Chapter Four

    It has been six months since I wrote the previous chapter. No, five. It was six months ago that I was still experiencing, on a daily basis, the satisfaction of finally getting to a final text with this autobiographical assignment, and, at the same time, realizing more with each chapter that I read, that Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was a very well written, well thought out, thousand pages of reconstruction of daily life in Georgia during the American Civil War. I had seen the film version when I was twenty or so but in my formative years as a student novelist I had not been inspired to think of the book as a model that I needed to analyze for my own purposes. The movie had given me the impression that Miss Mitchell had set out to write a historical romance, a genre I had virtually ceased to read, and I was not aware that the American academic world treated Gone With the Wind as serious literature. This third reason, by the way, in spite of the presence on my own University of British Columbia campus of a small and lively platoon of young literature professors of American birth and education.
    I was also under the amazingly ignorant impression that Margaret Mitchell Marsh had lived out her adult years as a spinster teacher of high school English, that she was a real life version of a Tennessee Williams female drone who had eked out a personal life in the desiccated South by living vicariously out of the invention of a bodice-ripper. This was not the first time I had made such a mistake about an artist, and it is probably not my last, given the power of false judgement in fallen man, wherever lack of instruction rules the day, but unlike my entirely self-inflicted youthful stupidities over the personality of John Keats, I think this impression had been helped by a number of my literary peers, at least the males. My omnivorously reading wife had always maintained that Gone With the Wind was a good book. And, having dubbed me, during our first weeks of knowing each other, as "The Last Victorian Novelist", she was confident that I would eventually discover the book for myself. My Beloved also knew that Mitchell's book was not a prime source, once my style had been more or less determined, for a novelist whose substance would one day be, by God's permission, the full spectrum of Catholic mysticism.
    This difference between Margaret Mitchell's characters and mine was the most important reason why it took me so long to be moved to take up Gone With the Wind for a serious read. Scarlett O'Hara, to the extreme of grave sin, exercised her will with utter freedom, always choosing to take and do whatever she wanted. She seems hardly to have a conscience, let alone suffer the invasion of her faculties by a Divinely jealous Teacher and potential Bridegroom, and only through her devout and relentlessly kind and dutiful Catholic mother does she seem to have any sense of religion. As a girl too quickly brought up to womanhood she is obsessed by her own pleasures and her power over men; as a young woman too quickly cast on her own resources by a profoundly unglamorous misfortune of war, and thus left a widow with a son to raise she adds to these desires a passion for material security. No character could be less of a contemplative, no matter how interesting she might be in other situations; no heroine could be less attractive to an author who must find ways of making fictional sense out of people who live - because they must live - by passages of sacred text like these:
    "The darkness which the soul here describes relates, as we have said, to the desires and faculties, sensual, interior and spiritual, for all these are darkened in this night as to their natural light, so that, being purged in this respect, the may be illumined with respect to the supernatural."  
    Thus spoke Saint John of the Cross, virtually saying the same thing over and over again, in every way he can think of, aided by the scriptures and the greatest theologians and masters of the prayer life, throughout his four great books, although of course in the pages of The Ascent of Mount Carmel he speaks little of being purged - the result of God's unique action on the lucky soul - and almost entirely of the soul's spiritual action on its own behalf.
    Scarlett O'Hara - and every other character in Miss Mitchell's very well put together text - never had to deal with passive purgation, as the mystics call it, nor did it ever seem to occur even to the unquestionably virtuous Ellen Robillard O'Hara that the joy of all joys was to be found only in the utterly quiet and still habits of regular contemplation, not in the grimness of an unrelaxed self-rule. (If any of the blame for Scarlett's self-centredness can be shifted from her own shoulders it might be in the direction of her mother's, and probably Margaret Mitchell was making just that point.)
    Nonetheless, once my own first novel was a good year underway I one day fell into Gone With the Wind and realized that the writing was indeed solid. And if the characters were hardly candidates for canonization, they were genuinely of literary significance, clear symbols of a civilization that was courting its own demise. Also, from my earliest days of reading I had loved descriptions of a pastoral landscape and I had many times been enchanted by such landscapes set in the American South. The strong images of childhood are an impression made for all eternity and especially applicable to the questions that turn up, sooner or later, in the long unravelling of life. And this is even more so if those initial impressions are from time to time reinforced and deepened by mysterious experiences of the same penetrating variety, sometimes inspired by the most minimal occasions of inspiration.
    Inspirations do not always have to be small, of course. The most important visions or Divine utterance of the spoken variety in our Scriptural heritage have been huge, and this option for magnitude has been repeated in the lives of the saints. Moses on Sinai. Christ walking on the waters of Galilee, Our Lady presenting Dominic with the Rosary, Thomas Aquinas being told by Jesus. " Thou hast written well of me Thomas." But this same Thomas also tells us, in the very first pages of his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, that God has a habit of hiding the greatest and most wonderful mysteries, in the finest fruits of truly diligent search for wisdom, in some of the apparently most insignificant places, persons, and things He can think of.
    I say this having in mind an incident that must have been one of the links in the chain of events that led, finally, to the full idea of the opera. It would have been in the spring of 1965, I think, that I ran across a little publication of "Old Favourites", songs primarily of the Nineteenth Century, no doubt pretty well centred around the works of Stephen Foster. It was a slim volume, and none too pretentiously printed, but the cover carried what was for me a most arresting image, that of a couple of fellows in a boat, on a lake in the moonlight, singing to the strumming of the ole banjo. There were only two colours, or at the most three, in the presentation of the image, and perhaps the most striking feature of all was the effect of the ripple on the lake, in the moonlight, thus created by the artist. Simple, even plebeian, and profoundly inexpensive - no doubt there was not a copyright left to honour - and yet the picture immediately and profoundly haunted my soul with the magic of the music of the South.
    God is no half-hearted artist. When He strikes a blow with the sculptor's chisel, the chips fly, the stone feels the imprint right down to the marrow. The bone shivers, the heartwood perhaps even assumes a new grain. In the human soul, the antenna rears up and searches a new direction: what in the hell was that? Where did it come from, and where is it going, and do I follow? Will my heart break forever if I do not go? Words fail, even words the most violent, words the most lyrical, when the Spirit shivers the human timbers.
    So, I was shivered. I was rocketed, through the South and its heritage of music. Or was it its possible heritage? Its potential? I myself was at that point a musician - of sorts - in a setting much more rural than metropolitan, for all that the town I lived in could claim a small university to its credit, and I was perhaps especially sensitive to the image of another rural musician, also North American, but in a culture more agrarian and at least a century older than my own. That culture, moreover, had already produced a universally significant literature, from my childhood authors alone: Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings John Fox Jr. That simple woodcut figure was merely throwing a little fuel on embers banked two decades previous, and never in danger of going out. The South had always been part of the history of my imagination, and from imagination's history comes inspiration, the daily bread of the artist, and the context of his ongoing relationship with the Muse.
    Is this not one of the great magic wonders of literature, that it can make us feel at home in a landscape we have never in reality seen; can give us the right to be albeit in a hidden fashion, a participating citizenship in a country we may never actually visit? Nor is this ability - of a book and of our own imagination - merely a skill for the present life only, for it has the most wonderfully august purpose of training us to look to life in yet another foreign landscape, the Paradise of heaven. Whatever strikes us as beautiful, compelling, or haunting in any earthly location is a sign of the transcendental joys to come in the location of the hereafter, and never more so than when it appears to be something like a perfect environment, where life seems to be all that we could ever want it to be, or even more than we would have thought we could wish for prior to the next level of aesthetic, metaphysical, or religious experience.
    Sometimes these events of imagination and intellect happen in our own real setting, from strength or brilliance of soul in our own family or community, and sometimes they come from something imported, from a culture distant and old enough to seem even more valid by way of objectivity. In the latter case they are more likely to arrive by way of art than by person, and the art easiest to import is something in a book or one kind or another. I'd had the first kind of experience before I learned to read, and once I'd learned how to handle a book or any other kind of reading material I was guaranteed - and experienced - the second, up to and including the image of the man with the moon over his shoulder and a banjo in his lap.
    The printed page will always retain this maximum universality because of all the mediums through which Man expresses himself little black letter symbols on a piece of white paper remain the most efficient, the shortest and broadest route for the best teachers to get the most important information to the most, best, students. Other devices have their own excellence, and of course do many things no book can do, yet their more material form of existence, their reliance on much more protracted use of the outer senses and predetermined and fixed sounds and images does not provide the immense, virtually infinite, freedom of the printed word and the lively mind that has learned how to deal with it.
    All knowledge worth having can be conceptualized, no matter how quantitative, intense, and repetitious must be the exercise of the outer senses in acquiring or imparting such knowledge, nor the expertise and experience needed to understand the symbols - words, diagrams or numbers - used to express the knowledge once it is conceptualized. Man has been created as a fundamentally intellectual being, so in fact not only is it possible for sense acquired information and habit to be conceptualized, it is also necessary for it to reach this peaceful and normalizing conclusion. To the degree that the lower forms of knowledge have not been conceptualized, i.e., totally understood, the student, the learner, even the partially realized teacher, lack mastery over the subject. From lack of instruction in methods of learning, not enough questions have been asked, so therefore - it almost goes without saying - not enough answers will have been discovered. There remains a kind of quantitative failure, from these insufficient questions; and then a qualitative failure, a lack of ease and joy, from insufficient answers. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that quantity and quality apply to both sides of the mountain of discovery.
    The largest successes or failures occur in the pursuit of wisdom and sanctity, but lesser ventures also experience varieties of quantity and quality. The topic at hand - as we began this chapter with mention of the possibilities of an opera - is a case in point, that of the greater or lesser degree of accomplishment in music, and not only in the areas of performance and composition, but also in pedagogy, including the possibility of improvements in music instruction made available through advances in technology. In its first years, the computer was to me little more than a glorified typewriter, and of no real advantage to my kind of writing, therefore nothing for me to become excited about personally. My wife lauded its growing use around her museum and my younger son took a degree in computer science. My two oldest daughters used computers in the jobs and professional training and my older son spoke with great enthusiasm of their use in composing music. I remained uninterested until I heard a voice emerge from a computer designed to include the technology made available by the concepts generally known as Windows '95. This happened to be an instrument just purchased for two young ladies to whom I was teaching piano, guinea pigs, as they called themselves, for my own experiments in pedagogy, and in their company, on the heels of just having completed my first run with the inspiration arising out of the idea of an opera based on Gone With the Wind - twenty or so sketches for songs - my imagination was off and running wild again. Sound had suddenly made a most radical difference. No doubt there was a little - or not so little - Divine humour at work: faith, it has been said, comes by hearing. Suddenly I had faith in the computer as something I could be directly involved with.
    I had, I must admit, been involved indirectly, quite at the onset of the new technology. In the autumn of 1962, I was teaching Grade Eight in the Catholic school in Terrace, B.C., and doing my best to explain to my students the aspects, at their level, of the "new math" that the powers that be had bestowed upon them. Contained in their brand new textbooks was an explanation of counting and calculation systems using other than the method of tens my and previous generations had all grown up on. Included in the various bases was the system of Base Two, the foundation, said the text book, of computer calculations. A long row of lights, simple off or on, could handle huge numbers at the speed of light. Dutifully I imparted the information, but by then, in my third year of teaching, I was much more concerned about the arts, the humanities - especially philosophy - and much more interested in giving students a sense of their own dignity as artists and thinkers than as mathematicians, even though math had always been one of my strongest subjects.
    It was a full five years before I had in any way to think of computers again, when I was no longer teaching in a classroom but was working as a clerk in the Land Registry Office in Nelson, B.C. My boss, the registrar mentioned to me early on that the government was then considering utilization of computer technology in land registry work. Some months later, when I had the chance to ask about such a possibility with a computer technician then in Nelson installing new equipment for the Canadian Pacific Railway, as soon as he understood the nature of my office's records and methods he said that registry work had far too many variables to be handles adequately by computers. Now, thirty years later, my old office - which I left early in 1972, for the sake of writing a novel - has just been closed down and its operations, computerized here already for some years, have been centralized in Kamloops. Obviously, the variables are no longer a problem. Perhaps it can even be said that the problems with the computer run in a direction quite the opposite from its earlier limitations: it is now being thought of as the device which can and should do everything, even without, on occasion, due reflection on the fact that the computer can never actually do anything more than man tells it to do. One man "pushes the buttons" that plant the programme; a different soul taps the keys that harvest. Without the human participation, the instrument is useless. By itself, it has less real life than a blade of grass or a ladybug. When, some years ago, this person and that tried to tell me that a computer could be of vast help to my writing labours I protested that I could think of no way any computer, a machine, could assist the infinitely intuitive process of poetry and in fact what I really appreciated as helpful to my labours was the gift from my young grandson of his pet rock. This was a flat oval, about five inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick, which served as an excellent paperweight when I needed to keep a book open so I could copy from it. Always necessary with a paperback, on occasion even required with a hardcover.
    None of this is to say that I was opposed to the computer on principle. As far as I know, I am in no way a dualist, that is, someone opposed to the material aspects of our existence because he believes God made only the spiritual realm and left the corporeal creation up to the mind of evil. Computers obviously had a practical use at the onset, both as high-speed calculators and glorified typewriters, that helped people do more work more quickly with greater ease, and in the long run, more cheaply. These are some of the goals of technology, thereby raising living standards, and, hopefully, providing more time for leisure, especially leisure which calls for the increased and more wholesome use of intelligence than mere work usually demands. For these benefits, possibly the computer will prove to be as profitable as the iron plowshare, comparatively speaking.
    There was one aspect of the computer that offered a degree of advantage to my writing, the capacity to electronically contain several different pieces of writing in the same memory files. Possession of a computer with this ability would enable me to flit from novel to play to poem to letter or didactic work at the fingering of a key or two. But was there a real advantage, or only an apparent one? One's personal memory is the greatest of all computers, and there may be real disadvantages in any process which actually undermines its need of regular exercise. Also, my naturally energetic temperament is much inclined on the side of trying to accomplish too much at once. With a handful of projects on all of them at the same time, thinking that if I were slow with inspiration for one I'd be quick to find it with another. But writing, like courting a wife, takes more than flitting from partner to partner every time the dance music changes. Nor is one's own imagination the prime source of inspiration, assuming that we are discussing the ingredients essential to a work that will survive the test of time, that is a classic. One's own soul is the unique channel through which the imagination is inspired and understood, but as it did not make itself, neither does it own all the beginnings or conclusions of its processes. An entirely objective - i.e. classical-functioning of the creative imagination insists on the regular dialogue not between the artist and his own various components and effects, but between the artist and his models, both real and intentional.
    These intentional beings, creatures of the self's own mind, are not the same as what becomes of them in the external works of art and science that the artist or thinker makes. They do not have the same limitations of the finite product, and that is why, as a rule - aside from the question of rewriting, editing, and redesigning - they offer a more fruitful and refreshing field of continuing inquiry, along with real beings, than do the various charts of the works in progress.
    This is not to say that the artist does not have to spend a great deal of time, on occasion, staring at the work he has undertaken. Through it, of course, he also sees the real models - the world outside his window and town - and the shadowy figures of his intentions - as philosophers call the forms of his mind - but he is acutely aware, in failure or success, of where his text or easel or staves are going only by studying whichever is relevant acutely, and he knows he has to put in this time, until the time is sufficient unto the inspiration, at the expense of anything else he might feel like doing. And this rule proves my point: he has to stick by that piece of labour until, according to his daily allotment, he is done with it. As a rule, too, there is usually more pain and tension in this sticking by than one wants to think about, and yet it must be endured, wrestled with, waited out, if the artist or thinker wants to accomplish anything lasting. The flitting about simply will not do. We must deal with our moods, - and art is nothing if it does not have a mood - thoroughly, and one at a time.
    Neither am I trying to suggest that the artist must, within the working day, deal with only one assignment, only one fruit of his inspirations. Over the course of a day or two, and more days on than off, I keep two typewriters employed, one on this book, on the second floor with its view of the lake and part of the town, and one in the basement study, with its maps and books and pictures, where I write fiction and the occasional letter of a business or theological nature. Between these house levels, on the main floor, stands a mighty old Gerhard Heintzman upright piano, where I occasionally skirmish with ideas for the opera and pedagogical principles for the proposed computerized keyboard. This threefold arrangement - added unto by other musical instruments and journals, notebooks for music and poetry - provides ample opportunity for flitting from project to project, as it requires enough physical labour to make me think twice about trying to slide from one frustration to another assumed inspired success.
    Such is the profound burden of genuine intellectual work, such is the patience required of those who would endeavor to go with the Muse, Who cannot allow Himself to be an ordinary victim of the work ethic. In fact the Muse is not to be worked at all, in the sense that the world often uses the term; the Muse, like any other object of true love, has to be courted, and it is this romantic aspect that gives intellectual endeavour its most profound and most rewarding elements, the spiritual affections the soul experiences in its pursuit and discovery of the whole truth. In Paradise, our work, as we call it, was to have been love, and what we not know as labour was to have been but a game, and God in his justice must be at pains to remind us what we lost. Yet, if we follow Saint Thomas, and his teaching on our obediential potential, we can recover no small degree of that preternatural facility, if only we learn how seriously God means us to put love into all things.
    Yet love must be patient, or it is not love, but only the exercise - not necessarily helpful - of some of the senses; and love must wait not only for signs, but for the discernment by which to interpret the signs, and for the Providence that may or may not turn the signs into one or more concrete external productions. Even the most ordinary elements in life rely on signs and symbols, although these are hardly mysterious, and from our training in the use of these lower purposes we should be able to make the analogous search for wisdom and direction in the greater predicaments of virtue and perfection, yet only as the Holy Spirit draws us, according to His specific plans for our particular development. We cannot be greater than He intends. And yet we should not willingly, knowingly, be less.
    So, in order to reach our potential, we obey the Holy Spirit, in general, through following all the teachings of the Church, and in particular through responding as positively and intelligently as we can to all of his promptings, even if they seem puzzling or contradictory, yet, by virtue of well-established habits, patently his promptings, his inspirations. Writing this chapter, for example, has wandered through some eighteen months of puzzles and contradictions, leading me at times into the land of symbols much more than that of reality, and then this morning, acting on the usual intuitions, I found myself at a coffee counter with three members of a Hollywood film crew. Although they had little time left before they drove off to the day's work many miles to the south, I was able to raise the subject of the opera, and my long considered question of taking it straight to film.
    Thus, to a degree, to a point with an as yet undisclosed future, Providence concluded a natural search, albeit guided in no small supernatural fashion. Yet the encounter, whether they realized it or not, was unquestionably spiritual for all three of the crew, and possibly somewhat supernatural for the one still intoxicated from the previous evening's socializing. For myself, and possibly even more so my spiritual advisers - at this point wary of operas and industry - the graces bestowed on the visitors were much more important than any gains toward the actual fulfillment of the production ideas. The ideas may only be disguises, the men were real and in need.
    But they too were symbolic to myself. Twenty-one years to the season after my first letter to Hollywood, I speak for the first time with an American film crew - I had nattered on previous occasions with Canadians - just two hours before I step into my own little sound studio to record the twenty-ninth cassette of the two-voice production of my first novel. There gentlemen seemed to think of themselves as none too important to the process, and they were best known to the hotel staff as generous with tips to the waitresses and alcohol to themselves, but I found them, for my intentions, ambassadors from the industry. At the very least, they could not have been sitting at the coffee counter without their guardian angels, and angels have never failed to inspire me.
    But for what purposes? A recollected history - of a single soul - must admit many surprises, and even if wisdom had elevated the darker surprises above the status of acute disappointment, seeing them in memory and hindsight as necessary challenges and educating experiences, still one recognizes that so many times the angels' spoke of possibilities better grasped by God and distant saints than the men and women in present company.
    So, in spite of so much inspiration, and all of it useful for spiritual purposes, will there be an opera, will there be something musical to manufacture? Even a mystic, even the seventh mansion, can only do so much, and all the most important of that in the regions of thinking and praying. And not that these are irrelevant. My household has just seen, most appreciatively the 1996 Renaissance Film production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. There are few plays I am more concerned to see done right. This version we found magnificent. And as I was browsing my journals during our second viewing, I found this note, from February 29, 1992: "I keep seeing myself on a slope of grass, looking down on the sea, with a big film crew." The Renaissance Film Twelfth Night was shot entirely in Cornwall, and made much use of the coast thereby.
    As long as the angels are with us, and we with them, even the mere images of our imagination have an effect somewhere.