A Memoir (World War II)

 Planes glide through the air like fish

     Before I knew why airplanes stayed up, I thought they glided through the air like fish through water. Later I found out it wasn’t like that at all, a fish can’t fall to the bottom of the lake because it has a pocket of air inside it, but a plane stays up because it moves. Sharks don’t have a pocket of air, they must keep moving or they will fall to the bottom like an airplane falling from the sky.
     We lived by a lake, whose clear water revealed the bottom six or more feet down. The fish were dark slashes against the grey green silt, or a swift gleam of silver as they turned. In the mornings and evenings, the fishers went out on the lake to set and fetch their nets.
     The fishers stood up in a long flat bottomed boat, leaning and straightening as they pumped the square-bladed oar, he tall and stooped in the stern, she short and round in the bow. They’re shovelling water, I thought, I didn’t understand how that could move the boat forward. The fishers stuck the small fish onto pine splints which they ranged in the smoke house chimney. The smoked fish tasted salt and sweet at the same time when one gnawed them off the wood.
     I watched the fishers mend nets, watched their hands and fingers move out and back with a twist as they fed and knotted the line with a flat, narrow piece of wood. I didn’t see how the line could make a knot with only one end free. The nets hung on frames made of pine poles, moving in the wind like waves on the water, bleached white and soft by the sun.
     Many years later, in another country, I learned Bernoulli’s equations and Boyle’s law, and understood how air moving over the wing made the wing lift the plane. For a few weeks I understood the equations that defined drag and turbulence, too. Now I understand only their meaning, a lovely interplay of velocity, pressure and viscosity, with which the airplane designer and pilot co-operate.
     I learned a lot of other things too, I understood the engineer’s and metal worker’s craft, their exquisite skill lavished on the bombers that glided through the sky, making death beautiful and distant.
     The bombers looked like fish against the sky, gleaming silver, but not like fish, sliding across the blue air, steady and inexorable, and making a sound you felt in your bones, a sound that struck across the sky and flowed into the earth and came up through your feet and made your teeth buzz. Then black flowers bloomed on the horizon where the railway junction was. Many years later I saw pictures of black chrysanthemums, they bloomed like smoke against a blue sky. My friend’s mother died among the roots of one of those flowers, but that was before he was my friend, before we even knew of each other’s existence.
     One day a plane came in low over our house, and fell into the lake, trailing a black and orange flag that stretched out behind it, longer and longer as the plane fell towards the water. My mother said my brother could see the pilot’s face, I must have seen it too as I stood next to my brother, but he can remember it and I can’t, I wonder if that’s why he hides his melancholy. I hide mine too, but not in the same way, he bursts out in sudden attacks of craziness, roaring like a monster, pretending to be Grendel, or the giant that ate an Englishman and ground his bones for bread. My Grandpa read us that story, I loved the bits where Jack steals the gold and the hen and the harp, and runs to the beanstalk along the winding cloudy road. The harp betrayed the thief, an early lesson on the deviousness of artists.
     I tell people I’m fine, when they ask. I ask them, too, and they tell me they are fine. We tell each other we are fine, making up a fine story about how fine the world is, and what a fine time we are having this fine afternoon, while we eat a fine meal made on a fine barbecue in a fine garden owned by a fine neighbourly neighbour.
     For several weeks, I understood the equations that explained airplanes, then we wrote a test and I forgot them. I didn’t forget what they explained. Whenever I look at a plane I see the air flow over its wings, faster on top and slower underneath, holding up the plane, a plane that weighs more than the largest steam locomotive ever built, and as the jet climbs into the sky like a man going up a flight of stairs, I know that if the air peels off the wings in unseen swirls and whirlpools, the plane will crash, but we won’t make a white splash in the water because there’s no lake under us, just grass and asphalt. A black and orange flower will bloom in the field at the end of the runway.
     When the fishers pump the oar, eddies and swirls peel off it and press against the blade, and that presses the boat forward. What brings down the plane moves the boat. Nature has her ways, if you work with her, she rewards you with flying planes and gliding boats.
     My cousin and I used to go into the park next to our house. The oaks and beeches and maples and pines and firs and sycamores made it a quiet place, the only sounds the rustle of the leaves high above us and the scuff of our feet in the duff. We thought of it as a secret place, known only to us, a source of treasure, a landscape of adventure. Once we saw the wreck of an airplane caught high in the branches of the trees. We took one of the transformers that had come loose and fallen to the ground, and for a long time after we had fine copper wire to play with, varnished a rich mahogany red. My cousin told me we could make snares and catch fish, or make electrical stuff, if we wanted. Just thinking about the possibilities hidden in the coils of fine, dark red wire was enough, it made us happy. We hid the transformer in the gazebo and took it out to relish the technical perfection of its windings, fine as hair.
     A day or two after we found the transformer we were forbidden to go into the park, a prohibition we could not understand until we heard talk among the grownups about the dead pilot of the airplane hanging in the branches of the sycamore tree. We waited for our chance and crept back into the park but the wreck had been removed. As usual, the grownups had spoiled our fun, but we were used to it, and went about our business.
     When it rained, the snails came out of the underbrush, their shells banded yellow and black and sometimes orange. The shells gleamed in the wet. I gathered up the snails and set them on the pine-log railing of the gazebo and waited for them to race each other. The snails came out from their shells, waving their antennae, testing the air for danger. They crawled over the curve of the railing and fell into the grass and disappeared.
     One day the sirens moaned while I was building forts and jetties with the rocks at the edge of the water. I ran up the slope to the road, a cyclist rushing home knocked me over. The wheels of his bike scraped my bare belly, there was no other injury. My mother dressed us in two layers of underwear, and two layers of overcoats, the topmost one made from a bright red blanket. We must have looked like little red snowmen. The woollen vest itched, I cried with vexation in the cellar. We heard the bombers fly over, they seemed closer this time, perhaps the cellar magnified their sound, it came out of the ceiling and the floor and the walls. When the bombs hit the railway yards, we felt the thump, and a small cloud of dust drifted down from the ceiling. The lights flickered and went out. One of the grownups lit a candle, the light made a boundary around us like a wall. We huddled up next to Mother, and felt secure. But the vest still itched.
     When I hear sirens in a war movie these days, something grabs my throat and squeezes tears from my eyes.
     I visited the lake again recently. The mountains that stood on the opposite shore still stand there, self-sufficient and silent. High above them, a con trail divides the sky. I can’t see the plane, but I know it glides through the air like a fish glides through water.

Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)

 Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock at McGill, and Ward at U of Saskatchewan. Like Leacock’s, Ward’s humour is witty and sly. Like Leacock, he cultivates an naive avuncular persona, so one lets down one’s guard. Then they slide in the rapier and skewer the target. For example:
     I have no particular reason to be prejudiced against goats and monkeys, for my first hand contacts with them have been limited to those in a life limited spent largely among politicians and university  professors...
     You can see, I hope, why Ward is my kind of humourist. My copy, a Christmas gift some years ago, is a reprint by the Western Producer, a weekly published in Saskatchewan to provide information, instruction and amusement to farmers and their families. Sometime in the 1970s or 80s, they began a program of reprinting books relevant to the Western Provinces. Ward received the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1961.

      About the title: Ward was delivering empty bottles to the local bottle depot. The gentleman who received his offerings mentioned that he found a lot of mice in the empty beer bottles. It seems they crawled in to enjoy the leftover dribbles left  They avoided wine, however, perhaps because stale wine sours.

     Recommended. ****

Losers that Win: Morley Callghan Stores

 Morley Callaghan. The Lost and Found Stories (1985) A conversation between Morley Callaghan and his son Barry led to the discovery of a box of manuscripts “up there with the bills.” Callaghan apparently dumped all his bills into a box. I don’t know how he settled his debts. Barry sorted through the manuscripts and selected 26. My copy is a reprint.
I enjoyed these tales in an often gloomy kind of way. Callaghan worked as a reporter, so he saw a lot of losers. Most news is about someone messing up. I think this enabled him to imagine stories about ordinary people.
     The characters in these stories achieve at least a kind of insight, and often slightly larger victories, such as mended relationships, or escapes from the life-destroying consequences of a more or less unwittingly bad decision. Callaghan writes a plain style, reporting rather than telling the tale. Only his assumption of omniscience raises these tales above news reports. Not that any of them would qualify as printable news. The fates of ordinary people facing everyday dilemmas aren’t exciting enough for newsprint.
     It’s Callaghan’s insight into how people feel and think that makes these stories worth reading. That, and Callaghan’s generally amiably charitable attitude towards the failings of his fellow humans. Underneath that attitude there’s what I now think is a typically Canadian ruthlessness of observation. Like Munro, Govier and others, Callaghan doesn’t try to make his characters nice people.
     Recommended. ***

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all expect the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the limited data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

New Blog: Kirkwood Tales

I've created a new blog for my stories etc. It's called Kirkwood Tales  The Page Stories  and Other Fictions on this blog will be transferred to the new blog.

New Blog: Meditations

I've decided to move all my sermons to a new blog. Its name is Kirkwood-Meditations. I hope it will be helpful and interesting.

Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***