Notebook

Shirts: or Notes for the Rotary

Bob Clark, when he invited me to speak to you, suggested that I might talk about 'how I got to where I am today'—a daunting impossible subject, I thought, since I've been writing for a very long time. And 'where I am'—which is really, 'where am I?' is one of those questions as complex as 'who am I' and guaranteed to provoke as much panic. We like to think that what we do involves progress, and possibly it does, but sometimes it seems to me the 'progress' is less like a rising curve (the kind of graphs in all those mutual fund reports I'm sent this time of year) and more like a spiral. Sometimes you wind upwards and touch those stars, and sometimes you just dig a deeper hole in the ground.

Since I've been reading about Archimedes, the mathematician who lived in Syracuse in the 2nd century BC, in connection with the novel I'm now working on, I'll mention Archimedes' invention of the screw for raising or pumping water. It too is a spiral, of course, and one with many practical applications.

Archimedes was a practical kind of guy: You might know of him for his statement, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth." This he said to explain the principle that given the force—and using a lever—any given weight might be moved. Or you may have heard of the ingenious devices he invented to defend Syracuse when it was under siege by the Romans in the second Punic war. One of Archimedes' defensive devices consisted of a kind of hexagonal mirror and then at intervals he set small mirrors that could be moved by lines, and made it all the centre of the sun's beam. He focused the arrangement on the Roman ships "at the distance of a bow shot" and burned them to ash.

Sadly, for the Syracusians, they let their guard down during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans breached the city walls and took the city in 212 BC.

Here is what the Roman historian Plutarch had to say in his book, "Parallel Lives" about the fate of Archimedes. (Marcellus was the Roman general conducting the attack.):

"But nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes, who was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through. Others write that a Roman solider, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the solider, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him. Others again relate that as Archimedes was carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres and angles, by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him. Certain it is that his death was very afflicting to Marcellus; and that Marcellus ever after regarded him that killed him as a murderer; and that he sought for his kindred and honoured them with signal favours."

I think you can draw certain conclusions from the story of Archimedes. I would like to suggest these:

• Creativity is always—at least ultimately—practical.
• Creativity serves society whether it likes it or not.
• There are inevitable conflicts between creators and society.
• Most creators are admired more in death than in life because of the above.

If I had Archimedes here in front of me I would ask him Bob Clark's question: how did you get here from there? What turned you into a person with those kind of thought processes, insights and intuitions; with not only the ability but the need to focus on what you were 'making' or discovering to the point of disregarding personal danger?

Naturally, I can't know what he would say, but I suspect there must have been someone or something that set Archimedes off on his path.

If I can digress again, for a moment: when you teach the theory of short story writing, you make a drawing of a dramatic triangle and label its parts. It begins with stability—things as they are; then there's an introduction of a destabilizer—something new or different enters—which sets the protagonist off on her path—I won't go through the rest of the elements as I'm not sure they're relevant; but the point is that something enters the life of a character—or a person—and starts them on a journey; this something is such that ever after, things will never be the same again; and that is what I think happens to writers and artists and mathematicians and other creators.

My talk is titled, "Shirts" and so I'd better get on to the part about Shirts which tells the story of my 'destabilizer'—one of the events that started me off on the path that leads to where I am now.

I was an avid reader, and a writer of poetry in spare moments, and probably no different from most teenagers who write poems or songs and play the guitar—when my brother came home from university one day and told me about something that had happened in one of his classes. He was a second year student at the University of Victoria, taking a creative writing workshop—one of the first offered there—with the poet Robin Skelton. This was way back in 1964.

One day Robin came into class wearing a white shirt that was many sizes too big for him. The sleeves fell over the ends of his hands, the tails were so long that they came to his knees. He said nothing about the shirt and conducted the class—a 3 hour workshop—in the usual manner. At the end though, he told the class that the shirt had belonged to the American poet Theodore Roethke. Roethke, who had been living in Seattle, had died in 1963. I don't know whether or not you read poetry—but you may have heard probably his most famous poem, "I knew a woman lovely in her bones."

I was thunderstruck: the idea that a university professor would do something so strange, obviously, out of strong feeling, as a demonstration to his class to say—what?. There was something going on here, something about poets and poetry and the connections poetry made that jerked me hard, and at once, in that direction.

After a great many twists and turns, I ended up taking a Masters Degree at UVic and studying with Robin. Not only did he teach me more than I dreamed I could learn about poetry, but he taught me how to be practical—how to work on several projects at once, the ropes of publishing and editing, reviewing and anthology skills and so on. He published, in The Malahat Review, one of my first poems, putting me in the company of such writers as Robert Graves and Kathleen Raine. He took it for granted that – having given the right answer to the question—"Why do you write?" Which is, "Because I must" —that I was, or had the potential to be, part of the worldwide community of writers, and that it was a community. I shall always be grateful to him, and although I don't believe I have his gift of teaching, in the teaching that I have done, I have tried to instill that broader view, of being part of a living link—or at least that as the goal.

Earlier this year (1998)—Robin died late last summer—his widow, Sylvia called me up to say that she had found something in the linen cupboard in which I might be interested. It was, of course, Theodore Roethke's shirts. They are now in my closet waiting for some appropriate moment for me to wear them or to pass them on.

I didn't set out to be a writer. I had no idea that there was a 'here' to which I might go. My family thought that I should do something practical. Be a teacher, a secretary, a nurse. But I hated these ideas: I knew that if I gave in to how others saw my life, whatever was 'me' would perish.

I like to think about Robin Skelton, standing in that classroom in a shirt belonging to a dead poet, sending out a signal that in some mysterious fashion reached me; and I like to think about Archimedes in imminent danger of death, still holding calmly to his imperative, concentrating on what was important, looking for and finding answers to the mysteries of life, while the rest of the world was recklessly taking itself to pieces.

That's the tribe for me.