After introducing Jane’s Garden in last post, I wanted to share another building on campus that has gained an addition to its old form. It is the Physics and Astronomy Building. Sadly for it, sharing a corner on campus with the impressive University College that looks like a castle and Middlesex College with a gothic-style clock tower, the original Natural Sciences building seems a little plain at a distance. This changes, however, when you get up close. Considered the better-built of the campus’s two 1920’s buildings, the Physics and Astronomy building is filled with quirky details you have to search for to find.
Opened in 1924, the original Natural Sciences and University College buildings are the two oldest academic buildings existing at Western today. When we arrive at Physics and Astronomy 98 years after its opening, we are greeted by a set of original carved faces like the one shown above. On the featured image, the carved heads appear only as dots along the lower banks of windows flanking the front entry. There is a bit of information about the carvings posted inside the building shown below.
Each of the side doors and the main entrance are also decorated with equally surprising carvings. A closer look at one of the smaller side doors is shown above. We can see leaves, flower buds, a sun with a face, and is the middle one in the bottom photo to the left a pie?
Like the Biological and Geological Sciences building, the Physics and Astronomy building contains an inner courtyard, but here a $25 million renovation in 2012 converted the space to make it interior to the building. Much of the exterior façade was kept. The new space serves for functions and events, and there are a small number of tables for students to use.
In the featured image at the top we see four rows of windows, the lower one appearing to sink into the ground. From where the interior photos were taken (seen below), we are in the middle of the building on the second level. In the next photo we can see down to the lower floor, and the top of the photograph shows a staircase leading to the upper levels. The last photo shows the upper level.
Exterior landscape renovations were completed in 2021, connecting the exterior space of University College and Physics and Astronomy is a large pedestrian avenue with exterior seating.
Writing teaches us many things, and the necessity of patience is foremost. We must wait with our story. Be patient to learn its ending. We must be compassionate with our characters. Be patient to learn who they are. We must manage our expectations about our narrative skills. Be patient as we practice, almost endlessly, it seems. Be patient with how much we do, how fast we work. Protect the creative energy. It may seem that we are always waiting, never fully reaching the thing we are trying to get to. But when it comes, it can come fast—the story rushing at us, overwhelming, and leading us to wish it away again.
In these past two years none of us has really known what the next year will be like, or the next month, or week. The uncertainty crawls into the belly, lives like a parasite in our guts. Meanwhile, in our most-human and paradoxical mind, we struggle with the everyday mundaneness of living, working, studying, cooking, eating, reading, fighting, loving, sleeping, laughing, crying, and doing-everything-at-home boredom.
November 10, 2021. University of Western Ontario. London, Canada.
Regardless of whether we are writers or not, artists or not, inventors or not, there is a rhythm to human life that moves us naturally into balance of doing and retreating. We are driven to oscillate emotionally and intellectually. We move between states, and this movement is where the creative static of insight, growth and self-expression comes from.
Some of you know that this writer is also a student, learning how be a mathematician. This is a strange statement “be a …”. It is strange, in part, because “to be” in the English language has such finality to it, a decisive closure that denies the precariousness of identification. Here, strange is the best word to fit against that finality, putting our sense of being in partnership with alienation. It reminds us that identity is a spectrum. We oscillate in our relationship with our own self, being and knowing ourselves as different people across a lifetime, sometimes even being several versions of ourselves in only one day.
To “be a mathematician” is also strange—mathematical culture is itself strange. It carries with it a layer of expectation from the outside world that the people inside it must be a stereotype of the anti-social genius slowly going mad with their own inability to connect with others. Think of the popular movies A Beautiful Mind (Nash) or The Imitation Game (Turing) that played up the stereotypes, misrepresenting the real-life people. To be is to both be a part of something and to be apart from it, never fully inhabiting the mythos of archetype, but not fully stepping away either.
October 15, 2021. University of Western Ontario. London, Canada.
There is a bit of anxiety within institutionalized math culture to uphold that genius-level expectation, even while exerting a high level of self-control to avoid the other stereotype of being socially inept. In so many ways, a math lecture is the opposite of those I had in the English department. Math: lectures are quiet, students are reluctant to speak, and there seems to an embarrassment about process, as though we can’t try and fail, that we should instantly know and agree and hide our ignorance or doubt, and therefore this process must be modelled in departmental colloquia by speaking over everyone’s head and otherwise being reluctant to talk with a general audience about math stuff. English: outbursts of passionate hyperbole and theoretical nit-picking are normalized and expected, no one is right and must be challenged, therefore this process must be modelled by being contentious in departmental meetings and controversial in interviews with the local press. (Drama was billed as part of the job if one stayed in humanities academia past the undergrad.) Math: this is what it is to be analytical, logical, and reasonable. English: this is what it is to be creative and people-focused. There is a pageantry of belonging, of acting the part. Underneath, we are always us and aware of our complexity, but we are less likely to let go of the costumes and masks—to come as we are—when we feel our place in the group is threatened. Thus, the caricature of difference and difference-making persists. In academics, where inclusion is offered to a fraction of those who pursue it, the game can be intense.
September 7, 2021. University of Western Ontario. London, Canada.
One thing, and this began before the pandemic arrived and upended our lives but has now sped it up, is that the dichotomies we have created for human identity and self-expression in the public space are changing. Some of it is the process of self-preservation. Those of us who felt happy removed from the world, best when left alone, have been joyful in the cyclic reunions with the world when we are afforded them amidst the waves of pandemic. For those I know who always seemed busy with the outside world, rarely making anything for themselves, creative work has become a place to put their excess energy during times of isolation.
When in-person classes resumed for some of the university this fall, something was different in my math classes. A greater delight to talk about math with each other, to ask questions, to use the colours, not just white chalk on black boards or black markers on white boards. Teachers seemed to enjoy students more, delight with their learning, seek response and interruption in lecture (no more muted and expressionless black zoom windows). And out of doors, cameras—real equipment or just the cell phone—catching a pic of the morning light, the first snow, the turning leaves in autumn. More of us remembering to grab those small, sustaining things that help us endure the hours of another lock-down.
On a family day trip to Niagara Falls. Canada. Early September 2021.
I walk past this place in the photograph several days a week, often enough that I have begun to not see it. To not see the tree, the contrast of colour with the small burst of red fruit against the green vines, the building behind it, the concrete and autumn leaves. But this day, there was something about the light, or the mood I was in, so rather than not notice, I saw Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” instead. Or, perhaps it is more honest to say that I didn’t see this either, but felt it and knew immediately where the feeling came from.
photographic reproduction of “The Kiss” from Wikipedia (public domain)
Klimt gives the lovers a natural world of flowers and vines and sunlight that holds them as they entwine with each other. There is support, gentleness and shelter in their pose. A yearning to be close, but their mutual embrace feels unhurried, in some steady state of forever. There is care taken to postpone the kiss which itself is not painted.
Talbot College, University of Western Ontario. London, Canada.
* oil industry slang, a gypsy is a land surveyor who moves frequently due to changing employment
Gypsy
We arrive almost by night,
jamming lives and furniture
into homes others leave behind
the locals think us
a curiosity
new family in a dying prairie town
they draw to our
bright novelty
our iridescence
skimming a puddle, us
round bubbles
wafting through breezes
living in caravan.
We’ve no time in this constant
shifting to see fall-planted tulips
bloom in spring
to write more than a word
upon a napkin
at a highway restaurant
they never notice the
frayed threads of our lives
how they pull and tangle.
They forget that
when they welcomed us
they wanted entertainment—
not art—
seeing as they wanted to see
every I is
curved under its lid
its own perspective.
This is the show they watch:
hundreds more come
drilling holes, laying pipe
overturning earth
and time
and expectation
dropping dollars in their sweat
washing everything vibrant
as spring after first rain.
We mark their course
in both straight
and curving lines,
leading on
drawing away.
This is the show they see:
‘Fortune telling the like we’venever seen before—who could imagine dirtwas worth a thing?’
We survey distractions
predictions as full
as a prosperous moon
while the sun moves overhead
shifting shadows across a face of time
until they come to see us
through the dark.
Forgetting.
Hearing what they wanted
they trusted divination of
a crystal ball
sparkle more believable than truth
they shudder
empty when corrections
become necessary,
forgetting
refraction of a convex sphere
is a broken line of sight.
Enlightened
impoverished by the psychic,
demanding compensation
with stones
crying over sons
saying we stole.
Forgetting
who danced with us
craving the taste of oil
carried on our lips.
We are gone before
the iridescence shifts
light moves
colour changes
in the bend.
We move on,
leaving the old and withered ones
to settle with
scars upon the land
to rumble resentment in their
sleep and doze on bitterness.
Some version of this poem was workshopped at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words several years ago and a request was made to publish it. I am putting it up on the blog rather than leaving it in some forgotten file on an old computer.
The featured image, like some of the header images on the blog, is a photograph I took somewhere between Regina and Weyburn in southern Saskatchewan. The shots were part of a sequence of posts entitled “Photo Series from a Moving Car” published here from August 27, 2013 to September 26, 2013. You can access them via the “Vintage Play” drop down menu on the right side bar.
Be it the influence of home renovation, or the challenges of writing, I have been thinking a lot about structure this summer. Whether it is an abode or a narrative, what we create is largely determined by how we put it together.
I had my first encounter with literary poetry when I was a teenager in high school. I have only two strong lasting impressions of this: I did not like poetry; I did not like the poems that compare women to flowers, fading beauty, or traps for honey bees.
I’ve been waiting for the pink-blossomed Siberian crab to show it’s stuff. Here she is.
The mauve-pink Bergenia cordifolia has been blooming for about a week now. I snapped this when the flowers were fresher than they are now, but kept it for rose-coloured reflection. The common name for this plant, elephant ears, derives from its large and leathery-tough leaves.
Another update from the Saskatchewan road. Swathed canola waiting for the combine. Forty-five days prior these three white buildings were floating in a field of yellow, blooming canola.
Forty-five days prior I caught an image of this barn. At the beginning of August the fields were green, the canola was blooming yellow. Now the fields are their variant shades of yellow, the wheat straw is the lightest shade–nearly blonde–and the flax (the blue-flowering crop) is the darkest, almost orange. Harvest is here, the brown is upon us.
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