Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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& Trenton … where the stonework changes from fieldstone to limestoniness … from freckles to garrison grey. & the Trent waterway debouches from Georgian Bay into Lake Ontario. Where Champlain canoed (idiot adventurer!) four centuries ago to found our empire. Outside the window, in that dark, all my entrails rolling under us now —
the great slice of limestone into Kingston, that grey canyon cut by the highway down into the valley of the old capital town of the Canadas — Kingston … where I walked that afternoon in November — to have the pleasure of seeing that unsung Ontario Trinity … St.Andrew’s Presbytery — the best of Ontario stonework; Elizabeth Cottage — the loveliest Walter Scott gothic; & (aptly Anglican) Okill’s Folly — the most splendiferous Regency manor — now the residence of the Principal of Queen’s Univ … all within a few hundred yards of each other — & was as joyous as if I had walked from La Place de la Concorde to the Louvre to La Sainte Chapelle; & had wanted to take a whip to the passers-by who didn’t make obeisance to these splendours.& why not — infraction against beauty is a crime against the state!
Of course the Penitentiary … Child’s King Arthur come ironically true, with its busy turrets … & the Military College (dare one still call it “Royal” — because that too will go soon enough — we’ll rechristen it the Federal Military College … surreptitiously! — and then by Order-in-Council)
the old #2 route thence to Ganonoque’s Golden Apple — laden with stonehouses and flowers spurting out of stone roadcut canyons …. & that day, it was February 28, when my wife & I sunbathed on the front porch of the deserted summer cottage, over the Thousand Islands, after returning from Amurrica — laughing at the legend of the frozen North (the look on the mongrel dog’s face, & then his master’s, when he saw us there!) The Ontario Front … Giant sentinel Mulleins stalking the land still in dried khaki above the white field beds. I know just where the climax oak and the hickory start again, near Kingston
… Oh, out that window is all of me underfoot. Out that window is inside me, always. That can’t be taken away. Can it? & now it is dark … I can see the Macdonald-Cartier “Highway” (damn the official term “Freeway” — it sounds like some boxtop prize … or, closer to the truth, a come-on to the Yank tourists) and its load of cattle-cars … all bypassing this Front, happily for the Front, unhappily for them … because suddenly the people that made the land disappear, under the asphalt and the speedometer.
The lights of the great Du Pont factory outside Brockville — and I pray that our lakeside won’t become like that of the American lakefront or Toronto … a shambles of hotdoggeral and gimcrap, and factories:because Lake Ontario may be the American back door, but it is our front door. Our garden. Then Upper Canada Village … which warns me that our history is now under glass … or under the St. Lawrence Seaway — and that this is but a sop to our vestigial historic consciences.After all, the Village is under the supervision of the provincial tourist department! QED. Goddam it.
So — I have a nostalgia. For my land, and its people. I’m a romantic. A sin in this era of belated Canadian positivism. I cry “too little for the sensibility,” when all our intellectuals moan “too little for their minds.” Too bad! I love my land. & damn their dry eyes. Detesticulate.
The home in Iroquois, where we were received for lunch … bad 1920’s Art Nouveau with a painting of an Irish setter on velvet over the fireplace — & the look on the man’s face, he was from the West, when I told him there was no sound in our East like the prairie meadowlark … I thought he was going to kiss me … but he got me another drink instead, unasked & we loved each other across the ages. &then quarrelled over politics. But meadowlark still sang.
Oh, yes, goddam it — I love my land … & I love my people. Still.Unpardonable crime in this age of “cool culture” & commissions. Or is it simply untenable fidelity? The latter has it, of course. So, I’ll love, &go under, hating those who so conscientiously kill my love …
Abruptly I am grilled … a cold sear of bright grilling me — grilling my flesh all bloodless bright red — Hate: of a sudden hate has me, has won … carries me off bodiless in triumph. Jerk me forward to catch this rape in the act, before too late — before I dissolve before I detonate. Make notes, ward off the evil eye now. What happened? What in this Hell happened? Go back & piece the evidence together. First — Where am I? & then sink back as I see … the train had stopped, lurched my eyes back into the traincar … Back in? No! — out: train swallowed me out of my land, smothered me away from my earth … dispersed me under the grill of neonessent light, those candy floss red seats — at once compressing and atomizing me. Anteus bereft … Christ — in a hot sweat I need a pee. & heave me into the aisle, into — “Hello Hugh — you look as though you need a tonic” — I look up to find the soft laughing eyes of Jack Greg … we speed to the bar-car.Thank God it’s him … someone I can want to see. Fellow publishing house man. Feverish in delight I leech him of the blood the Rapido has just haemorrhaged out of me … squandered. & over a martini I don’t want we giggle indecorously about the Great Auk the Royal Ontario Museum has just acquired (both bird-watchers!) Positively clenching the padded seats with our buttockry …
“God knows that’s what the museum needed — a Great Auk!— the one thing all museums need, and lack … ” and I catch Greg’s lilting gawkwardness out my eye-corner in a feline complicity of joy … we both mould the seat pads in an accredited squirm of delight, harvesting their Great Auk.
Greg — “It was bought from Vassar College” — a burst of sweet gigglement again.
Me — “God — our provincial Auk came from Vassar!”
Greg — “What’s more, it was Audubon’s Great Auk.”
That is too much — we eye each other openly, as silent upon our peak … More laughter. & then the Great Auk has done its service. Has bound us as one flesh, refurbished — & can be discarded, like any dildo.I stop — suddenly aware how nearly the laughter has consummated my self-expenditure. So close to depleting my entire reserve of credulity now, of faith, of available energy. Suddenly wary — I nurse my last ounce of resistance. Look around at the bar-car. At this new world of plausible plush. I’ll have to be careful.
Joined by two of Greg’s friends … an Englit don & wife from the University of Toronto. A typical Englit combination — the wife has a beard, bass voice, & three testicles. She is a TV producer when she isn’t producing hubby. He is a falsetto — visually if not audibly; as slight as his wife is muscle-bound, no beard because no chin to carry one … I bethink me of the Great Auk again … Thank God for the Great Auk — after all, the provincial museum is part of the provincial university — it can do yeoman service therein. Audubon’s Great Auk, bought from the girls of Vassar …. It will just be sufficient.
Jabberwocky for half-an-hour, as I keep withholding me from the decor of the bar-car … And then the Englits are leaving … wife carrying hubbie off by the scruff of his neck. Mrs. doesn’t like being in a “beer hall.” Incredible — but so … But who am I to laugh — because I can’t stand the place either, although for different reasons