The Jehovah Project

I will let my hair grow long for your sake; I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion. --The Epic of Gilgamesh



Class assignment

Build this city


In the Skin of a Lion is the transcript of a tale told to a sixteen-year-old girl during a four-hour drive from Toronto to a small town which is the sled-dog capital of Ontario. The source of the story is the girl’s adopted ex-con father, but she too has many bits of the narrative and she thus shares the task of constructing it. The book was written a generation ago in 1987 and can thus be seen as a period piece from high post-modernism.

Your assignment is to piece together the welter of themes in the book into a multi-thematic structure, ziggurat fashion. It’s all very well to notice, for example, that both Caravaggio and Patrick are alluded to as bears, but what is this animal imagery in service of? Both the boathouse with its skirt upon which Caravaggio lurks and Commissioner Harris’ great temple [ziggurat] of class and metaphysical yearning are described as people. Well, what of it? Can you make a unified claim about the voyeuristic titillations of both sex and urban struggle and still be willing to quickly fray the fabric to permit threads to link this to a mix of other metaphors without losing yourself?

I take it as a given that your work as professors will be to get your students multi-tasking up and down the well-wrought Tower of Babel which is the work of art not only in old-fashioned post-modernism but in every era. That for them to find themselves in the complex of the modern educational establishment and make decisions about where to participate, where to resist, how to wake up, how to be good, they will need to get the fullest possible look at the structure. I speak here at the very least of the work of art, of the architecture of its containment in the establishment, and of love.

Right. Time is critical. The man at the bar is polishing the last of those tumblers. Some of you have four novels to read this week. There was a time, perhaps as recent as 1987, when there was leisure to consider themes as motif, as a single coherent proposition. Blue, say. This novel has been brought to you by the color blue. As grad students not only can you no longer take the time to write a paper on the color blue in the book In the Skin of a Lion, but it would perhaps be indulgent for you as professors to let your students linger in such an exercise. Faster, please! Get on with it!

Blue…metaphysics…bridging…water…Bloor Street Viaduct relates to longest bridge in the world over the Zambesi…tendrils to that water temple in the east end…lateral connections cross with vertical ones: rich people weighted with their possessions while above them float lighter bodies, thieves…imposters…Caravaggio playing a rich man but aren’t all displays of wealth already a theater?...mime…silence of lambs, the innocents…dyers…dire straights…back to metaphysics…glossallalia of immigrant voices…caged dogs as aristocrats…east end poverty, the bridge from the city…

There’s enough there for a first level (and of course you have your own). Meanwhile let me pause to think if this is a conservative book, assembling the nuclear family with a fortuitousness at novel’s end which is possibly hysterical or even—ouch—Hollywood? Clara and Patrick and Hanna, exemplars of their historical moment, moving decisively out into the remains of their century, while the radicals, Cato and Alice, are carefully pared away into the stasis of noble death. But even if this is the case, are such monuments as static as their deaths would imply? Aren’t Cato and Alice on the move in the permanent impermanence of the hermeneutical act? Things shift. The entirety of this story is contained within the fragile shell of a sleep-deprived narrator’s car, bifurcating into the twin carapaces [carapace motif! Textile as body-scaffolding motif!] of the heads of the narrator and interlocutor (where we—look at us!—are so thoroughly implied as to be bursting fully formed from Hannah’s head). My great grandmother was killed in this country by a taxi ramming her car, and she died in my grandmother’s arms. And who among us is not aware of the tenderness of light steel along the side of automobiles, the bits of flesh pressing out from within? Isn’t this our historical moment?

Second level of the ziggurat: scaffolding as antic gesture (WWLisaRobertsonD?), flying nun motif impacting the one-armed man motif. Did Ioana say that a cherub is half animal and half angel? In class I spoke of holding the hand of my uncle so freshly dead it was like a birth, an innocence, and of my mother released to matriarch status by my uncle’s death, a few days later taking her first tentative flight in this role, arms spread, lofting herself into the living room. And if she returned to earth, what of it? She was unhurt, and not the worst of the winter’s ice could stop her as we made our hegirah across the city, back and forth across that bridge built before the subway cars were even invented, over Gift Valley now a parking lot but in her day she rode a horse there and dismounted and it ran off and rolled in the sand. One day she will fly, and faith might tell us where. Build this second level of the ziggurat, the pyramid, of objective stone if you will, but there will be pockets of the personal, subjects in the objects, not unlike the whole of the 20th century in the frame of my uncle, an entire city in there releasing its grip into spirit. “It’s prurient, maybe, this obsession with your uncle’s body,” a lover told me (or, given the lateness of the hour, possibly told me). Of that maybe, leisure to consider its import later, crossing back alone across the bridge on the trainway slung from the famous suicide bridge…or to consider my father, six foot seven inches, a logger for the Abitibi Pulp and Paper Company in Ontario, cutting 80 trees a day with a handsaw, and later an explosives expert…picture of my mother standing on the pickup truck beside the word EXPLOSIVES.

Time, calls the barman. And our ziggurats will have to be hastily assembled from materials to hand. I find continuity, solace, not only in the skin of the Numean lion to which Ioana alluded and whose paradoxically punitive and protective qualities my six-year-old Liam has noted, but in Gilgamesh, with whom we began Psychogeographies and who is sequestered in a potentially unseen frontispiece of the book. Gilgamesh, who brought us writing and mourning in a single flourish, lashing out at the great trees storing carbon and memory, thus bridging the beyond and the present in the cadavers of trees. Timber! Trees—scaffolding us with the exaggerated sturdiness of a jester’s commentary, reaching Babel-like skyward for us, miming our principal activity, an erection upon the ground of being. I have cried for trees, and if I did so now would you know? Gilgamesh, come to us now, teach us to conduct our tears in their appropriate path, show us the viaduct which will connect our carriage, our bearing, to the earth.

Time, calls the barman. Ziggurats please. And if they are built already, if the city waits just outside that door, equally concrete and inconceivable, would we know it, standing back on the threshold here, adjusting our funny Canadian hats? Time. Step out and in, outside and into the city.

--dt, Toronto