I was listening to the radio today before I got out of bed and it was one of those days of poor reception. I was tuned to CBC in the foreground of the transmission, while in the background, for all the world resembling NB politics, a strident French voice fought to become clear.
I was reminded of the palimpsest, the text within text which was the result of the medieval monks reusing vellum. They would carefully scrape away a top layer of the text to be overwritten, for vellum was expensive and worth the trouble, and then they would overwrite that with the new story. Even now, under the ultraviolet light of modern researchers, the older narrative can be seen, struggling through, demanding to be heard.
The sixties theorists made much of this, and claimed that allusion and other references to earlier works, and texts which used such techniques deliberately were calling upon this doubled structure which is the natural by-product of cumulative culture. In fact, they went on to argue, in all text, in all utterances, this ghostly voice of the forgotten, the deliberately excised, the vanquished, can be heard faintly trying to assert its presence.
In truth, I thought only briefly about what those theorists had said, and instead I was reminded of the voices that a person carries within them. Not so much the diverse voice of history, such as the use of “holy” in Winnipeg, but rather the personal pasts which demand a hearing. It can be heard in expressions known only to a small group that have their origin in a specific historical event of meaning only to them, or more significantly, in the debris and misunderstandings we carry into our own future.
Outdated attitudes and meaningless opinions, such as notions about gay people or the position of women, persist in the culture in a kind of cultural palimpsest and trouble us all when they reach out of the past and demand to be heard. Likewise, the religions of the world, with their various and exclusionary truths about the ineffable should surely stop their shrill shrieking from the vegetable past. The reptilian demands of blunt bodily necessity, such as ideas about beauty and the transformative nature of love which may be at its base the urge to procreate are all dragged with us into a future which may not be suited for their incessant demands.
More positively, the voice of those we’ve loved, the ones lost to time, death, or merely change, are there as well. And we can hear their thin voices piping up when least heeded. Expressions come unbidden to our minds and scenes we’d thought forgotten and buried are pulled out and pawed over as the demands of the mind deep voices are met.
In my own life I hear my foster father’s stories even as I hear my foster mother’s condemnation. Caught between the magic of narrative as an escape from the mundane, voice as a combatant in an unequal fight with the vagaries of coincidence and the arbitrary nature of life, there is also the octave shift of derision and litany of shortcomings.
Perhaps story is what is left, when both voices are gone. That story can compete with the arbitrary nature of human spite and the natural world’s huge indifference, or at least story is a tool potent enough in the voices peeking through the quotidian day of the present to offer an escape from the moment, and a light that shines where superstition and vitriol cannot.
I am in my cabin here at noon. The water is dripping off the roof as the heating day encounters the warmth from my fire, and although I left the fire to burn out last night, I slept long and well in the twelve degrees or so of 
morning. The cabin heated quickly, eagerly assuming the 20 degrees I have been keeping, and inspired by the light snowfall and the rabbit and squirrel tracks around the cabin, I am writing once again, mimicking by twitching fingers the outside world of still flakes falling onto the blank medium of text.
The creek has only dropped marginally today, and the expected snowfall has only amounted to half a centimetre. Here, after my too hot shower in the cold, and tasty fried veggie sausage and onion garlic meal, the fire is warm and I am sleepy. Outside the mix of snow and rain is falling, and my fire is too hot because I was cooking. It’s early evening still, just after six, but it always feels later due to the darkness. Soon it will be the longest night of the years, in just a few days, then the pendulum will swing again and summer will come back to this northern land.
You appreciate summer so much more in a northern climate, especially in Winnipeg where I have no doubt it is seasonably cold again. I’ve no doubt my cabin would perform quite differently in that climate.
I am now editing Glooscap’s Plan, which I am also relieved to see is a decent if strange book. There are even some funny bits in it, although for the most part it is an environmental manifesto, using Aboriginal stories and present social and environmental ills. I should have a few books ready to go when I get back. I wonder what will become of this enterprise. I wonder if these books are only a few grains of sand in the huge ocean that is amazon, or whether they will distinguish themselves somehow and become more commonly read. I am interested in seeing what my statcounter and amazon and smashwords purchase reports look like when I get to internet on Sunday. Also, once I get the physical copies up and ready to release, which has stalled at the proof stage in a rather trying set of problems with covers, I am interested to see how they do. I wonder how many books I will have by spring.
