Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons

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Combat Journal for Place d'Armes - Scott Symons


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tea together (it wasn’t a “drink” — that was what happened in novels; and he smiled.) Beatrice had “died” a few months ago, heart failure, under an oxygen tent — and then been revived and come back to tell about it. She would know. He tried — between the lines — to tell her what he was really doing … tried to tell her that he knew that the novel was for real. He wanted to tell her of the hara-kiri explicit in it. But it was hard to acknowledge fear to someone who has already died and come back. That strengthened him again. And at 4:45 p.m. he was on board the Rapido …

      “the Rapido! the very name pillages me of more blood. Part of the mediocre anonymity of the New Nation. An evasion of identity. An abstraction. Might as well call it the ‘Quickie’ the Cdn Quickie.

      But that would be too American. At least the CPR has the guts to be the Chateau Champlain or the Royal York. Well the new name matches the new ticket booth matches the new Canadettes in the booth matches the Respectable Hick matches the New Flag matches the new entry to the train itself from the main floor of the thermal bathroom. I got a new respect for that great arched Roman Bath as I saw in contrast the board-and-batten triumphal arch all of eight feet tall through which we went to the train. Red-white-blue archlet not the old colours, grim old colours, full of gristle and gut, but these new candy-floss colours. (Oh, Christ, even the colours of my community are undergoing a change of life are being gelded!) At the arch entry a professional greeter welcomes us in. Rolls out the cheap red carpet for all of us members of the new lower middle-class Canadian royalty. Pathetic.Plush for the people.

      Why can’t I be proud of it? I should be. It is clean, competent, fresh, proper. It even has this mitigated concern for majesty the plush carpet, the stage-set entry, the self-effacing CN impresario to grimace us at entryway I suppose because it makes me by definition part of these New Canadettes. A sort of post-graduated folk-yeoman-king…. Hell why should I be proud of it? This isn’t what my people spent two centuries here for! Even if I wanted I have no right to be proud of it!

      Dumped my bags on the rack between cars #3012 and 3011 & slump into a seat lucky got one by a window, facing forwards (dislike riding backwards). Ten minutes to go catch up on my Notes.

      … 4:45 p.m., sharp, the station moves away from us leaving me exposed sudden to the body of my city out the back corner of my eye that becalmed Beaux-Arts bulk, rising like a series of improved Buckingham Palaces piled atop each other the Royal York, could only be she

      the long slit unended of Yonge Street like all our streets dissolved only by infinity

      with that wedding-cake turn-of-the-century prestige bank at the lower left-hand corner Front Street corner: a kind of gaudy bodyguard for the longeststreetintheworldthatisYongestreet ending only in our Ontario Lake District. Bank of Montreal, at that!

       with its back square upon me, the squat cube of our beer baron’s art centre: O’Keefe

      overtopping all these, the soft-nosed phallicity of Bank of Commerce circumspect, uncircumcised 32 stories of Canadian self-satisfaction

       the new National Trust tower, well below

      & below again, prickly up these closed commercial shops, the spired incisions of the old City of Churches Saints James & Michael &Metropole

       &, last link with the old city, Osgoode aside, St-Lawrence-Market- where-Jenny-Lind-sang

      pinched by the Victorian gabling from Jarvis Street East even gables in Toronto are Presbyterian spinsters’ eyes on my wayward trainside

      Gooderham ’n Worts stone distillery 1832: THERE is the REAL HOY culture Honest Ontario Yeoman Hoyman none of this nostalgic log cabin cult but cubic yards of squared stonework behind it, the high windows and gratuitous lantern of Tuscan Revival blocks (if only they would repaint these!)

      a minute, a panorama of 2 centuries passed to the free flowing muck of the Don River where Founding-Governor Simcoe’s wife fished for fresh salmon! What could she think now of this shit-sluice?

       Anal canal for 2 million congested citizens! And all the valleyside of it superways with some guilty pretence at parkland

      squat huddle of houses one, two, five, seven minutes the Emancipated Methodist Culture of Canada! Cdn squatters our national smugliness small, stolid bungalows; unlike anything in the Yewnited States smaller, thicker, squalider. Someday we’ll clear the land of these affluent slums in revenge for the lost White Pine we cleared first to house them….

      a trickle of land apologetic almost extinct landscape!

      redbrick belfry & white cornicings cuddle me kinetic to the land for spring of course: the Church at Dunbarton rural Ontario Ecclesiological as specifically Ontario as the French-Cdn parish church is Québec want to shout the news out to the traincar but am silenced by the sight of she-man opposite me

      glut of bungalettes again more modern now

      the Ugliest City in Ontario easy laureate: Oshawa cartown

      Queen Anne’s Lace, Milkweed pod, St. John’s Wort all the sun flushed earthenware of Ontario winter garden of the open fields (want to shout “do you see these? look our winter garden …” but the eyes in front of me are deaf) snow-pocked field furrows sudden woodland shimmers bronze of wintered beechleaves

      at horizon spruce palisade (sharp eyes, like those spinster gables!) alerts me to the orchard that must arrive & cedar hedge, overgrown, and hip-rooved bulky barn, stone root house, & same stone foundations to the blockhouse home red-and-white brick trimmed that completes this Chateau-fort of our HOYman. Massive, impenetrable, us! Nowhere else in our wide bloody world but Ontario Southern Ontario: Home damn it, and blessings

      more bungalows distress the site unworthy, unworthy God UNWORTHY offspring

      Spiresides Port Hope & on the knoll behind, overlording the factories beneath its notice almost but not quite, Cdn Eton (for better and for worse) Trinity College School vestige of the disestablished upper Canadian Anglican Genteel State (but choose your enemy then this or the bungalettes! Sweet choice.)

      that impasse resolves sudden with the grace notes in conscientiously squared lines between the great cubed fieldstones that amass an eternal yeoman stone Georgian home Canadian Fabergé, these stone houses: cameos out of rich stone-sown earth to clear those near generations thrust abruptly by now to be restituted in only a retroactive nostalgia for tourists and the New Nation: as though killed for a better Resurrection. Each one still a gem legacy rebuking the preflab culture around it Cobourg & now the dark.

      How well I know this route our Ontario Front, Niagara to Montreal 500 miles of us. Ontario Foundation line, and front door to our estate of ½ a million square miles. In each town,


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