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Lone
Wolf
Howl:
SUMMER DAYDREAMS OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE
Spending my days (and most of my nights) in the company of words – both those written by somebody else and those waiting (with remarkable patience) to be written by me – I find a great deal of time is swallowed up considering the oddities of language. It’s a pastime, I realize, that increases during the slow, hot, 3/4 time days of summer. When is a verb a noun? Case in point: I was sitting on the beach recently in Penticton, ostensibly watching my daughters avoid drowning themselves in the warm, shallow waters of Skaha Lake, but really devoting hour after sweaty hour reading ample amounts of Western ‘not true’ literature (more on this later), when it struck me that the word ‘verb’ is a noun. Being inherently lazy I took great delight in this. Our word denoting ‘action’ is as devoid as action as the words ‘camp chair’, ‘Stockwell Day’, and ‘messiah’ (more on this later too). Perhaps it was the strawberry ice-cream cone melting into my too-dry swimming trunks, or the cramp in my legs from remaining in the same position for over 90 minutes that led me to this linguistic illumination, I don’t know. Who can say whence such inspiration blooms? I spent the next 90 minutes daydreaming about how to fully exploit such an insight to the tune of paying my expenses and indulgences for the next 3-5 years, eventually coming to the conclusion that it would only be marketable to the most desperate of ad agencies or the ‘Wise Words’ citation that graces the front page of this newspaper. The dollar signs sprouted immediate wings and flew away just as my two year-old was tipped off her inflatable turtle by her six year-old sister and left floating on her back in eight inches of water thanks to the lifejacket I had the uncharacteristic foresight to pack into the minivan. Not true vs. not not true Another earth-stopper came to me in the evening later that week, as I sat in the same camp chair, unwilling but unavoidable audience to the neighbour’s plasma screen television mounted on the outside bottom panel of their Dutch Star motor home, sipping a glass of $12 port with enough sugar in it to choke a horse: namely, that fiction must be of greater importance to the world than non-fiction by the simple fact that the former exists by its familiar name and the latter has no other moniker by which to identify itself aside from not being the former. Or to put it another way, no less difficult to grasp in its obtuseness: we either read ‘not true’ writing or ‘not not true’ writing with little or nothing in between (save for holy scripture, but more on this later too). Contrary to the demographic of most men my age, I prefer the ‘not true’ variety (believing the Sufi mystic who pronounced that ‘there is no truth, only stories’ with something akin to religious zeal). A look back and a look ahead However I devoured (again, uncharacteristically) not one but two volumes of ‘not not true’ literature before leaving for the Okanagan, only to fully digest and reap the nutrients of this double entrée while pigging out on ice-cream, port, and individual cereal boxes only and ever eaten on holidays. ‘The Pagan Christ’ (by Tom Harpur) and ‘A Whole New Mind’ (by Daniel Pink). On first glance, the two couldn’t be further apart in their ‘not not true’ subject matter: the first outlining Harpur’s research into the Holy Bible as pure mythology (pilfered, for the most part, from the ancient Egyptians) with Jesus himself having no more historical bones in his body than Horus, Hamlet, or Huckleberry Finn; and the second book outlining Pink’s theory of the dawning of the conceptual age, wherein the MFA will be the new MBA, and the right-brained practitioners (artists and poets and storytellers) will be worth their weight in gold to the traditional, left-brained, money-oriented CEOs of the world. One book floats in a lake called religion, the other in economics. One looks clearly to the past and proclaims ‘we’ve been duped’ while the other points itself to the murky future and prophesies who will be the haves and who the have-nots. One is Canadian, the other thoroughly American. One is available to borrow from the Nan; the other is not. What kept me up at night in the tent in Penticton (along with the heat, the RV-TV, and the Australian two sites over who just had to tell his wife about the great deal he found on a new set of tires until 1 o’clock in the morning), was not the contrasts these two books offered but the common link that made them both exciting and readable in their shared ‘not not truthfulness’: the power of myth and metaphor, and the deep meaning that can only be found in mythic-poetic expressions. That is, great fiction. Whether it’s the spiritual fiction of yesterday’s gospels or the fictions soon-to-be-spun in the corporate boardroom, the ‘not true’ was, is, and ever will be more truthful and guiding to us than the ‘not not true’. That’s why the non-fiction section lacks its own name… it will always point you back to the fiction section to find out the real truth of the matter and that is, simply, that there is no truth to be found… only stories. I found these oxymoronic, paradoxical Twister games for the brain strangely liberating, and spent more time playing with my girls in the lake the next day than reading. Were I entering Grade 1 in the fall side by side with my daughter, I’d stand at the front of the class on the first day and proudly claim what I learned on my summer vacation: that verb is a noun, Jesus a myth, and the skills I’ve been developing over the past 20 years may actually be not only valuable but indispensable in the coming age. I’d say a good summer, all round. (www.lonewolftheatre.com) |