The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (6 page)
Read The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out Online
Authors: Karen Solie
to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails
our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which
one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space,
low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy,
reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the size
of England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened
by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated,
blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue.
The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem,
with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes
a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future,
like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure,
Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63,
the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain
unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches,
white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east
for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant
the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now,
though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon's Jackfish is five-star,
an obvious exception. But McKenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealisâ
years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag
has WiFi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasuâ
we're guests, after all, not prisoners, right?
Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mould,
botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it's not
a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments,
fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung out
on whatever and general offence and why doesn't anyone smoke
anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms
organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River's colour isn't good.
Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places?
Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled
by a bear at the frontlines of project expansion
into the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows.
They pay for insignificance with their lives. It's the structure.
Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day,
in the minutes before sunset it's still legal to hunt. One might,
like Caspar David Friedrich's
Wanderer,
at a certain remove
from principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presence
of the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosive
vapours unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltrates
your mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whom
grown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compound
emitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signature
approximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together.
The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims
the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek
asphaltos,
“to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist's earth that resists decay,
resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burn
the houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock,
raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution.
Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black grave
of Athabasca Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of
Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We're all downstream now.
Action resembles waiting for a decision made
on our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which,
like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatic
tenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition,
but eventually discolours to a black treacle that degrades
any pigment it contacts. Details in sections of
Raft of the Medusa
can no longer be discerned. In 1816, the
Medusa
's captain,
in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran aground
on the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents,
refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other,
the 147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboats
of the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there,
risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive,
small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured
is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizon
include the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wish
to be included in the scene. One can't be sure if the brig,
Argus,
is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance,
in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassion
of a new age onboard. Géricault's pyramidical compositionâ
dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upward
toward an emotional peakâ
an influence for Turner's
Disaster at Sea,
the vortex structure of
The Slave Ship:
all those abandoned, where is thy market now?
It's difficult to imagine everyone saved, it's unaffordable. Waves
disproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulating
the speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautiful
when you don't go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you,
rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairs
to your bedroom, you can't think of it generally then. The constitution
of things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us.
Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regionsâ
floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven't seen the last of
reveal in stagnancies and bloat what's altered, as avernal exhalations
of mines and flares are altered but don't disappear. Still,
iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the trip
to photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflame
in light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs
its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.
Connected by disposable needle
and tube to a little of this life, a little
of the next, the IVAC complains when its delivery
is interrupted, drags me through an inland sea
up to the human purview: inconsolable
parking lot, aircraft on final approach
above embers of the city that expire
with the dawn as though oxygen's run out.
Workers once banked coals in ashes
leaving for the fields,
the wars, a comfort for those able to return
if they could not. Grief isn't columnar.
It spreads and soaks into the land,
becomes the land. My experience
will prove pointless as any tool used poorly,
the river in its doorway smoking
into cold white air, into the opportunity
of a level place in which to change its state.
And now the objects recur. Chief interests
of their divine secular lives no longer
idle. Thought anticipates them, but they aren't
hindered by it. We have them
in common. They don't aspire.
Appearing in priority, category, scale,
they make possible a world
that does not appear. Arguments favour
their existence. In the rosary of a city block
I find my childhood. I give it away and I keep it.
We were destined for each other, I could learn
from their experience of time
if I could learn. The objects do not defer,
but express themselves as constancy
inside which a seeming shines, surprising
our judgement with affect. We who arrive
from nowhere in our monotony
of psychic instability, our fragility
and immaterial intuition, contrast sharply
with their variety and richness, plurality
which is the world's first law. Antecedents
and survivors, they are faithful
to our purpose. In them, pretense does not inhere.
If we are deceived, the error is our own.
Pea weevil as eye-headache.
Barbed wire, smart casual.
Four-stroke my electronica.
Clay mud my hospital.
Rattlesnake as concierge,
Lanius, campaign of enemies.
Axe to kerf in contemplation.
East wind my ibuprofen.
Distemper. Disambiguation.
Red oxide as verdigris.
Monsanto our atelierâ
From the inside, it dresses me
In esters of phosphoric acid.
The Psalms, a field of grasses.
FOR THE SKI JUMP AT CANADA OLYMPIC PARK, CALGARY
You grew into your destiny
in the city's northwest, overlooking
a gas station, the KOA, a few acreages maybe
on the earliest suggestions of foothills,
we hardly remember what that was like.
It was before I was born into
what I think of as my life.
Development has flooded the sceneâ
Victory Christian Fellowship expelling
exhaust, a warehouse vaguely Bauhaus,
reservoir of modern open homeplans
risen nearly to your base.
Each time I encounter the same place
it's different. The adjacent new
community of Crestmont tries to act natural
leaning on the hill, rife with claims, wearing
last year's colours in its awkward
final construction phase. In 1988
some people who've bought its houses
weren't yet alive. For them
you might as well be a product
of erosion. A natural event, without promise,
defined according to what is most durable
about you. Does it matter to us
if we're outlived by a minute
or a thousand years? I'm not saying it should.
You strayed from insignia,
from the party of the symbolic imagination,
and no one noticed. Hung with ads now,
the odd corporate zipline. Tourists
on the observation platform observe
the accelerating ritual of supply
and demand. A view makes us feel young.
Ideal conditions are a memory that pains
even a Finn. Competitors and their equipment
have evolved, old ratios are untenable.
You've outlived your design.
Would need to be retrofitted for safety
and who has that kind of time.
Asked for the eight hundredth time that day
if one has remembered to lock the door.
At least, it's not unlike that.
Something contrived from lime Jell-O and Spriteâ
coloured marshmallows
suspended like pronounsâ
and called salad. Odd, that an excess
should produce such hollowness, tin bucket
racketing down the endless metal staircase within.
Odd my irritability in its fullness should arise
from a poverty of spirit. I could not enjoy
marzipan, either. Half sugar, half
ground sweet almonds, or the cheaper substitute
potato flour, it inhabits as poems do
shapes of pigs, houses, geometric figures,
fruits whose seeds in nature house
the toxic compound also present
in the bitter almond that flavours itâ
your apples, plums, and peaches, stones
and wilting leaves of native cherriesâ
who count among their symptoms
gasping, the staggers, depression, and death.
Wheeled out on special occasions under
gold-plated anniversary clocks, gilt-
frame mirrors of the commemorative industry,
heirloom burnt-matchstick crucifixes. Faces
around the holiday table chronically etched
in memory's iron ferrocyanide. Churchill
Chelsea Blue Willow dinnerware. Reflectionâ
there's no solace in it. Because
some of those faces have ceased to change.
Because, now, they will never change.
You said a storm makes a mansion of a poor man's house.
I wonder if you did so to make the best of living where
it always blew, the maddening wind that messed up our ions
and made men want to fight. Now you have no house.
There's no need. The cure took the good with the bad.
Who cannot escape his prison but must each day rebuild it?
For a year rather than drink we smoked and went to bingo.
It was like working in a mine, the air quality and incessant
coughing, bag lunches, good luck charms, the intergenerational
drama. It's not my place to say what changed.
You hadn't developed around a midpoint, and fell to the side.
A part remained exposed. Still, you were kindâ
unusually so, it seems to me now, for someone with talent.
But loneliness expands to fill the void it creates. To plot against it
was to plot against yourself. You felt the effect of the whole.
When the mind is so altered this resembles death, but it is
not death. Then the faint trail ran out and you continued on.
The night you've entered now has no lost wife in it, no daughter,
no friends, betrayal, or fear; it is impartial, without status.
I would like to think it peace, but suspect it isn't anything.
When our friend wrote you'd died I was on Skye,