If I write Clifford, I write him as fiction, as a fantasy, as a thought experiment. I close my eyes and the earth and the sky disappear. The warmth of my sleeping bag wraps around me and sleep pulls me under, into that half-world where reality and fantasy mingle in a place where coherent thoughts disintegrate.
I like this idea of memoir as thought experiment, so while I could never be certain which events in Clifford were meant to be strictly true, Harold R. Johnson's mix of memory and fantasy works well to honour the legacy of a brother he lost too soon. Returning to his long-abandoned childhood home in a Northern Saskatchewan Indigenous community on the eve of his brother's funeral, Johnson spends the night in the hollow formed by the roots of a “grandmother” tree, watching the stars march across the sky and welcoming visions of Clifford and their time together. If we are all – people, the earth, the cosmos – nothing more than the story we agree upon, Johnson does his brother a real service by committing that personal story to the page; a lovely and fitting tribute. (Usual caveat: I am quoting from an Advanced Readers Copy and passages may not be in their final forms.)
Within this cosmos of siblings, of rivalries and affiliations, gravitational forces drew some home. They stayed for a while, then spun away with the momentum of their own adult lives. The younger ones orbited around Mom, and there were two planets, Clifford and I, that were caught in each other's magnetic field and we orbited around Dad.For brief biographical information: The author, Ray, was the seventh of nine children, and older brother Clifford was the closest to him in age with a six year gap. Their father was a quiet Swedish immigrant who, at twenty-three years older than their mother, died of a heart attack when Ray was just six. Their mother was a strong-willed Cree woman who then provided for her young family by running a successful trapline (with the children's seasonal help) until Social Services stepped in and told her that they would take her kids away if she didn't relocate to a nearby village, enroll the kids in the school there year-round, and put herself on welfare. From their father, Ray and Clifford learned the point of math and letters; from their mother, they learned how to live on the land. With the mind of a self-trained philosopher-scientist, Clifford was always drawing his younger brother in with his experiments and inventions, and it was from Clifford that Ray learned the connections between story and reality.
As the author spends the night on the land of his childhood, vignettes of memory come to him randomly, organically filling in the story of his childhood and his relationship with Clifford. As a child, Clifford taught Ray how to mentally explore the cosmos (in a spaceship made of a giant soap bubble with an eagle feather in his hand), and as a teenager, Clifford guided him on psychedelic trips to explore the reality of matter at the quantum level. All of this subatomic-uncertainty principle-parallel truths philosophising is right in my wheelhouse of interest, and as the boys grow into men and have deeper and deeper philosophical conversations, Clifford – although self-taught – is portrayed as a man with a profoundly intuitive understanding of physics and its implications. Ideas like the constant state theory – that the universe is constantly expanding without getting any bigger – are explained perfectly:
So the earth is orbiting the sun, and the sun is part of a galaxy orbiting a black hole, and while that black hole at the galaxy's centre is eating the galaxy, at the same time it is causing a whirlpool in space, putting energy into it, creating more mass. The two forces balance each other out. The universe is being eaten by the void that surrounds it, which is stretching it in all directions and creating more mass. And the black holes in the centre of each of the billions of galaxies are creating whirlpool energies that turn into mass. The universe is in a constant state of being created and destroyed at the same time.Clifford grows from MacGuyvering a motorcycle out of a washing machine engine as a kid to inventing a microwave engine rocket as an adult that he then worries will rip an earth-devouring void into space-time. Even so, the rest of Clifford's siblings (including the author) accuse him of under-achieving; treat him like a black sheep for trying to carve his own path instead of throwing himself into local back-breaking industries as the rest of them have. Clifford knows that everything – religion, science, capitalism, reality– are just stories we tell ourselves, and instead of it making him pessimistic or nihilistic, this knowledge makes him love humanity all the more:
You were born knowing that you were destined for greatness. Everyone is born with that same message written in their DNA. It's what kept the Indians walking on the Trail of Tears. It's what has kept us going despite everything. That kid you see on the television with the extended belly and the flies crawling all over him, and they're trying to get you to send money to save him – he has the same message. That's why he stays sitting up, why he doesn't just lie down and die. It's an irrational sense of purpose. Most people have it educated out of them, or, like the kid on television, blocked by trauma, but we all have it. We just have to learn to listen to it again.I loved that when Clifford tells a Wesakicahk story around a campfire, it's about the trickster flying into space in a rocketship, trying to mend a hole at the end of the universe; loved this blend of the two sides of his heritage and how the author weds them together. The stories that come to Ray as he tries to sleep on the family land add up to a loving portrait of a man and a relationship, and in the end, this mix of fact and fantasy seems the perfect way to honour Clifford. It certainly makes for an interesting read.
