Faint Purple

Leah McLaren and the hidden nature of lilacs

A last lilac leaf from the bush outside my house transplanted from the stand at my inlaw’s farm on my front porch

The Scandal

This newsletter doesn’t have anything to do with Canadian media scandals except that because I know some people on both sides of what now feels of an unbridgeable chasm between two versions of the truth about past I found myself watching for the first time a #metoo cancellation in real time on twitter. To save you a trip to twitter which I don’t recommend I will try to sum it up: The only thing that seems certain is that the human hunger for stories of trauma can make publishers and audiences and writers dangerously careless and that memoirs are a murky business and that we might never know the truth. I also couldn’t help thinking of what Sheila Watson famously called the Double Hook from her book of the same name:

“He doesn’t know you can’t catch glory on a hook and hold on to it. That when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear.”

But even with all that in mind I still found myself staying up late last night trying to write my way into my past which you would think would be less of a minefield because its mostly just a story of me alone in nature. (you might want to make yourself comfortable and pour a tea, this story is a bit long)

The Lilac Forest

On a leaden winter day like today but decades ago in a suburb of a small Canadian city at lunch recess I’m hiding at the far end of the schoolyard behind the parking lot near where the chainlink fence separates the school grounds from the woodsy park beyond. I’ve retreated along well worn paths where probably the outcasts of every year would find themselves. Through the scrubby trees and to a little clearing at the very back where the sneering voices finally fade and back there its not even really trees more just patches of low-lying grey branches sprouting out of the frozen ground. Was I backed into this corner or was I drawn to it? A little thicket to mark an edge. An in between place. The branches look dead and scrappy and tangled but kind of beautiful too. Each twig when you looked at it forked at the end into two reddish brown buds. Bending down lower to be sure the bullies wouldn’t see me I looked closer at the buds. They had a reddish brown shell tough and gentle like the armour on the back of a ladybug that splits open when it flies. I pealed back this shell layer a bit sticky on my thumb and under it the vibrant yellowy green of tucked together leaves. If you were careful with it you could kind of unfold the leaves layer by layer.

The Softening

There crouched on the frozen ground intently taking apart the bud of a lilac shoot something extraordinary, or maybe intra-ordinary was happening to me. My attention, with my prying fingers, my blurred vision from all the snotty-nosed crying I was doing fashioned a thing I would later call The Softening. Part of The Softening came from the power of this Y-shaped twig with its buds of potential life drawing me into its delicate spiral of green but also I was learning a special kind of focus. As the world that the school belonged to dissolved, something else was opening up. Something radiant and planty and humming. Something I could join.

ἀ–λήθεια

It was my first year at University and I’d signed up to major in Classics mostly because I’d read that in your fourth year you got to go to some tiny Greek island and do hands-on work at a real archeology site. I learned later that that fourth year abroad was only for the rich kids and I ended up at a different University with a different degree but there was one thing that stuck with me from my first year intro to Ancient Greek Language. It was a word the professor carefully chalked onto the blackboard that looked to me like a math equation. Imagine, my professor told us pointing to the scribblings, the dull grey branch of a tree with just the beginnings of a bud. (I perked up at this) A bud on a seemly dead branch in winter contains all of what it will be, she said, and so exemplifies the ancient Greek word for truth ( ἀ–λήθεια ), which translates to unconcealedness. (I perked up even more) Truth, for the ancient Greeks was less about veracity or some kind of common agreement, than about a reality to be uncovered, in the same way that the truth of the whole plant leaves, flowers and all is there in its bud.

The Artwork

Quite a few years later I dated an artist named Shary Boyle who had, and still has, a very particular ability to draw from dreams, memories and possible worlds with the kind of care, precision and training more commonly found among classical or realist artists. Early on, maybe before we started dating, I told her about the lilac forest and the strange feeling that I had there and then later, maybe when she was in Berlin or beside the frozen river in rural Nova Scotia and our romance was mostly postal she sent me an image that felt so precious and personal and so perfectly incapsulating of my memory, even the empty space of the cream paper that the image floated in seemed to buzz with that electric feeling I had in that place where everything outside seemed to disappear. For years and years the image lived carefully sandwiched between a piece of black foamcore on the back and a sheet of translucent onion skin paper on the front and both of those in an envelope in a hard plastic case. The case with the artwork and other significant documents traveled with me to Seattle and Dawson City, to Winnipeg, New York and half a dozen apartments and makeshift studios in Toronto before coming to rest in my basement in Little Portugal. The art and the memory stayed mostly undisturbed.

Shary Boyle pencil and watercolour on paper, Jan 2001

Winterbuds

And then just a few weeks ago I found myself outside and wandering the streets of my neighbourhood. I was looking for nothing in particular though maybe waiting for some flash of shape or colour to catch my eye. And there are flashes. The meandering iridescent edge of the last of the moldy purple brown oak leaves, still tannic rich and clinging to the tree at the bottom of the hill. I could make a bruised blue black from them. The rosehip hardening red with its calyx crouched like a brown spider that I could make a slight pink wash with. Right now the ink I am making is mostly scraps of metal oxidizing down in the basement and the plant foraging is mostly over. But what was this? A green heart-shaped leaf the rusty dried flowers the grey twigs forked and at the ends of the forking the two fat green buds. It can’t be right to be looking at new green buds just as everything is dying. When I got home I looked up lilac biology (why had I never done this before?) and found that most trees create their buds in the late summer and while protected by a kind of waxy shell and tightly packed up they do stay green all through the winter. So spring is not when buds form but when they ‘break’, unfurling into leaves and flowers.

The rusty seedpods in the background were a giveaway that this was lilac, the sun for a minute slanted through the clouds I took this picture on my phone.

About a week after that I was at an art opening and I bumped into Shary who I rarely see and who was moving out of town for good, packing up for parts East. The romance is long gone and I feel bad that I haven’t maintained much of a friendship but my admiration for what Shary does remains undimmed. I told her awkwardly that I had been thinking about her because of lilacs and I am not sure she even remembered making the artwork for me and then I rushed off to another event. The next morning I found the box in the basement, peeled back the onion skin, and looked at the artwork took a picture of it to send to her and looking at it closely I started to wonder.

INKTEST: Winter berries, street copper, salt water, ashes on archival paper. 8”x8”

The Chronology.

Shary drew some sprigs of greenery by the lilacs and she seems to have drawn me wearing shorts maybe because she wanted to draw little white socks which I am sure belonged to her own childhood lore because I can’t remember ever wearing white socks at any age but also when I said lilac buds she probably thought spring. Or I maybe I’d told her it was springtime. I was at that school for 2 years with my older sister and younger brother and it was during that period that my mother died of Hodgkin’s disease. The doctors told us that Hodgkins was one of the best kinds of cancer for her to get and that because she was in her late twenties when it appeared and because they’d caught it early the prognosis couldn’t be better. She died in mid-February at age 33 leaving four kids and a heartbroken father behind. I was 8. The day after she died I went to school as usual because what else would I do but that whole spring I was particularly “out of it” as teachers and students kept reminding me and so it makes sense that by spring of that year feeling ostracized and insular and connected by love to whatever is on the other side of life I might have been particularly susceptible to the idea of a portal to anywhere but where I was. But now, understanding how buds work I realize that in the lilac forest it might have been fall, or deep winter instead of spring. I realize that the bullying may not have ramped up after my mother’s death. Rereading first chapter of The Silver Chair today where Eustace and Jill are bullied to the edge of their school yard to a shrubby area where a door opens up that leads them into Narnia I realize that even the bullying part of this memory may be somewhat shaped by fantasy and my need to give shape to the shapelessness of tragedy. Even that Ancient Greek word for truth which I looked up the other day actually comes from an interpretation made famous by Heidegger who was a Nazi with a thing for secret truths and other scholars point to Homer’s epics which suggest that truth for the ancient Greeks was less about a singular obscured reality than about a negotiation between all the different realities that come from different people experiencing and telling stories. So where does that leave us? I can’t after all this writing find a moral for you. Or for me. The past just seems to keep getting further away and more complicated. And yet!

The Truth is Hands-on

The part I am sure of is the way I felt as I slowly unpeeled the lilac bud, the way I found its inner green which was not a treasure to hold but a feeling of turning inward, an uncovering and then a warm million bees buzzing merger with the moment. And inside that moment that I held hands with what I now might call mother nature. With her I knew that we were in this thing called life together and that I could never be alone. The only reason I know that this part of the memory is real is because the trick I learned there in the lilac forest is trick I never stopped using. —JL

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