2011.01.29 — Paper, Scissors, Rock continues...

P.S.R Begun and continued.

And there definitely is a poetical structure to the prose, and I don't mean just the writing on these two pages, but also in how themes return to the stage, in a pattern of growth, or, more precisely, growth's inevitability to be expressed, or do die. This citation shows Decter's return to the issue of living in a patriarchy.


Ann Decter.
Paper, Scissors, Rock.
Vancouver
Press Gang Publishers, 1992. (Now McGilligan Books.)
ISBN: 0889740402.

I just want
you all
to get along.
Later that day Jane saw Phil back at square one. Intensive care unit.
Arms by his sides, impossibly still. A small hole in his throat, with a tube coming out. Completely so totally motionless.
Still lifedeath.
I just want
Her knees buckled
all of you
going down she grabbed her shins, held onto a crouch
to get
breathed as deep as she could
along.
Falsified air.
In the small waiting room, a social worker came looking for Jane.
"Are you the girl that had trouble in there?"
"Pardon?"
"You know, seeing someone very ill can be very difficult for some
people."
Jane smiled. Strange apparition, some people.
"I just got a little dizzy."
"Have you been into intensive care before? It can be hard the first time."
Peering into Jane's face. Placed a hand on Jane's knee.
Go away. Jane closed her eyes, raised a hand to her brow.
"Yes, I have. I have been in there before." I've been in here, I've been down the hall, I've been to the intensive care two floors up, I've whiled away hours in the cafeteria, I've held the cloth with the ice cubes, I've mopped his brow, I've arranged his house, I've driven day and night to get here and been dragged directly to this hospital upon arrival by Owen, because someone had to take over worrying, had to be responsible for caring, someone had to slip into the space Sophia escaped. Everything required it. Family. Hospital. Social workers. The whole damn system.
Everyone.
Jane opened her eyes and the woman was gone.

In a strict patriarchy, men maintain power by insisting that women show caring, give comfort, soothe wounds, assuage anger, and then devaluing emotion as weakness.
In a changing society, those drawing strength from new patterns feel the reimposition of the strictest forms as an alienation from themselves.
Slow spiritual death.
In a causal philosophy, the agent must be identified.
A box of chocolates.
In a philosophy of emotions, expectations must be assigned to the person that generated them.
Phil wanted to know his family would be alright.
Owen wanted to know his father would be alright.
Made Jane their agent.
A box of expectations.
Slice your way out.

Jane phoned Shulamit.
"He's back in intensive care."
"What happened?"
"He ate some chocolates and threw up. Something caught in his throat.
They had to do a tracheotomy."
Shulamit waited.
"I let him go. I was holding him, then I thought—what am I doing? This is a hospital, it's full of people who know what to do."
"So?"
"I guess I should have held him longer."
"Why?"
"So he wouldn't have choked."
"How do you know he wouldn't have choked?"
Jane was silent. "I don't."
"That better?"
"Yep. So how's Toronto?"
"The same. Colder. Crawling with droolers."
"Droolers?"
"Like what you just did. Dripping all over. Droolers. I went to an opening."
"Yeah?"
"Boxes. A whole room full of little boxes."
"What do you mean, boxes?"
"I mean boxes boxes. Small wood boxes, maybe eight inches across, painted inside, made into rooms—living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms."
"Good?"
"Drool. Decoration. All they're doing at the art college these days. I mean how interesting is a living room?"
"Well, if you think about it, it could be interesting" (85-7).

Paper, Scissors, Rock — Continues With Some Nice Writing & Tiny Fushigi*— 2010.12.27

I'm still not sure if I really like this book or not, but there are bits that are very good indeed.

I came across the following lines that resonated with me:

Eldest son of the eldest son in the autumn of a patriarch. Rational learning. Roles born into. And she, the connection to the ground. Roots, emotion, feeling.

In a strict patriarchy, men and women are opposites. Strength is a characteristic assigned to men. Weakness is a characteristic assigned to women.

Weakness is vulnerability.

Strength is invulnerability.

In a strict patriarchy, men maintain power through not exhibiting weakness. Women maintain vulnerability through possessing and acknowledging emotion.

In a strict patriarchy, some opposites attract.

Others remain in opposition.

Cowboy Stories. In the bones.

In a changing society society, those losing power cling to its harshest forms. Those who move beyond those forms live with a strength drawn from abandoning the logic of opposites(68).

And it wasn't until I began posting the above, and saw how it looked that I realized that it has managed to entangle itself in a poetry fushigi.

In goodreads there has been an intense discussion on a thread about what is and is not, properly, a poem. That discussion began with Shannon Marie's request for a critique on her poem 'Yes I want []', and the question she subsequently posed asking if it was a poem. Here's her very powerful (maybe) poem:

Yes, I want to be [ ] for the rest of my life. I want to feel empty in the acid of my center, never leaving the [ ] satisfied, with my gut broken into no boundaries and slushy beheadings. I want to see my collarbones there through the lens, gazing fondly at me, my parents and friends as they rack the rest of my protection around what matters most: my squishy paste heart, the tendons of my lungs extending their branches in the tundra undone. I want the world to accept me in this form I desire, collected inside, pressurizing my chamber till I’m blue in the face. I want to live like this because I know what it means. I know what it breathes, if breathing exists here at all. It chokes me without pain, lifeless death of a migrant maid in a rich man’s vacation rental no one ever sits in. Lying on the floor, carefully positioned with head resting on outstretched arm above her head, so as to not raise suspicion, Breaching every boundary a maid could ever see, by dying in the living room, a virgin un-believed. Yes, I want it, I want [ ] so no thing can ever touch me, never again being [ ] in my life.

The discussion meandered around it being/not being a prose-poem, prose, poem ad infinitum. I suggested that it was a koan, and thus moved it into a category outside of being either prose or poetry.

So, what makes this a fushigi?

Well, it is most certainly a tiny one, but what makes it a fushigi is that while participating in an intense discussion about what is and/or is not a poem, this book I am reading, Paper, Scissors, Rock is written in a style that by one of the definitions would categorize it as a poem: specifically the method of breaking the lines on the right, which stood out to me when I blogged the citation above, even though it is more pronounced on the printed page. And even when I read that definition I did not make the association to this book. So, I have participated in a great discussion about what is a poem while unwittingly reading a prose-novel that is by someone's 'proper' definition of a poem, probably a poem. The universe is trying to make a point, I think, that writing is what it is.

And what is even funnier, is that I began this post because of Ann Decter's ideas, the style of presentation, and prose. "In a changing society society, those losing power cling to its harshest forms. Those who move beyond those forms live with a strength drawn from abandoning the logic of opposites," is a lovely bit of prose. (Or is it poetry?)

Paper, Scissors, Rock — Continues with a Fushigi* Cave — 2010.12.19

I began Paper, Scissors, Rock on 2010.10.06. I just finished Part II "Evidence," and though I had strong ambivalence about this book when I began it, it is beginning to grow on me. In the closing balance of Part II the description of the general strike was very compelling. The moving between perspectives and time worked very well.

But I have come to blog the 2nd fushigi this book has provided within  30 pages. It begins with my reading, this afternoon, an e.mail that I received from MH, a Goodreads friend, two days ago:



Within the e.mail MH links me to a story she wrote, called 'Bear.' It is an excellent short story about a woman living with a golden furred bear in a cave. I highly recommend it. It has some very nice imagery, and a great feel to it. For example:

Day Twenty-one

I’ve set up housekeeping and Bear loves to watch. I made a pine broom. I sweep the hard dirt floor. There are bones from the bodies of small animals that came here to be eaten. Bear is happy about this. He tells me this by carving an X on one of the tiny skulls. He says that a mountain cat must have lived here and that her maternal power and the power of her eating small animals fill the place. All of this is still in the cave and don’t I feel it?

“No,” I say.

Later, after eating supper, I picked up Paper, Scissors, Rock and finished the balance of Part II "Evidence." This is a well written chapter that culminates with a general strike being broken in small town Canada by government sanctioned and paid violence. The actions within this chapter switch between the denouement of the strike being broken and the experiences of the narrator in a later time reflecting on it — the writing is complicated. However, it closes with:

Jane runs a hand across the soft moss and remembers. Removes her shoes and lays her feet on the moss. Remembers. A cave. The cave. She scrambles down the path to the water, turns left and leaps from rock to rock. Up behind the old pump, climbing, childlike. Hand food hand foot. Sliding sideways on her ass. A cleft in the rock. The cave. Gene. Gene is here, somehow, in the cave. She climbs in. A cleft in the rock. Slate. Lava rock. Cold. Cool moss beneath her. Soft.
"Gene," she says, faltering. "I found the cave."
... Listen. "You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine." Up up up sky and trees.
Blue.
Safe cave.
Cheek against. Stone. Cold.
Tonight.
Tonight maybe Jane will walk to the phone booth across from the beach, put in the quarters she has been saving and call the wild woman, back here in the big city where everything is always happening. Maybe Jane will tell her about trees and children, moss and caves, about Clementine and her father. "Who knows," says Jane quietly, 'maybe she'll be listening"(57).

So, as you can see, there is the nice 'cave'-link in the two stories. But also a bit more. In Paper, Scissors, Rock Jane is to 'call the wild woman, ...'[my emphasis].

From 'Bear' there is a similar description given to a women. From "Bear", picking up from where 'Bear' left us.

No,” I say.

Bear will not let me take the bones out of the cave. He lets me arrange them in a pattern around the cave’s perimeter. He says he never thought of that and that I am a clever witch.

And finally, while the writing between the two snippets is very different, you will find that the feel is similar in a way. Not the same, but that they evoked, for me anyone, a similar feeling.

Paper, Scissors, Rock — Begun with, No Gout About It, a Fushigi* — 2010.12.06

Last weekend I bought from my local used bookstore, Renaissance Books, Paper, Scissors, Rock.


Ann Decter.
Paper, Scissors, Rock.
Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1992.
(Now McGilligan Books.)
ISBN: 0889740402.


It was one of those strange finds, in that I was in a part of the store I don't usually visit, but when I did this book jumped out at me — and not because it was at the right eye-level or because of the cover - which I couldn't see when it caught my eye. I walked to the area, glanced at the top shelves, lowered my eyes and 'found' this book. I bought the book without even looking at one word of it, or even the cover, because it being there 'for me' was a fushigi*-like incident that had its nascence the previous Friday at work.

On that particular Friday it came to pass that a rather unpleasant job assignment-choice needed to be made between my self and a co-worker who doesn't like to make choices. Without thinking about it, the 'game' Rock-Paper-Scissors popped into my head. I have no idea why. I mean, I've always found the concept fun and open to the possibility of abetting synchronistic happenings, but I don't remember having used it to make a decision at work ever. Now that seems unreasonable to me, but I certainly haven't used it since beginning my current job 10 years ago. Anyway, perhaps my unconscious saw R-P-S (Jan-ken-pon) as a quick way to avoid the whole time consuming see-sawing about who would get the worst job tug-o-war. I am too busy at work right now to waffle around false-sincerity delaying the making of a choice that may have more unpleasant consequences for the one person than the other.


Now things get funny, because my co-worker claimed to have never understood R-P-S!??! Note, he didn't say "I've never heard of it," but "I don't understand it." 

"Okay," I say without, I hope, any real condescension, "I'll show you." ¶ "But I don't understand it." ¶ "No problem. Rock is represented by a closed fist." I show him, "and paper by a flat hand and scissors this way." ¶  He shakes his head. "I just don't get it." ¶ "Scissor cuts paper, so scissors 'beat' paper. Paper covers rock, so paper 'beats' rock, and rock breaks scissors, so rock 'beats' scissors." ¶ "I don't get it." ¶ "Okay. Trust me. When you do it, you'll get it. On the count of three, with your hand, pick 'rock,' 'paper,' or 'scissors'. I'll do the same, and whoever wins gets to pick first." ¶ "I don't get it." ¶ "Just do it!"

And he did — and his rock beat my scissors. Sigh! (Doubt if he 'got it,' though.)

Anyway, that night while driving home on my usual route I noticed a sign that had two of the three R-P-S words. The only reason I noticed them was because of my co-worker's over wrought reaction to understanding, let alone playing, R-P-S. Nothing special in that, but simply that my mind-eye noticed something I've driven by many times, and never noticed before.

But then the following day I found the book Paper, Scissors, Rock. So, I bought it.

Yet another prompt to blog yet another fushigi came Wednesday. I drove to a work related lunch meeting within the city of Vancouver at a place I'd never been to before. While driving home, I was amused to see a window sign that also had two of the three R-P-S words in fancy yellow print: Paper Rock Bar & Grill. Today I went to find it on Google Maps. Très amusant because the Google Street View almost showed it — from the one angle it was blocked by a lamp standard, and by the one shown the angled window partially cuts off the word 'Paper'.

But I've attached its curriculum vitae:


Thus, on Wednesday, following all the prompts I was perceiving, I began to read the book.
So far it is not in a writing style I like — lots of short, even one word sentences, heavy with meaning.
For example:

The former Mountie praised the investigation. It took the RCMP sixteen years to bring two of the four white men to trial. One was convicted. The woman on the radio offers a list of people the Inquiry should be speaking to. Listening to indigenous people. The Inquiry has only spoken to four. And twenty-nine whites.
Screamed so loud through fifteen years of silence.
They can't even find injustice, Jane thinks; how will they ever find justice?
Home sweet home.
Hate. Sophia used to talk about hate.
Hatred, she said. A Sophiaword.
"Hatred," Jane says aloud, and thinks about a glass of scotch, two ice cubes floating. About the soft skin of a faraway woman, the firm thighs of a once-upon-a-time man (25).

But even all of that wasn't enough to get me to blog this as a fushigi, however — albeit, it had become a book to blog because I had in fact begun to read it.
No, the final straw in getting this blog done today as a fushigi was what I read in it this morning. On page 34, on a list of shops visited during a typical morning shop was a bread place called 'Oscar's' — just before reading about Oscar's breads I'd turned off the TV after having watched Cesar Milan take into his pack a dog named Oscar. But even that wasn't enough. No, the final kicker was 14 lines later, on the same page:

"Hi, Doc."
"Hello ... Pin in his left elbow."
"Mornin', Doctor."
Nod. "Gout."
"Gout? Like Henry the Eighth gout?"
"Ssshhh ... gout. Swelling of the joints...(34)."

And the reason that that was the straw that broke my fushigi back is because after eating some purine rich foods — smoked salmon, pickled herring and shrimp — at my business lunch Wednesday, I began to notice the preliminary signs of a gout attack Thursday, and by Friday morning I was hobbling around with a bad gout attack in the metatarsal joints, which is, for me, typically where I will feel it. Now, if you have read this far, please tell me how many times in a contemporary novel have you read the word 'gout.' How many times have you read the word 'gout' in a contemporary novel while experiencing a gout attack? Think about.