I was walking with my dog, Trinka, who is half Golden Setter and half Golden Lab, along a trail in the woods near the University of B.C., and stopped for a moment at a small bridge crossing a stream. The young sun filtered through the great branches of cedar and the leaves of alder stirred in the faint morning breeze. Trinka had disappeared somewhere, as usual, for unlike many other dogs, she does not suffer anxiety when she is parted from her “master”, but glories in the freedom of the forest. When I walk her along city streets people say to me “What a quiet, well behaved dog!” as she sits down placidly to receive her well-deserved pat. They should see her on one of our trail-jaunts – black coat willed with burrs and eyes gleaming wildly as she plunges through the woods chasing something real, sometimes imaginary rabbits. Only when she is completely exhausted and has all the creatures of the woods and her imagination in full flight does she return to my side to become “well-behaved.”
Trinka, deep in her being, really belongs to wild nature; and somewhere, even more deeply buried within me, I think I do too. We have a kind of kinship, therefore, Trinka and I, which is more basic than I would usually care to acknowledge.
Anyway, my thoughts were inclined in that direction as I stopped by the little wooden bridge in the depths of that forest, for I could hear Trinka far off, baying, as she pursued some ever-elusive rabbit. Something in me answered to that sound, whether it was founded on anything real or not, and a momentary thrill passed through me. In the following silence I stood listening with complete absorption. What occurred then was so instantaneous that one might question whether it really happened at all. I saw, perhaps 20 feet in front of me, above the bank of the little stream, against the dark green of the foliage, a flash of light – like summer lightening in its intensity – stringlike in appearance and infinitely thin. In that same instant a small bird startlingly nearby, but hidden from sight, let out a shrill little cry. It was a tiny sound yet at such a sharp high frequency that had it been higher I would not have heard any sound at all. Or so it seemed to me. And in some way that I cannot explain these two events of sight and sound coalesced, combining into one magical event. Considering them separately, there was no magic. A bird called out – nothing magical about that. The flash of light did indeed puzzle me –but a few moments later I got another flash, not so intense, and then another, and I made my way to where I found, hanging from an extended branch, a spider’s filament. This infinitesimal strand, moving in the faint breeze, had caught the light so that it reflected in my direction. Nothing magical there either. Both of these events were certainly remarkable in that they combined things so diminutive with such intense bursts of light and sound. That they took place at the same time, of course, could be dismissed as pure coincidence. Yet the coincidence was so extraordinary as to be uncanny, for I was sure that the bird sound not only began at the moment the light flashed, but also that it ended at the same instant, and we were talking about a duration of less than a second. May I be permitted to use the word magical, if not altogether for the reason just given, then because of the effect this event had on me? For in that instant I felt, no, more than felt, perceived, the unity of all things. Yet it is curious how flat and uninteresting such a statement sounds compared to the event itself – the way in which it was like a door simply flung open for me, flung open to the wholeness of life – in that mere instant.
The other night I read to Eleanor, my wife, the famous “Conclusion” to Walter Pater’s book – The Renaissance. I had chosen Pater because of the tranquil suavity of his prose which, together with the soft monotone of my voice should have the desired effect of including the sleep which so frequently eluded her. Pater had worked very well for her. Two or three paragraphs of “Botticelli” or “The School of Giorgone” or “Winckelman” and her gentle breathing signaled the onset of deep sleep. But that night when I read Pater’s “Conclusion” she remained wide awake, and I had to go back to poor “Winckelman” to achieve the desired effect. Next day I reread the “Conclusion” having been only half awake when I read it to Eleanor, and understood why it claimed her attention. For Pater living is experiencing and that means getting everything we can out of the moments that make up our lives. Pater is not recommending a life of mere sensuous pleasure-taking, as has often been supposed. Rather, he talks about “the capacity for constant and eager observation”, of achieving “a quickened, multiplied consciousness”, of being “present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unites in the purest energy.” His most quoted sentence follows: “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
It is an important idea. Having wealth, or power, or prestige, or the respect of our fellows is not success in life. Only if we turn our lives into art can we attain the focus needed to reach his goal, which is: “the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and only for those moments’ sake.”
Reading that last comment of Pater’s I was reminded of the exquisitely high quality of my moment by the bridge when the song of the bird and the filament of light were fused into one magical event. Yet few of the events of our lives have that much intensity, and not many would we describe as ecstatic. Can we not make an art, also, out of our less vivid experiences, which are memorable and have their unique values? Surely we can learn to focus on these, too, for in their linkage something of much greater significance than any one of them could offer by itself. This would be to give Pater’s advice about making an art out of life an application that would have much more relevance to most of us.
In my own life, I remember two experiences which seemed to have no connection, until a third experience showed me the bond between them. All three experiences engaged my fully at the time – indeed, one of them was dramatic; but none of them had anything to do with Pater’s “ecstasy”. Nevertheless, in their connection they took on a tremendous significance in my life.
Let me describe the third experience first. One January morning I was flying from Toronto to Winnipeg when I noticed a transformation in the landscape below. Having traveled that route before at other times of the year, I was not unacquainted with the geography. But on this January morning nothing looked familiar to me because all the night and the day before it had snowed heavily across central Canada. My familiar geography had been covered over, its human features obliterated, and I searched in vain for the highways, the patterns of fields, the town grids which I thought I knew so well. They had all vanished. For a moment I wondered if the plane were off course, but then looked and saw far out on the port side the vast glinting expanse of Lake Huron. Peering again at the landscape below, I realized that it was not so much what the snow had obliterated that confused me as what it had exposed, which I had never noticed before, namely the contours of the land itself, the shapes of hills and folds and valleys. It was all a kind of curvilinear chaos, simplified and softened by the snow. I knew that if we flew higher we would only see more of the same stretching out to the horizon – and if we flew much lower smaller elements of the same winding land forms would become visible – such as the edges of lakes and rivers and woods. I realized that we seldom, if ever, experience the land as it really is in its infinite richness and variety. We live in cubes called rooms inside our boxes of houses containing within gridlike properties. Even the blankets we sleep in are rectangles and we peer out at nature through flat rectangular planes called windows.
Maybe that’s the key, I thought, staring over the frozen waste of Huron – the difference between human and nature is that we love what is finite, while nature is always curving off into the infinitely large or the infinitely small. Thus it eludes and fascinates us, but also terrifies us in its unapproachable immensity. Science is the practical strategy by which we deal with it, but never with complete success, and the struggle, given form and force by our technology, goes on and on.
Then I remembered two experiences which I had never before regarded as particularly related, but which I now saw linked to the archetypal earth which had been exposed by the deep snow far below my plane.
I was 29 and fishing on a commercial boat off the west coast of Vancouver Island perhaps five miles out from the village of Kyuquot. With me were two men of the Nootka people – father and son. The father, about sixty and heavily set, was named Stanish John and his son, in his mid-thirties and much rangier, was Napoleon Vincent. We had our stabilizers out for it was a fairly heavy sea, though the storm of the night before had abated. Clouds rolled by close overhead, yet there was little wind. A couple of hours had passed without a catch on any of our lines. The unpredictably aligned dark grey waves carried us up the slopes of their giant bodies, and passed on leaving us to slide down into the hollowed out basins below.
We were in the grip of a giant sea which stretched without landfall 4,500 miles to Japan, here rolling remorselessly toward the tangled grey-green edge of the continent, where so many vessels floundered and broken up that it had come to be called the graveyard of the Pacific.
Other than the creaking and groaning of our rigging as we rode that restless sea, and the whoosh and gurgle of the waves as they broke speeding past us, it was a silent world. We never spoke. No seagulls or other birds careened crying above us. So I was startled when the bell tinkled sharply on one of the lines. Stanish John immediately pressed the lever that wound in the line. I stared down into the black depths and at first saw nothing, and then the faintest flash of light which had to be reflected from the Tom Mack lure. Inexorably, the line came in and went taut as the fish sought to escape the hook in its mouth and return to the depths. But the line ground in steadily, and I saw the dark gray-green back of the fish arch desperately away from the hull of the boat.
I have caught many fish and could not account for the emotion that then took hold of me. It wasn’t only a feeling of remorse that surged in me as I watched the great Spring salmon being hauled out of its habitat. It was something much stronger than that. As the gleaming 25-pounder was pulled churning and writhing out of the ocean I felt a sort of kinship with it. Taken from the chaotic turmoil of that enormous ocean, this vital creature, splendid in its charged power, its sides gleaming silver, was tossed flopping and gasping in the bottom of our boat. In that moment I wanted desperately to hurl it back into the sea. Yet I knew well that that could not be. For if this fish were to be returned, why not the next one, and the one after that? Salmon provided the sustenance of the Nootka – they depended on the catch as their staple food and to provide a small amount of money for their other needs.
I heard Stanish mutter something in his own tongue as he removed the hook – and I quietly asked Napoleon what he had said, for the old man knew no English.
“He is thanking the salmon-father for giving him the fish,” Napoleon answered, and added, “He does that with every fish he catches.”
The idea seemed completely appropriate at the time, for it went some way to ease my emotion, yet it sounds strange in the context of western industrial society. One might relate to the Christian concept and thank God as father of all life for the gift of the salmon – but to thank a particular father of the salmon species, as though some prototype ancestor existed for each of the forms of life? Yet this idea would not seem strange to the Nootka or the other native peoples of the north-west coast for whom every form of life is sacred.
No doubt, my emotional reaction to that salmon catch would strike many people as rather odd, and understandably so. I could not explain my extraordinary feeling of kinship even to myself, not until that snow-covered morning flight from Toronto to Winnipeg. Then I saw it clearly in its connection with another event experienced years before in the Yukon.
When I was nineteen I went with a friend to work in the placer gold fields of the Klondike, which is a network of streams and the centre of the Gold Rusk of ’98. Places like Last Chance, Dominion, and Hunker Creek swarmed with thousands of gold seekers picking their way twenty or thirty feet down to bedrock through ground that had been frozen solid since the last ice age. They often found little more of value than the occasional head-sized tooth of one of the wooly mammoths which once roamed these regions.
Not long after the break-up of the ice on the Yukon River I wandered to a spot a few miles from Dawson City, which was then a community of barely 500 people. It was a Sunday, about mid-afternoon, when I found myself on the bank of the river. Scattered chunks of ice floated by; otherwise the stillness was as complete as only the north can make it. I don’t remember whether I first saw or heard what happened next, but I think I must have heard some barely audible rumbling sound and I looked up at the opposite shore. It seemed to me that the small trees on the ridge there were all moving, like the forest of Dunsinane in Macbeth, and then that the whole horizon was in violent motion. In a moment I was watching an onrushing multitude of caribou pouring down the opposite embankment to the river’s edge. Soon they were leaping in their hundreds into the ice-strewn Yukon — branched horns everywhere moving toward my shore. I saw several of the animals carried away by the ice, and others, probably the old and the weak struggling in the current. Though the main mass of the heard had entered the water across the river from where I stood the current swept it a few hundred yards downriver before it began to emerge. A few caribou, who had entered father upstream, clambered out of the water directly in front of me, veering off, like creatures possessed, to join the main herd.
They kept on coming down the embankment opposite – hordes of them. Later, I learned that more than 150,000 had crossed at that point on the Yukon River – the really big herd of over 400,000 taking the more normal route well north of Dawson City.
In order for me to try to explain the impact of that event, I must ask you to consider the scene in the moments before. Probably better than anyone else, Lawren Harris has depicted the far north in its utter remoteness and stillness. A visitor to Paris told me that the reaction to Harris’ paintings when they were shown in Europe was generally negative because people found them bleak and nonhuman. I understand their reaction. You have to be alone among the mountains at the north Yukon, or out on the Barrens of the Central Arctic, or on one of the islands of the High Arctic to experience a world that is outside the human scale, offering nothing but the splendour of its vastness.
You can imagine the effect when out of this vast emptiness suddenly emerges a moving mass of creatures carried by such a force of need that it would not be stopped by anything. One seems to be present at the primordial spectacle of life emerging from nothing, or what seems to be nothing – as though in conformation of what the cosmologists tell us: that at the Big Bang the whole universe came into being from nothing.
The aftershock came many years later on that January flight to Winnipeg with the realization that we cannot be mere spectators of experience but are part of it, that like members of the great caribou heard, we materialize in the stream of time and are carried along feeding from the nourishment of the earth until we are swept away, down current, while the heard thunders on. Off Kyuquot, I had momentarily known myself kin to the great salmon, for a moment felt the hook in my own throat, heading in my death-throes the words to the salmon-father. One flow from birth to death, from apparent nothingness to nothing once again.
This is what came to me on that winter flight – the oneness of life – even in death. The ancient earth mother – revealed for me under the great snowfall of that year, and in the dark depths of the sea off Kyuquot, and on that Klondike ridge as it began to move like the earth in labour – the mother lode as the old Yukoners used to call her – this source of the salmon and of the caribou and of human beings is not nothing. Rather she is the source of everything. That is hwy she seems like nothing, because her vast womb bearing all that we are and all that we will ever be must be empty if it is to give birth to absolutely everything.
One other thing came to me in that desolate January sky. We don’t understand life either. The scientists say that life is the product of mere complexity. But what they should say when they are doing their business properly is that the life that swam up out of the ocean came to walk on the land also, that the rock of the tundra gave birth to the lichen which made the coming of the caribou inevitable. They should say that the fertility of the earth reflects not order, but chaos, the primeval and creative chaos, which gives form to life. They should say that life is a mystery because it is the product, not of mere complexity, but of that totality of being which we shall never comprehend because we cannot grasp what is both us and exceeds us, because the infinite is in us as the mother is in her child. And the father, too, Stanish John would have added. Yes, the father is in us, too – the father and mother also, ultimately, are one.
Right now I hear Trinka in the corner growling in her sleep as she chases some immense rabbit through the thickets of her dreams. Is the art of life merely a way of making dreams seem real? I don’t think so. In a minute Trinka will wake and shake herself and will know the difference between dream and reality. Turning life into art is not inventing our world. For it is the art of focusing and discriminating our real experiences, and then connecting these by perceiving in them what is really significant. I happen to believe that these meaningful connections are the truth so far as we can find it out and tell of it.