Art is a form of the verb to be...or not to be...The Making of a High Priestess of Bardolatry Tattoo #1

My first tattoo came from Harold Bloom, really.  If I could have been branded with the same design which I had tattooed, I would have been. 

W.S.  with a quill behind the letters and a crescent moon hovering above the initials.

William Shakespeare.

Sorry about the quality, this is on my right shoulder blade and really hard to photograph

I had to decide what I could live with for the rest of my life.  I had already accepted that I would be getting a tattoo – that I wanted to begin the ancient tradition of recording my life story on my skin.  I had to decide what that all important first mark would be. 

As soon as I had decided, there could only be one answer to that question, then. 

W.S. 

I saw myself as a High Priestess of Bardolatry (the worship of Shakespeare…a word coined by Harold Bloom in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) – hence the crescent moon above the initials.  I worshipped his work as if they were sacred texts and held the answers to all of the secrets of the universe…because they did…still do. 

 For me, Shakespeare was my portal into real poetry.  I had been exposed to nursery rhymes and trite pieces from my mother’s poetry books – beyond the classics in her high school English Lit text to which I had little access as a child, and little understanding until I, too was in high school.  Those pages entombed Keats and Milton and Blake.  They made no sense to me, yet.  I had no way into them.

But Shakespeare was magic. 

Mrs. Toal’s grade 10 English class…Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.  That was my first exposure to the spoken word:

..what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

What the fuck did I just hear and what happened to my head? What was this musical language and how do I get more of it?  And why did my heathen classmates hate it so much?  How could they not understand it? Love it?

Very early, I discovered that Bardolatry was a selective religion and not many people chose to be members but those who did choose to worship at the altar of the Bard were passionate and had differing opinions and interpretations of his work.  I was thrilled to count myself among them.

Fast forward several years, decades…I am a young mother with two small children and I find myself sinking in the drudge of diapers, dinners, and play dates.  I needed something for me.  I needed an artistic outlet. My therapist prescribed Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way as a way for me to find my outlet. 

I started to write a play which I produced and had directed for the local Fringe Festival.  That led me to audition for acting classes at the local University College where the policy was to perform a Shakespeare play every year in the Spring.  This particular year the play was Macbeth…my favorite. 

I auditioned, with a monologue from King John, which, I am certain I could perform much better now.  I was accepted into the class, auditioned for the fall show, performed in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood and, just before Christmas of 1996, auditioned for Macbeth.  I won a role as one of the witches…and the spell was cast. Down I slipped into the vortex of Shakespeare.

This is not a bad thing, quite the contrary.  I found myself in those words and roles and the deeper I read, the more characters I stepped into (or, more truthfully, the deeper they slipped into me) the deeper I slipped into myself.  I learned so much about myself from those roles, was so electrified by the women/men I became, that I wonder if I would have reached those places without the catalyst provided for me by Will.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom talks about how Shakespeare “…invented us.” (xvii of preface).  He says that “We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still.  They read us definitively.” (xx of preface)

His plays read me like marble braille…fingertips on goose flesh…I was the instrument and he was the master orchestrater. And he did play me.

I am in the centre - the owl witch

 It was exhilarating to howl every night at the approach of Macbeth to the witches cave in IV,i.  I plugged into the ancient magic I carried as a pagan Priestess and surrendered to the work.  It was ecstasy.

The only thing to do after the first taste of performing Shakespeare was to (1) join a local Shakespeare company and (2) become a director.  The choice was obvious, and made for me, actually…Hamlet.  How the fuck was I going to step into that piece?  Like dolphins to water, apparently because all I had to do was to channel my grief for my recently deceased mentor; a beloved teacher who had encouraged me to write and to honour my talents. 

So, I took the job.  I directed Hamlet…the magnum opus in the opinion of some.  I read several different versions, did an in depth dramaturgical study of the play and put together a piece I think would have made Will proud. 

We performed in a park, at night, and it was crazy hard but beautiful.  Today I still go there and sit on the bench, located in what used to be the main entrance to the castle, and meditate on the beauty of the place, my life, and the magic of the Universe.  I actually scattered some of my mentor’s ashes there (shhhh) so that when I need to work out a writing snag or just need someone to listen, I sit on the bench and tell him what I need to tell him and read what I am working on.  It is one of my sacred places.

After Hamlet, came Othello and a dramatic reading of Venus and Adonis in the winter following the summer in the park. 

Othello showed me that the magic of the Bard was not limited to life in the play.

*sigh* Yes.  That is me.

I was cast as Desdemona and, from the start, should have seen that this piece was going to be weird.  The man cast as Othello did not seem to understand the concept of imagination and acting; my dear friend, who was cast as Iago was tormented by the character for a number of weeks beyond the “post partum” acting stage (many are who take on that character and I have heard the same of those who have played Macbeth).  For me, though, the strangest thing happened:  my husband at the time began to act like Othello – jealous and grasping.  I was suffocating.  I was terrified.  I was fuelled by this in my performance and, in the end, just wanted the run to be over.  I loved the play but hated the weakness of this woman who would not fight back. 

I would not make that same mistake.

I guess that is why the natural progression from there was Venus – a goddess.  And, yes, Will made me feel like her, then.  It was exquisite!

After that came Twelfth Night.   I played Feste and directed – definitely a challenge. 

A female Feste worked really well in Twelfth Night

This was the time I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to Bardolatry and when I read Bloom.  I was all in.  And when the needle hit my virgin skin, I sank into the bee sting-like pain.  It was my initiation and I was earning the right to carry Will’s moniker on my flesh forever.  I closed my eyes and ran my lines from past shows; words from other lips – Shakespeare’s humans. 

I loved the pain and pretended that he did, too.

And, when the time came for the run of Twelfth Night, we played in the same park as where Hamlet played.  This time, instead of sun and heat, we played in torrential rain storm after torrential rain storm.  It became a joke, a long lasting joke, that when Olivia said to Viola-Cesario:  “…tis beauty truly blent; twill endure wind and weather…” the sky opened up and the wind blew and the actors were completely soaked, makeup running down Olivia’s face.  We still laugh about that today.

A couple of years after that performance, Feste married Orsino… “…unclasp’d To thee the book even of [our] secret soul…” (I, iv, 12-13). 

And then I became Cleopatra. 

And utterly, fucking butchered the role.  I was too young for her and too small and I hope to be allowed the privilege of playing her again from where I am now.  I know I am older now than she was when she died but, hey, I look 39.  I just feel like I am big enough for her now. 

I was an ant walking in the sandals of a colossus. 

Today, after my morning pages, I read a line in Julia Cameron’s Walking in This World, a companion to The Artist’s Way and read these words: 

                                Art is a form of the verb to be. 

My heart skipped a beat.  It is.  It really is. 

And, for me, nowhere have I learned this more intimately than from Will.  I am because Shakespeare invented me…and will continue to be because he wills it to be so.

My Bard altar

The Skin Gallery and the Art of wearing your art on your sleeve.

I have been writing a tonne lately.  I have been making lots of connections which have opened my creative self and, as it happens, I also booked another tattoo this weekend with my guy, Alex Rousey.  When I shared this info with a friend, the reflection back was:  “Another tattoo?  See what happens when your creativity gets a kick in the pants!” 

My reply was: "I am a walking art gallery."

That thought caused me to pause and think about that statement which, to be honest, was flippant to begin with, and actually revealed how I really feel about my skin and, maybe even my body... my whole image; my style. 

Some people in my life have made observations about why people get tattoos.  Some people have said it is because I am in extreme emotional pain and that is how I express my pain.

Maybe.  I used to be a cutter.

If that is the case, then, I choose these colourful scars.  They are an album of my healing.  Each one represents a step in my journey toward myself.  And, honestly, I have never really reflected on why I love tattoos or why I love getting tattoos.  I just love them.  I think they are beautiful.  I am sure that people who collect piercings feel the same way.

Bod Mods are about decoration and an aesthetic sense of self in which you live art because you are art.  We are all art works.  Art of metamorphosis.  We create a life and it sways and blurs and folds into the lives of others which sways and blurs and folds into ours.  Our lives are lived parallel to and in conjunction with the lives of others – our art is part of the art of others.  A kaleidoscope of experience.  A mandala of existence – the gift of living with and around other people.

Sometimes those connections are represented in art on our skin. 

I have often wondered if that is why people started decorating themselves. 

I know that many indigenous peoples have written family histories on the skin of their people to preserve family stories of legitimacy and the connections of one clan to another.  The shapes and designs passed the origin stories of family on from generation to generation.  It started with the collective history and, as a person aged, the story was added to with the tales of his or her own story.  And, in some cultures, the songs and dances which accompany the story would be passed on as well. 

Y’know, if I look at my art, I could say that each piece represents a step in my story on my life’s path.  And, if I followed that tradition, I know I could pair those pieces with songs, dances, and stories, too.  Actually, I named this blog after a line in a poem which found its way into becoming a tattoo.

Looks like a new series is being born – one in which I will share the story of my art on my skin.

The complication is how to photograph them all.

I have one on my back.

 I’ll need help. 

The Day the Music Died Again

I remember, very clearly, the day Joe Strummer died.  I felt like the bottom of the world had fallen out.  All I could think about was the first time I had heard those iconic chords opening London Calling. 

Close your eyes. 

Yes.  You hear it now…here comes the bass…and now that voice.

I heard it over and over.

Then came the pain. 

So, even though I am not a Bowie fan, I know the pain his fans feel because we have all had one of those losses.  For others, weeks ago, it was Lemmy.

Artists help to define us – they allow us to become inspired and bolstered by their bravery.  Bowie and Strummer and Lemmy were the souls of the rebels and “freaks.”  The outcasts.  The kids who scream, over raging guitars, that the Emperor has no clothes.  They gave us permission to be who we really felt we were…we are…who we were becoming.

For many of us, this music was the first music that was really ours…not our parents’ music.  The music they told us to turn down, turn off, or throw out.  It was the music we raged to; our cacophonic Declaration of Independence; our “fuck you” to our family, our school, our society.

Bowie gave us gliltter – guys could wear makeup and be ok.  Lemmy gave us leather-scented, eviscerating guitar.  Joe screamed out injustice. 

They all painted our souls in sound in ways we could not do for ourselves.  That is why so many of us feel like those pieces, those colors, died today.  They took a piece of our childhood, adolescents, our self-hood. 

You will for a while, dear hearts, feel like a piece of you is missing – and it probably will be for a while.  And that is ok.  A piece of us is missing. 

You will also feel, dear hearts, like you cannot scream out injustice, rage, or sparkle for a while.  And that is ok.  The sparkle will be dull for a while.

Somewhere though, dear hearts, we are all stardust.

Blessed Be all of you who mourn today.  

My husband gave everyone some great advice today on his fb status:

Only thing to do on a day like this is listen to as much music as you can.
Volume up. ITunes random. 
City of Fire albums ordered.
Kendrick Lamar in Amazon basket.
Heal your hearts, friends.

The Evolution of Christmas Eve

The magic of the Winter Solstice brings ghosts to us, haunts us like Scrooge and, for me, forces me to stare those spectres in the face and read their messages through my veins.

The pale, chained Ghost of Christmas Past needles my heart – the sharp-ended, frozen candy cane shank probes, and pokes, and pokes. 

I realise this is not the real Ghost of Christmas Past but this is how I see it.

Pricks my soul and stings my eyes.

He shows me my Granny at a dining room table playing cards.  We are Whist partners, as always.  I am a young mother.  It was the last Christmas I had with her and I was so grateful because she was able to meet her namesake.  My daughter was given Granny’s name as her first middle name. 

There was so much confusion for me.  I was nearly thirty but felt much younger.  Especially when with my mother and Granny.  It was like I was my son’s age – he was 3 then. 

I was so young.  I was having a child’s Christmas and yet I had children of my own and one of them was worried that Santa wouldn’t find us.

Santa.

The grief of being Santa that first year, when my oldest knew that Santa existed, was weighty and palpable.  If I was Santa, then the Santa of my childhood did not really exist. 

Ever.

The chained Ghost drives the candy cane point deeper into my chest.

But he had an encore appearance, a resurrection, as I became him.  And just when the two older kids teetered on the edge of losing Santa, another child came into our family to resuscitate him and keep him alive for a little while longer. 

Until last year.

Last Christmas the youngest, then 12, made a Declaration of Independence.  He declared that he was not going to be:  read to at night, “tucked in,” “play” with his lego (it had to be put away and taken out of his room), sleep with his bear Sunny, or do anything else deemed by him “baby-ish” because if he was going to high school in the fall, he had to act like a big kid.

So let it be written.

So let it be done.

And for some reason that triggered in me a yearning for the days when my children were young and I felt that old familiar grief. 

The ghost chain rattled and Santa died once more.  Unceremoniously.  No dirge.  No procession.  No eulogy.

I wept for him as I wrapped the gifts I had chosen for my older children – themed gifts that connected me to their “little” selves.  For my oldest son it was Where the Wild Things Are, for my daughter “The Little Mermaid,” and for the youngest “Lilo and Stitch.”  Each child knew the connection and message they would bring from me. 

It really, really hurt and I was so jealous of my colleagues who had small children – houses where Santa Claus was still very much alive. 

Then, in the nick of time, Christmas Present’s ghost walked through the wall, into the room, and embraced me.  I began to understand that I just needed a re-framing of how I was viewing everything.  My relationship with my children had been growing and evolving – particularly with my adult children as they graduated and started navigating early adulthood.  Why would that not extend to Christmas?

This year the youngest, newly-minted high schooler, asks “Santa” questions around who fills the stockings when and could he please play Santa on Christmas morning because he has been thinking about it for weeks? 

Enter the Ghost of Christ mas  Future to slowly slide the candy cane shank from my chest.  With the frozen candy splinter removed, I can see that the spirit of Santa moves on and one day there will be grandchildren near to resuscitate Santa once again. 

This Spirit has a great lesson for me – a salve on the sticky, minty wound in my heart.  It whispers to me that Santa never really dies.  He sleeps.  He sleeps until the children wake him again year after year, generation after generation. 

Thank you blessed Ghost. 

May your Spirit heal all whose wrists are bitten by the frozen shackles of Christmas Past and may they find love and Peace in this Christmas Present.

Blessed Be all this season.

My Righteous Indignation with Your Sunday Coffee

In his truthdig article States of Terror, Chris Hedges raises some very interesting and poignant points concerning the continuous “war on terror” which made me reflect on another on-going, seemingly unrelated issue which are receiving very similar approaches and media responses. 

Hedges’s article made me think about the gang “war” in Surrey and the South Fraser area and how similar approaches could easily end the supposed war and hysteria surrounding it.  He made me reflect upon several points I have made in the past regarding social issues which seem to never go away because we continue to take the same heavy-handed, fear based approach to situations which require love and compassion.

CBC Radio One has had a number of excellent interviews lately with journalists and UN aid workers who have had the opportunity to interview either Jihadi and ISIS fighters who have been arrested or people living in Syria and Iraq who have been dealing with occupation for a number of painful years.  The similarity in the stories of those who have joined extremist movements and those who have yet to join them are strikingly similar…duh.  Take a look.  In article after article written by or interviews with psychologists who have studied the minds and souls of “terrorists,” the theme is the same:  creating a world of “other” creates, by necessity, covert or overt cells of “together.”  

Humans die without connection and so will create connection with like-minded/souled people in the absence of connection elsewhere in their lives. 

The result of this isolation: 

Gangs

ISIS

Fraternities

Movements

Rebellion

Revolution

“Recruiters focus on forming a “social bond” with their target particularly online, using Skype and instant messaging as tools to build a relationship,” says John Horgan, a Georgia State U psychology prof who specialises in the psychology of extremism, in the Boston Herald article Inside the Mind of a Terrorist.  Another psychologist, interviewed for the same piece, points out that in France, the recruiter pitch resonates particularly strongly.  There Muslims make up about 7 percent of the country’s population, but 70 percent of its prison population.

“There’s no competing message,” said Scott Atran, director of research in anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

THERE IS NO COMPETING MESSAGE. 

The recruiters for gangs/ISIS/Jihadist movements embrace the unemployed, disenfranchised young men (mostly) because their message is different from the one they hear around them which repeats that they are worthless and a problem.

 I wish I could remember the name of the man interviewed on CBC R1 on Tuesday night who was saying that racial profiling and military occupation have created terrorism (not a new message).  Humanitarian approaches and a commitment to enfranchisement of those who feel dispossessed, disconnected, and dishonoured throws a blanket upon the flames of discontent in the areas of the world struggling with it the most.  If the heart of ISIS and other rebel organisations are young, dispossessed, unemployed men who feel no other choice than to use violence to win back a sense of pride and self-respect, why are we as a global community not doing something to eradicate the problems where they start? 

Why are we not creating a competing message?

Many captured fighters who have been interviewed are sharing stories of inter-generational institutional racism, profiling, and poverty under the thumb of imperial oppressors who do not respect or understand cultural differences and whose only interest is, like any imperialistic nation, plundering the human and natural resources and staking political claim.  They build a police state to quash resistance, treat the local population like criminals, and brutally grasp and horde anything they want with complete impunity.

Now tell me, if you grew up in an occupied state – especially as a boy – watching your once proud people beaten down or murdered for protesting the fascist regime; denied work and livelihood because of your religion; witnessed the desecration, denigration, and vilification of your culture and people, what options are you left with?

How would you feel if all you saw or read on news feeds sanctified the dead of the imperial nations but referred to yours as collateral damage or worse, did not acknowledge them at all? (Don’t worry.  I am all too aware, as an Aboriginal woman, how much this sounds like what happened to my ancestors.  The parallel is not lost on me.)

Why are white lives worth more than any other?

We are not separate.  We owe each other compassion and dignity because nothing ever says that because we are privileged, white, educated people that we will never be migrants or fall upon desperate times.  There are no guarantees of anything.  Ever.

How do we end gang violence in Surrey or war in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq?  It is, actually, pretty easy:

Create a competing message to the one of isolation, racism, and rejection.

1.      Treat all people with dignity and compassion – curious compassion…which is based in curiosity around how people need and work with them to get it.

2.      Create opportunities for all peoples’ basic needs to be met:

a.      Food

b.      Shelter – racist-free housing policies world wide

c.       Clean water

d.      Clothing

e.      Connection

f.        Self-respect

3.      Create opportunities for connection.  This starts early but can be rectified later.  KIDS WON’T JOIN GANGS IF THEY FEEL CONNECTED TO SOMEONE THEY KNOW CARES ABOUT THEM. PERIOD.  If we work together to create programs to address the emptiness in the lives of children who feel left behind/out, we create a different message – a new out.  More money for more police only creates more violence.  If we want to reduce the violence, we have to reduce the violence.

People who join groups want a sense of community.  If we provide loving, “healthy” communities aimed at empowering and enfranchising people, they will thrive and flourish in the communities in which they are embraced.  In addition, creating communities which welcome other cultures and seek understanding of differences rather than trying to eliminate them may very well go miles in helping new Canadians feel a part of rather than a part from.

This also means, on a geopolitical level, doing all we can to eradicate imperialism and the death clutch of corporate dominance on the planet.

But…Black Friday and the Christmas shopping rush and…

Why should I give up my hard earned:

Money

Freedom

Security

for a bunch of:

lazy junkies

dirty terrorists

potential threats

idiot delinquents?

Because, people, in the blink of an eye “we” are “them.”

And when those eyes close, how do you want people to treat you when they flash open again?

Shame! Shame! Shame! MCFD and the Government of BC

Alex Gervais is dead.

Another Aboriginal kid in care is dead not more than four months after the Paige report written by BC’s Representative for Children and Youth.  If you remember, among Turpel-Lafond’s many recommendations in the Paige report was that children in care should be absolutely nowhere near SROs (Single Resident Occupancy) or hotels as a place of permanent or temporary housing. And, in May when the report came out, Stephanie Cadieux told Turpel-Lafond that there were no kids in care living hotels.  

Hotels are no place for kids to live.  Two teenagers in Winnipeg died in provincial care while living in hotels.  Several teen aged girls report being sexually assaulted and/or introduced to drugs and alcohol while living in downtown hotels.  In Manitoba, kids in care who live in hotels are supervised by contract workers – people who are hired to merely “babysit” teenagers.  They have little or no mental health training or any social work training.  In fact, these contract workers have little or no training whatsoever regarding the needs of teens at risk.

What do governments think is going to happen when teenagers live in hotels without significant adult connections or significant adult to watch over, check in, or otherwise care for them?  Kids at risk are just going to take care of themselves, I guess.

In Alex’s case, let’s place the blame at the feet of those who really deserve it:  the provincial government.  The government cut funding and shut down the group home in which Alex lived. 

This government’s consistent marriage to their policies of austerity and their obsession with the “balanced budget” is consistently being borne on the backs of those who are the most vulnerable in our province.  Worse than that, this policy is being borne on the backs of the most vulnerable children in this province.

I desperately try, on a daily basis to help kids like Alex and Paige put their lives back together.  I try to work with them and to work with the eroding systems which consistently work against us.  The harder we try to put it all back together, the more difficult MCFD makes it for us. 

It’s like trying to build a sandcastle in a monsoon.

How is this continuing to be ok? 

Why is it acceptable to this government that some children are treated in ways that would be unacceptable if their own children were treated in the same way?  Why are we, as a society, allowing the most vulnerable children to be treated in the most horrific ways?

How is this continuing to be acceptable and permitted in this province?  Why are we doing nothing about it?

None of these children asked to be placed in these situations.  None of them asked to be born into these hurting families.  None of them asked to be born into lives in which they are neither loved nor wanted.

The Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, has suggested that there are strong indications that Alex took his own life.  If this is indeed the case, all this shows us is that, once again, cracks in the Child and Youth Mental Health system in this province have precipitated a desperate youth to take his own life.  I have ranted many a time and oft about the complete lack of supports for youth with mental health needs - particularly for kids in care and particularly for Indigenous children in care.

Child and Youth services of any kind in this province are a fucking joke…no…a nightmare.  There is absolutely nothing funny about MCFD, especially the Aboriginal department.  Social workers reneging on signed agreements – worse – bold faced lying about signing papers or claiming that the meeting during which the papers were signed never happened.   All of the lies and game playing to get out of paying a student’s fees. 

How do you sleep at night, Stephanie Cadieux?  Your ministry’s ineptitude is killing the children with whom you are charged with protecting.

How do you sleep at night, Suzanne Anton?  Where is your response to the recommendations from the many reports out of Turpel-Lafond’s office?

How do you sleep at night, Christy Clark?  Child after child dies under your watch and the only time you acknowledge the loss is when it serves as a photo op for you!

All three of you should be ashamed!  How do you allow these children to live in conditions in which you would never allow your own children to live?

  

How many more children have to die before we get angry enough to actually do something or demand that something be done?  The recommendations have been given and have not been followed. 

When do we hold our governments accountable to those who cannot speak for themselves? 

When do we admit that “austerity” economics is just a covert (or not so covert) attempt to destroy the poor, the sick, the old, and the vulnerable? 

When will we realise that, in the words of the great Welsh band, The Manic Street Preachers, “if you tolerate this then your children will be next”?

The Last Day: Torches and Towers

The last day, July 24^th, we visited a number of cemeteries as we meandered our way back to Paris and CDG airport.

We started the day back at Essex Farm Cemetery, aka McCrea’s dressing station bunker.  As I said in my last post, one of our tour mates stayed behind the day we visited Essex Farm the first time and she wanted to visit it.  She was prepared with a copy of Flander’s Fields so she could read it – or have someone read it – in the field of poppies behind the cemetery.

Essex Farm Cemetery

By this time I had become known to the group as “the keener” and, as I was to learn later in the evening, “the trench poet,” so it really was no surprise to me that my tour mate asked me to read the poem in this sacred place.  Honestly, I was really hoping to be able to recite it there anyway so the invitation was an answered prayer of sorts. 

Since getting back into the routine of my daily life, when people find out I did this tour, I am frequently asked to describe the highlights of my trip; this is one of those moments.  For artists, visiting the birth place of a seminal work of art is really life changing.  I know I have used that phrase many times during the relaying of my trip but I really cannot think of any other way to describe it.  Standing in that poppy field beside the bunker where McCrea treated the wounded, gazing out onto the cemetery where those he tried to help were buried, was exhilarating – I get goose bumps every time I recall the moment.  I could have even been standing on the very spot where the poem was penned…all of this ran through my mind as I took a breath to start the poem. 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row  

(I looked to the rows of white stones behind the fence in front of me and felt the energy of that moment prickle my skin into goose bumps)

That mark our place,  and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing fly

Scarce heard amidst the guns below.

(The cemetery is on a very busy motor way which has a rumble of its own – not guns of course but another representation of the modern world encroaching upon those who sleep restlessly there.  Larks were, indeed singing above the din of the motor way…and I heard every single note as I recited that line.)

We are the dead.  Short days ago

We lived, Saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders’ fields.

(At this point I almost had to stop reciting because I could not speak.  Here I was, some lost traveller from another time, standing in this sacred ground reciting this heart-wrenching lamentation for a lost, beloved friend to the dead in the cemetery only a few feet before me.  The lump in my throat was painful.  There they were…the dead who had lived, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved…and I was speaking to them – directly to them.  It was all too much for a few seconds.)

Take up our quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch – be yours to hold it high;

(In that moment my mind took me, once again, to the marble figure on the Vimy Memorial brandishing the torch and I wanted to catch the torch, too.  I wanted to catch it from the failing hands of those lying in that cemetery in front of me.)

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep though poppies grow

In Flanders’ fields.

(I wanted to shout a promise to those dead, and to the dead who lay in pieces in the fields all around me for miles and miles, that as long as there was breathe left in me I would be sure to keep the faith.  I wanted to shout and declare and make some grand gesture to prove my fidelity…but in the end I was silent.  I was silent and let my recitation be that promise.)

I needed a moment after reciting the last lines of the poem.  I just wanted to stand in that moment and memorise it in my cells so that whenever I heard, or recited the poem, I would always feel the connection to it I felt that day in that poppy field reciting to the dead who slept in Essex Farm Cemetery.

There were a couple of standout cemeteries on that day, one we had planned to visit and one we stumbled across while visiting another cemetery.  We planned to visit Caix British Cemetery and stepped out to have a look.  It is a small cemetery off of a side road on the edge of a wheat field.  It holds a number of Canadian Military Cross winners and, for the hat badge geek in me, a number of hat badges I had not seen previously.  I snapped a number of pics here and wandered over to the other cemetery we noticed on the drive in to where we parked near Caix Cemetery.

Caix German Cemetery

It turned out that the other cemetery was a German cemetery:  Caix German Cemetery.  The eerie black metal crosses did not seem as foreboding in this shade-dappled place.  What a difference the bright July sun made to the German cemetery.  The first such cemetery I visited during a rainy, grey day.  On this day, the sun seemed to bring a melancholy dignity to the place and seemed to lift some of the heaviness. 

Caix German Cemetery

This was a dignified, peaceful place.  The shame which seemed to cloud places like Neuve Chapelle and Langemark did not appear to exist here.  There was a heaviness of homesickness – a longing to be home – but there was no indication that any of these men felt ashamed to have died here.  Perhaps because many of those in this cemetery perished during the last hundred days – the days of the Kaiserschlacht – the Kaiser’s last push to win the war.  During these battles, even more so than any other battle, the Germans gave everything they had.  The men in Caix German cemetery died with the knowledge that they had done everything they could to win and they did not feel let down by themselves or their comrades.  This may not be the case for those in Neuve Chapelle near Arras.  The early days were not awesome for anyone but the German soldiers, in particular, felt disorganized and forgotten by their leadership.  Reflecting upon those differences helps me to see the differences in the “feel” of those two German cemeteries.

Our last cemetery was Beaucourt Military Cemetery.  Beau, for those who speak French know, is “beautiful” in French.  This tiny cemetery on the hill was, indeed, beautiful and included in my list of the most peaceful cemeteries I had visited. 

Beaucourt Cemetery

Surrounded by poplars and birch, nestled against a wheat field, this cemetery holds a number of men from British tank battalions and Canadian soldiers killed during the Last Hundred Days of fighting.  Norm shared some very interesting stories about these men and we piled back into the van to head to the hotel near the airport.

We had a wonderful last night: dinner and drinks in the hotel and then someone (who shall remain nameless – and it wasn’t me) decided that we had to go to Paris to the Pere Lachaise cemetery and the Eiffel Tower.  By the time we got to Paris it was around 11 at night and, of course, the cemetery was closed but the Eiffel Tower was magnificent by night.  We wandered around for a while and made the hour cab ride back to our hotel.  It was an awesome night.

My trip ended with the same Paris magic with which it had begun – unplanned and unexpected – a surrender to the adventure. 

The life lessons I have gleaned from this trip, I have discovered, have been both easy and very difficult to describe and to convey.  Some have been beyond words and even my photographs cannot capture the experience in a way that matches the emotional/spiritual experience. 

I hope to return to France and Belgium in two years, to do another tour with Norm and to learn more about these sacred fields.  Next time my focus will be on poets – the true trench poets of the Great War – and the lessons they have for a colonial teacher from the prairies, and mountain valleys,  of the Empire.