15 Words

I'm almost to page 200 of the Seven Types of Ambiguity. I went to the bookstore yesterday to buy the book but then didn't and when I was reading it last night, I decided I didn't like it that much. I'm in the third section/part/ambiguity. Empson says that this ambiguity "may profitably be divided into those which, once understood, remain an intelligible unit in the mind, those in which the pleasure belongs to the act of working out and understanding...and those in which the ambiguity works best if it is never discovered". Angela, in part 3, is telling her story but also trying to work out what happened with Simon. I think the reason that I don't like it as much is that it is really straight narrative (backstory) and I found part one more compelling in the way the story was told. I'm also not completely buying the "representation of the prostitute" in this book. It's a great plot device but...Maybe I'm being negative because I'm considering not finishing the book now - the fates are on the doorstep...the book is due back at the library...I didn't decide to buy it...Maybe I'll take it back to the library and check out again in a few days...

I've also been thinking about the two words from the brainstorming bag that I've left lying on my desk: Lair & Sigmoid. I have to move out of my office again soon...so they'll have to go back in the bag for the move. I may never find them again. Here are fifteen more words I may never find again. I'll see what I can do with them over the next week:

penguin
token
unicorn
moil
drop
corpse
bulkiness
attract
whisker
insistence
eyelash
bearded
spur
diagram
ice cream

Just typing them released some thoughts and associations (animals, facial hair, what D&G say about Willard, how I ate some ice cream recently and it wasn't so bad but wasn't that great and 'moil', what a word!) but I have to go driving now...

Psychonav 3 (3 days)

I totally screwed up the navigation on Saturday. I was going to Oakville. I even had a map! But I refused to use it except for the fine details at the end –the street and house number and I was stymied several times in my attempt to navigate and manoeuvre through the suburbs. I had to backtrack finally and use the QEW which I wanted to avoid. I blame the suburbs. That’s easy! No, I blame myself because I was too rushed and felt nothing as I was driving. It was all in my head and not in my heart. I was too logical and I forgot to calculate Bronte Creek. I assumed that because it was the suburbs that it would be all logic. I was ok with the reason (a bridal shower) for having to go to what ended up being the northern outer edges of Oakville closish to Milton. I was kind of curious as I always am about families and bridal/baby shower rituals. I learned a new one this weekend – that during the gift opening, you present a gift to the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first (the bride-to-be should be so lucky!) giver. “It’s a tradition!” shouted the maid-of-honour/hostess. I have a sense that you could make traditions up on the spot and justify them with that phrase. But the route to marriage and the future with someone else is also subject to psychonavigation. The bride-to-be on Saturday was lovely and assured and held all the babies of her best friends with confidence. At the last shower I attended (in April), the bride-to-be and the rest of us played a game in which we were blindfolded, spun and then had to stick a flower on a larger-than-lifesize drawing of the groom. We had to try to press the flower against the paper close to his heart. A senior with a deft touch won the game. I won something too (a pedicure kit) for having a special mark on the bottom of my chair.

Why am I so determined these days to avoid the QEW and the 401 and those other superhighways? I think it has to do, in part, with pacing and concentration. It’s also aesthetic. I like driving down Concession 6 W in Flamborough because it’s kind of a narrow road and the trees arch over it. I like Gore Road too (except for the speed limit which is 60 km.). A few weeks ago it was all lilac-lined and I could drive by smell. There’s the roundabout on Townline Road and the black bridge. I stopped by the side of the road on Sunday to top up the oil (the car was making a clicking/ticking sound) and I was completely alone for about 10 minutes. The big wind – prelude to a coming thunderstorm – blew the high grasses all around me. It was hot. The grasses were five and six feet tall. They were in full bloom. A Fortinos bag in my trunk billowed away out of my reach as I fumbled for the funnel, the rag, the red bottle. I could feel there and then that I was on the right track.

On Friday morning, I took the GO bus to Toronto and let go of the driving. The navigation belonged to someone else. I read over some notes I’d made from an article I’d read which I intended to refer to in my conference paper that afternoon. I felt pressured and tired and I didn’t pay much attention to what how and where we were driving. The only thing I really noticed was that though it was just after 7am, we were moving all the time. And this turned out to be (apparently) the driver’s preoccupation. It seemed that it didn’t matter where we went, what route we took, what mattered was that we were moving. We all have our reasons for moving. At one point, I looked up and saw an unfamiliar building and briefly wondered about it. At one point, I looked up and saw Pearson Airport and wondered, why are we here? It was a very strange route to take but we kept moving and then we were going south on the 427 and then were on the Gardiner/Lakeshore, the Lakeshore, York Street backtracking to Bay and arriving at Union Station at 8am. We had ranged all over the GTA and made it to our destination in less than an hour during morning rush hour. While we were on the 427, I counted the number of World Cup flags flying from cars moving in the opposite direction. There were an incredibly small number – only 21 out of thousands of cars. Actually, only 20, because one was an Oilers’ flag. I wondered about this. I wondered also why so many people were supporting Switzerland until I realized that they were England fans who fly the St. George’s Cross (not sure why –always thought that was the Welsh flag) – definitely this is the most popular flag next to Italy and Portugal on the 427 at 7:40 am. I can’t read all of the flags though…just don’t know what they are.

Getting Past Father’s Day

Of course, I’ve been dreading Father’s Day for the past month or more…ever since the signs appeared in stores, I guess…the day after Mother’s Day. My Dad was never one to fully embrace the tribute day…he didn’t really care about holidays and celebrations that much and told me last year not to buy him a birthday present but that might have been because he could feel that he was dying (and wouldn’t need anything like a new shirt or an Artie Shaw CD with Kitty Kallen singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” – which is what they played on Jazz FM while I was driving to Waterloo yesterday – should have known…1946…Artie Shaw…my dad’s fav.) though the rest of us didn’t know it at the time…

Of course, I totally felt like a suck even worrying about Father’s Day. There are lots of people around me without fathers who blithely breeze by the day without a flicker, or maybe there is a flicker and I just don’t know about it at the time…after all, I didn’t exactly go around telling everybody how I felt either…maybe I’ll ask them now that it’s over and done with till next year…when, I assume, I’ll feel differently.

Fatherhood looms large in Seven Types of Ambiguity. I am proud to say I read up to page 106 this weekend. I still doubt that I’ll finish it by June 24 but I’ve been thinking about buying the book as I really would like to finish it now. I don’t know how I did all that reading actually. I was away all day Friday and it was a very busy weekend. I’m well into Part Two, the second ambiguity, I guess, which William Empson in his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) says “occurs when two ideas which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously”. I don’t know what the word is yet. I haven’t even thought about it.

Part 2 is a first-person narrative by Joe, who is Sam’s father. So far, Sam & Joe haven’t interacted much (though Sam is reading Winnie the Pooh when he and Joe have their conversation) but Joe talks a lot about how he is defined as a father by the people around him especially under the circumstances (I’ll keep it cryptic so I don’t spoil things for anyone who’s also reading or wants to read the book). Joe also seems intent on escaping from his own history and his own father’s legacy even as he seems to be playing-out the same drama as his father played (on page 104, even his eyebrows are conspiring to be like his father’s). At least that’s what I think…Joe’s being drawn into something dangerous now by Sid who also has a father issue…Hey, maybe the word is ‘father’.


The ambiguities which Empson saw as “stages of advancing logical disorder” are playing-out. I like the way Perlman can tell stories even through this increasing disorder which is, I guess, realism, in a sense. The only things that have really bugged me about the book so far are that Simon’s dog is named Empson which is dumb and that the female characters consist (so far) of a hooker with a heart-of gold, a dressed-for-success object of desire and an out-of-touch working-class mom. Reading Seven Types of Ambiguity is also interfering with my reading of Ivanhoe which is stopped at a very exciting moment…De Bracy is issuing his ultimatum to Rowena. She cracks and emotes and we see De Bracy waver – so we can see him as a conflicted character…will he play it safe and go for the straightforwardly evil path…or will he embrace complexity in a complex world? And where the hell is Ivanhoe…the book’s named after him and all he’s done so far is fight and faint!

Two or more Types of Ambiguity

I've had Eliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity out of the library for 4 1/2 weeks now and I'm only on page 47. It's a 623 page book so I'm going to have to get going if I'm going to finish it by the due date (June 24). It's unlikely. So, will it be just another book that I haven't finished reading because it has to go back to the library? And what's the significance of that? Does not finishing = not liking or valuing or enjoying? Probably not, in my case just because it takes me so long to read or maybe because I get distracted and read other stuff in the middle of the reading of the 623 page novel or maybe it's just too big and I can't carry it around with me so it ends up sitting in my office for a week just because I can't fit it in my bag to take home with me and read 'at my leisure'. I like the Perlman book. It's interesting and a bit of a page turner at the part that I'm at right now with a climactic kidnapping etc. yet I don't feel desparate to move ahead. I know what's happening in the book right now so I can just leave it and then say...ok, what's next. I really like the second person narration in Part 1 which is the only part I've read (I'm about 2 pages away from Part 2). It's second person so it's really bizarre and circular in a weird way. You can also get confused and think that the narrator (a shrink) is talking to you (the reader) so that's compelling and interesting. I don't mind percolating this book. I feel absolutely no sense of identification with the characters, I don't think. I'm not with them so maybe that's why I can't move forward very committedly. I don't think it matters. I'm just worried that I may only get to page 63 or 72 or optimistically, 88 by June 24 and not really have read the book. How much of a novel do you have to read to have read it? I dread buying the book mostly because I have so many books already that just sit there, mostly finished but unreread. I'm not much of a collector of books (except I like photo books).

26 Hours in North York

Psychonav 2

I wanted to know more. I got Gene Ammarell’s Bugis Navigation out of the library. I’m always surprised when books like these are so readily available. I checked and within ten minutes had the book in my hand. It’s a kind of magic. As is navigation.




Navigation requires macinnongati or an 'undeviating heart'

The navigator’s meditation = ‘arrival ensured, then depart’

prior to departure one surrenders one’s material and spiritual self to a higher power (the Bugis are Muslim)

the process of the meditation is samananita ‘making it as if it has already been seen’ or visualizing the entire journey:

things and people you expect to meet
places you know which you imagine might be similar

If the trip cannot be visualized, if no mental image appears, it is postponed (usually only for a few hours but can be for one or two days).

Danger can be anticipated with mata ati (‘the liver’s eye’ or what we’d call ‘the mind’s eye’)

Self-empowerment in the face of the unknown and feared.

I’m trying to think about how much I do this already, if at all. I know that I have a very hard time letting someone know when I will arrive and that I am often late arriving because I feel guilty and pressured and say a time that then turns out to be completely ridiculous.

Psychonavigation

I’ve been away. Not far, but certainly ‘out of normal range’. And I’ve been wandering without a map again…in a rental car. Reading the signs and wondering. The rental car was a much smaller car than I’m used to driving so I read the space differently and parked all wonky the first few times but then revelled in parallel parking which is so much easier with a small car. I did it enthusiastically…all the time. I didn’t realize that the car had a CD player until after I’d left home, after I’d picked up the car so I hurriedly burned 2 CDs in my office before I left town. As I did a lot of driving, I listened to these 2 CDs repeatedly over the four days I was away. I’m still humming those tunes and singing those songs and seeing the ballet and the play in my head. Does intense musical repetition create a kind of muscle memory in the brain and the mouth and the heart and the hands? I listened to Anita O’Day everyday and a sweet and simple California-sound jazz song “I Want to Sing a Song” became my theme song:


Sometimes when I get blue
I want to sing a song
So I do

And sometimes when I feel gay
Another song I sing
That’s my way

There are those who fret over things that have passed
I forget

If I’m found without friends
A song is what my heart recommends

And if I’m lost in a crowd
I want to sing a song

Long and loud

Loud and long to show that I love someone too

I want to sing a song
Just for you

I want to sing a song
Just for you

I was out for the evening one of the evenings I was away and at the end of it, I gave a ride to a couple of guys who were going my way and on the way back we talked for the ½ hour drive about driving without a map. One of the guys told me that this was called psychonavigation and that the Bugis of Indonesia (fishers and traders) have perfected this skill. What I was really interested in was how they read their environment and in reading up on this later, I found that they not only read wind, weather, clouds, all the stuff you’d guess but they read the phosphorescence on the water and the lightning on the horizon. They memorize algorithms that predict tide activities, know the stars, bless the voyage with coins and an egg in the centre of a basket of uncooked rice and “Captains will also engage in "meditative visualization" of their journey, literally willing their ships (through the power of their thought) the ability to reach their destination.”



Is this what I do? Is this ‘ranging’ like a dog, like I do, banking on memories and feelings to get me (in this case) from North York to Waterloo without a map and without resorting to the 401? And why, why do I do it? I swear, this time, I revisited/passed childhood-haunts-I'd-forgotten-about almost instinctively - "Oh, yes, it's there I think", I thought and it was there. Where do I think I’m going? For what am I fishing?

Choosing Kitchener over Guelph