Pre-amble:

I’ve taken a travel year with my family, heading more or less East until we find ourselves back in Quebec (or prove the Flat-Earthers correct!) I’ve always liked to read something from the places I travel to, and I thought it would make a fun quest to explore the world simultaneously through the books of each country we visit. Like a literary Anthony Bourdain.

Of course, we can’t pretend to understand a culture from a few books; we aren’t going to catalyze a series of epiphanies and insights here… …no, OK, we can pretend. And pretending is fun. And cultures are different. Arts are different. Sensibilities and worldview differ. What a boring world it would be otherwise!

And if this project doesn’t turn up any cultural insights — which I’ll be honest, insights are pretty far between for me — it will still be fun. So let’s go.

Amble:

Argentina and her literary champion were revelatory. When we started the trip, we had a general idea of what we would be doing in Colombia and Peru, but Argentina was a black box. We had chosen it to make our son feel part of the planning process: he’s a Messi fan.

And what the heck, why not? It turned out Argentina had an immense treasury to offer. Including, especially, Jorge Luis Borges: a writer whose stories one could imagine physically rivalling Argentina’s stupendous natural sights.

I can’t say Borges is my favourite writer of the trip, or even my favourite of South America (#TeamVargasLlosa) but he may be the most interesting, original, intelligent and powerful storyteller I’ve ever encountered. Borges. Wow. You have to respect an imagination and audacity like that. That’s magical realism!

He opened my eyes to what fiction, particularly short fiction, could be. His stories are often not stories at all, they are just concepts, imaginary worlds: imagine if….

Now, I look back on so many of the authors I’ve consumed over the years and realize they are all Borges children — from Herman Hesse to Kurt Vonnegut to David Foster Wallace. Writers who influenced me were influenced by Borges. More: Umberto Ecco, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Neil Gaiman. Some have acknowledged Borges’ influence, while others seem, in retrospect, impossible without him. I had always heard of Barth, but never felt enough momentum to read him until I began exploring more on Borge’s influence. Barth is most definitely a child of Borges, one who also admits how Borges expanded for him the realm of what is possible in storytelling (try the Night-Sea Journey for a great example).

“Reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the first time is like discovering a new letter in the alphabet, or a new note in the musical scale.”- from a BBC.COM article

Borges is often called the godfather of Latin American Boom: First Borges, then the Boom. So, he is godfather of the two authors I’ve previously read on this trip, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.

In Buenos Aires, the start of our Argentinian and my Borgean experience, we stayed in a small flat in a run-down area at the edge of Palermo. Buenos Aires is a sprawling megalopolis, but our neighbourhood and time here was peaceful; the tempo of Palermo itself seemed slow and of a different era. We spent our time homeschooling and exploring the neighbourhood. Buying cheap, great red wine at the corner store. I found an old boys rugby team to practice with. We saw a wonderful tango show*. The kids ran their first 1k race. I got my first ink. I tell you, Borges left a more permanent mark on me!

I read The Aleph. The Aleph is one of Borges major short stories, the title story for his second collection (published 1949), and a many-layered tale of love, loss, art, and a spot on a basement staircase from which the entire universe can be seen.

Hooked after The Aleph, I went back to his first short story collection, Ficciones, published and expanded between 1941 and 1956. One of his first stories stands as a flagpost on the fantastical territory he was staking out: in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

The story’s narrator is one of the first to stumble upon the hidden references to Uqbar, a land supposedly adjoining Iraq, in obscure encyclopaedia and atlases. Failing to find corroborating sources for this unknown realm, he and a few friends follows the mystery for years before a major new reference source on Uqbar appears.

Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. In the Islamic world, there is one night, called the Night of Nights, on which the secret gates of the sky open wide and the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter; if those gates were to open, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English, and had 1001 pages. On the yellow leather spine, and again on the title page, I read these words: A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Volume XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was nothing to indicate either date or place of origin. On the first page and on a sheet of silk paper covering one of the colored engravings there was a blue oval stamp with the inscription: ORBIS TERTIUS. It was two years since I had discovered, in a volume of a pirated encyclopedia, a brief description of a false country; now, chance was showing me something much more valuable, something to be reckoned with. Now, I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds, and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments, all clearly stated, coherent, without any apparent dogmatic intention or parodic undertone. 

As more and more references to Uqbar and the double-imaginary Tlön are discovered by others than the narrator, they impregnate themselves fully into the popular consciousness. Now just, read this. THIS is Borges:

The popular magazines have publicized, with pardonable zeal, the zoology and topography of Tlön. I think, however, that its transparent tigers and its towers of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of all men. I should like to take some little time to deal with its conception of the universe. Hume remarked once and for all that the arguments of Berkeley were not only thoroughly unanswerable but thoroughly unconvincing. This dictum is emphatically true as it applies to our world; but it falls down completely in Tlön. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives—religion, literature, and metaphysics—presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.) The previous passage refers to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (the eleventh volume has little information on its Ursprache), the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation.

This is like reading a genius’ mushroom trip.

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon. Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another believes that, while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, and that thus every man is two men.

Borges invents for Tlön a fanciful, but somehow complete, mathematics. I remember in Calvin & Hobbes, the father messing with Calvin re black and white pictures.

More on Tlon:

The books themselves are also odd. Works of fiction are based on a single plot, which runs through every imaginable permutation. Works of natural philosophy invariably include thesis and antithesis, the strict pro and con of a theory. A book which does not include its opposite, or “counter-book,” is considered incomplete. Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the very oldest regions of Tlön, it is not an uncommon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real,  but more in keeping with his expectation. These secondary objects are called hrönir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals. Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental children of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness… …One curious fact: the hrönir of the second and third degree—that is,  the hrönir derived from another hrön, and the hrönir derived from the hrön of a hrön—exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not possess.

So much of Borges feels like this. As he progressed he learned to better interweave more satisfying narrative with his imaginary rocket rides.

Borges fictional form was the short story. An art form he vastly enlarged. His stories are often told third hand, the supposedly central narrative seeming almost as an excuse to give grounding to the more and more baroque framing stories, which finally appear like a librarian’s bibliographical notes on the inner framing story. (E.g. Story-proper, told in summary or just partially, as part of a fictitious literary critique of that story, which literary critique is then described in bibliographic detail by an unnamed narrator, who is telling us the circumstances under which he discovered this critique and what he thinks of it.) Borges takes a good story and makes it great by telling it in the most unexpected fashion. Its like he takes a regular turkey sandwich, a quality turkey sandwich, and he adds dijon mustard and spicy eggplant, but he adds them on the outside of the bread. And it’s served by an alien, who, in a surprise twist, is the narrator’s mother. These are stories that should be narrated by John Malkovich or Christopher Walken.

Everything is meta, to the point where you feel like Borges is actually writing you reading the story and you wonder if you exist at all!

Sometimes Borges gets bogged down in almost unbelievably tedious cataloguing of bibliographic details as part of the framing story. I certainly had to fight to get through some of the stories. It almost feels like he’s making fun of you with this bullshit. You’re like, can he actually think someone wants to read this? Is he putting me on?

Thankfully, they’re not all like that. The Garden of Forking Paths is one of the stories that get it right: that tell an actual coherent story, through which Borges can play his intellectual riddles within riddles, in such a way that we WANT to read the story, not just from intellectual curiosity but because we are enjoying the story. (Even when he fails, it seems like dry non-fiction: you aren’t enjoying it, but you continue because you feel driven to learn what the writer is trying to give you).

Another is The Story of the Warrior and the Captive, a wonderful tale of a German warrior who came to destroy and pillage Rome, but who, when confronted with its beauty, achievements and splendour, far beyond his comprehension, dies defending it.

            imagine him a worshiper of the Earth, of Hertha, whose covered idol went from hut to hut in a cow-drawn cart, or of the gods of war and thunder, which were crude wooden figures wrapped in homespun clothing and hung with coins and bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the boar and the bison; he was light-skinned, spirited, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe, but not to the universe. The wars bring him to Ravenna and there he sees something he has never seen before, or has not seen fully. He sees the day and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole whose multiplicity is not that of disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, amphitheaters, vases, columns, regular and open spaces. None of these fabrications (I know) impresses him as beautiful; he is touched by them as we now would be by a complex mechanism whose purpose we could not fathom but in whose design an immortal intelligence might be divined. Perhaps it is enough for him to see a single arch, with an incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters. Suddenly he is blinded and renewed by this revelation, the City. He knows that in it he will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he also knows that it is worth more than his gods and his sworn faith and all the marshes of Germany

He uses this to frame a twist on the story from the frontiers of Argentina, of a British women kidnapped and then assimilated to a native tribe

Borges is much more than a trickster or world-builder. He has immense range. He tells complex psychological thrillers, like Emma Zunz. One story tells of the minotaur in the labyrinth, from the point of view of the minotaur, not realizing it is a monster.

Deutsches Requiem is brilliant. A searing, haunting memoir of an unapologetic Nazi concentration camp official, one versed in philosophy and literature, charged with the guarding and extermination of one of his own favourite poets. (Search for it here, RIGHT NOW. I’ll wait.)

Borge’s works reflect Schopenhauer and Shakespeare, Kafka and Goethe, Berkeley, Nietzche and Spengler, Catholic theologians, Jewish Cabalists and the Koran. Borges is just obscenely loaded with ideas. Like this:

            Throughout the Earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain could be the speech of the god, or a river, or the empire or the configuration of the stars.

Imagine that! A god writing his message in mountains or empires, a message meant to be decoded. Now that’s an idea! And what’s more, maybe it’s true. Maybe WE are Her message. Perhaps She is OURS.

Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges is quoted as saying in the introduction to Labyrinths; it is a mirror that makes the reader’s features known.

In the grip of Borges collections, Ficcones (8/10) and El Aleph (8.3/10), we travelled to the northernmost reaches of the country to see the spectacular be-jungle-d Iguazu Falls. This is where we first got the inkling: Argentina’s physical beauty is big, bold and beautiful. It is eye-popping. It is SO much like Borges. {You may be wondering why the A- ratings for such powerful works. The answer is, as I’ve explained above, the masses of boring bullshit Borges tends to throw in between the layers of his stories. Some of his works are just pure, spectacular gems. Others are really gems hidden in a haystack, written on one particular stick of hay.}

A half dozen ribbons of water tumble from the sky along the winding jungle paths through the national park, and then the motherload, a massive horseshoe falls stretching into Brazil, so powerful, beautiful and nuanced as to make each prior sight seem irrelevant. Again, like…

From Iguazu Falls, we crossed the length of the country to the Patagonian town of El Calafate. Patagonia—a name that touches you, one loaded in our popular subconscious. It means something, or plays on some specific nerve ending, setting off visions or feelings, like Texas or the Amazon or the Himalayas.  Patagonia! I see mountains, cowboys, red wine and tango and vast empty plains.

El Calafate, in fact, reminded me a lot of Banff back in Canada, a timber-framed tourist village with luxury spas and low-rent hostels, brew pubs and outdoor activity centres, and shops full of local-beast-stuffed-animals and gourmet chocolates, framed by an alpine backdrop. We visited stunning glaciers, rode horseback in the frigid air, and ate exquisite paella and lamb, chicken and beef parilla in the home of new friends. Asado barbecue huts are common in Argentina. In the extreme weather of deep-south Patagonia, our hosts had built theirs in a kind of playroom-garage, with games and a TV for watching rugby, and a six-foot wood-grill vented through the roof. Here, they entertain family and friends with weekly Sunday feasts. We were very lucky to be invited to one!

From nearby El Chalten, we spent our days in incredible alpine hikes. The kids survived a frigid 8-hour epic trek. It was grey and blizzardy all day, and we wondered at the point of it all, but we were rewarded for our stubbornness with a suddenly clear sky at the final viewpoint, with vistas of glaciers and the towering peaks of Chile beyond. It was a karmic, athletic and aesthetic victory. I may have had to carry one or two of the kids for the last hour or so back down to the village.

In Patagonia, I began the great late nineteenth-century epic poem The Gaucho Martin Fierro, and the sequel The Return of Martin Fierro, by José Hernández.

“I believe that Martín Fierro is the most lasting work we Argentines have written.”

Jorge Luis Borges

From an Argentina tourism website:

Martin Fierro, an epic and “gauchesque” poem which has turned into one of the iconic master pieces of Argentine literature: a must in school programs. Its author, Jos. Hernandez, was born in the province of Buenos Aires, in 1834. He was a devoted poet and journalist, exiled for having supported the wrong side during the civil war faced in the first decades of independent Argentina. He wrote about the Conquest of the Desert, and the forced recruitment of gauchos to exterminate the native people.…It was such a great success [I assume the tourist website means the book, not the genocide] that people would gather around to recite it at meetings. It has also been declared one of the most relevant Spanish American works.

I loved this work. The hero’s story felt tragic, adventurous and frighteningly common; there was a nobility to it that was dirty and sad rather than glamourous. It felt honest.

Here I come to sing to the beat of my guitar:

because a man who is kept from sleep by an uncommon sorrow

comforts himself with singing, like a solitary bird.

…

And whoever may be listening to the tale of my sorrows –

know that I never fight nor kill except when it has to be done,

and that only injustice threw me into so much adversity.

And listen to the story told by a gaucho who’s hunted by the law;

who’s been a father and husband hard-working and willing —

and in spite of that, people take him to be a criminal.

Martin Fierro (8/10) hangs over all Argentinian culture. It has been quoted in public speeches by the current Pope. It is fundamental to the national culture and consciousness. Perhaps analogous to Don Quixote in Spain, or Huckleberry Finn in the U.S.? Les Mis? Can any readers supply other works of art so baked into their national psyches?

The juxtaposition of Borges and Martin Fierro seems to me an indicator of something about the Argentinian character: there is a sophistication and formality here, a fondness for intellectual play and a lack of shame in intelligence, akin to French culture, but married to the frontier roughness, big-spirit, and machismo of the American west or rural Spain. That first feeling was very much evident in the next book.

Finally, I returned to the BOOM, our old friend, the Latin American Boom, and Julio Cortazar’s famed work, Hopscotch. To be honest, I had never heard of Cortazar or Hopscotch. I went into it with no idea of the time it was written or Cortazar’s place in the South American pantheon.

Beginning as a tale of an Argentine ex-pat in boho Paris, Hopscotch immediately seemed a cheap knock-off of  Jack Kerouac, or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. But especially Kerouac. It was almost an unfunny parody. Sentences that go on for pages; dollar-store, name-dropping, first-year-university-stoner philosophical ramblings; and chapter after chapter listing each song played at the party and each partier’s reactions and thoughts for each musical phrase or lyric.

Same Same, But Different

I would have dropped this book by chapter three, still vaguely describing the protagonist and his girlfriends so-bo-ho relationship. But I plugged on for you, for you.

There are times in Hopscotch where, if you really force yourself to really focus, some of these run on sentences are fun. But I just can’t focus that hard, page after page of stream-of-consciousness with no periods or paragraphs.

If all this, the predawn tapioca starting to stick to the skylight, La Maga’s so sad face as she looked at Gregorovius looking at La Maga looking at Gregorovius, Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, Babs who was crying again, hidden from Ronald who was not crying but who hid his face in the sticky smoke, the vodka transformed into a truly saintly halo, Perico the Spanish ghost up on a stool of disdain and Pavlovian stylistics, if everything were able to be extrapolated, if everything just did not exist, if he were there just so somebody (anybody, but he at the moment, because he was the one who was doing the thinking, in any case he was the one who knew that he was really thinking, eh, Cartesius, you old fuck), so that somebody could extract from all that was going on by striving and biting and especially by delving, it was hard to say how but by delving down to the very dregs, that out of all this there might pop up some grasshopper of peace, some cricket of contentment, that a person might be able to enter any gate and come into any garden, an allegorical garden as far as the others were concerned, just as mandalas are allegorical for everyone else, and in that garden he would find a flower and that flower would be La Maga, or Babs, or Wong, but described and describing itself, reconstituted outside their appearances among the Club, back to what they were, emerged, dawning, at best this all might be just a nostalgic view of the earthly paradise, an ideal of purity, except that purity had come to be inevitably the product of simplification, the bishop moves, rooks move, the knight jumps, pawns fall away, and in the center of the board, big as anthracite lions the kings remain flanked by the cleanest and last and purest of their armies, at dawn the deciding lances will be crossed, fate will be served, peace will reign. A pureness as of coitus between crocodiles, not the pureness of oh Mary my mother with dirty feet; a pureness of a slate roof with doves who naturally shit on the heads of ladies wild with rage and radishes, a pureness of … Horacio, Horacio, please. 

Make of that what you will.

So you read in a fog and then wake up in the middle of some metaphor or allegory where everyone at the party is a flower or chess piece or toilet paper brand on a shelf at the supermarket and, like the Talking Heads you ask, How did I get here?

By chapter 28 we get our first really well-carved dramatic scene, although it makes the protagonist even more unattractive: the usual gang of idiots is at a party at the chief boho couple’s apartment. The boyfriend, and gradually the rest of the gang, realize the girlfriend’s baby, which has been sick for days, is dead in his crib. And they all attempt to carry on the usual drinking and banter with this incredible tension underlying it as they wait for the mother to understand what they all do:

Now we shall have fifteen minutes of chain reactions which no one will be able to avoid, no one, not even by thinking that next year, at this very same hour, the most exact and detailed memory will not be capable of changing the output of adrenalin or saliva, the sweat on the palms of the hands … 

Finally, after that all hits the fan, and the break-up and the descending into some real muck, the protagonist escapes back to Argentina. The story turns here, and becomes a bit more readable. The characters almost sweet. Another kindle note: 200 pages in and genuine lightness and likeability

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o’clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature. 

Then, the experimentalish: after fifty or so chapters, culminating in an actual story-like climax, there are the bonus non-linear chapters! Yay! Somehow we are meant to start over, and read the books in a wholly new order (proscribed at the end of each chapter, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with just one option), but now incorporating thirty or so new chapters. The new stuff seems to be mostly more random wordy meditations on the meaning of life… and meaning of meaning. Because there wasn’t enough of that in the first 56 chapters. This is basically the second string meditations, the stuff that couldn’t be shoehorned into the story itself.

OK. As much as I mock Cortazar’s self-indulgence, he does have the guts and memory and skill to bring his youth and its drama to life in spots. The ability to take those tiny moments or periods of our life that seem so epic at the time, but that we can never tell of, for fear of rendering them embarrassing and small. He remembers, and he tells them, and they work. Anyway… 5.5/10.

And finally, there is this:

Stopping in front of a pizzeria at 1300 Corrientes, Oliveira asked himself the great question: “Must one stay in the center of the crossroads, then, like the hub of a wheel? What good is it to know or to think we know that every road is false if we don’t walk with an idea that is not the road itself? We’re not Buddha, and there are no trees here to sit under in the lotus position. 

I read this line on the flight out of Argentina the day after a final dinner of pizza on Corrientes! Probably within a few blocks of Cortezar’s pizzeria. In a city of 16 million people counting suburbs, this is a mystical coincidence. Mystic pizza.

*when a ‘national’ cultural exhibition is chiefly performed for tourists, is it really a part of the national culture?

I have had Conrad’s Lord Jim in mind as one of my favourite novels since I first read it, close to twenty years ago. I remember it as the perfect mix of excitement, exoticism, storytelling, and idea. It was a perfect book to me. It was what I wanted to do, as a writer. I was convinced it was the greatest novel. I recommended it to everyone, I loved to talk about it.

Now,these many moons later, I have no idea, really, if this is remotely right. I haven’t really looked at it since then. I don’t remember what it’s about, except that its in India, or Thailand, or someplace hot and east. I remember the set-up for Jim. I remember the shell story, or the storyteller, at least (Marlowe? The same storyteller as Heart of Darkness, I think).

I don’t remember the story.

So, I’m reading it again.

Wish me luck. I hope I have a better revisit than I had with The Sea Wolf!

I wrote this post 8 years ago, for the French Open. The Federer/Nadal rivalry was already one of the all-time great ones, though Nadal had not yet “run away” with the head to head. That took a little lustre off it as a rivalry in terms of their direct contests (Rafa dominates the H2H 23-11; but in terms of career accomplishments, Roger is far in front). Still, here we are, 6 years from their LAST Grand Slam final (a 2011 French Open win for Rafa), and the two are ready for a kind of tennis Valhalla battle. So, before we do, please take a look at some thoughts from a long time ago, a Nietzschean analysis about what makes this rivalry so enthralling, despite the lopsided H2H in Rafa’s favour: 

On the eve of the French Open, the rivalry which has animated the sport for the last four years has flickered back into life where it had seemed to be extinguished. Nadal and Federer have, for years, faced offin the Grand Slam finals as two titans in a battle to repeated through eternity. Titans or… gods?

What exactly has made this rivalry so special? As with no other pair in the history of the game, Nadal and Federer faced each other on the biggest stages, to the exclusion of every other player of their time. That alone explains why so much attention has been paid to their rivalry, but it is not the only reason. There has always been something more: with Borg/MacEnroe and Sampras/Agassi there was a similar dynamic of major rivals characterized by polar opposite personalities and on-court styles. This is a clue to the importance of the current duo.

It has become trendy of late to engage in revisionist tennis commentary: after Nadal had been characterized as a brute force for so many years, commentators now point out the thought which has gone into creating his game, the ongoing improvements, the tactical adjustments. Nadal is now called a thinker. All this may be true upon in-depth analysis. But let’s look again at their games, superficially, and we easily see why they were categorized, typecast even, so quickly: Federer as God, Nadal as Beast.

Federer’s game has been called the most beautiful, most perfect of all. His shots are immaculate. Aesthetically, he has no rival. At his best, he is like a painter, each shot adding colour and shape to the portrait which he alone sees all of. It is a game of perfect control, perfect balance. In short, it is an object to behold. Nadal’s game, despite the process which lies underneath creating it, appears as brute power. Primordial power unleashed. Watching Nadal is cathartic. He seems to pour ALL into each shot, as if he is channeling a greater power. It is an unshackling of the human body, each shot a release and explosion. It is orgiastic.

In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the philosopher attempts to unlock the secrets of the ancient Greek dramas of Sophocles and Aeschylus. The key to his thesis is the recognition of the integration of opposing artistic forces: the gods Apollo and Dionysus.

Apollo is the “shining light”, the symbol of the “plastic” arts, such as sculpting and painting. The Apollinian represents the World as Appearances (i.e. the Grand Illusion, or the Veil of Maya). The gorgeous Olympic gods are manifestations of Appolinian culture. From Apollo, the beauty of order and appearances, and especially of individuation (the illusion that the world is made of discrete, separate objects and individual).

Dionysus is the god of ecstasy. The Dionysian arts, the drumming, dance, and music of the Greek Dionysian festivals, are those which strip away the illusion of the world and reveal the unity between men, and between man and nature. If Apollo is the god of appearance, Dionysus is the god of That Power Which Lies Beneath. The archetypal Dionysian art is music, that which seems to communicate deeper meaning, to touch That Power Which Lies Beneath without our “Real World” as intermediary (as in the plastic arts).

Nietzsche saw, in Greek Tragedy, the union of these two arts: at once individuated and beautiful, in the characters we see on stage, at the same time touching the Truth and underlying unity of the world we live in through the mythic archetypes portrayed, the grand mysteries touched on through the story and the hero’s ultimate realization of That Which Lies Beneath, all of which was aided by the very Dionysian music and chorus. To Nietzsche, this was the most powerful possible art, using Apollo to reveal Dionysus and vice versa.

And this is why Federer-Nadal touches us like no other! There, live and on court, we see the two great archetypes engaged in their own dance: with Federer we marvel at beauty and grace, with Nadal we are released through primal force. Their rivalry touches us at a mythic level; they represent basic categories of existence.

So, for the French.

Nadal vs Fed in the finals.

On a lighter note, today, Tragically Hip, Twisted became Amazon’s #1 bestselling Canadian short story collection. Anytime you can lead a list containing Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, David Bezmogis and Lucy Maud Montgomery, you’ll take it. (Bestseller-page image below the Sunnybrook letter).

Over a decade ago I began a hobby that I’ve still not given up, though I get to play at it seldom. I write short stories based on Tragically Hip songs. Not the songs that tell a story – because they already tell a story. But the songs that don’t quite, on their own. I’ve always found the Hip’s music expressionistic and evocative. Their music put stories in my mind, even when the lyrics don’t tell one directly. They tell story snippets. The listener can piece together a multiplicity of possible stories from them.

I think this is part of the reason Gord has been so interesting as a frontman: he interprets the songs in new ways, and these songs have many dimensions to mine. In my stories, I pick one interpretation.

The first one I did was Locked in the Trunk of a Car, must have been 15 or more years ago. That came to me driving, listening to the song on the radio, daydreaming. Shortly after that came Little Bones (Happy Hour Is Here), then, over the years, Looking For a Place to Happen, Scared, The Darkest One, and Lionized. I’ve had aborted efforts on New Orleans Is Sinking; Grace, Too; Wheat Kings; Put It Off; and Boots or Hearts. I’ve tried to take the feelings and contours of the songs from one medium to another – like Fantasia. I listen to the song on repeat while I write, I hope the mood carries that way, and lyrics wind up popping up in the narrative.

Hopefully, the stories read well on their own without knowing the songs. But for a unique music-literary experience, I recommend listening to the respective song, on repeat, low, while reading, as I wrote it.

Or don’t, it’s a free country.

All the stories are available on Amazon here.

Thank you Tragically Hip, for it all.

https://indiefab.forewordreviews.com/finalists/2015/

From their press release (I’ll place another contests review below):

Each year, Foreword Reviews shines a light on a select group of indie publishers, university presses, and self-published authors whose work stands out from the crowd. In the next three months, a panel of more than 100 volunteer librarians and booksellers will determine the winners in 63 categories based on their experience with readers and patrons.

“The 2015 INDIEFAB finalist selection process is as inspiring as it is rigorous,” said Victoria Sutherland, publisher of Foreword Reviews. “The strength of this list of finalists is further proof that small, independent publishers are taking their rightful place as the new driving force of the entire publishing industry.”

Foreword Reviews will celebrate the winners during a program at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida in June. We will also name the Editor’s Choice Prize 2015 for Fiction, Nonfiction and Foreword Reviews’ 2015 INDIEFAB Publisher of the Year Award during the presentation.

About Foreword: Foreword Magazine, Inc is a media company featuring a Folio:-award-winning quarterly print magazine, Foreword Reviews, and a website devoted to independently published books. In the magazine, they feature reviews of the best 170 new titles from independent publishers, university presses, and noteworthy self-published authors. Their website features daily updates: reviews along with in-depth coverage and analysis of independent publishing from a team of more than 100 reviewers, journalists, and bloggers. The print magazine is available at most Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million newsstands or by subscription. You can also connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. They are headquartered in Traverse City, Michigan, USA.

The Flood was also entered in Writer’s Digest‘s Self-Published e-Book Awards. Although it didn’t win, I was very happy to read the judge’s feedback. Here are some excerpts:

the author has done such a fabulous job of crafting this storyline that the reader cannot help but to stay engaged from cover to cover…

…The author has really crafted a multi-dimensional character in Travis.  And it is through Travis that the author’s voice really shines through.

I was hooked from beginning to end and found this to be surprisingly a bit of a nail biter.  Really strong entry with an over-all appeal that will leave audiences wanting more…  

…Great mix of narrative and prose keep the pacing at a page turning pace that will not disappoint the reader. Well done.

Finally, in the other Writer’s Digest contest, the 23rd Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards, The Flood received a perfect score, 5/5 in all 6 categories!

Of books.

I just discovered an historic document! A list of all the books I’d read from 2003 to the beginning of 2011. I began keeping the list because I thought it would pressure me to read more. It wound up just being fun, especially looking back and remembering. I’d rated them, too. I don’t really know why, its just one of those OCD-type things I would insist on being strict about.

Finding it now reminded me of why I found it fun. Reading the titles I rated highest was a trip itself. Those books took me on trips. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, she quotes the musician Tom Waits:

As a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of people’s minds.

I love that idea. These books (and plays, comics, essays…) decorated my imagination.

Another way I see them, is as adventure-vacations for my mind. The best brought me on some of my most memorable journeys. As I list them now, I find myself thinking the same thing over and over and over:

My God, THIS book was magical!

PERFECT 10’s

In the almost 9 years this list covered, there were two books I loved so much I could only rate them as Perfect:

Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version

and

Michael Malone’s Handling Sin. 

I’ve written about Handling Sin before. Its a beautiful comic epic of music and family. I’ve been reading this book since grade 9. I’ve read it a dozen times or more. Each time, I seem to get something new out of it. (The other book I read every couple years is the  The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett.)

Strangely, these are possibly the ONLY novels that my father and I both loved. They both can make me laugh out loud and cry in public.  Handling Sin is a gentle, third-person, linear, Quixotic adventure; Barney’s Version is a rough, first-person, timeline-jumping settling-of-the-record.

They could very well be the best books I’ve ever read. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way: they have 4.4 and 4.5 stars in Amazon ratings (too low!). Just check some of these Amazon reader reviews for Handling Sin.

The [> 9]’s (That’s right, I’m so book geeky I use decimals in my rankings)

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

If I were to have a novel custom built for me, this is what it would probably look like. Down to the narrator-outer-story gimmick.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Twain is, to my mind, the greatest writer of words. That is, forget stories, characters, whatever. Just the words. Man, I love Twain. I remember this book as part of a set: we were travelling East Africa, and my wife and I each carried a half dozen books and shared them (pre-Kindle), which is how I wound up reading Wuthering Heights (uggh). Other books from that set included Things Fall Apart, Brideshead Revisited, Empires of the Monsoon, Mzungu Days, and Notes From the Underground.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, by Mordecai Richler

Looking back, I have to wonder if I was right to rate this book so highly. It doesn’t scream Magic in my memory the way the others do. What I do remember is, this is an angry, ugly book, about bad people, but its powerful and compelling, funny and ballsy.

The Watchmen, by Alan Moore

The series that transcended comics, yet could only be told as a comic. Mind-boggingly smart. The most intricately planned plot, constantly building momentum, and the most vivid, deep and original characters. Check it: 4.6 stars on 1,566 Amazon reviews.

The 9’s

Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

(an essay only, but I thought I should include it since it appears 3 times on the list, all with high ratings)

John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs, by Jack London

London is my favourite writer. My sadness with London is that I’ve never enjoyed him at book length as I do in his short stories. Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf have great aspects, but page-after-page of monotonous flowery description. Then, I found John Barleycorn. This is London’s memoir as a drinker, an idea brought about in sympathy with the temperance movement. It is the story of London’s life, one of the most exciting lives in literature, told through the lens (or bottom of a beer glass) of his drinking. From his days as a teen sailor through poverty and hard labour, world travel, and fame and fortune, funny, sad and maddening tales, with themes and ideas carried along throughout. Along with the first-class storytelling is some very honest, intelligent and multi-faceted writing on booze.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Hamlet, Tricky Bill Shakespeare

The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse

Hesse is the outstanding writer  in a field other writer’s don’t even know exists: writing about something without touching it. In The Glass Bead Game, The Journey to the East, and to a lesser extent Siddhartha, Hesse somehow tells a story which is clearly about SOMETHING, but he never tells you what that SOMETHING is: In The Glass Bead Game, we never learn how the game works, just some characteristics of it. In The Journey to the East, we never learn what the Journey was for, or how it came about.

The Glass Bead Game is Hesse’s magnum opus. It is a story, a meditation, an alternative reality, and an intellectual game. One of those books that looms so large in my heart and mind, I’m scared to read it again and be disappointed (e.g. The Sea Wolf).

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain

Typical Twain. Original, funny, smart, tragic, insightful, unforgettable characters, sentences and paragraphs you wished you could read again for the first time. Come on, Twain. Pick it up a notch.

[> 8]’s

The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling (short story)

I think this is the only one where I watched the movie first. One of my favourite films: Sean Connery and Michael Caine at their peaks, with Christopher Plummer as a fantastic Kipling-outer-tale-narrator.

A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz

What a special novel. One of my favourite modern books. Its funny as hell, brilliantly weird, with an absolute world-lit-all-star roster of characters.

Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music), Friedrich Nietzsche (non-fiction)

There ain’t no one like Nietzsche. Reading Nietzsche is like being locked in the car with a madman at the wheel. You have no idea where he’s going; you’re forever anticipating a fiery crash; the scenery rolling by seems somehow more meaningful than ever before; and he’s riffing off every song as he flips through radio stations, and you begin to think maybe he understands something you don’t, and that its the Most Important Thing in the Universe. I’ve written about this book here and here. Here, Nietzsche tells the tale (or his version of it) of the relationship of Mankind’s Greatest Generation (Golden Age Greece) with their art, specifically, their highest art: tragedy. Nietzsche demonstrates the synthesis of Tragedy from the ying and yang of the human experience, explains how this synthesis within the soul was responsible for the birth of these Highest of All Men, how Western Man degenerated alongside the loss of Tragic art. While he’s doing this, insights into art, life, modernity, and science whiz by. They should sell this pre-highlighted, because if you want to mark down some of the most unique or startling bits, you’re going to need a lot of highlighter.

Koolau the Leper, Jack London (short story)

Batard, Jack London (short story)

The Seed of McKoy, Jack London (short story)

I can’t say why these particular three London books stood out at the time. They are brilliant, but I could name so many other London stories to love. I guess I’ll just have to blame it on the aughts. Koolau the Leper is a South Sea story. Race was an important theme in London’s writing. Whereas, in his earlier (Yukon) stories, the Indian was sympathetic, but the white man seemed somehow the destined winner and appropriately so. By the time of Koolau the Leper, London has really changed his view. Now, the white man is a curse, individually noble or evil men, blundering about, remaking the world with no comprehension of what they were destroying. Batard is a Yukon tale. This is a dog story, like White Fang or Call of the Wild. But there’s an edge to Batard, it seems more mature, rougher, and somehow deeper than those novels. The Seed of McKoy: well, sometimes a story’s great because its just a great story. Here is a ship of white men, out of their minds with fear, on a boat they all know can explode at any minute – and a local pilot from the Pacific islands who shares their fate (though he alone is deciding it), and experiences it from a wholly different state of mind.

The Greek Way,  Edith Hamilton (non-fiction)

A tremendous (and hugely influential) primer on Greek culture and manner of thinking during their Golden Age.

Faust, book 1, Goethe

Faust is one of our most archetypal myths: the soul sold to the devil for great, but unholy, power here on Earth. The sequel sucked, though.

America Declares Independence, Alan Dershowitz

(This is another one that I can’t really recall what I loved about it so much – again, doesn’t evoke any lingering magic).

The Master and Margerita, Bulgakov

The Devil and his entourage make a pranking visit to Moscow during the athiest-communist-brutally faceless-Stalinist era. Like Faust, it includes an orgiastic witches ball.

Oh yeah. Magic. I wish I didn’t like other books better, so I could say this is my favourite book. Because I love this book so much.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Empires of the Monsoon,  Richard Hall (non-fiction)

I read this book, about the history of the Swahili coast while travelling the Swahili coast. The book tells an epic tale of the Arabian sea as a long-standing ‘neighbourhood’ of interacting cultures: Arab, African, Persian, Indian, and occasionally, Chinese.

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote this with a new form of literature in mind, bare bones and intimate, like a stage play. He wanted to write in a simpler, briefer style that could be more widely palatable, because he was presenting philosophic and political ideas that he felt were of interest to an audience that was less educated.

Here is a famous, though controversial, adaptation for screen:

Night, by Elie Wiesel (non-fiction)

This is an artistic and human triumph. Wiesel turns his most torturous personal events of the Holocaust into a meaningful, coherent, illuminating story. This book is a look into Nietzsche’s abyss.

***

I’ll stop here before I get to the 8’s. I think that is where I would say we go from Magic to just great books. There is more Steinbeck, Shakespeare, and London, as well as Hemmingway,  Orwell, Stephen King and Hunter S Thompson.

Update: It just occurred to me that I stopped keeping this list shortly after my second child was born. One more thing to hold against her!

C                                     Am

I’ve heard there was a secret chord

C                                            Am

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

F                                  G                        C              G

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

                                                                             -Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

By a happy coincidence, I was re-reading Infinite Jest and The Birth of Tragedy at the same time.
Each are brilliant books. Nobody writes like Nietzsche, and nobody writes like David Foster Wallace. Each writer grabs hold of you and takes you on a ride. But aside from that superficial connection, I found a surprising thematic connection between the two books. They each deal with art and entertainment, and in particular, the effect of art on man.

Infinite Jest is a book about addiction in one sense, but in a wider view it is about the way we entertain ourselves, the way we recreate, and drugs and alcohol are one facet of this many-sided jewel. In the midst of a youth tennis academy, an addiction halfway house, and a cell of Quebecois terrorists in wheelchairs, is something referred to as the Entertainment, or the Samizdat – a Soviet term for banned books individually copied and passed in secret. The Entertainment, the ultimate weapon in a pleasure-indulging civilization, is a video so compelling that those who watch it are captured forever. Like, someplace far beyond couch potato. Their only interest is watching the video; the rest of life disappears to them, and if they are pulled from the Entertainment, they are hopelessly vegetative. The Entertainment (possibly also titled Infinite Jest) has stolen their soul through pleasure.

The Birth of Tragedy deals with the Golden Age of Greece, and their goldenest art form, Tragedy. Nietzsche’s basic thesis is that the Greeks of this short period were the most perfect of men: contemplative, understanding of the great and terrible nature of life, yet, unlike Hamlet, capable of action. These were the heroes of the 300 who stood against the Persian hordes, who built great monuments, yet participated in Dionysian revelries. They reinvented the very nature of being human, and made great foundational advances in arts, science and governance.  Nietzsche looks for a cause for this unparalleled healthiness of mind an soul, and finds it in the art form of Tragedy. To Nietzsche, the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, performed properly as they were with appropriate music, had an almost magical effect on generations of Greeks. To Nietzsche, Greek Tragedy represents the unions of two threads of art and the human condition, the great unifying force we associate with Eastern spirituality, and the individuating aspect of the superficial world as we see it. Through this combination a kind of alchemy was performed on the human soul, and Man was, for once, perfect – attuned with nature, filled with spirit and strength.

Whether or not this was historically the case is less interesting to me (for today) than the idea of art touching us, moving us, changing us. This is an old debate: does art matter? I can’t say I know the answer, but I know what I want it to be. As a writer and reader, a music lover and musician, art matters to me. Does a piece of music or work of literature, a painting, or a poem effect a permanent change in me? Of course, it can please or sadden me in the moment of experience. But does it leave an imprint? And if so, how powerful can that implant be? Is there a Secret Chord, that if we could only find it, would soothe our psyches, and move us beyond existentialism?

The idea is an old one, much older than Nietzsche. The Greek myth of Orpheus deals with magic music, and other cultures have similar myths. Centuries of storytelling abound with magic instruments and songs. And when an idea is that old, that appears in myths around the world, it is because it springs from the basic nature of man.

I leave you with the final movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (not the duh-duh-duh-DUM part). Does it matter?

So now, with video camera cell phones everywhere, this whole art form, which has existed only in vanishing, isolated moments in space and time, is suddenly recorded, and callable at whim – we can see just how much fun is being had out there.

Check some of these out. This is what music is all about to me: improvisation without a net; sharing; creating as a team; opening minds; breaking down barriers; and pure joy.

Check this:

So much to love in this! Look at that face on the second sax player as he gets ready, he KNOWS something special is going down. The first guy ALREADY has the train dancing and bouncing. Then in comes the second gun-slinger, and it is ON and everybody knows it. Listen to that clapping! That is a sophisticated audience there. Make sure you wait for Part 2 in the video, it just blows the roof off. And again at 3:40.

Or check this one:
.

Or this:

This last is a public piano in Amsterdam. You can Youtube a whole range of stranger-jams at that piano, or any of the other public pianos which have been sprouting up. That’s cool.

Myself, I am a lousy musician across a wide spectrum of instruments. I love playing. I am least bad at harp (harmonica), then probably piano. A step down in bad is my ukulele, and then my sax playing, and then a level below that are vocals and drums. I’ve been known to play bass, but that’s below the range of the chart. -Eleven.

The great thing about a harp is that it travels with you, so wherever I am, if the situation comes up, I am equipped to make music. This has led to some of the greatest memories of my life, these impromptu jams. On a beach, a street corner, a subway stop, or, of course, in a bar or on any other stage, THERE is music. There’s the spark, someone has begun. There’s the opportunity: if one more musician, armed and in-the-mood walks by, there’s the fire, and the magic.

I am in love with this form, and look forward to discovering more gems like these! Be a part of it!

You come around a bend and see the white froth on the horizon line of the river. Maybe this was a bad idea. You stand in the back of the canoe for a better view, discuss with your partner a route through the long, rocky, droppy, turbulent mess – hidden boulders to avoid, eddies to shelter in, chutes to aim for.

Afterwards, in the first calm water downstream, you’re a bit shaken, a bit wet. One or two more dings on the heavy ABS plastic canoe. The fear drains out and you’re filled with adrenaline and euphoria. This is whitewater canoeing.

Camp at Red Pine Rapids, Dumoine River

The Unabomber wrote about surrogate activities, distractions we concoct for ourselves to take the place of our primal and once-dangerous hunt for food and shelter; to fill that psychological void. I wonder about this: is there a hierarchy of legitimacy to recreational activity? Are some more indicative of a balanced psyche? Is there something unhealthy about using dangerous situations for fun, just to find a way out (alone and remote, in the case of whitewater canoeing)?

It’s hard to imagine feeling as alive as riding a wild river by canoe, or as healthy and whole as sleeping by it. Maybe it’s just a mistake to use the Unabomber as my standard for mental health. 

My wife and I spent 5 days on the Dumoine. It was our first time on the Dumoine. The river flows more or less north-south from the Canadian Shield highlands to the Ottawa River, dropping 500 feet along the way. The altitude drops make it a whitewater river. The Dumoine has two sister rivers, the Noire and Coulonge, which run over roughly the same terrain. We’d run those two before, but the Dumoine is supposed to be the classic, one of the superstar rivers of Quebec.

We drove to our take out point, where a shuttle took us up river. That way, our car would be waiting at the bottom. Getting to the Dumoine, we got up at 5, drove to Da Swisha, then shuttled up the  old logging roads to put in around 60 km of river above the Ottawa by early afternoon. This is how trips start: the driver drops you and your canoe and your gear deep into the bush, somewhere near the river, and disappears down the dirt road. You look up, look around, and go, by fuck, we’re on our own now.

This is one of the special things about wilderness camping. Other vacations, you go to the beach, it takes a few days to wash “home” off you, the office, the home projects, the headaches and nerve-rattles. A weekend is a break, not a vacation, because you can’t forget that quickly. Except wilderness camping. The moment that shuttle is gone, shit is real and you are there, in that moment. It’s another world, and you’re another man in it. Remember that old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon where the kids take a roller coaster, and then it transports them to a fantasy world with unicorns and dragons? Like that.

Our bags and barrel and canoe are lying on this scruffy beach next to the Dumoine, and it’s always a strange feeling seeing that everything you depend on, food, shelter, clothes, camp gear, is going in that canoe. 

The Dumoine

We quickly packed the canoe, and slid off the beach and out into the current. The Dumoine welcomed us in with an immediate long series of rapids (“Bridge Rapids”), and we were gone as quick as the shuttle.

The river was relentless (how Megan put it). After that long day of road travel, we spent the afternoon running eleven high-class rapids. Eleven times hearing that noise, approaching for a first look, nerves and adrenaline firing, making the decision: do we run it straightaway? Scout more from shore? Skip it and portage?  Then, the active intensity of the run. Eleven times. Nine went well. Two were hairy, with significant boulder contact, having to get out a couple times to push off rocks to get unpinned. Always a nervy experience. Lulu Lemon says you should feel fear at least once a day. So we’re good with Lulu.

Each rapid is different; you learn to read the water to understand what’s happening underneath. With low water levels, the Dumoine rapids were predominantly long boulder gardens, with not much margin for error; and challenging river bends through the rapids making them difficult to scout.

The house specialty: a Dumoine boulder garden

We made camp at Little Steel rapids the first night. It was a beautiful, shaded site right in the midst of the rapids, swarming with mosquitoes.  There was no spot calm enough to swim or fish around the site, but the views were spectacular.

Here was the juxtaposition that makes whitewater canoeing a rare experience. The wet, splashing excitement, the fury of the river, the intensity of concentration as boulders whizz by. You’re thinking about a plan to work the rapid, at the same time as the paddle and balance technique needed to follow the plan. Your body is fully engaged, all while watching, hyper-alert, for surprises. Then, the serenity of camp, the infinity of the wild. No sign of human contact save a portage trail and fire pit.

These rivers have been run for thousands of years by native peoples before the plastic boats. They would have used the same portage trails, the same campsites, maybe even the same spot for a firepit. When you walk here, you are completely separate from humanity in the moment, yet connected with a thousand years of it.

There is a ying-yang here of human experience. I’d go so far as to bring out the ol’ Apollonian/ Dionysian. I use these terms following Nietzche’s use in Birth of Tragedy, who set them up as distinctive, opposing forces in experience and art.

[I’ve used this schtick before, within the context of the great tennis rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. But it’s one of my favourite concepts. So useful in describing so much of human experience.]

The Apollonian is man as a self-conscious individual. He is the man in a fragile craft, holding onto his sanity, ego and identity on a deep ocean of mystery. Paintings and sculpture are Apollonian, individuating arts. They celebrate differentiation and uniqueness of objects.

Dionysian is humanity as One. It is the connection of man to each other, and the universe, the often-ecstatic loss of self as experienced in Dionysian festivals (or drum circles, raves, shamanic ceremonies, religious experience, drug and alcohol use, etc). It is the man outside the craft, in the ocean. Music and dance are Dionysian arts.

Canoeing the rapids is a pretty literal interpretation of the man-in-the-fragile-craft metaphor.

Man alone, in a fairly sturdy craft

You are as individuated, as focused on your physical being in that moment, as can be. You are fighting to protect that individual. Then all at once, you find yourself in nature, and melt into it. Your individuality is gone, you are swallowed by the wild.

One night, on a quiet stretch of river, I watched the wakes of invisible bugs on the glasslike surface, disturbing for a moment the reflection of the trees, hundreds of yards away. Damn right, it was serene. Nietzsche claimed that it was the bringing together of Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in Greek tragedy that made it a sublime, ultimate art. There’s no ultimate sport, or pastime, despite the Unabombers’ hierarchy. We all experience and profit from our recreation in different ways. But whitewater canoe camping has unique combination of feelings. The mosquitoes fit in somewhere, metaphorically. I’ll get back to you on that.

We travelled like this four more days. One of those was spent in camp, at Red Pine Rapids, as a play day. I love play day. No campsite tear-down and set-up. No need to go anywhere. Nothing but to enjoy the place, rerunning the same rapid different ways, practicing techniques, fishing, reading, writing. Reclining in the hot sun in a shallow rapid – a glass of white wine, still cold, in hand, the cool river flushing over your bottom half.

Play day on the Dumoine

Unlike the Coulonge and Noire rivers where paddlers generally take out somewhere along the river itself, the Dumoine has no road access near its mouth, and spills right out into the wide Ottawa. You finish the trip by paddling through the wind and waves of the big river. Your car is waiting on the other side.

You open the car, change into some clean clothes, pack your stuff up and take off. That’s it. No ceremony, no medal, no one waiting to shake your hand or cheer. No one knows or cares. Something magical happened. You’re bursting to talk about it, the experience is too big to keep inside. But you can never capture magic with words. You start the car, get in gear, and that world is shut behind a portal. You will have to find it again next year, that portal. For now, you are back to the mundane world, with a pile of dirty gear.

***

From Schopenhauer: Just as a sailor sits in a boat trusting to his frail barque in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with the howling mountainous waves; so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual man sits quietly, supported by and trusting to the principium individuationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomena. The boundless world, everywhere full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite future, is strange to him, indeed is to him but a fable; his ephemeral person, his extensionless present, his momentary satisfaction, this alone has reality for him; and he does all to maintain this, so long as his eyes are not opened by a better knowledge.