Opposite Contraries (16 page)

Gee! That old fool and lots of others make me sick over the poor dears lowering their status to sixth-rate individuals, robbing them of their natural nobility of their birthright as animals. They must invest creatures with silly sentimental twaddle, telling you a creature thought this and this — silly human humbug. I think in their mute unworded way they must despise us and our patronizing. There is a no man’s land where beast and human meet. We have a lot of things in common: birth, death, desire to keep breath in us, to be warm, to eat, to sleep, to produce our kind and help [keep] the affair going on. They have a great sense of comfort, but [we have] more for aesthetic beauty. A dog doesn’t care if his mate is pretty or hideous; he may have a code of beauty totally different to ours. The smell of another creature means much more than its looks. I think a creature thinks with smell. I think smell is its first sense. How unresponsive our noses must seem to them whose life is charged through the nose. They can pick smells out of the air with their noses like we can pick sounds out of the air with our radios. Smell is the basis of all their sex relations. Smell is the link that binds mother and offspring. Smell, smell, smell. Destroy a creature’s sense of smell and you have cut him out from life, more than sight or hearing cuts off a human. A dog smells her pup; it is her own smell, a part of herself that has got separated but nevertheless must be cared for as herself. If you rub a stray pup against her so that it has acquired her smell, it becomes her pup. When a pup dies, the smell of her goes out of it; then she loses interest in it. It dies to her. It is the living smell that counts. We don’t care about our relatives’ smell. We don’t even know the smell of ours, our babies smell of powder and
soap and other made-up sweetnesses. They don’t smell of themselves or of us. Vana was little perturbed by maternity. Once her large family were out of hand — weaned, rather — her figure tightened back into slim lines, her spirits bobbed up, eyes brightened. She slid back into her virgin days and puppy ways. But she remembers that the pups are her offspring, plays joyously with them, never touches their food ’til the pups have had their fill, does not push past them to get my attention. What of the father, Pout? A growl every time a pup comes near him, no recognition of blood ties. Fatherhood is a poor little thing and motherhood is
great
. I wish I had felt it in this life. The stupendous wholeness of it, it must be an enormous lesson in mellowing.

[…]
My thinker is too tired to think. All it says is, “So all the rest of your life will be like this — me and the beasts.” Yet I like it best, really. I have lived alone so long. I am so different from my relations, I jar, they jar. And the tenants? Good Lord deliver me, I have had my fill.

Women are so much nicer when there are no men around. Maybe men don’t think so. Quite dear women change over into a sexy brag as soon as a man comes into the room, when before that they were gentle and real. Enter the man, up go the temperatures of their being; voices pitch higher, eyes twinkle, they are all a-quiver with blandishments to catch the attention of the male. It makes one kind of sore and a little ashamed. So often the conversation is led by little, indelicate, giggly hints into directions you did not expect. It is not good being squeamish, but on the other hand
why want always to walk on the edge of things, to peer over, pull back, do it again and look and feel so consciously brave over it? One’s darned old grand[mother] made us beastly prudes — reaction set in — but we have not caught the steadying rhythm; instead of not swinging far enough, we swing too far. Honesty with no simper or giggle can do or say plain straight things with absolutely no indecency. It is the self-conscious simper that dirties.

It is not good for man to be so much alone, unless they are really big with big stores of knowledge to draw from and a clear brain to think with. That’s the whole problem. A clear brain that can take thoughts and work them out, can filter and clean our muddy confused thoughts, can read meaning into things, can draw meanings out of things and come to conclusions. One that [can] converse with life and above all one that can forget themselves. The tendency in being alone and not having anyone to exchange thoughts with is to be always on the fence between yourself and yourself. Not a fence that divides this and that, but an aimless fence that does not end. Either end is unfinished and keeps things neither this side nor that. What’s the good of climbing the fence? Just a waste of sweat when you can walk round the end and be practically in the same place. Nothing kept out and nothing kept in.

[…] Yesterday those silly single spikes on top of the young growth bobbed and bowed to each other like gawky, immature youths. Today they are trying to straighten and brag who can reach the sky first.

Thoughts are the only things we really own. Nobody can steal them or kill them or even know them unless we have a mind they should.

Therese is a strange woman. I admire her and she has no fear. She and her father moved near my camp. I was very surprised last night when she and her pup came into camp about 8:30. They had moved that day and she was tired. There was a cold wind. I made a campfire and we had toast and Vitone. She is going away to Calgary to be married and she has not seen her man for two years and then only meagrely for several other years. It is a risk. I wish she could have a spell of his society before she is tied body and soul to him. She is easygoing but she has been so utterly free for so long and she is not very young. He could not marry sooner; he had duties to his parents and now he is free. She figures if he did his duty by them, he will by her. But a man has only to give his outside self to parents, his thoughtfulness and caring capacity to parents and as much or little love as he feels. But to a wife, if he marries right, it is his whole self, his soul, body and manhood. Therese is mature, has knocked about, an only child and her father’s companion since her mother’s death. But fathers? Oh, they are not mothers. I can’t enthuse on Pa’s — too almighty. I have not met Therese’s. It takes courage for a woman to travel alone some hundred miles to a man she has not seen in two years and sparingly for a long time before and say, “I’ve come.” If she had seen him often and intimately since they both matured and knew they were going to take up just where they left off, it would be a far easier matter. Marrying takes a lot of love. She has a strong sense of humour. That will help.
[…]

Lizzie lies among the flowers facing death. I wonder how she feels about it. I wonder how I should feel if it was me. I can’t believe that Lizzie is dying. She seems so usual. Any minute she might go or she may linger on and on. Anything would be better than that slow eating of disease. That is horrible.

Some people don’t get a chance to live ’til someone else has died. That was the way with Lizzie. Dede was so autocratic. She completely dominated all flesh in our house — five all right but crudely dominating. She scorched Lizzie, yet Lizzie adored her, fussed her to death while she lived, mourned deeply and sincerely when she died and then started to live. Alice and I always gave Lizzie precedence in everything, acknowledging her head of the family though all going our own ways. We all had our own homes and it’s a delightful peaceful way for a family to live — apart but close.

[…] All that was left of the old Carrs stood looking down into the quiet grey coffin. All the fret and worry was ironed out of Lizzie’s face. Every bit of earthiness was washed out and Heaven flooded in. I did not know she was so beautiful, so dignified and so sweet. It is good to look on the faces of the dead. They look like crumpled old
lace that has been beautifully laundered and renovated. We laid the flowers from her own old garden in the coffin.
I shook hands with Una. She was good to Lizzie and Alice is great company for her.

[On a separate sheet of paper]
“A great artist is one who says as nearly what he means as his powers of invention allow.”

“If I cannot feel an undercurrent then I see only a series of things that may be attractive and novel at first but soon grow tiresome.”

“It is harder to see than it is to express.”

“All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit towards a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.”

[…]
This is one way my sister’s death has affected me queerly — nauseated me against a certain phase of religion. She was a good, good woman, yet her religion always irritated me. Why? Possibly because she rubbed it in so. She worked very hard at her religion from the multitude [of] books about prayer. How to pray, why to pray, when and where to pray, forms to use, places to do it in. I think it must have given her great trouble. Praying is hard unless one is absolutely, has absolutely become [a believer]. She spent hours at it in a torment of striving, I judge. Perhaps it brought her peace. Her end was lovely peace. Perhaps that was the answer to all her prayers for healing and everything. Alice and I burned and burned and burned tracts on every conceivable method of prayer and living and
dying and behaving. It was sickening, cloying, cheapening, irritating. She read slowly. She could not have read and digested them all. One
ought
to sympathize to honour her struggle instead of revolting, your mind reacting like a stomach reacts to overcramming and wants to vomit to relieve and empty itself, so it can start all over again after it has enjoyed an empty rest. I took home some of the books and looked into them to see if I could enter into their spirit. But I could not. A feeling of awful disgust came, not at the thing itself but at the volume. Suppose one went into a fine wholesale confectioners and were urged to gorge on every variety, that same feeling would be in your stomach as in my heart after those books and pamphlets and receipts. I know it’s wicked but there it is. I surmise Alice feels more or less the same, but being more placid, it has not moiled her up so. She burns them and that’s the finish. The very ashes inflame me. [. . .]

Somehow when night comes I always feel a little more right with the world if I’ve run up to the hen house and plucked little Cockydo off his perch and sat him on my heart for a few moments. He has the most delicious paternal little way of chortling softly with his head bent down on you, as if he was absolving you of all your sins of the day before he went to sleep. Bantams are very talkative and he has a specially lovely way, a little “sundown finish off.” Quite different to his boastful proclamation of the arrival of morning. [. . .]

The foghorn sounds like a discontented cow. It connects up with thick damp outside. Inside the cottage, the three clocks — the eight-day hall clock, slow and hollow sounding, the trilling breathless alarm clock, metallic. The fire is out but the air is still nursing its glow. The neighbours on each side are in dark,
wrapped up in stillness except for the ticking of their clocks and the beating of their hearts. The heart of a woman we knew stopped beating today. Her daughter and her husband will be lying in their beds. Everything in the house will be calling her name and their pillows will be wet.

It is the supreme thing one wants. They want it so badly that you ache. The spirit moving, isn’t that it? Movement alone is not enough. “The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” Spirit is undying life. Life is always progressing. The supreme in painting is to imitate that spiritual movement, the act of being. Perhaps if one understood music they could approach easier. Everything is in the act of becoming. Nothing has ever quite become.
[…]

Life is cram full of things, millions of things to think back on, to wonder about, to expect. It’s great fun trying to word them. They don’t interest anyone in particular except yourself. Why should they? I was figuring out which part of my work each teacher taught me. Seems like I got something special from each, just one thing in particular. (N.B. remember to write “My Teachers.”)

I s’pose the thing to do with this painting learning is: Don’t worry, paint steadily, day by day, just to the level you know. Next day you’ll creep on a little higher, turning steps tremendously felt for and risen to. Nothing grows violently but with steady pushing imperceptibly.
[…]

[…]
Cockydo, my little bantam rooster, is dead. Such a high-stepping affectionate little man. He had such a homely, loving little chuckle and he did love me. He did not throw me in with his hens in love and admiration but gave me a place all my own. He loved me to lift him off the perch at shut-up time and specially cosset him, and then he gave his explanatory little chortles. He loved to come under my window early and crow from toes to crown; every feather of him crowed.

My fine little Pout has gone too. Maybe temporarily, maybe for good. My cracked-up heart says this is wisdom, the time has come to lose, loose hold, but my indefatigable heart cries out I want their warmth and love. The corners of life will be so empty and bare and cold without them, corners too small for humans to squeeze into. I do not say that all the creatures we love here we meet again in Heaven, but I think maybe we shall meet love again, don’t know what form or semblance it will take. Maybe we are like children running round, rolling snowballs with our little love ball attracting all sorts of strong love lying round; love of creatures and people and flowers. Our own love pulls it out of everything like a magnet. When some of us hoard our little bits and keep it too pure and safe, it can’t grow.