Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

 

My world is muted. I look out. If something upsets me, I just wait, and the upset passes. I sit beside. Sometimes, I remember the other me, before I was frozen in the lake. I remember caring and engaging and the sharpness of unmuted feeling. I remember hopeless connection.

I don’t feel stuck, in part because I don’t feel anything. Their song isn’t wrong, the ice is like a warm, weighted blanket. My form dissolved when tragedy came and if I am fluid, the ice is container.

Noopiming; The Cure for White Ladies is a challenging, lyrical, and rewarding read from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. According to the publisher’s blurb, “Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for ‘in the bush’, and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making.” The most challenging aspect of this book is its use of aesthetics from Simpson’s ancestral storytelling tradition; aesthetics that unapologetically refuse to conform to the expectations or comfort of someone (myself) raised solely on the Western canon. Words from the Anishinaabemowin language are untranslated, Anishinaabemowin grammar (including the nongendering of all nouns) sits uncomfortably on the English-speaking tongue, and confusion reigns as one attempts to discern if the character speaking is a human, a goose, or a sentient maple tree that conveys their prized possessions (beneath the white man’s notice) along the roads between Peterborough and Toronto in a shopping cart. And Noopiming is rewarding for these exact same reasons: The language is poetic, the characters are meaningful, and if I had trouble perfectly understanding everything, I acknowledge that I was probably not Simpson’s primary target audience; but I am here to listen and to learn. Well worth the mental exercise.

Mindimooyenh is sitting on a lawn chair on the ice visiting me, talking and talking. It doesn’t matter if you listen or pay attention or respond or talk to them back. And sometimes I like when they come around because it doesn’t matter if I talk, not even one little bit. It doesn’t even matter if I pay attention, because my response is irrelevant. Mindimooyenh is like that. Maybe because all those years in residential school they weren’t allowed to talk, and now their words have just built up and come bursting out.

Noopiming opens from the perspective of Mashkawaji (a word which can be translated as “frozen stiff”); a person who has spent the past two years trapped in a frozen lake. “They” introduce us to seven other human and nonhuman characters (I found it very helpful that the rear cover of my book had these names listed along with their identities [the old man, the caribou, the giant], but continually referring to it did feel like cheating), and Mashkawaji introduces each as their lungs, or their marrow, or their brain, etc. In very short passages (many pages have only a line or two), perspective switches between these characters (and others), and while the whole does not add up to a plot in the way that I might define it, Simpson does tell a story that confronts and adds to the dominant Canadian narrative.

Simpson seems unafraid to ruffle feathers, to get political or confrontational:

• Things seem pretty fucked for the humans, to be honest. The white ones who think they are the only ones have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way this time. A few good ones get their footing, and then without continual cheerleading, succumb to the shit talk. It is difficult to know where to intervene or how to start. There are embers, but the wood is always wet and the flames go out so damn easy.

• They dream of driving their Jayco house trailer boat all the way to Palestine with the flotilla to resist the idea that this situation is complicated, that there are two sides, that there is no way to help.

• KOSIMAANAN STORY FIVE : A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INDIANS OF CANADA

Mashkodiisiminag begins by saying that they learned this story from Thomas King and that it is not their story by any means.

But Simpson also has important things to say about family, tradition, and ceremony:

They don’t need to try and explain that one can’t just look at or preserve a sacred site. That if the sacredness is to be maintained, Nishnaabeg have to continue the relationship. Fast. Pray. Sing. Carve. You cannot just ignore something and expect it to still be there for you when you need it.

And that last quote feels like the heart of Noopiming: Where once Susanna Moodie found her way in the “uninhabited” Canadian bush, Simpson’s characters explore a different kind of desolation; sleeping rough under the Gardiner overpasses, ignoring the toxic tang of the Don River, prevented from lighting a traditional fire in their own back yards because of Toronto’s bylaws against open air burning. The ultimate response to a collective consciousness finding itself frozen in the ice is to employ art as a political act; Noopiming is such an act of art that strengthens the Nishnaabeg people’s relationship to the sacred. I am grateful to have witnessed the act.

Life Without Children: Short Stories

 

Now, he actually was the man with no children. They weren’t in the house. They weren’t in his head when he woke. Their names on the screen when his phone rang were often a shock; nothing in the house or in the rhythm of his day was a reminder. They were gone. He wasn’t a father. What was he? A sixty-two-year-old bachelor. With a wife. And she was a sixty-year-old spinster, with an occasional husband. They’d become brother and sister, somehow.

Life Without Children is a book that I’m glad exists. According to an interview in The New Yorker with author Roddy Doyle on his inspiration for writing a collection of (mostly) pandemic-themed stories:

I’d been working on a novel — I’d just started it. It’s set in the present day, and I realized, as I tried to continue work on it, that I didn’t know what the present day was. It wasn’t the thing it had been two weeks before, or even two days before. I decided to set it aside, and I thought that short stories might be the way to capture the moments I was now witnessing.

Masks and hand sanitiser, 2m personal distancing and 2km travel zones, essential workers and zoom meetings, they’re all in this collection. Told primarily from the POVs of grumpy old men, these are stories of adult children giving up their leases to move home (which, generally, delight their Dads), partners in their “third age” rediscovering each other, dogs with human names, craft beer with clever names, and so many cyclists in lycra (actually, the collection begins and ends with collisions between pedestrians and cyclists — with a truly tragic such accident referenced along the way — so perhaps this is Doyle’s own greatest of grumpy old man pet peeves). And again, I’m so glad that this exists: Each of Doyle’s stories contain nice little slice of life moments, enjoyable in their own right, but taken together, they represent a valuable artifact of our pandemic experience; I reckon this collection will become even more valuable as time passes and memories fade. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I don’t want to dissect the ten stories in this collection, but will include a few interesting passages. From Box Sets (presumably set pre-pandemic, on Irish life more generally):

The cookbooks were a sign of the shift. Whenever they went to people’s houses — and they did it a lot, on Friday and Saturday evenings, the homes of people Emer knew from work or old friends she’d kept in touch with — they were given food that was supposedly eaten on the streets of cities that Sam associated with bombings or destitution. Beirut street food, Mumbai street food. Jerusalem was the latest — Ottolenghi. The recipe book was always on the kitchen counter, and they’d have to hear the tale of the hunt for the ingredients before they were allowed to eat. Not that he objected to the food. He cooked a bit himself. Dublin street food, and the odd Mexican or Far Eastern dish. But, anyway, that was the start of the country’s comeback, he’d thought. And Emer had agreed with him. The street food books — the money to buy them and the money to use them, the tiny bit of ostentation. The books alone on the counter, and the box sets piled beside the telly.

The Curfew (about an “ex-hurricane” hitting Ireland):

The west of the country was being chewed by the weather; there were power cuts, roads made impassable, tin roofs pulled off farm sheds. Outside — here, in Dublin — it was a windy day. That was all. He’d been sitting on the bed, waiting. He wanted to see a car in the air, a hundred-year-old oak toppling; he wanted to witness something — anything. And he didn’t. The leaves were the story. The fact that nothing was happening. The leaves going the wrong way, and the woman with the teddy bear. They were his stories. He lay back on the bed. He turned, into whiteness and nothing — no thoughts or things. He slept.

Life Without Children:

Social distancing is a phrase that everyone understands. It’s like gender fluidity and sustainable development. They’re using the words like they’ve been translated from Irish, in the air since before the English invaded.

Masks:

The lockdown’s a nonsense. It’s more crowded than it ever was before the pandemic. There are chip bags and empty snack boxes all across the grass and footpath. It’s outrageous. And the masks. Dozens — hundreds of them. They’re damp and lethal on the concrete, like the leaves.

The Charger:

He can’t see himself walking into a full room again. The heat, the sweat in the air, the steam, manoeuvring himself through bodies to get close enough to shout for a pint. Putting his hands on the counter. Picking up a wet glass. Pulling open a packet of crisps. Licking the salt off his fingers. It’s not going to happen.

The Five Lamps:

Talbot Street — this was Dublin’s CBD. It was empty, the shithole it had always been. Grafton Street had a bit going for it; you could persuade yourself you were in London or even Paris if you wore blinkers and blocked your ears. But this place — danger at every corner, seagulls in charge of the air, half the premises already shut down, just waiting for the pandemic to put them out of their misery — this was Dublin.

 

Magma

 

He’s peeled me like an onion. Surrounded by the leavings of my own sallow skin, I’ve dwindled to nothing, and my eyes smart.

Well, this broke me. Magma may be short (it’s about an hour’s read), but debut Icelandic author Thora Hjörleifsdóttir hits all the slow beats of an increasingly manipulative and abusive relationship that threatens to destroy a young woman; body, mind, and spirit. Twenty-year-old Lilja returns to Reykjavík from a solo backpacking trip through Central America to start a relationship with an older student who had been engaging her in romantic email exchanges while she was away. Although he doesn’t want to be thought of as her boyfriend, this Derrida-quoting, grey-eyed hunk will become ever more jealous and controlling, isolating Lilja from her friends and family; and the more time he spends with other women, the more Lilja believes that if only she could be more perfect — assuming his vegetarian diet, loosening her sexual boundaries, accepting his close relationship with his perfect Ex — maybe then he will finally commit himself to her. For anyone who wonders why women stay with their abusers, Hjörleifsdóttir unspools a plausible narrative of someone who makes a series of increasingly larger compromises until she has utterly betrayed herself; and with backstories that go some way to explaining why each of the partners in this couple act the way they do, Hjörleifsdóttir evokes the heat and pressure of her title that bubbles beneath all of our controlled facades. Brief but brimming with painfully relatable truths, this was an outstanding read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I felt really guilty. I’ve been with him so much lately that I’ve completely ignored my own friends. But there are so many things I can’t tell them. If you talk about what happens within a relationship, everything gets tangled, and it’s easy for an outsider to judge — I don’t want them to write him off completely. They don’t know what it’s like to be as in love as I am now.

Magma is written in a series of short chapters — from a few sentences to a few paragraphs — and with this breezy, mostly declarative (mostly non-contemplative) storytelling style, it reads like a much younger girl’s diary. And that apparent immaturity made me feel very protective of Lilja; Hjörleifsdóttir earns a real emotional investment from her readers as we inhabit Lilja’s mind and can’t stop her from acting against her own interests. An early chapter (my e-ARC doesn’t have the pages numbered but this is at the 15% mark) reads:

When I shower at his place, he always wants to get in with me. We’ve showered together so often that he seems quite hurt if I say I’d like to shower alone. The shower is really tight with two people, especially when I wash my hair, but he thinks it’s cozy, and I want to make him happy. Sometimes when we shower, he asks if he can pee on me. Urine feels strange when it runs down your body; it’s colder than the water, and the smell that cooks in the heat and steam isn’t especially pleasant. He usually wants to piss on my back. But sometimes he wants me to rest on my knees while he pees over my head. Once, he peed in my mouth. I didn’t like that. But I don’t mind the other times as much, as I’m already in the shower and can rinse it right off.

This brief chapter ([ironically?] entitled “Hygiene”) shows not only how Lilja starts off with “small” compromises but also demonstrates how she’s a willing participant in her own degradation — she’s not financially dependant on this guy, they have no children together or other tricky ties, Lilja simply wants to prove she’s good enough to earn this man’s focussed devotion and nothing will be good enough for him. And as I wrote above, each of these participants will have events in their background exposed that underpin their behaviours — I don’t think we’re supposed to think of him as a monster, even if he’s no good for Lilja — and while men in general aren’t presented in the best light (the man’s father was an alcoholic jerk, neither a male psychiatrist or ER doctor will give Lilja adequate care after she starts harming herself), there are also women (the man’s mother and Ex) who give the man’s behaviour a pass and who participate in the gaslighting and otherwise mistreatment of Lilja. It’s all so plausible (right up until a maybe not-so-inevitable ending) that I found the whole thing simply heart-breaking. I’d love to read more, especially something longer, from Hjörleifsdóttir.

The Death of Francis Bacon

 

The century abandoned me at dusk. I panicked and added more newsprint. Crappy friends leaving me, crappy artists, crappy bitter aphorisms pouring out of me, plasticky surgery belches, dapper, bandaged, trashed, honestly I behaved horribly. I’ve been lost a bit. It’s just dying, finally. Pity me, up and lead the dance of fate.

David Mitchell recently popularised the phrase (originally attributed to Martin Mull of all people), “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and in the same vein, with The Death of Francis Bacon, author Max Porter ups the ante by not simply writing about painting but attempting to “write as painting” (according to a quote on his publisher’s website; emphasis my own). I confess to not being familiar with the life and work of the (surrealist? abstract impressionist?) British painter Francis Bacon, but I did do a shallow dive before starting this short novella and I would suggest that some such familiarity is absolutely necessary for anyone hoping to discover a few handholds of reality in this slippery, abstract work. And do you know what I discovered? I don’t really “get” or “like” the work of Francis Bacon. It’s too weird and ugly and unsettling, and by attempting to “replicate thought, struggle, the struggle of thought, but also the sheer energy of the eye’s confrontation with the painted image” through writing (an effort as sensical as dancing about architecture), Porter has created a narrative that is equally as weird, ugly, and unsettling — but with the added confusion of language. Were I a knowledgeable and devoted fan of Bacon’s work, I might have found this a brilliant bit of prose; but as a Philistine who would likely give Britain’s most famous and highest-selling artist a three star rating, I can only do the same for this novella. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It’s an attempt to express my feelings about a painter I have had a long unfashionable fixation with. It’s an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak. It’s an attempt to hold catastrophe still so you can get a proper sniff at it.

I learned from my shallow dive into Bacon’s biography that he died in Madrid in 1992, spending the last six days of his life under the care of a nursing sister in a private clinic, the Handmaids of Maria. The Death of Francis Bacon covers these last six days, with Bacon more or less rambling on at Sister Mercedes about his life and work, referencing identifiable paintings and lovers and interviews as she encourages him to get some rest, intenta descansar. Each of the six short chapters (plus preface) begins with the dimensions of a painting (which other reviewers assure me relate to actual works) and the writing that follows is gritty, visceral, and closer to poetry than prose:

You look well Aelfryth, you look well Edward, long ride, good day, strong wind, sea air, here, some beer, a long gladdening gulp of gold, the colour of the stone, strange look, first cold, extremely cold and makes him think of river swims and soiling his sheets, shock, shame, the wet sock game, being stabbed is the same, extraordinary pain, the colour blue, lapis right through him, and then again and again and she’s walking back into the castle and he’s dripping venison memory, white fat and clicking, smoke, dripping onto the stones, trying to turn and see where the hurt is, caught in the stirrup and upside down, crack on the skull metal thump in the side in a brawl with the pages, again, crack again, black, bits of his brain scattered on the track thumping down the hill down the hill down the hill and into the river Corfe, last thought is of the beer, wasted, where is the cup, we are concerned with those who notice the cup, yes the dead king, yes politics, meat and temporality, but also the well-made cup, perched body ripe and crucial on the road.

As I said above, this is a very short work — it only takes about a half hour to read, so I went through it twice — and while it was the surrealism of Porter’s Lanny that most entranced me with that book, writing about surrealistic painting, once again, seems about as transferable as dancing about architecture (or “singing about economics” if you prefer; apparently the original original simile). This was interesting, I did appreciate what I learned on and off the page — and I will grant that a more knowledgeable reader might find this to be a perfect result of Porter’s intent — but it doesn’t go beyond a three star “like” for me.

Last sight isn’t human after all, is pure throb colour on the heart inside.
Get some distance, stand back, six feet, no glass, no label, no price list, no body, no gallerist. Just the painting. Seal the lid. Is pure throb colour on the heart inside.
No more.
Is pure throb colour on the heart inside.
Sí. Intenta descansar.

 

The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

 

The first part of The Infinite Staircase is, in effect, a contemporary riff on the Great Chain of Being. It seeks to explain via the metaphor of the staircase how all reality is indeed structured as a hierarchy. Unlike the Great Chain of Being, however, both the top and bottom of this staircase are shrouded in mystery — hence the infinite staircase. Fortunately, however, the middle parts are clearly in view, and that is where our story takes place. Telling this tale will take up the first two-thirds of this book. In so doing, it will set the stage for the remaining third. There we will address the question, If this is indeed what the world is actually like, what does that mean for how we should act? What, to bring things back to my perennial concern, should be our strategy for living?

The Infinite Staircase is a radical and persuasive Theory of Everything, referencing the peaks of human thought from quantum mechanics to Romantic poetry in order to explain the origins and the meaning of life. Author Geoffrey A. Moore, known for his best-selling Business books, carefully leads the reader up his metaphorical stairway, ably explaining high-level theories in understandable language, and what this adds up to in the end feels nothing short of revolutionary. Although my e-ARC was only a couple hundred pages, I worked through this slowly, entranced by Moore’s facts and connections, and while I don’t feel that I 100% absorbed everything that I read, I’m left with the awe-filled sense that I’ve been shown a peek behind the curtain that shrouds our reality; this engaged me on every level and it has my highest recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, not really certain how deeply I should try to explain Moore’s ideas (it really does take a book of this length to go through them), so I’m just going to put one of his summing-ups behind a spoiler tag for anyone who’s interested in a deeper dive (no spoiler tags on Blogger, so the summing up is at the bottom of this review): More succinctly: The Infinite Staircase starts at the beginning of time with the first step centering on physics and the Big Bang and an explanation of entropy (which most people define as the universe’s trend towards greater disorder but which Moore more precisely defines as the universe’s attempt to lock up the heat/energy resulting from the Big Bang in ever-increasingly complex systems; the most complex system that we know of being humans ourselves). The steps climb through chemistry (how the first elements and atoms were created) and biology (with a convincing explanation for how life arose on Earth and evolved into us), and as the steps proceed, Moore stresses that each higher step emerges naturally out of the one below it without ever requiring some deity or other organising principle imposing order from the top down. The steps which Moore covers are:

11. Theory
10. Analytics
9. Narrative
8. Language
7. Culture
6. Values
5. Consciousness
4. Desire
3. Biology
2. Chemistry
1. Physics

It may seem surprising to claim that values emerge prior to culture and language. In fact, however, they grow naturally out of the interaction of any conscious being with its social group. The former brings intentions driven by desires and fears; the latter provides boundaries and direction for sanctioned behaviors. Values, in other words, are socially constructed. Without social interactions, there can be no values, only desires and fears.

The staircase metaphor is really useful for explaining how we got here and how we live (with the philosophers and academics occupying the highest, most complex steps on that staircase with their theories and analyses), but it doesn’t give the complete picture on how to live. And this is where Moore asks for what I think of as a leap of faith. Anyone can understand that the 4th step, desire, underpins our selfish and greedy behaviours. And I can be convinced that its counterbalance, kindness, is common to all mammals (and therefore a part of our genetic makeup); that higher facets of ethics (fairness, morality, justice) are products of the culture that we’re raised in (and therefore a part of our “memetic” makeup):

Just as a genome replicates a set of strategies for living that is biologically maintained and transmitted from generation to generation via genes, so a culture replicates a set of strategies for living that is socially maintained and transmitted from generation to generation via memes. Upon this analogy rests the transformation of evolution from the realm of genetics to the realm of ideas. It is the “missing link” that joins matter to mind.

But, beyond society as a whole rolling along on the strength of cooperative values, what should prompt an individual to choose against his own selfish desires? Here, Moore explains transcendentalism (he has practised Transcendental Meditation for decades), and whether one accesses it through meditation, mindfulness, or epiphany, Moore insists that there is a verifiable and universally accessible “goodness” outside of ourselves that supports consciousness, and thereby, every step above it. (This is the leap of faith, and I leapt. Doesn’t everyone feel that there’s something more ineffable to life than what can be accounted for by pragmatic materialism?) Things then get super interesting, with Moore concluding that since humans are the storytelling animal, most of our conversations and entertainments attempt to dissect what a “good” life looks like. I relate a newspaper article I read about a man saving ducklings from a sewer grate, you talk about the jerk who cut you off in traffic, we have no problem agreeing on what good looks like. We read books and watch movies together to see how characters react under pressure, hoping that their stories end with just desserts. We can discuss some intractable political situation, and even though we can’t hope to solve the issue, I’m left inspired by the empathy you displayed for all sides. And in the end, that’s what Moore says it’s all about: Every human being is a character in the ongoing story of the human race, every one of those characters will eventually die, and all that any of us can hope for is to be an example of what good looks like, to be remembered for that, and to inspire others to do good in the world after we’re gone.

Historically, ethics have been situated in religious narratives entailing obedience to a divine creator. What we have sought to demonstrate in this book is that they are equally compatible with a strategy for living unfolding in a secular universe. In either case, we are carried forward by the narratives we embrace. They provide the foundation for our strategies for living. We are storytelling animals living out our stories as best we can. That is the common thread that unites us all.

I feel like I’ve really oversimplified everything here, I certainly can’t do justice to the level of interdisciplinary scholarship Moore demonstrates (quoting everything from Plato to Flashdance) in a reasonably bite-sized review, but I can say that I do hope this book finds a wide audience; totally worth the read.

In discussing the metaphysics of entropy, we hypothesized that Earth has an interest in maximizing complexity as a means of shedding the sun’s energy. Such an imperative does account for a staircase in which higher and higher orders of complexity emerge, each characterized by greater entropy-generating capabilities. Biological life represents a major step up in this regard, with humanity achieving the highest step to date. In this context, all that we value about ourselves, including our most profound emotions and dearest accomplishments, are indeed just epiphenomena. This is the materialist point of view, and it is perfectly sound as far as it goes. 

The materialist account of reality falters with the emergence of consciousness. Yes, consciousness is a tool for creating more entropy, but that is not its only function. It is also a mechanism for sensing and managing homeostasis, the tendency of all living things to seek a lifesustaining equilibrium. In the realm of animal behavior, homeostasis results in what we called the Darwinian mean, a pragmatically determined equilibrium between risk and reward based on balancing desire with fear, one that maximizes an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction. In the realm of human behavior, homeostasis is more closely aligned with the Aristotelian mean, a psychologically determined equilibrium among a variety of conflicting feelings that maximizes our organism’s sense of well-being. 

Reliable access to well-being is the kind of spiritual support we are looking for. Aristotle’s strategy for securing it was through a conscious commitment to the virtue of temperance. That can work for personalities that are already in balance and have spiritual energy to expend, but it does not work for those that are disaffected, wounded, or in need. The latter need an influx of energy from outside themselves, something the Aristotelian mean does not provide for. Religion, by contrast, does so handsomely, which helps account for why it displaced philosophy at the core of the Western cultural tradition. But can a secular tradition supply a comparable spiritual support from Being? 

We have reliable evidence that mindfulness and meditation, as well as other related practices, do confer a state of well-being. Earlier, we associated this state with joyfulness, but now we need to be more precise. We experience joy in two modes. One is as a sharp pang that can completely overwhelm us, the other a serene centeredness that suffuses quietly into our consciousness. The former is not a repeatable experience. Its epiphanies are good for shaking us up, waking us up, and taking us up to a higher plane. They make us aware of feelings we did not know we could have. But they pass, often quite quickly, and they leave us not only breathless but also at a bit of a loss. By contrast, the quieter mode of joy that suffuses into our consciousness is indeed a repeatable experience, one that becomes increasingly accessible through the practices we have been referencing. This is the joy that provides spiritual support, the one that underlies spiritual homeostasis. 

Where, then, does such joy come from? It is important to note that it does not come from the practices themselves. What they deliver instead is an awareness that this quieter mode of joy was there all along. Once we are sufficiently aware of it, we can access the experience between practices. It can become abiding. This is the point at which being becomes Being. Note that we are not at the bottom of our staircase. There, being truly is just being. It is with the emergence of consciousness that being becomes Being. In other words, in the systems hierarchy worldview, Being emerges out of being halfway up the staircase.

This is a departure from the traditional understanding of transcendentalism, which aligns it with idealism. In that context, Being is positioned as a divine field from which reality emanates. Such a narrative may be compelling, but there is no way to verify it. By contrast, working within the systems hierarchy model, we are aligning transcendentalism with pragmatism. Our focus, therefore, must be on verifiable outcomes in the here and now. In that context, Being is verifiable only with the advent of consciousness. It could exist prior to consciousness, it could even be the foundation out of which the Big Bang emerged, but we have no way of verifying that. What we can verify is that Being provides spiritual support for consciousness and thus for everything above it — values, culture, language, narrative, analytics, theory. This means, among other things, that it is available to support and authorize ethics. That is what makes Being a bridge between metaphysics and ethics.

Undersong

 

What can be more ordinary than my voice — wind through my branches, sap gurgling in my wood? Trees cover the earth, as common as stones! Inventors and poets scour their own minds for sparks of life, but Rotha perceived vitality in natural bodies. She knew life was a force no inventor can create, and even now her knowledge remains visible yet unseen, just as the word real indwells the word realm. But invention! Progress! Machines to counterfeit myself, Sycamore, and other trees. Bee-sized apparitions to mimic bee work, humming and whirring ever faster, louder than Rotha’s undersong of wind in wood, of fluttering wing, of hue atremble in corolla. Common life will become uncommon. The ordinary will slip underground from whence it once flourished. Not dead, you understand, but in waiting.

Undersong is a fictionalised biography of Dorothy “Rotha” Wordsworth — sister of, and evidently, mostly uncredited collaborator with the poet William Wordsworth (apparently performing the same function for family friend Samuel Coleridge) — and while I do tend to like these kinds of books that right the historical record by bringing women out of the shadows, I had a hard time figuring out just how much of this was meant to be accurate. Narrated by a fictional handyman, James Dixon, who came to serve the family when he was seventeen and Rotha forty-five, author Kathleen Winter also includes passages from the point-of-view of a Sycamore tree (as I opened with) and passages from Rotha’s diaries (which are more impressions of nature than a record of her life). As even Wikipedia points out the famous lines that William Wordsworth lifted from his sister’s writings for his own use, this seems an important story to tell, but ultimately, I felt I knew James Dixon very well by the end of this, but Rotha? Not so much. Still, an intriguing story, and with Winter's reliably excellent writing on display, this was a very fine read. Rounding down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

As Undersong opens, Rotha has just passed away at eighty-three and her loyal servant James begins to tell the story of their nearly four decade relationship:

My mam, says James, always told me this: When someone you care about dies, you can tell their story to the bees and they’ll keep it, like. Even if everyone else forgets. Bees’ll hold onto it for you, then once you’re dead yourself they’ll scatter it abroad with the pollen so the world never really forgets. That person stays alive and the world hasn’t lost them, and you haven’t lost them either. What about it? Do ye reckon Mam’s right? He reaches his hand forth and five bees alight on it. Only in our world does James possess anything now. So we denizens of the garden do what we always do for those who acknowledge us the way he and Rotha have done. We eloquesce in the realm of light, wind and water — and with our earthen bodies we listen.

James remembers first being struck by the sight of Rotha and her strange crow of a brother when he was a little boy — in all the years since I saw Rotha Wordsworth that very first time when I was five, I never met the glimmer in anyone except her — and goes on to describe how, recently returned from the Battle of Waterloo, he was hired by William as a gardener/handyman/someone to keep an eye on the melancholy Rotha so that William can be free to write. James and Rotha go on rambles through the Lake District (although she would rather be with her beloved brother as in the old days), and after Rotha writes her impressions of what she sees in her diaries, William would have James (with Rotha’s permission) read passages out for him to assess and borrow from:

— Nothing in the woods is whiter than the snow of blackberry blossoms on the dark green leaves, & the leaves are dry as bones under the few raindrops that sit on them like tiny crystal balls —

Keep going. Write that one down.

— & water sparkles among the reeds, its voice a flute in the undersong of wind, thrush and reed — lights in the grass — & the lake glimmers through the lilac leaves — skeletons of the lilac flowers stand on the treetop, brittly swaying — a strong wind blew the lilac leaves so they became folded hearts — half-hearted, & it tore the skin off the lake revealing glittering silver blood — like ripped metal — the sound of the wind went hollowly around the hills like a soft-headed stick scribing a spiral on cymbals—

Yes, write it down! We’ll have all that.

(According to James’ account, Rotha explains that William is terribly near-sighted and has a poor sense of smell so she saw it as her duty to experience the world of the senses on his behalf.) As I said above, we learn a lot about James’ life and family (including the younger sister who ruined her body working at the mills in Manchester since childhood), and as devoted and selfless as he is in service to the Wordsworths, Winter continually underlines the class divide that prevents Rotha and William from seeing or treating James as a person; if this is meant to be a proper biography of Rotha, it doesn’t provoke much empathy for her. Near the end of Undersong, James fulfills a promise to Rotha: to destroy the private “red diaries” which recorded her actual feelings, but which William was decidedly uninterested in reading. James recites from these secret diaries to the bees:

The first shock was realizing I was no longer one of the boys. The second shock came after Wm & Sam stopped including me, & after Quincey also found a wife — what is it about their finding wives that made me obsolete? The second shock was that, No, I had never been one of them. Not in our youth & not in our age. What had I been? They loved my thoughts, it is true, but did not hear me utter them. Rather, they imagined that my ideas had flown to them from the same invisible wind that flows to all men, & that my ideas counted among their discoveries.

I suppose it is the remove of having Rotha’s story told by a servant and the trees that kept me from really connecting with her experience and that just makes me question Winter's intention with this format. As an overall concept, however, this was very interesting and I am happy to have learned as much as I did about the Wordsworths.