Reverie and Deadlines

Karen Solie revisits the Army & Navy store

In May last year I received an invitation to contribute a new poem to a project organised by Canadian poet Farah Ghafoor (her excellent debut collection is called Shadow Price) that examines how our wellbeing and experiences of where we live are influenced by architecture. Funded by Steelcase Art Projects, Structural Integrity would exhibit the commissioned poems on the exteriors of industrial buildings in Markham, Ontario. My own structural integrity and wellbeing were somewhat compromised at the time. Less than a month prior I’d fractured seven ribs and collapsed a lung in a fall down the stairs of a housesit. The parfaits of painkillers may have numbed my concerns about my ability to compose a readable draft in two months, which for me is unthinkable speed.

I am happy for these invitations, even as I know they will involve my past self – so innocent and hopeful – meeting my haggard present self in the dark alley of not having a thought in my head. In this case, even three weeks on from the accident, my relationship with architecture was largely hostile. Stairs were anathema. All furniture was evil. Especially beds. Sidewalks and markets were full of maniacs careening around corners, of which there were also too many. Owly and exhausted, after pill-time I would often sleep a bit propped up on a body pillow a friend had brought for me, hating everything except that pillow – the indoors, the outdoors, poems, everything.

Many artists have written about the 11th-hour energy of the deadline. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” In “The Deadline Effect,” magazine editor Christopher Cox writes of experimenting on a notorious unnamed misser of deadlines by setting them two weeks in advance of necessity. Which is ridiculous. We all know editors do this. There is the deadline, and then there is the deadline. We know what we’re like.

Even before the fall, I’d dreamt about the cage elevator in the Army & Navy store that occupied the old Eaton’s building in downtown Saskatoon when I was a child. Having grown up around machines always in one of three states – broken down, provisionally fixed, and it’s only a matter of time – riding in that elevator was terrifying. So much could go wrong. On entering the store I felt it there in the melancholy interior of the building’s solitude, ascending and descending like a mood, a thought. No effort was made to disguise the feel, the smell, the noise of its machinery. What if the building wants to keep us there for company, where it’s alone with itself? There must have been stairs, though I wouldn’t have thought to insist to the adults that we take them.

Post-fall, the dream seemed prophetic in a patronisingly obvious way, with the faux inevitability hindsight whips up out of coincidence. But in it was the seed of a poem, and I needed a poem. Once in the poem’s crosshairs, though, the dream became wary, an animal avoiding my attention as I stalked it with the weapon of my deadline.

As a writer, and otherwise, my dreams have been largely useless. I admire writers who work successfully from dreams. It suggests discipline and discernment. I associate lucid dreaming with a strength of mind. Alice Notley believed that “a sensitivity to one’s dreams might play in making one’s way through the egoism and manipulation of oneself and others abounding in daily life (after all, you’re also the pathetic creature you are in your dreams)”. Point taken. She also stated “as a fact that dreams can be premonitory or telepathic”:

they can predict the future and receive information at a distance from the dreamer. They don’t do these things in a way that can be easily evaluated, and they don’t always do these things clearly, but they do do them. Many people recognize this truth but don’t know what to do about it; I scarcely know what to do about it, I usually incorporate dreams into my poems rather than speculate on how dreaming works.

My suspicion is that we will take any opportunity to make sense of experience, whether conscious or unconscious, to see narrative and meaning in the random. That said, we likely have all had our “Hm, that was weird” moments, déjà vus, been visited by the dead in dreams that leave us shaken or comforted, have been offered the solution to a problem. Between YouTube videos on rib fracture recovery posted by an Eastern European physiotherapist (you have to walk and do your exercises or else get pneumonia and die!) I looked for the dream as though for a place I’d been to once but couldn’t remember how to get back to – which, in a way, it was.

But I didn’t find it. Or it didn’t find me. Or it did and on waking evaporated. I remember the elevator pretty clearly in a conscious state, if perhaps as more Lynchian than it actually was. I remember the grandeur of the building, the outrageous fun of a department store café. I wondered at one point whether I was conflating the bargain basement of Army & Navy with that of the Hudson’s Bay store also in Saskatoon, with its caged mynah bird that screeched “Don’t touch that!” as people walked by, and who I felt desperately sad for. (The specific name for the common mynah, tristis, I see now, is Latin for “sorrowful” or “gloomy”.) Some details were confirmed by my mother, some by newspaper articles and photographs attending the Saskatoon Army & Navy’s closure in 2000 (”It’s a shame”, said one unhappy shopper. “We’ve always come here, for years and years. Even from Humboldt . . .”). Most didn’t make it into the poem – that the elevator attendant wore white gloves, as corroborated in a Facebook post, for instance. There are photos of the vertiginously narrow wooden escalator that descended into darkness, and that almost never worked. When it did, it shook and clattered on its bare rims like a wagon to the underworld.

Whatever normal or paranormal trigger gave me the dream, the commission and its deadline gave me the daydream, what Gaston Bachelard calls reverie: “Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream.” In The Poetics of Reverie he describes it as a space one can inhabit, like a secret hideout, “a phenomenon of solitude” that helps us also to “escape time.” It is a state, he writes; it exists. In reverie I was able to return to an experience that was – ironically, given the mandate of the discount store – rich, multidimensional with fear and comfort, awe and novelty. In my memory it’s always busy, it’s always winter, puddles on the floor from snow tracked in, people visiting, smells of cold air and cigarettes on their coats. As I remember it, we arrive in the morning and leave in the late afternoon as new snow falls and streetlights blink on. Which isn’t, of course, true. Writing on house images in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard notes that “The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.” I’m generally wary of nostalgia; but the poem is definitely nostalgic.

ARMY & NAVY

Before we’d even arrived to browse deep discounts

in the basement, I was thinking of the old cage elevator

with a doubter’s fear, of its clattering metal lattice

roughly closed by the attendant who’d admit us, three

at a time, to facilitate our journey through the building’s

narrow psyche. It was quite shaky, smelled of oil

and electricity and we rose slowly, as consciousness

might, doors opening to the main floor like waking

from a dream. Tall windows drew the gaze above the racks

and signage, terrazzo and mahogany conferred dignity

on the bargains. A fine staircase led to a nautical-themed café.

Back on the street with my mother and grandmother,

some of the expansiveness remained with us, the unpredictability

of random surplus, the free popcorn, the extravagance.

Emerging from the elevator could be where the dream ends and daydream begins. It did feel as though more time had passed in the elevator, as a witness to the building’s privacy, than had passed in public life. It doesn’t matter whether I felt changed by it then. I can go back now and feel myself changed. Reverie, writes Bachelard, “gives the I a non-I which belongs to the I: my non-I”. In this doubling, it’s like time travel. The expansiveness of the daydream that became the poem counteracted the isolation of the time of its writing, the physical and mental shrinking inwardness of pain. It also kept me from Googling pulmonary embolisms. As often. And as E.B. White said, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” I overran my deadline by two weeks.

I don’t know what’s to become of the poem. In addition to its subject, the commission involved a line limit and other structural considerations. I don’t know whether a revision might make its way into a collection. Maybe the poem is just a bit of ephemera, like a flyer from the Army & Navy’s last sale. Maybe it’s meant to gradually fade away on a garage door in Markham.

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