Thursday, July 25, 2013 Williams Lake, Canada
I sing of Huns and trees, but not of Huns in trees, nor of their descendant German children in trees in the film The Sound of Music, nor of Huns holding parts of trees to sneak up on a castle, as in Shakespeare's play Macbeth; but the Huns of whom I speak are English, fighting the Irish, close colonial cousins of the Scottish, who populate Macbeth. A castle, Dublin Castle, does enter into it, and the British entered into it in 1916, in a city of many dead and dying Irish patriots.
Yes I have been reading the poetry of John Donne and the Ulysses of James Joyce, but this is less conceit, more stream of consciousness; but with more punctuation, orality having declined so much since Thomas Carlyle that the word seas of Joyce would drown more than direct readers in our day, including many of the sturdy few who dare to read my words. You know who you are. You readers are my heroes, such as Carlyle wrote of in On Heroes and Hero Worship.
Joyce wrote
"If you see Kaye...
Tell her...
See you in tea."
Heroism-cum-whorism?
Williams Lake is the third part of the yet-unexplained title of this writing. "Williams Lake's got talent," to use the opaque, ungrammatical formulation. Beware ungrammatical formulations, their flashing eyes, their floating hair, as Samuel Coleridge wrote in "Kubla Khan," a hero to the east of the Huns, and Juliet is the sun.
To the Huns' west lay the British Isles, a contentious conundrum.
Tonight, Williams Lake's talent showed up in Boitanio Park, a "green and pleasant land," in the words of William Blake, no relation to Williams Lake. Although young women, this talent was unlike the whorehouse talent in Joyce's Ulysses. Under the frying sun, several young women sang in turn. One turned to "Foggy Dew" but did not sing the line, "Britannia's Huns with their long range guns"sailing in from the foggy dew to blast away at Irish independence. Erin go Bragh, "Ireland Forever."
She left the stage, British imperialism intact, and got a smoothie at a table selling such. She walked past me yon and hither, but someone else was singing, so I didn't ask about the omitted line.
I thought of ribs, that is, of a scene in the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. The guitarist who invented the opening notes of the song "My Girl" was aged and sitting in a California restaurant.
As the server walked up to our ancient musician's table, the opening notes of "My Girl" played. His eyes lit up, met the young woman server's eyes, there was a pause, and he said, "I'll have the ribs."
"Why didn't you tell her that you invented that famous opening music?" his partner asked.
"Who'd believe an old man?" he replied.
Old man I didn't accost the "Foggy Dew" singer, nor her teacher, who had accompanied on piano.
Instead, I watched children climb a tree on the other side of the stage. I remembered "the climbing tree" near my childhood home near Edson, Alberta. All those "nears" are "almosting it," but that's a Joyce of a different portrait of the artist as a young man. Many times I climbed that tree, alone or with friends. From above the power lines, I could see the Rocky Mountains to the west.
These children would need to perch 300 metres above the ground the see out of the Williams Lake valley. These children were mere metres above the ground, the tree shorter than my childhood tree.
These children. Ah, these children. I was "These eyes are crying" nostalgic, and Guess Who sang that?
Oh, childhood, where is thy sting, Donne in, fallen to safety from the delicious danger it once was.
The vast, distant prairie horizon stimulates the imagination, I read somewhere. Does the narrow, close, mountain horizon diminish the imagination? I grew up in neither, so am I imaginatively challenged? "Imaginatively challenged" is a phrase full of potential, energy, but it is kinetic energy that children produce by falling from trees.
No sooner did I finish pondering horizons than a matronly woman rose from her lawn chair on my side of the stage. So did Venus rise from the foamy waves. This Venus walked toward the tree.
I was sore afraid for the barefoot gossins at their tree, Galway Bay or no.
For I recalled neighbor women yelling at us children to get off the water tower, but I remembered none every yelling us out of the tree. "This is no place for old men" or women, to embellish Yeats;
but I don't pretend to polish Yeats. The tree: no adults allowed. Tell Adam and Eve.
I feared, ancient music mariner I, I and I if I were a Rastafarian, that this woman would command the children out of the tree. Medea spoil the fun, but no children die. I watched. She merely stood below as they climbed above. Inwardly I commended her.
As I rose to leave the outdoor concert, having heard the young singers but not planning to stay for the country gospel band to follow, I screwed my courage to the sticking post and approached first the "Foggy Dew" singer, then the tree woman. The first did not sing like Sinead O'Connor. The second did not look like an Avatar heroine, nor like Venus, but Williams Lake's got talent.
And Brutus is an honorable man, as Mark Antony said at Caesar's funeral in the Shakespeare play.
A writer from the United States, which has the minimum daily requirement of them, named Michael Parenti, wrote The Assassination of Julius Caesar a few years ago, to trumpet the porous leader's democratic intentions and refute the tyranny that mainline history has fixed on him.
Mainlining history might be better than mainlining drugs, but revisionism rocks. Ask the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist Leninist), which helped make one tiny party into two tiny parties 60 years ago, their splinter venerating Joseph Stalin. Every cult has its saint. Don't drink the Kool Aid in the Gulag, nor the Kool Ag in the Gule Aid.
"Did you omit a couple lines from 'Foggy Dew?'" I asked the young chanteuse.
"Yes," she baa-ed sheepishly.
"About Britannia's Huns? My granny came from Ireland."
"Yeah." Yeah what, I wondered, Huns or Granny, neither of whom I ever met.
"Good job, though," I said.
"Thanks."
It seemed that she meant to sing of Huns. I worried that her teacher and piano player edited the song to improve the image of the English. This is, after all is said and shot, the "British" Columbia province of Canada. I worried for nothing, but I suppose I could worry for something else. There's always reason to worry, usually without reason.
Singer accosted and flattered, I approached the woman who had approached the tree of children, an interesting image aesthetically, evolutionarily, and wily. Perhaps one could use the tune of the country song "Sea of Heartache" and change the words to the theme "Tree of Children."
"When I saw you walk to the tree, I thought you were going to tell the children to get down," I said. "I'm glad you didn't. I grew up climbing trees."
"I'm responsible for two of those children," she said, seeming to agree that children may, dare I hope should, climb trees. "I didn't want them to fall out of the tree."
Our contrarian culture begged the riposte, "Oh, and I did want them to fall out of the tree," but more later on the utility of children falling from trees.
Her dutiful response left open the possibility that she cared for the handful of other children in and around the tree. Presumably, one of them falling would concern her. Watching her catch one or two falling children would have added athletic aplomb to the musical evening.
Catch a falling child and put it in your pocket. Save it for a rainy day.
"Children can fall out of trees and not hurt themselves," I said. "I fell when I was a child," but as I said that I realized that falling out of a tree might have made me weirder than I had been. Such are the "shocks the flesh is heir to" as Hamlet would say, falling out of resolution, but not out of trees; although falling out of a tree might have enhanced my character. I heard that pain enhances character. Ask the Irish, with or without shelling from Britannia's Huns, in Dublin in 1916 or in Canada in song in 2013, 97 years later.
Falling out of a tree at my age would merely break body parts that I'm still using.
I therefore didn't join the children in the tree, but I climbed in spirit. I doubt that the semi-dutiful woman would have caught me, had I fallen from the tree. I'm sure her husband would disapprove.
Up a tree, I end where I begun, Donne.
