fernwood, victoria and slocan; the cat who walks through walls

Consistency continues to be damned. (Not really, but for the purposes of this post, we'll pretend sincerity, a phrase I prefer to leave unexamined.) It just so happens that I suddenly stopped reading the aforementioned Glavin and Adams texts—through no fault of their own, of course—in favour of some very well-thumbed Robert A. Heinlein tomes with the shift of the weather. It's finally sunny again here in Victoria, which apparently makes me want to dip into the (un)familiar Tertius, space-time twisters, and sassy female counterparts¹.

Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. (382)

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was my first encounter with Heinlein's future history, the summer after high school graduation (makes this post somewhat appropriate, as I now re-read—albeit not for the first time—in the summer after undergraduate convocation). My dad, an avid reader, had recommended his work several years earlier, but I chose literature as my site of teenage rebellion and refused to read any of "that science fiction crap." I was a fantasy girl, with a(n un)healthy dose of the classics and children's lit, and would not submit to my father's erratic taste.

In retrospect, this may have been ever so slightly ridiculous. But hey, I wasn't spray-painting old growth forests, burning down public monuments, or some inverted version thereof.

So this, like the Robinson post, will travel—space suit notwithstanding—and like the story itself, will muddle with the concept of time, as my imagination carries rather more immediacy to the hammock in my backyard, long since disintegrated, where I first met Richard Colin Ames Campbell, protagonist and narrator:

It was a gay ending to a happy evening. There was still the matter of the stranger who had had the bad taste to get himself killed at my table. But, since Gwen seemed not to be aware of the unpleasant incident, I had tabled it in my mind, to be dealt with later. To be sure I was ready any moment for that tap on the shoulder...but in the meantime I enjoyed good food, good wine, good company. Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life's innocent pleasures. (6)

So begins the "rollicking" action described in the New York Times review (excerpted on the back cover); within a few scant pages, Richard and Gwen are engaged, married, and exiled from several planets. Then the story gets interesting.

But what I particularly like about this novel (and did on the hammock), is/was/will be not so much the plot, which purposely ignores gaping questions and careens through the laws of probability and believable storylines,² but the characters subjected to it. I remember the intense early summer green of the backyard cherry trees from which I was suspended as I imagined myself into the role of Gwen/Hazel Nowak/Stone/Long/etc. Apart from an intellectual attraction to Ames/Campbell, Gwen/Hazel's role appealed to me at the time as an ideal lady, smart, sexy, savvy, and comfortable in command:

But it was Gwen who brought down the house when Auntie finished her highly-coloured [sic] account. Gwen did it with pictures.

Listen carefully. Gwen had used all her ammo, six rounds, then—neat as always—she had put her Miyako back into her purse. And pulled out her Mini Helvetia, snapped two frames.

She had tilted her camera down a bit, for it showed not only both bandit vehicles but also three casualties on the ground and one bandit up and moving. The second shot showed four on the ground and the superdoughnut turned away.

I can't figure an exact time line on this but there must have been at least four seconds from the time she ran out of ammo to the time the giant wheel turned away. With a fast camera it takes about as long to shoot one frame as it does to fire one shot with a semi-automatic slug gun.

So the question is: What did she do with the other two seconds? Just waste them? (177-78)

Upon revisiting the story, I note to my slight dismay the idealized nature of her character; rather like Lizzy Bennet with Mr. Darcy, I wonder at the creature of Heinlein's vivid imagination and the implications of her impossible polish. But the narrative is playful and self-deprecating, and continually conscious of its profound SFicity. In the end, I appreciate the fact that her pedestal, while not as wobbly as my hammock, includes feist and personality; she's perhaps made even less attainable, but at least thereby functions as a confirmation of genre—and is neither distressed damsel nor femme fatale.

This was the first book I intentionally dogeared, the first I was bold enough to underline (though in pencil; belt and suspenders!), and the first that described cats, to my mind, satisfactorily. Indeed, I will likely use it for an intended future project on the depiction of felis domesticus in literature as an example of the potential for delicate treatment of the cat as individual rather than composite cliche. When I crack its spine, I can smell the sultry, almost stifling aroma of dusty oiled cedar walls marinating in second-floor heat—my childhood bedroom—and taste the sticky sweetness of the tiny backyard cherries (as opposed to the huge, pale Queen Annes wrapped around the front of the house).

At the same time, my current and past selves grapple with atmosphereless Luna and the sybaritic Tertius, communities of the distant imagined future in an almost-parallel universe where lifespans are dictated only by accident and there is space enough, and time. So even as this rereading takes/has taken/will forever be taking place at home in Victoria's Fernwood neighbourhood, in another ficton (which concept will be expanded and featured in my next post, I promise), a young(er) girl who feels impossibly old is discovering adult Heinlein for the first time as she nibbles on baby carrots from the family garden.

¹A note on the latter: Heinlein has been accused of misogyny, which accusation was rebutted by Spider Robinson in favour of "Bob" as a champion for women. I find myself toeing the line between these extremes; Heinlein writes some of the most interesting women I have yet to encounter in any sort of literature, but they tend toward the superhuman, such as in the case of Gwen Nowak. His occasional adherence to prescribed gender roles I find myself forgiving when I remember to look at publication dates (and biographical information, as much as I would hate to admit this most of the time) and consider the leaps in sexual politics and gender relations that he does male—wow, Freudian slip—make.

²"My most outlandish tales are the ones most likely to be true—as that is the literal truth. No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe" (Time Enough For Love 31, another Heinlein I'll be chatting up in a few posts).

lifelabs, 1641 hillside avenue: going away to think

I'm going to start in an unlikely wood—and not the hundred-acre variety, either—LifeLabs in the Lansdowne Professional Centre. Here, I was waiting for some lab results to be processed and reading Scott Slovic's Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. It was a strange day, one in which absolutely every single out-of-house interaction went awkwardly awry.

After (questionably) helping a friend to move his couch into my Fernwood basement suite for active summer storage by opening the door just quickly enough to permit standing in the way, I was offered a ride down to the lab. Protesting politely against infringing on the driver—friend of my friend and still practically a stranger—was to no avail whatsoever. Instead, I managed to hopelessly confuse the poor girl and render myself entirely inarticulate, mumbling incoherent syllables of uncommunicable self-recrimination. Her look of mute concern at my tongue-twisted flailing served only to finally silence me as, practically fuscia, I climbed into the backseat and buckled my belt. So far, I was off to a good start.

After arriving at the lab, I was quickly prepared for my test and then sent to sit in the waiting room for half an hour. Having been warned about the wait the first two times I attempted to take this test, I brought Slovic with me to delve into his notions of bioregionalism, smugly imagining my composed inner monologue as evidence of staying home to think.

Slovic addresses bioregionalism, discussing the apparently inherent contradiction of ecocritics preaching ecological sustainability and the importance of the local by travelling all around the continent to present on these issues. He describes the ecocritical scholar's relationship to literary and inspirational "home" in response to Wendell Berry's admonition to stay there, claiming physical regionalism as "the quandary, the anxiety, of the place-conscious scholar. Should we wish to sustain our species on this planet, we must learn to live more lightly—to use fewer resources and trample less aggressively on this surprisingly delicate globe" (15). Slovic claims that "Berry pricks my conscience and leads me to consider the virtues of my travelling life and the possible virtues of a more sedentary, home-rooted life." But what is more interesting to me is how Slovic chooses to deal with this ethical confrontation, deciding

to take the poem as a prompt and point of departure for such meditations, not as an absolute statement of prohibition....The point is not to push everyone into a sudden immobility, but to nudge those of us who travel frequently to do so more mindfully, with more awareness of the costs of such a life to ourselves and to the planet.

This observation of the importance of mindfulness, too, strikes a chord with my own interpretation of the role of ecocriticism more broadly. In a world necessarily concerned with and impacted by the concrete, physical realities of uneven population and resource distribution; air, water, land, sound, and aesthetic pollution; and in- and out-fighting between those working to suggest alternative actions and modes of consumption, it seems essential that we take the time to sit and think, think about what imaginings and their side effects brought us to where we are and are continuing to propel us where we seem to be going, think about how some of these imaginings might be ir- and reconciliable, and to think about how they might together reimagine sustainability that works and lasts, is dynamic and fluidly evolves to transcend confrontation in favour of interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate every aspect of our societal imagination.

Whew. An eyeful, certainly. This hopelessly overwhelming series of phrases and clauses is of course a selectively reduced and incomplete assessment—it only just barely begins to olfactorially graze the edge of a single lupine on an immense mountainside shrouded in the potential of its nigh-spherical resting place—but we've got to start somewhere. Why not here, reading Slovic in the LifeLabs waiting room?

My technician, who was moving to Nanaimo and whom I had seen weekly in the fall for INR tests, directed me to room three.

"I've never been in this room before!" I said brightly, hoping to mitigate some of the unhappy patients she had received before me.

"Oh, my, I'm going to miss you, too!" she rejoined, much to my confusion. Baffled, I struggled to sort out how her answer applied. "But maybe you'll come and see me in Nanaimo, someday," she consoled me, and I gave up trying to think of a reconciling or self-explanatory response and smiled.

Well, one missed connection at a time, I suppose. Craigslist has it figured out; we need to start facilitating conversations, any way we can. And any time I start to feel like home has become too predictable, it kindly offers non-sequiturs to remind me that communication gets scrambled as soon as I step outside my door. Plus, I went all the way from the familiar waiting room to room three, unfamiliar in its own right, and then to an unintentionally alienated Nanaimo. There's plenty of work to do, literary studies, in reading, writing, re-reading, and re-writing our societies, one neighbourhood at a time.