Winston Loving It

Here he is, with his cat Charles, in Campbell River…

Winston and His Cat

Still loving it.

Here he is hard at work on the set of the Okanaganokanogan blog, leading the way…

Leadership, Cooperative Style

A big chunk of the spirit of the world found expression in his 125 pounds.

Winston, September 30, 2001 – January 25, 2012

Winston fills out the final section of my Winging Home, in all his youthful zest. Here’s the poem that he helped me write on a few  walks in the Cariboo, and which won the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. I think it’s a fair tribute to a great literary dog. I hope it is.

The Bone Yard

Winston sits out in crusted snow —
once white, now violet — while the blue
plateau moon sheds
her mesh nylon stockings.

What am I going to call a dog like that?
Who stands on two legs, cocks
an elbow over his gate and looks
me straight in the eye?

Not to mention the days the German
shepherd in him gives me
a gold-toothed glint — when
he looks like the wolf from Little
Red Riding Hood, and it’s best
just to walk away,
and quietly close the latch.

In the Vaude, in the Swiss
uplands, the Celts held
out against the Roman sons of bitches
and then against Christian
rogue monks dressed in potato sacks, whose best
trick to win souls was to feed bread to bears.
Every monk within two hundred miles sliced
and served that pumpernickel. Later,

a black dog — like, for example, Winston —
was sent ahead to talk
to the dead, and to return
with their blessings
for children and good
crops, or maybe just an old bone.

The monks of the Hospice
of St. Bernhard, where Hannibal’s
elephants had hard
going of it at the very worst
time of year, hit
on the trick of saving travelers with dogs
descended from old Roman
warrior stock,

Rovers and Fangs and Busters first
sent north to tear
the monks’ Celtic
ancestors limb from limb.

The tonsured even crossed
their pups with Newfies to get thick coats
on them for the snow and cold
particular to those
parts — so close to Heaven (purity such
that no living man not sheltered
by his faith could withstand it),

but had to abandon
the idea when the dogs’
long hair matted with snow, and the big,
smelly lugs had to sleep
indoors to keep
warm — which is to say that, maybe, it’s not
so bright an idea
to take a seagoing
dog into the mountains, when
he’d rather be snuffling at an old, rotten fish.

I named him after Churchill,
because of the way he stuck
his tongue out
to the side, like a cigar, and, besides,
he would look good
in a top hat, with a cane, too,
and maybe even, yes, with a cod,
fresh or salted, but you can’t
have everything,
can you.

Still,
Winston does look a lot like a bear,
and in hunting season
I am tempted
to spray-paint DOG across his flank,
after all,
just to keep him safe, you understand,
from stray hunters,
who wander up into these parts from
the cities down South,

where they don’t
know shit about what lives
out on the land, but are eager
enough with their Remington
soul catchers and their quads with
gun racks and retro Vietnam
camo paint —
to claim it as their own.

He was bred as an attack
dog — some guy way out
in the bush
past Hanceville
wanted an Akita that could
take the cold, and maybe
was a little less independent,
which is, perhaps, a good
thing in a dog, I wouldn’t
know — and was claimed
by the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals at eight weeks,
because, well,

the father had been chained to the bitch
until they bred, and none of them
had been fed
thereafter. Well, yeah. So
when I look at Winston, when I actually

see him,
as wolfish as darkling
night (at starless midnight I find him only
by the sound of his breath
and a cold nose on my hand,
like the brush
of an owl passing through shivered trees),
I think, in a moment’s stillness,
of how

both St. Bernhards and Newfoundlands
earned their size, not by being
warriors, but by bringing
people back from the dead. “Well,

Winston,” I say. “You
are a very Christian dog.
Tell me again of the nuclear
bomb that Hitler was
scheming to drop on New York; tell
me again how the Führer had a Bomb
before the Americans
turned the Columbia River
into a polluted sink, sacrificed
the salmon of the Columbia
River to build the dam that brought the power
that made the Bomb
in the ranked centrifuges at Hanford,
Washington, how the American
Army sacrificed
the twenty million salmon
of the Columbia River
for a dozen tanks of polluted water,
rusting underground and seeping
towards the water table,
where there’ll be hell to pay
soon enough. Tell me

once more of how the war was won
by democracy in those five days in May, 1940,
when you should have surrendered,
by all reason, but instead
brought all the dead men back home
across the water.
“Tell me again right now
how you were going to beat Hitler
on the beaches with your bare claws. Tell me again
how you were going to do the Punch and Judy
to his men, like some old fertility God —
yess, from the Alps, good boy! —
with a stick. Tell me
that whole sad sob story again,”

I said and patted his greasy,
waterproof fur. “Tell me again
why Hitler didn’t drop the damn thing.
Tell me again how he was afraid the Americans
would drop it right back.
Tell me again how he was afraid it would melt
through to the core of the Earth
and send us all to Kingdom Come,
not in a thousand years, but right then, in 1941 —
a fear the American men in white lab coats shared,
but it didn’t stop them, did it.
Tell it to me again, Winston.
Tell me how you saved the world from war,
because I don’t get it, actually.”

I was all ears, but what did I know?
Every night, while the moon
slips over the house and trees
blow in its spilled tides,
Winston is out there in a bed of straw,
like the Christ Child —
he even smells like the Baby Jesus
when I greet him in the straw morning —

holding very still and quiet,
as big as a house —
hell, as big as the world, for all I know,
as big as the wire rimming his pen —
the electrified wire,
because the Akita in him just loves
to hunt down deer
out in the bush (and they’re everywhere
out there, too, believe you me: giant
stick-legged mosquitoes with ears like fur-lined gloves),
and the deer certainly
don’t need Winston, what with
all their bucks “culled,” and only one
fawn every three years.

The deer shift through lichen-hung
trees so dense the snow
stays in the branches
and in the thickets rarely
touches the dusty ground, while I,
the supposed brains behind this operation —
go on, laugh, it’ll do you good —
am inside the house. For me,

the day is divided
into dark and light, between switch-up
and switch-down,
so to speak, while for Winston, under
that moon, it isn’t,
so it’s no surprise, really, is it,
that he has other concerns,
the green and red flares
of the northern lights
above the ridgeline, the planets
overhead like yellow
stones cast across a tide flat, and the stars
like salt dried from the sun,
lifted, perhaps, on a kelp leaf and tasted,

so, while I was hoping for some
understanding

of cruelty and courage, some spark
that would illuminate the difference
between morality and logic,
even though both come,
ostensibly, from the same
source in the same briny
sea of God’s first coital word, and wondering,

still, what do you call
a dog like that, who’s as tall
as a man, and as heavy
as one, too, and has fairytale teeth,
and feathers between his feet
like a manticore
or some other beast from a book
of hours a gentlewoman prays to,

because every gentle Celt and Christian
with her shrubberies
laid out like a clock prays to animals
who have been known
to hang around the dead and give advice
to shamans,
right?

This was all
before I began to wonder just who
was the shaman here, and who the rattle,
who was the beetle-killed
lodegpole pine, its heartwood
blue with fungus like an old pair of Levis,
and who was the swede saw,
who was the woman
in the bed and who was the man
who loved her, who the brush
and who the hair,
who the knife and who the butter,
who the shaman and who the inquisitor…
a guy could get dizzy,

but the moon,

the moon rides across Winston’s pen, casting shadows
like slow hands brushing his fur,
and the moose come into the bush in back
and snap trees off at the height of my head,
so they can eat the tips another six feet up.
The cracking trunks startle me in my sleep —
even me, inside the house; deaf.

The deer come into the yard,
at night, too, and nibble and tear
at the raspberry canes
up against Winston’s wire, and he doesn’t
say a thing; in this
incarnation Winston gives no speeches,

yet when I asked about those things
that have me terrified
for the future — that
Churchill bought us fifty
years until the end of the Cold War,
to make a future, before a time
not of our making
unmade us —

well, the clock’s unwound,
the curtain’s down, the bank’s bust,
the fat lady has sung and the janitor is sweeping
between the seats; there’s been a wind:
trees have fallen.

Now there’s a lull before an entirely
different storm,
so don’t blame me, please, for asking Winston,
who only barks when there is fog,
at night, because that
is the only time that he cannot see.

“But see what, Winston?” I asked,
this one desperate time.
“Tell me about the future,” I asked,
“by telling me about the past;
you understand.” Not Winston.
No,

he told me instead of the ravens
who had been tearing at old bones —
cow pelvises, leg bones
and skulls, blooming with lichen,
green and pink, with the marrow veins
showing through at the broken ends,
and looking very much like Innu carvings
in the Vancouver International
Airport, in their glass cases —

while people
hurry through
with bird flu and an extra mickey
of whiskey in their suitcases,
maybe, and their wireless
laptops and jetlag
espressos —

and on sale, too,
for the price of a good used
car, one
with a few miles on it,
but, so far, not too much
rust from all the salt they put on the winter
roads
up this way.

“Ravens,” he said,
“are digging the damn bones out of the snow
where I left them to lie after I dragged them
home out of the bush.”

Well, actually, Winston, darling, we both
carried them when their weight
threatened to seize up the muscles in your neck;
don’t you remember how your jaw gave out?
You wouldn’t trust me at first,
but then you did,
with the black shadows of ravens flying
overhead
between the green flames of the trees that prickled my skin
as we passed, until my arms, too,
grew heavy and groaned with the weight
of carrying
those bones for miles,
which is way too far. For bones.

Nothing. Just the ravens.

Well, what did I expect?
The poor bastard is just a dog, after all, and,
although overly large and fiercely
independent, knows nothing about how
to conduct a war
after it has been lost and everyone says
it has been won.
I should have seen it coming.

“Those ravens,” he says. “God,
let me tell you about those ravens.”

Of course, in these conversations,
it does appear, from a distance,
that I am doing all the talking, but that’s only because,
unlike me, Winston
speaks without a single
word, and what’s more, he understands
every grief I refuse to
howl in return.

Two Friends, Walking

Peace.

Robin Skelton Sharing the Cover of Our Book
We’ll be going out reading in January. Come and share the magic.

These are poems created out of the Old Norse and Anglo Saxon traditions of blessings, prayers, poems of love and death, and earth-consciousness that are at the root of our language. Here’s where you can find me with the book this month:

January 19, 2012, Nanaimo. Vancouver Island University, Building 365 (“The Cabin”), 7 pm, with Robert Pepper-Smith. Full details here. Here’s a map, to help you find the cabin:

Upper Vancouver Island University

With the Cabin circled in red. Just uphill from the library. Just in from the Upper Parking Lot off of the Nanaimo Parkway. 

January 20, 2012. Victoria. Planet Earth Poetry Series. 7:30 p.m. Moka House, #103 1633 Hillside Avenue. With Nick Thran.

January 21, 2012. Quadra Island. Herriot Bay Inn. Herriot Bay Dinner Series. 7 PM, $15, includes tasty savoury & sweet morsels, 250.285.3322 for reservations and information. I will be combining the book with stories of the amazing salmon of the Okanagan River, who swim to Siberia and back. There’s is a truly inspiring story. If you know the Herriot Bay Inn, you know these evenings are true expressions of spirit unlike anything else in B.C. If you don’t, do come, and then, once we’ve eaten like kings and queens and have celebrated the magic of words, we can retire to the pub, where the jam sessions can put any LA studio session to shame. This is B.C.’s best-kept secret. It shouldn’t be a secret! Just follow the signs to the Cortez Ferry, and turn left just before the loading dock, and you’ll be there.

January 22, Campbell River.Noon to 4 pm. Writing Workshop: English – Language of the Earth. Sybill Andrews Cottage. 2131 South Island Highway. To register, please call: 250-923-0213. $40  English is a language built on old knowledge of the earth brought to us by our Old Norse ancestors. All of our language for our physical lives is a gift from them: man, woman, star, wood, water, ice, fire, love, birth, death, grass, rain, and all the other things we can pick up and hold and which hold us in turn. By moving into this language, we can make all of our writing come alive in the way the earth is alive, and it is in this language that we both describe the world and speak of love, spirit, magic, prayer, and our dreams. Whether you are chanelling, writing prayers, novels, meditations, memoirs, stories, poems, or blessings, or in any way speaking for your body within your words, you will find many new avenues for writing within this hands-on workshop.

January 24, Campbell River. An Evening With Harold Rhenisch. 7-9 p.m. Sybill Andrews Cottage. 2131 South Island Highway. For information, please call: 250-923-0213. I will be combining talk about my latest forays into complementing and extending the writings and environmental concerns of Roderick Haig-Brown, with readings from The Spoken World, and other new works. I will augment the show with slides from the Broughton Archipelago and Iceland. There is much in our ancient language that can help us in these troubled times, in which we all have become increasingly aware of the earth speaking through us, and of the need to find terms with which to speak for it and to save it. $6.

And, of course, Robin will come:

Robin in One of His Frequent, Playful Moments

Oak Bay, Early 1980s.

If you want to hear these poems somewhere else, or want to have coffee along the way, drop me a line at rhenisch at telus dot net.

Blessings.

Okanagan River near Gallagher Lake

As the Ancestors watch.

Of course, on other days it breaks over the rocks with a vengeance, trying to wash the island away. So far, it has failed, but the sacred dance continues. I have brought it home. I  left Canada, convinced that it was no longer possible to write a memoir using the character “I”. I return with the literature of the earth, and with these trolls and ogres, dwarves and elves. More on that in the days to come.

I have spoken many times about seeing faces in the rocks. It fascinates me. One of my current projects is an illustrated journey through the human faces in rocks from British Columbia’s Thompson Gorge, the Broughton Archipelago on the Mid-BC Coast, the northern tip of Vancouver Island, the Black Forest, the Okanagan Valley, the Columbia Basin, the Nazko, and Iceland. Here are some pictures from the European part of this project.

First, the possibly Celtic formation at Siebenfelsen above Yach (pronounce Eich) in the Black Forest. Here’s the skull at the base of the phallus:

Yes, there’s a vagina right next door. Yes, it’s giving birth. Yes, there’s a navel farther up the hill, with a wild boar. Take a look at what’s below the phallus/vagina tumulus, though:

That’s how it was done. Chips were taken out of the stone along a line. Then the stones were split. The hillside below the monument is littered with humanly-altered rocks like this. Presumably, the monument was carved, much like a Canadian Inukshuk. Now, take a look at this:

Crikes. What is that, anyway? A bear? A dog? A lion? I snapped this shot as I was leaving. A big storm was pouring over the hill. I only noticed the head when I got the picture home to Canada. The site also boasts serpents and horses.

But it wasn’t just the Celts. Let’s go to Iceland. First a troll in a cliff. The cliffs here (and in many other places) contain a lot of Troll faces. This is not the strongest, but it’s cool because it has a little hand-made troll on his head. It seems that humans can’t avoid making self portraits.

And here we are closer, just a hundred metres from the cliff edge:

See what I mean? Closer yet:

But don’t think it’s all about getting cozy with the trolls. Here we are at the geysir Geysir at Geysir. Well, actually, just uphill. Warning: that red dirt sticks to your boots and you will spend a half hour scraping it out with a stick and hopping around in mud puddles. Good to know.

It’s enough to make one feel like one is being watched. A little closer:

Did art start like this? If so, I think it’s watching us. Virtual reality didn’t start with computers or SFX laboratories, at any rate. Aren’t humans beautiful and curious mammals? A dozen rocks on top of each other, and there you have it. You.

It’s magic.

East Meets West at Point Alpha

And this time I found my way home. I have become a Trabant, with an Ossie in my head with both hands on the wheel, and the car puffing blue smoke like, well, not like Brecht’s cigar maybe, but at least like a Pall Mall, eh.

Puff.

I feel like John Le Carré.

Cigarette Machine Next to the old Waid Hall in Gotha.

Ok, that Waid thing might be tough. In English, it’s Woad. It is what made the world turn around before the British East India Company brought Indigo back from India. Until then, you made the colour blue from this plant, that was fermented, for months, in urine. The law was: keep your windows shut on Sundays, for God’s sake. Looks, pretty good, though. Nice and artsy. All those stickers are illegal bits of Neo-nazi and anti-Nazi art. The way to deal with them is to tear them off. Here is one so enigmatic that no one bothered:

Politics, German Style

Well, OK, maybe that’s not the kind of books that the writers of Canada have in mind. Something like this maybe?

Picture Your Book Here!

Obviously, some books would be better able to compete than others. I pity the poor writer who got stuck in next to the Marlboros. I mean, sheesh. Even Margaret Atwood can’t out-brand Marlboros. Well, the deal is that these machines are everywhere, in the smallest village and the biggest city. In the villages they aren’t adorned with illegal publications, but in the communist-era housing settlement (that replaced over half of the old town) of Gotha, they look like this:

The Cigarettes on the Other Side of Town

Yeah, a bit of genuine graffitti there. You can bet it’s old. The Germans have so moved on from that. But cigarettes? As the playwright Stefan Schütz said to me: “What do they want to do? Take the last pleasure away from the proletariat?” Ditto for, I think books. But don’t let the cigarette machines have the last word. Don’t let them just simply say: a book is not a book until you can smoke it, right?

Let’s see what the German post office has to say about the matter. Again, in Gotha (we’re talking about the royal city here, after all)….

Unwanted Mail at a Hair Salon in Gotha

You can, it seems, lead a German hair-salonist to the mailbox, but you can’t make her read. Her neighbour, by the way, is The Glass House, the State Association for Living Drug-Free.

I think there’s lots of potential for this cigarette machine idea…as long as we glue the books on in the middle of the night, so our readers can tear them off before dawn.

And with that, good-night (I bow). Tomorrow I go to the most beautiful church in the world, the round church of St. Michael in Fulda.

Sorry, the monks are pretty clear: no pics.

Smart monks.

I think you could safely say they aren’t smoking their books.

Napoleon Singing His Heart Out

Perched on the marker stone commemorating the 1806 battle that saw Napoleon’s armies slaughter the Prussians and achieve European dominance, a former emperor sings into the morning light, five minutes before a warm summer rain. The marker was erected in 1990. Until then, the place was a tank practice ground for the Russian army. Everybody, it seems, got to practice being Napoleon, just a little bit. Nobody, it seems, gets to keep the place for long.

Meanwhile, down in Jena, the war continues.

The War for Hearts and Minds

On the one side, the symbols of German culture. On the other side, German street culture. Visually at any rate, the official symbols are not winning. In a world of instant and mechanically-reproducible art, art itself becomes a quaint antique. And looking a little closer …

Anti-Nazi Street Art

Downtown in Jena, most political action is fought using small glued-on posters. This one, though, was made using a marker and some bus timetables.

Hard to imagine any art gallery rising to this level of art anymore.

No wonder Napoleon is singing. As they say in Jena,

Indeed.

And down the road I go again.

Friday night, I had a beer can up there, too

Should all fans of football be so demure.

For a year now I have been working on the text for a book on the shield volcanoes and lava plains of Central British Columbia. I found the volcanic rocks above in the Thompson River Canyon, crumbling to dust where they fell out of a cliff face folded out of a collection of volcanic islands that formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean before drifting up against the continent. For images of the book, check out the Chris Harris’s newsletters. He has taken the pictures. The book is coming down to the wire now, and it’s a gem: art, science, passion, and mountains the colour of migrating salmon. We’ll launch it in 100 Mile House in October.