations in the world. Twenty thousand earthquakes, give or take, are registered and located each year.
5.
Before the Sanriku earthquake in 1611, fishermen some 20 miles out to sea saw a red light in the sky in the direction of their town.
“Our homes are ablaze!”
“Quick! We must save our families!”
Expecting the worst, they raced back to land as fast as oars and sails could take them. But nothing was on fire. The town was safe. Perplexed, but relieved, they stored their catch, put away their nets, brewed their tea and settled in for the evening. At midnight, a loud bang ran out like cannon fire. The men craned their necks just in time to see the mountain behind them split into two and sink into the sea, taking with it the entire coast and all who lived on it. Only one person survived, a housewife who was rescued from the sea, and who told this story.
In a postscript to his second published series of Mount Fuji woodcuts, Hokusai, the great painter, draftsman and printmaker of the Tokugawa period, wrote that he had first began to draw at the age of 5 and by 50 had produced many pictures, but none done before the age of 70 were of any value. “Finally, at 73, I learned something about the true nature of things—birds, animals, insects, fish, the grasses and the trees. By 80 I will have progressed further. At 90, I will have probed the deepest meaning of things; at 100, I will create genuine marvels, and at 110, every point, every line, will have a life of its own.” He was dead at 89.
Hokusai was solely obsessed with his mountain. He believed it was the closest place on Earth to Heaven and that, at its peak, it held the perpetually burning secret of eternal life, an elixir of immortality deposited there by a moon goddess. He was a member of the Nicherin sect and a devotee of the Lotus Sutra. He chanted Nam-myohorenge-kyo day and night, silently and out loud.
Tsunamis do not break, they do not crest, they roll like a tide, long, flat and fast; this one depicted here is an open-water wave, a rogue breaker, wind-generated, 40 feet high and leaping fast forward toward the sky. It is early morning, the sun is rising. The cumulonimbus demon-clouds are leaden with rain. The storm is coming. The cresting waves dwarf the mountain. All feeling hearts must feel for him who felt this.
Beneath the Wave, he called it. The horizon is deliberately low to force the eye toward the centre. The water rolls from left to right, against the grain. Japanese read right to left. The signature is in the top left corner, to the left of the inscription in the rectangular box. Over the course of his life, he used more than 30 different names to sign his work. They changed as he did. He passed the old names on to his students. This is his best-known work. There were 5,000 printed, only 46 remain. He was almost 70 when he made it.
He had made similar works twice before, back in his 30s, and he would do another ten years later. The earlier two were bird’s eye views and thus much less threatening; in this one, we are in the water, and the claw-like crest is poised to smash down upon us. The three rowboats caught in the waves are transporting live fish. There are 30 people in them, clinging to the oars and gunwales in terror. The Hollow of the Wave of Kanagawa. We are caught in the hollow, framed in it, the hole, the tear, the crack, the rent, the switch. Debussy used it as a cover illustration.
The tear in the rip in the crack. Ten minutes of tremoring hell and and and and then, before the long length of uncresting swell arrives, the full weight and volume of the sea draws back a quarter of a mile or more from the shore; and many of those near it, those too poor of spirit or too surprised to move, too blind and deaf and stupified to see and hear and know what is happening, stand, amazed, transfixed, unable to flee, watching the fish gasp and flop on the exposed seabed, listening to the waters suck back into their roiling mass. Some of the idiots collect bagfuls of fish and scuttling crabs off the revealed ocean floor. Then, with a loud crack, the final wave rolls back in a swift rising tide.
Lafcadio Hearn, aka Yagumo Koizumi (1850-1904) describes a tsunami in Gleaning in Buddha-Fields (1897):
“The day had been oppressive; and in spite of a rising breeze there was still in the air that sort of heavy heat which, according to the experience of the Japanese peasant, at certain seasons precedes an earthquake. And presently an earthquake came.... He rose to his feet, and looked at the sea. It had darkened quite suddenly, and it was acting strangely. It seemed to be moving against the wind. It was running away from the land...”
The villagers raced to the shoreline to watch the astounding movement of the water. Hamaguchi turned his back to it, walked into his fields and lit the stacks of rice on fire. The villagers thought his house was burning and raced up the hill to put it out.
“Grandfather is mad,” screamed the man’s grandson. “I am afraid of him! He set fire to the rice on purpose! I saw him do it!”
“The child tells the truth. I set fire to the rice. Is everyone here?”
The Kumi-cho and the heads of families looked about them, and down the hill, and made reply: “All are here, or very soon will be. . . . We cannot understand this thing.”
“Kita (It’ s coming),” shouted the old man at the top of his voice, pointing to the open sea. “Say now if I be mad!”
Through the twilight eastward all looked, and saw on the edge of the dusky horizon a long, lean, dim line like the shadowing of a coast where no coast ever was, a line that thickened as they gazed.
6. Unlucky mortals! O deplorable earth! All humanity huddles in fear! The endless subject of useless pain! Come philosophers who cry, “All is well,” And contemplate the ruins of this world. — Voltaire, "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster", 1755
Out the door to the ferry, across island to the sound. By the time you read this, I’ll be down there on the dock below, at the inlet’s edge. And France will have a new government.
Nam-myohorenge-kyo.
https://www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org/house-styles/vancouver-special/
Oh man. There’s a lot going on here. A lot to think about.
Loved it.
Also, about the blooming mad dogwood. The trees here went wild this spring. A lilac that had always been parsimonious was suddenly outright pornographic with its blossoms. Same with a normally subdued chestnut. It was striking, impossible to ignore.