Vic Report, Summer, 2008: John Bemrose Vic 7T0 Depth of the World

SUMMER 2008

John Bemrose on Writing and the Environment page 7 page 7

The Depth of the World page 8

The Depth of the World B y

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ne of the most common questions novelists run into is, “Why did you write this book?” Having heard it so often, I’ve taken to amusing myself by giving a different answer each time, a tactic that is less dishonest than it seems, for there are many reasons behind any book, as well as more obscure motivations that will never, probably, be understood. But there is one answer that I’ve pretty much kept to myself. I wrote The Island Walkers, in part at least, to explore an extraordinary experience I had in my mid-20s. In the novel, this event occupies the final few pages, where I evoke a young man’s nervous breakdown, and the rather unusual experience of healing that followed.

I’d just returned to Canada from a year in England, where my attempts to write fiction had gone badly. Caught in a vortex of panic, deeply confused about the direction of my life, I went back to the small Ontario town where I’d grown up, to visit my parents. At first, this seemed a mistake, for I immediately felt worse. I was speedy, profoundly anxious, and, worst of all, the possibilities of life seemed to have shrunk. The world had shrunk – reduced to a nightmarish flatness that at times made even breathing difficult.

One morning, escaping the house, I went for a walk into the fields at the edge of town. I was hurrying along, barely aware of my surroundings, when something drew me up short.

A breeze was blowing over the hillside to my left. As I watched, it moved among the weeds, ruffled the surface of a pond, and in two or three seconds, engulfed me in sudden warmth. It was a cold autumn day, but the breeze felt like August. I seemed to come awake, and at the same time an answering warmth flooded through my body: as if a second breeze had risen inside me, to meet the breeze flowing across the pond.

The next thing I knew, I was half a mile away, sitting on the ground, on the crest of a high hill overlooking a golf course.

I had no idea how I had gotten there. I suppose I must have fallen into a kind of fugue state, and walked to the hill without noticing. But it seemed as if I had been plucked from the ground, by someone, or something, and carried there through the air, in less than a second.

In any case, there I was, sitting on the ground, swaying a little back and forth, and weeping – not with relief merely, but with a kind of joy I had never felt in my life. A joy that seemed to 8 S U M M E R 2 0 0 8 VicReport

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Photograph: ©iStockphoto.com/Paul Kirkby

suffuse not just me, but everything I looked at: the steep, green and with his help, I began to understand that what had happened fairways of the golf course, the more distant pond, the prancing to me by the pond that day, could not have happened, at least of a white dog someone was walking. A sense of possibility had certainly not to the same extent, had I not been outdoors; and spread everywhere. Space had opened, inside me and around me: moreover, it was less likely to have happened on a city street or even a city park. The presence of those weeds and wild-flowers, the world had depth again.

It was not an instant cure. I had relapses, and it would be the movement of the pond, the erratic presence of that little more months before I came back to a fuller life. But my return to breeze were not the mere background of my experience, but health began then, and to this day, I can’t think of that experience deeply essential to it: the wildness of the world, or what was without being moved by the memory of the power, whatever left of it near that small Ontario town, were part of the healing power that came to me. it was, that came down the It was an experience I was hillside with the wind. ultimately to find mirrored I have been thinking about it ever since. For some years, “I was thunderstruck, for it seemed in the testimony of others, as well: artists, native shamans, while I was reading the works almost an exact description of philosophers, thinkers of a of the great psychologists, I certain bent. All, in their suspected the experience was what had happened to me.” different ways, evoked a entirely mental – that is, it had power in nature, and in our taken place inside me: the part relationship to it, that is vital played by the breeze and by my surroundings was only incidental – in fact, a projection, as the – and that goes far beyond what our culture usually teaches psychologists say, of my feelings onto the landscape. But I was us is to be found there. Moreover, our access to this power never satisfied with this explanation. Then one day, I opened – that in our culture has no official standing, and no name, William Wordsworth’s great book-length poem, The Prelude, though it is singularly necessary for our well-being – is every day being eroded. written, at that point, 170 years before. It begins like this: We are all aware that we are standing at a unique point in history, face to face with what we call the environmental O There is a blessing in this gentle breeze crisis: global warming, the poisoning of our air and water and A visitant that while it fans my cheek bodies, the extinction of species. We pay constant tribute to the Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings observation that we ourselves, dependent on a besieged planet, From the green fields, and from yon azure sky... are threatened. And yet, for creatures who seem to see their own A little further on, he recounts how the touch of this breeze predicament clearly, we react with a surprising sluggishness. We changes his entire mood. In fact, in a rapture, he cries out – for sort our garbage, we perhaps choose to drive a smaller car – good this is a man who has been mired in depression, “I breathe things, as far as they go – we tell the pollsters the environment is a priority. But while a few, a precious few, go much farther again!” than this, and act boldly, most of us are aware of a sense of drift And then he writes this: around this issue.

Why hasn’t the sense of crisis brought about a deeper For I methought, while the sweet breath of heaven mobilization? The question leads, I believe, to an underlying Was blowing on my body, felt within question of identity. Who are we? Who in the last few hundred A correspondent breeze, that gently moved years of scientific and industrial progress have we become? In With quickening virtue. the pursuit of our particular kinds of success, have we ourselves And he goes on to say, that these two winds, inner and outer, undergone changes that lie outside our awareness? Amidst our have entirely broken up his old, burdensome, restricted mood, undoubted gains as a species, have we lost or degraded some powers, some forms of knowledge, some possibilities for action and set him free for a future of creativity.

I was thunderstruck, for it seemed almost an exact description that were once natural to us? Is the loss connected to our present of what had happened to me. I began to read Wordsworth avidly, crisis of will?

To answer these questions, I think we must characterize as well as his biography, and learned how, orphaned as a boy, he found a deep, saving consolation in the natural world. I also the world we live in. Above all, it is highly technological, it began to realize he was far more than the sentimental celebrator encourages speed of action and reaction, and it is very crowded, of clouds and daffodils that most people dismissed him as. He in many senses. As a corollary to this crowdedness, comes a was, in fact, one of the great prophets and critics of modernity, shrinking of the natural world. Wild places and the people and

animals who inhabit them are being forced into their final stands; the sense of spaciousness of the planet, that we once took for granted – that formed the deep, nourishing background of all our activities – is diminishing, and in its place is a world that seems much shallower and more compressed, filled, everywhere you look, with ourselves and our works. To some, this represents a triumph. But to others, it is increasingly a nightmare scenario where, like someone trapped in a hall of mirrors, we can meet only ourselves. Far too much of the world, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “wear’s man’s smudge and share’s man’s smell.” This situation represents, I think, a spiritual crisis, though one that has come upon us so subtly that we scarcely notice, from one generation to another, how much more constricted we feel – both in a physiological and a psychic sense.

The environmental crisis itself contributes to our claustrophobia. Take the fact of pollution. When we know a lake or river is polluted, something in us withdraws from it. It might still look beautiful, it might still reflect a spectacular sunset, but it does not call to us quite so strongly. It is the same with the air, or the sun. We breathe more shallowly, to resist the air’s burden of particulates; we come 10 S U M M E R 2 0 08 VicReport

to think of the sun, burning ever more hotly through a depleted ozone layer, as threatening.

But as I’ve been suggesting, this is not merely a matter of physics and physiology. We belong, in our deepest beings, to these phenomena of the natural world; we are in fact part of them, having evolved in their midst, and with their help, for millions of years. When we withdraw from them – we are withdrawing from ourselves.

There are other factors at play that have alienated us more than any people who have ever lived from the natural world. At a basic level, there are our sheer numbers – in not too many years to reach 10 billion. Little wonder we must be forever be cutting down forests for toilet paper and marching ranks of houses across the fields. There is also the constant stimulation – I might say distraction – of electronic media; and of ever speedier machines whose rhythms, far removed from those of the natural world, force us to misshape our lives in order to keep up with them. We democratic peoples think of ourselves as free: the notion is one of our most cherished and sustaining possessions. But if we were to represent ourselves metaphorically, we are less like the crusading free citizens of a painting by Delacroix, and more like the cyborgs of our own comics and films, where flesh has fused with chip and wire, our destinies snared by a programmer we can’t quite recognize.

To return for a moment to Wordsworth.

Even in his time – so much more spacious than ours – he sensed the world shrinking.

The Industrial Revolution was turning English towns and cities into smoking engines of new wealth, and dreadful new kinds of poverty.

One of his sonnets begins like this: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; It moves us not. –

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Illustration: © 2003 The New Yorker Collection from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

“We lay waste our powers.” What does Wordsworth mean by the course of a few thousand years, to turn the earth and all it this? What powers? Do we even know any more? I think we know holds, into a kind of storehouse for our desires; and in parallel what these powers are, for they still belong to us, and do not know, with this, we have invented a radical kind of human freedom. for we have lost the language and the thinking that might cherish What you want you shall, if you can pay for it, have. In the them in our awareness. I have already evoked one of these powers process, nature has been marginalized; in fact, the very term – when I spoke of how the breeze on the hillside opened again, “nature” – meaning a reality that is somehow separate from for me, what I am calling “The Depth of the World.” I should ourselves – is a symptom of how we have sought to objectify perhaps define the term a little more closely. It is nothing you can and so push away the natural world.

Aloof from our natural roots – though that aloofness is an point to objectively, though ultimately it depends at least in part illusion, for our own bodies on objective circumstances. It are wild, as the progress of a is, rather, to be found in the living relationship of people “We have managed, in the course of love affair or the simple fact of aging show – psychologically with the world: in a deep, ever a few thousand years, to turn the alienated from the depths of changing fusion of person, the world, we live in a habitual, culture, and, as the necessary, earth and all it holds, into a kind of culturally induced state of replenishing background to storehouse for our desires...” denial. All cultures are a kind culture, the natural world. It of bubble that empowers and seems, simultaneously, to exist protects, but also blinds, the out there, and in our own bodies: the felt depth of our own emotions and spacial sense; the people inside. No bubble has ever been so empowering, or so felt depth of the world. It is, in fact, the lived experience of our blinding, as ours. We really do assume we are self-sustaining and being one with existence, and of this existence being brimful of self-perpetuating: our culture, vaster, stronger and more complex presence and of possibility. It is our breathing with the world. than any that has ever existed, seems destined to go on creating Just as a frightened child can be calmed by the calmer rhythm of itself out of itself forever. This is one of the main reasons, I think, its parent’s breathing, so we are kept calm and balanced by the we cannot rouse ourselves in the face of our environmental crisis. breathing of the world in its depths – ultimately wild depths, So used to denying our roots in the natural world – I mean as for there are no other kind: so I was rescued from my anxieties, a felt experience and not simply as an idea – we cannot break I now think, by the breeze flowing down that autumn hillside from the comforting torpor of our illusion. We hear about the challenge, but in our heart of hearts, we do not really believe it – that called up the answering breeze of healing inside me.

The irony is, we have waged a kind of war against such has anything to do with us.

Unfortunately, this stance, which is peculiar to our culture, possibilities almost since the inception of civilization, as we drive wild nature as far as possible from our doors. We call this progress, is reinforced by other, more universal forces: for humans are and in a certain light, it is: the invention of agriculture, of cities, not programmed to worry about nature; it is a stretch for most of written language, of science and medicine and cathedrals and of us to worry about any more than ourselves and our families. theatre and ice hockey and capitalism and liberal democracy Nature can take care of itself – that is our ancient, instinctual – all part of our making a more comfortable and interesting and reaction, and until now it has been both accurate and sufficient.

In fact, it still has a great deal of relevance, for the environmental sustaining home for ourselves on this earth.

But looked at in another way, we have been simultaneously crisis does not mean the end of the world, but rather a steep filling up the world’s depths, which depend so much, at root, decline in its richness. Abused by us, “nature” is not going to go on the persistence of the wild – on the great spaces where we away; but it is going to rearrange itself in a way that makes life are not dominant. Fortunately, we are rapidly – I hope not impossible for many millions, and harder and less nurturing for too tardily – becoming aware of this problem, for there is a the rest of us.

At times, the problem seems overwhelming. What can be the spreading intellectual movement dedicated to mapping the losses our gains have brought us, and the cultural beliefs and solution if we are culturally and instinctively biased in entirely acts that have led us down this diminishing path. Much has the wrong direction? I do think there is hope, however; but it been analyzed and deconstructed: the biblical granting of depends on excavating a part of ourselves we have been taught “dominion” over nature; the patriarchy that has denigrated not to bury: on listening to the quiet voices of what we already know just women, but the feminine; the prizing away – by Renaissance but have been taught to ignore.

As I’ve suggested, our culture tells us that the earth with its and Enlightenment philosophers – of the substance of things from God’s hands, and the presenting of it to humans, as simple plants and animals is just so much neutral stuff – raw material raw material to do with as they choose. We have managed, in to be used as we see fit. We go along with this approach, indeed

it has become a ‘given’ of our culture, a kind of common sense. But now and then we have an intimation that it is not entirely right. Who hasn’t been upset at seeing a favourite tree cut down?

Or at seeing yet more of our countryside turned into strip malls and highways? Who hasn’t felt a rush of exultation to see a hawk soar, or been moved by a sense of home-coming when driving or walking into certain landscapes? This is the voice of something much older and deeper than our learned rationalism. It is a sign, ultimately, that our native animism is alive and well.

All humans are animists, by instinct. We have been animists since the days when, as paleolithic hunters and gatherers, we believed the spirits of animals must be propitiated, and that stones, sometimes, could talk. Few of us go that far, and yet still, to most of us, to children especially, the natural world seems very much alive, and sentient, and closely bound up with our own lives. To find consolation in sunshine, 12 S U M M E R 2 0 08 VicReport

or a mirror of our grief in a moody November day, is natural and necessary for us.

Yet when push comes to shove, our animistic reactions are brushed aside. When a developer wants to cut down a grove that has delighted people for a hundred years, the trees, with the blessings of property laws, are soon, usually, felled. In the meantime, the voices of protesters are dismissed as so much emotionalism or sentimentality, their concerns trivialized as merely “aesthetic,” for our native animism has no official standing in our culture, and no language to convey its depths.

Cowed by this lack, many environmentalists have adopted the ground of their opponents, and tried to make rational arguments in defence of the wild world. So they enter the dreadful labyrinth of cost-benefit analyses, and find themselves arguing about the economic or medicinal benefits of preserving a forest or saving a population of jaguars.

Sometimes these arguments – which can have great merit – prevail; often they do not: in either case, they leave even their proponents feeling that they have missed something vital.

For there is truth in our animism – not just “emotionalism” or “sentimentality.” But we are continuously steered away from this truth by the dominant assumptions of our culture – that the world is dead matter, put there for our use; and that humans are free, independent agents, quite separate from the natural world.

This is the “grown-up” view, and it underlies, mostly unconsciously, the confidence of our business and political leaders as they drive the great vehicle of our culture in pretty much the same direction it has been following for the last few centuries. They have learned to express concern for the environment, and no doubt some are sincere, but their steering adjustments remain minimal.

Yet no culture is monolithic. The seeds of alternative ways are always alive in us. At this moment, there is an intellectual revolution going on, as philosophers, ecologists, artists, nature writers, and every kind of thinker in between question our direction and try to map new ones. Many of them, following the lead of ancient sages and philosophers, are rediscovering the deep, unitary nature of existence. They argue that we humans are not free agents, a special case

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Photograph: ©iStockphoto.com/Jacom Stephens

somehow floating outside the natural world. Rather we are one is mentioned – they are actually here, part of the wild depths with it. All of existence, including us, is “one flesh,” as the French from which the poem is drawn. The poem evokes one of those thinker Merleau-Ponty puts it: we are one with the sun, with the winds that come suddenly, changing the mood of the day. In stone warming itself in the road, with the dog scratching its fleas. fact, Dickinson’s wind might be taken as the spirit of animism Such a view makes deep sense, when you think about it, for we itself, quickening everything it touches. have grown up over millions of years in the midst of the natural There came a wind like a bugle world, we are composed of the same chemical compounds, and It quivered through the grass our mental processes and even religious instincts are shaped by And a green chill upon the heat its imperatives – far more, indeed, than we have ever shaped it, So ominous did pass for all our power. We are animals ourselves, and cannot even We barred the windows and the doors express ourselves without making an animal sound, or turning As from an Emerald Ghost– to the natural world for the metaphors we must use to express The Doom’s electric moccasin our more complex thoughts and feelings. We are living, sentient That very instant passed– nodes of one great, single, living being. And so when we sense On a strange mob of panting trees our spirits take wing with a hawk, or floating with the moon, And fences fled away this is not an illusion: it is creation recognizing itself, through us, And rivers where the houses ran and discovering that it is good.

Those looked that lived – that day – Yet it’s a long way from recalling this truth to making the The Bell within the steeple wild cultural changes that would incorporate it. How do we set our The flying tidings told– culture on a new footing that honours the natural world? Indeed, How much can come has such a major revolution ever been accomplished, or must And much can go our civilization, like all the ones before it, run its course before, And yet abide the world! perhaps a century to two from now, its survivors can begin again on a much-diminished earth?

The depth of the world is very much in this poem – an I think we have no alternative but to try, for our knowledge of where we are makes action a moral imperative. My main ecstatic calling into the spaciousness of existence – just as it is in concern, though, is not with the political, social and economic any fine work of art. This brings us to the main reason, so little actions we must pursue right now, but with the deeper changes recognized, that the arts must be supported. They can be vehicles we must make to our own outlook, indeed, to our very beings, of social criticism, yes, they can provide an “aesthetic” experience, they can “tell our stories” and if we’re going to truly mobilize mirror the issues of our day: yet ourselves, and if we’re going nothing they do is as crucial as to make the changes stick. I’m their opening of the depths of concerned, too, with identifying “How do we set our culture on a life. They are our village songs, energy sources where we can new footing that honours the our tribal dances, our magic refresh ourselves for the fight. paintings that encourage us One of these sources is the natural world?” with the joy – even if it be a arts. For all artists are dedicated tragic joy – of belonging to the animists; even the most abstract depths of the world. and intellectual of them are Of course, loving the arts is not possible for everyone, and involved in the business of letting life into their materials: into paint, into clay, into sound. Who opens the depths of the world by itself, it’s not going to change our cultural imperatives, more profoundly and powerfully than Beethoven or Shakespeare? though it can certainly contribute a great deal, if we would Writing in a time when high culture and the wildness of the world only take the arts much more seriously than we have tended were still in balance, they summoned a brimming spaciousness to. Yet beyond the arts, there is much we can and must do. We must each, in our way, become conscious of the problem posed – a sense of possibility we can still feed on.

I would like to quote a short poem by Emily Dickinson, the by our culture’s dominant themes, and become rebels against New England poet who wrote in the middle of the 19th century. them. Even a small, private act of revolt can make a critical There is extraordinary energy in this poem – both intellectual difference, if it is performed in the right, attentive state of mind. and aesthetic. For all its formal beauty, it possesses a wildness, for In fact, paying attention is in itself an act of rebellion, in our the poem has its roots deep in existence. The claw of the tiger is distracting culture. But let us suppose you are in the mood for here, and the raging of the sea – though neither of these things rebellion: what can you do? You might, I suggest, go for a walk.

Or better yet, a stroll – walking for walking’s sake, following your nose, which as psychologists tell us, is the seat of intuition – moving much more slowly than the people around you – for hurry kills feeling – into places where you have never been, places where you might, turning a corner, find a tree looking back at you, or a baby who drops her usual shyness to follow you with her eyes, for you are unlike the others who pass her: slow, lazy and attentive, you have become a definite danger to your culture, for you have subtracted energy from its hurrying, headless mass. You have retrieved lost bits and pieces of yourself, fragments of old feeling, smells that pierce – that sudden stink of Tree of Heaven drifting from an alley – and in your sleep that night, you may dream dreams unlike any you have had for years.

Many of you have or will have children.

The culture wants you to turn them into little achievers, as quickly as possible, and in resisting this, you are certainly a danger. Let her be the little animist she wants to be, and knows better than you how to be. She needs no speeches about how to play, or be curious.

A spot of shade or sun, a tree, a favourite toy or two, a dog, an hour in which to build an eternity of make-believe, or to look up suddenly to see the whole world looking back at her, in the person of a squirrel: no computer game could give her one millionth as much, or shape her mind so profoundly.

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I hope you will travel farther than the local park, or the picnic on the beach. To the north of us, in our own country, on the Shield, and in the boreal forest, the tundra and the high arctic, we have one of the last great, wild – or mostly wild – hinterlands on earth. I believe it is one of the things that, unconsciously, makes us an optimistic and forward-looking nation. As one foreign commentator said, “Canada is the last country where everything still seems possible,” and if this is true, it is partly because we sense that deep hinterland behind us. I hope some of you will go there, not as tourists peeping through tinted glass, but as hikers and canoeists who take possession of the land not with bulldozers and chainsaws, but with your hearts.

You will find, if you do this, it will give back to you, for as our native people have often said, the land will teach us, if we take care to listen.

Its vastness will show us our own smallness, which is a good and chastening thing to learn.

Its dangers demand our resourcefulness and respect; its clarities refresh and heal us.

Everything I’ve been talking about so far, leads to the idea – once familiar to us as a species, and now long abandoned – that the land itself is sacred. I remember how a Cree elder put it to me once. “For you, the holy land is thousands of miles away, in Palestine.

But for us, everywhere we set down our feet is holy.” And so the central question becomes, How can we resacralize what for hundreds of years we have been accustomed to pillage? I’m not, I should say, calling for a return to the old, spook-haunted days when we sacrificed virgins to the volcano god: but the achievement of a midway place, where we can keep our rationality as a useful tool, but also embrace a reverence for life for its own sake. For in the end, arguing that the polar bears must be saved because not to save them would be a blow to the tourist industry, or even to the food chain, is trivializing to everyone involved, not least the bears. They and their habitat must be saved because they are a deep, mysterious and splendid part of the sacred original world on which our lives depend. Not to save them is a crime against that world, and ultimately, against ourselves.

So: how can we learn to approach the natural world with reverence? Each person,

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Photograph: Larry Davies

I think, must find his or her way towards an answer, or a least the Through all their troubles, they have somehow managed to beginnings of an answer, working towards the day, hopefully not keep alive this particular spark of reverence for the land. Long too distant, when our society, embracing new principles, changes before, we modern people had once held this spark ourselves, character and direction. As I’ve already suggested, such a societal but we had abandoned it for our own adventures. And here we change will be very difficult to achieve. How can a society as are, thousands of years later, needing it again. By sharing it that day, the Ojibway had made it secular, rationalist, and driven, possible for us to remember, as ours is, take into its heart the though perhaps not in so many principle of natural reverence?

“We must each, in our way, become words, that we ourselves are We can’t just proclaim the conscious of the problem posed native people; and to remember change without actually having what they have never forgotten: undergone it: that would be by our culture’s dominant themes, that we belong to the earth, it false. But our society can’t do and become rebels against them.” does not belong to us. everything it needs to, without I would like to finish with changing first. It’s a Catch-22. a poem by Gerard Manley Where can we turn for help?

Last summer, my family and I enjoyed the privilege of visiting Hopkins. Written in 1881, Inversnaid evokes a stream – a burn a native sacred site known as Dreamer’s Rock. It lies about 300 – tumbling down a Scottish hillside. kilometres to the northwest of here, on the isthmus connecting This darksome burn, horseback brown, Manitoulin Island with the mainland: a thick, granite spire, His rollrock highroad roaring down, floating above the pines through which you climb to reach it.

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam There is a hollow up there where native youth used to lie, fasting Flutes and low to the lake falls home. to find the direction their lives would take. It was an exhilarating place to be that afternoon. To the north, we could see the white A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth quartzite mountains of Killarney sparkling in the sun. To the Turns and twindles over the broth east and south, the blue waters of Georgian Bay rolled under a Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, blue, voluminous sky. Turkey vultures floated past, so close we It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. could see their feathers ruffling. They seemed to be looking us over, wondering if we were perhaps a meal, for the four of us Degged with dew, dappled with dew were scarcely moving. In fact, I think I can say, the four of us had Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, rarely felt so alive.

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And this was a gift from the local Ojibway. Actually, theirs And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. was a double gift. The first was the permission to be there, which we had obtained at the band office. But the second gift was the What would the world be, once bereft knowledge that this was a sacred site, maintained, guarded and Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, reverenced by them, in keeping with beliefs they have held for O let them be left, wildness and wet; time out of mind. Without knowing that Dreamer’s Rock was Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. sacred, our experience would have been entirely different, I believe. We would have stayed five minutes, enthused about the The trick, if I can call it that, is to fall in love with the wild wonderful view, and clambered down.

But knowing it was sacred stilled something in us. At first, depth of the world again. And if we can do that, if we can take this was simply the stillness of respect. But the longer we stayed possession of it in this way, it will, simultaneously, in the nature – and we stayed for about an hour – the more it deepened to of love, take possession of us. And when that happens, we’ll something else. We hardly spoke, as we sat gazing off in our know what we are fighting for. private thoughts; as our private thoughts fell away, and we slowly became inhabited by the place. From time to time, one of us John Bemrose delivered The Depth of the World at the annual got up to lie in the sun-warmed hollow in the rock, for you can Pelham Edgar Lecture on Jan. 17, 2007. Pelham Edgar was a never have enough of figuring out who you are, and where you professor of English and French at Victoria College from 1897 to 1938, and one of Canada’s best-known literary critics. The lecture are going.

I don’t believe we could have given this gift to ourselves: not was established by Johanna (Leuty) Metcalf Vic 5T7 in 2003 at so deep a level. It depended on those other people, whom in memory of Edgar’s daughter, Jane (Edgar) Conway Vic 5T7, our own culture has so long scorned, patronized and ignored. Metcalf’s good friend and classmate.