Changes

By Robin Molineux

The stories in this book began as individuals. Some, Diocletians Cabbages, had been in my mind as an intriguing idea for years while others, A Head Start, came complete, quite suddenly, often waking me in the early hours of the morning. Only after several had been written down did I realize that they all spoke of change.
I arranged them, not in the order in which they had been written, but geographically. They started in Europe and moved through England to the west coast of Canada and the United States. Only when this was settled did I see that they began and ended in the same place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490736969

Robin Molineux

I have lived in four countries and been educated in three of those as well as travelling extensively throughout the world. I have heard many stories and been privileged to share the lives of many people. The delight in living, the curiosity and the extraordinary inventiveness to be found often in the most unexpected places are a constant source of joy and hope to me. I live on Hornby Island in British Columbia. Sabine, my wife, is an artist, a ski instructor, an excellent kayaker and a wonderful dancer. We share all of those things together with the eagles and sea lions.

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© Copyright 2014 Robin Molineux.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

The photograph on the front cover and the design of the front cover are by Sabine Taylor.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3698-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3697-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3696-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909283

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

ANIMULA VAGULA BLANDULA

A MEETING

WHERE I WAS GOING

WHITEWASH

DIOCLETIAN’S CABBAGES

A PROPHECY

A HEADSTART

THE BOYS

THE ROAD TO LITTLE MOOSE

ROMAN TOES

For Sabine, with whom each day is a

journey of delight and discovery

PREFACE

The stories in this book began as individuals. Some, ‘Diocletian’s Cabbages’, had been in my mind as an intriguing idea for years while others, ‘A Head Start’, came complete, quite suddenly, often waking me in the early hours of the morning. Only after several had been written down did I realize that they all spoke of change.

I arranged them, not in the order in which they had been written, but geographically. They started in Europe and moved through England to the west coast of Canada and the United States. Only when this was settled did I see that they began and ended in the same place.

St Petersburg exemplifies change as does no other city. Emerging from the mind of Peter the Great to be built on frozen marshland in the delta of an unknown river, becoming the dramatically magnificent capital of a country which it dragged from a time of boyars and serfs, wolves and golden domes, into Europe of the Enlightenment, it began and continued in change. For Gogol it became the epitome of idle wealth, impregnable bureaucracy and lacking in all the virtues of the true Russia. Pushkin and Dostoevsky changed the literature of Russia. 1905 and then 1917 changed the world for all of us. In 1941 the start of the seige of Leningrad began the eventual destruction of the Wehrmacht, completed at Stalingrad and Kursk. Now the three-day-visa tourists see a very different Russia than described in the stories with which they grew up.

Thinking of other cities created quite suddenly; leaving aside those planned and built by committee: Brasilia, Hong Kong and Cancun; looking just at those conceived by a single man: Akbar’s Fatepur Sikri, Stamford Raffles’ Singapore, Pius II’s Pienza: whose fates varied from a deserted city, now a tourist destination to an economist’s plate glass dream in which the past is denied and destroyed and those who work there are reduced to efficient faceless automatons, to a small hill town, home to little more than two thousand people, worth stopping in to buy a loaf of fresh bread and spend an hour looking at a dome, some carved doorways and and cornices before driving on to the restaurant marked in one’s Michelin Italia as worth a detour. Only one other can stand beside St. Petersburg. There were many Alexandrias across and beyond the known world of Alexander the Great’s time. In Egypt the greatest of them saw pharaohs become Greeks and saw the events that changed Rome from Republic to Empire. It too still reverberates through the Western imagination. Great waves were made by Julius Caesar, by Octavius, Shakespeare and Gibbon; smaller ripples by Cavafy, E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell.

The tales in this book are of much different men and women than the Long Man, even in the form of his seated bronze image; without his wig and usually draped with Japanese girls, giggling as they are photographed on his lap; to be found in the Peter Paul Fortress. They are even more different than the short fair man with the twisted neck whose imagination ran beyond this world, a god with his horns of Ammon.

The people of these stories are to be seen among a group of strangers waiting for the lights to let them cross the road. The magnitude of the changes which I have attempted to describe, whether sudden or almost imperceptible, match in their lives the magnitude of the changes Peter and Alexander brought about in their worlds.

My interest is not in the changes of childhood and adolescence, when only the absence of change would be remarkable, but in those unpredictable changes that occur after the brain begins its long decline in our mid-twenties, after we start to coagulate, become fixed in the patterns of our work, our relationships and our expectations. Changes after middle-age are, perhaps, the most interesting because of the complexity of their genesis and the effort and determination needed to effect them. I must add that I exclude changes determined by fashion and the media in Palm Springs, the Cote d’Azur or the Gold Coast.

I am not clever enough to attempt to disprove the view that all fiction is autobiographical. It is, and I see nothing wrong with that. These stories are set in places I know. None are an attempt to describe any individual; rather the characters contain elements of many and try to express a delight in finding the unexpected, in being let into the imagination of others.

The language is my habitual mixture of Canadian, English and American speech, reflecting my education and working life. There is even a little Oz collected during the year in which I lived and worked in North Queensland. My first move occurred sixteen days after my birth and continued. For the resultant inconsistencies I make no apology.

The idea of writing this book, of writing anything, came after my life was changed catastrophically and irrevocably by the death of my wife, Elaine.

The worst that I could imagine had occurred. Life was determined by grief. Tomorrow did not matter. It would happen but there was no purpose to it. I was alone and neither expected nor wanted to be otherwise. I had lost the irreplaceable.

I don’t think I saw it at the time but grief gave me a kind of freedom. Because nothing really mattered I worked longer hours, not leaving anything to be completed the following day. There was nothing to go home to. I talked to anybody, there was no reason not to. I expected nothing and wanted nothing of them. It took time to get beyond the sympathy, to control the irritation roused by those who ‘understood’ and those who had solutions for my ‘problem’, my ‘situation’. I travelled alone and, because I felt no purpose, simply went from one place to another. Because some places and activities were seen as dangerous was no reason to avoid them. Luck played a larger part than ever before. I became much less judgemental and discriminating. Unplanned, it was all to my advantage, but that advantage was then meaningless.

Three years passed in this way. Julian Barnes and many others are right in pointing out the absence of any equivalent in English of ‘Coup de Foudre’ and that is not just a linguistic anomaly. It is a profound difference in thinking, feeling and belief. Perhaps, as a mongrel, I was spared those limitations and certainties.

The most profound change in my life came at about ten in the morning on the last day of March.

Married for three years, Sabine and I live on our small island, Hornby Island. She tries to teach me German and sometimes there is progress. She has taught me to ski and to kayak. We paint and sketch together. I have learned to operate the backhoe. She has travelled with me from Brittany to Morocco (though she will never feel any affection for a camel), from Quebec to Bulgaria. Each journey has been a delight in the random, unorganised way of our travelling. My greatest joy has been to discover, at her insistence, that I can dance; not in any formal sense, just dance. From the Hornby Island Festival each summer, in fields that slope down to the waters of the Strait of Georgia where, as the moon rises, the lights of cruise ships heading to Alaska can be seen beyond the music from Africa, Quebec or Cuba, to a cafe in St Petersburg and a wedding; a Bavarian Ethiopian wedding; in San Francisco, we have danced together. Sometimes in the morning we dance, between the croissants and the granola.

It is in no way comparable to the life I lived before 2007. Each has been entirely different, each has brought great joy.

That this life with Sabine began when I was seventy-two continues to be a cause of wonder that becomes the more so with each discovery we make together.

ANIMULA VAGULA BLANDULA

Animula vagula blandula

Hospes comesque corporis

Quae nunc abibis in loca

Pallidula rigida nudula

Nec ut soles dabis iocos

         Hadrian

Ah, gentle, fleeting, wav’ring sprite,

Friend and associate of this clay!

To what unknown region borne,

Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?

No more, with wonted humour gay,

But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

                                                 Byron

‘I think I like it here’ said Erich. None of us had spoken for some time and no one replied at first. Erich thought a long and heavy time before he said anything and this was a thought he had never uttered before, not even to Lev and Giovanni who knew him first. The fog slithered slowly and insidiously over the snow covered ice on the canal as we each considered Erich’s statement. Under the connecting bridges where the Griboedov canal meets the Moyka there was little to distract us. What traffic there was made only soft and muffled protests about the conditions. Occasional voices drifted down, the words too tired to leave any meaning. We usually gathered here from the first days of November until the ice began to shift and stretch over on the Neva in the spring which comes late here. Since I had become the fifth and last member of the group we had never been disturbed here.

‘I shall never be able to say that again’. It was Lev, the first, the oldest of us all whose deep, sad, slow singing voice always commanded attentive silence and would do so for long, long periods as he told how he came to be here and described a time and a place, a life and a love, long before any of us, even Giovanni, had been dreamed into existence. ‘It saddens me to remain as I have since the first trees were cut, the first pilings driven and the first ditches dug; to know I cannot change these things or change myself. Before those things began was empty grief, the gnawing pain of loss and regret, the futile questions without answers; but it seemed as it ought to be. The winters came and the marshes lay still and rigid in the dark days. When the ice broke and pressed on our island, when the floods slackened and birds sang in the small green branches, when the mosquitoes and the mould told you it was summer as you fished in the reed channels, then it all seemed as it should be, always would be. The berries and the baskets of autumn, the slow dying acceptance of the season always suited my mind best, not that I had any cause to feel that my purpose had been fulfilled. All that was destroyed forever by one long man.’ The silence that followed we had all heard before; a deep, rolling, long drawn out, immensely ancient thing from before there was speech; the first singing in the world.

We all heard it and remained still, absorbed in the depths of our being. Lev had told us, little bit by little bit, of his wife, the woman who shared the seasons and the uncertainties with him; the woman who had given birth to nine children. Three of those children had lived long enough to die of the fever that took them all: Lev, his wife and children: one Spring. They died in their mud, wood and reed house in the marshes. Their bodies and the house subsided into the mud, disintegrated and became a part of the marshland that had seemed to them eternal.

As I had grown older, like everyone else I knew, I’d listened to my friends repeat their stories, their jokes, their lies. My wife usually told them that she had heard it all many times before, that they were senile and that it never had been amusing anyway. I kept out of sight, stuck to the weather, the ball game and last night’s TV, none of which interested me. People pitied me, thought me a wimp or a saint and invited us back for my sake only. I kind of agreed with them. Here none of us ever tell Lev that we had heard him say such things before. I think this is because it never was exactly as he had told things before. There were subtle complex changes; a different colour in the birch leaves of autumn, a different note as the first ducks returned to the lagoons, a different turn of the mouth when one of the children smiled. We were the listeners, the only listeners, to an infinite set of variations on the theme of living in and with a primaeval world, a world of slow deep movement, unchanging over centuries, that was at its end. The changes were incomprehensible to Lev even now. The world of words and ideas, the grandchild of Lev’s world, had destroyed it.

Giovanni was the next to speak. ‘Yes, Erich, I know that feeling but I had it the moment I and my master Domenico set foot in this place. All the new palaces, the new churches, the paved roads by the new cut canals, the energy of men creating new beauty; all this excited me. I felt that I could make things here, create my own new beauty and make money, enough money with which to return to Impruneta a wealthy and respected master of my trade. I saw mud and stinking ditches turning into golden domes, pillars and beautiful statues. I saw an empty place, inhabited only by otters and herons becoming the glittering centre of an aristocratic, wealthy, witty world stretching to Rome and beyond. That I was only a journeyman plasterer with few enough jobs to my credit in Florence, did not suppress my delight in this place. And so it remained until I finished my work.’

Giovanni was, in certain ways, the youngest of us all in spite of his years. It was he who showed us how to drift into that Georgian restaurant just off the Nevsky Prospekt. It was he who moved with the music there, gently, almost imperceptibly at first then with all his fragile being as we watched the dancing, heard the drum and the pipes and the wildness of the singing and knew that life was good for the dancers that night. It was Giovanni who pulled us out and made us watch the long legged girls with stiletto heels and miniskirts parade their bodies for all to see and enjoy. Giovanni has an erotic imagination

Reviews for Changes

[delan_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Title: ChangesAuthor: Robin MolineuxPublisher: Trafford PublishingISBN: 978-1-4907-3698-3Review by Bob Lane, MA“Talking does not make the world or even pictures, but talking and pictures participate in making each other and the world as we know them.” Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols has pointed correctly in this statement to the inevitable association between works of art and the language used to talk about those works. In the last century, it was believed that the exclusion of subject matter (landscapes, people, family scenes) from painting would disentangle the image on the canvas (or the words of a poem) from literary associations and clear the way for a direct response of the eye to optical data. The hope was to reduce art to speechlessness. An “Art of the Real” exhibition recently at the Museum of Modern Art described its selection as chunks of raw reality totally liberated from language. “Modern art,” writes one recent critic “has eliminated the verbal correlative from the canvas.” Perhaps. But if a work of today no longer has a verbal correlative, it is because its particular character has been dissolved in a sea of words.At no time in history have more words been written in defence of art, in explanation of what it “really is,” in defence of its “uniqueness,” in the production of manifestoes of explanation and genesis. To describe a striped canvas and a striped tablecloth in the same terms is to commit an artistic faux pas of great proportion much like the child who, because he didn’t understand the rules of the game, remarked that the emperor was naked. The language of art criticism today is a subtle and abstract means to create the idea of art works in conceptual framework of theories instead of in the perceptual framework of the senses. Recently two young artists in Latin America contrived a Happening that was reported in detail in the press but never took place, so their “work of art” consisted of their own news releases and the resulting interviews, accounts,, and comments. Here the “work of art” was only what was said about it. There was no “picture” only “talking”.Other “artists” are using nature as a canvas. By rearranging rocks (or grinding up bottles to cover a B.C. Island) and making trenches in the dirt, they hope to show that there is no real distinction between a work of art and natural objects. But, like the child in the “Emperor’s Clothes” this is to function without knowing the rules of the game. “Art” implies artifact. Its Indo European base is from “ar ” which means to join, fit together. Certainly Goodman is right when he says that talking does not make pictures (or by extension any work of art, except, of course, in the obvious way that talking makes, e.g. oral poetry, where the act of talking is the art form) but participates in making them. One need only look at any history of art book to note the way in which words about pictures are used to classify and categorize those pictures. But the pictures are real. The works of art are there in time and space, have an existence of their own carved out of the flux of that time and space. Talking and pictures are married, but form allows the marriage.In literature, the art form closest to me in terms of training and interest, one finds not only the primacy of words, but also words about words.“I got to use words when I talk to you”. Perhaps, at least on this point, all literary critics would agree. A simple statement. Yet implicit within it are the very problems about which the critics storm and rave. “I”,, “talk”, “you” or poet, poem and audience these three parts of the poetic experience are the basis of all critical arguments. Where does one place the emphasis? Which is to be considered most carefully? Is each of equal import in the communicative process referred to as the poetic experience? Do we study a poem to investigate the complex maze of the creative mind, or to discern its philosophical statement and place it in the history of ideas, or do we concern ourselves with the emotional impact of the poem on the reader, or are all of these ingredients of the poetic experience?Most all critical differences of agreement dealt with by our critics come about as a result of shifting the emphasis from or changing the relation among the three: poet, poem and audience. The formalist critics insist upon concentrating on the poem itself, convinced that knowledge of the poet (his life, letters, philosophy, etc.) is of no value in the evaluation and judgment of his poem. The psychoanalytic critics would have us concentrate on the poet in an attempt to probe his psyche to discover what makes him different from the rest of the world of non-poets. And of course the political critic is interested in examining the poem as a rhetorical device for the control and/or education of the audience. Aristotle,, for example, would have us believe that art serves simply a social function in that through purgation (a purging of emotions as if by an overdose of laxative) or catharsis the human audience will be trained to the higher ideals of the perfect state. Following this notion we find the state subsidized plays where the theaters become hospitals to cure the ills of the tribe. Or in somewhat less pejorative terms the emphasis is on the spiritual regenerative function of tragedy and comedy.Can we ever really deny this function of art? Something does happen to a person as the result of experiencing Hamlet or The Seventh Seal, somehow one is different as result of the experience, one has been impressed, purged, changed as a result of the intellectual, emotional power of the experience; has achieved a new insight into the nature of man and his relationship with the universe, with whatever gods there may be, has come closer to an awareness of what it means to be a mortal human being filled with passions, desires, ego, and overwhelming self-concern, who is attempting to carve some meaning out of life as he continues his walk toward the grave. Poetry and fiction helps to supply this much sought meaning, this non-scientific truth concerning the nature of things which helps to bind humans together in an appreciation of the wonder of life. One must never forget the importance of life itself, however, as teacher, as a force which shapes and changes the human sensibility. In any event, to appreciate poetry and fiction as an integral part of life, one must become a part of the creative poetic/narrative experience. In a sense every reader, insomuch as he is creative, recreates the work of art which he is perusing. To the creative reader, the moment of insight has value insofar as he is able to relate it to the body of his previous experience, his previous attitudes, his perception of reality and his outlook on life. Integrating what one reads with one’s beliefs about self, about humans, about the world values is a process that must be unique to each individual, and is, therefore, a creative act.Robin Molineux’s Changes is a collection of stories that requires such a creative response. The stories require a creative and intelligent reading to fully appreciate the complexity and power of the characters and of the changes those varied characters undergo in these powerful stories of restlessness, alienation, and acceptance. The locations of the stories ranges from England, to Australia to St. Petersburg and on to Vancouver Island. The first, and in many ways the most interesting story, “Animula Vagula Blandula” begins, “‘I think I like it here’ said Erich.” Here. But just where is here? We are provided a clue in the head quote:Animula, vagula, blandulaHospes comesque corporisQuae nunc abibis in locaPallidula, rigida, nudula,Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos… —Emperor Hadrian (138) Hadrian’s paean to his departing soul is followed by Lord Byron’s translation:Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav’ring sprite,Friend and associate of this clay!To what unknown region borne,Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?No more, with wonted humour gay,But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.—Lord Byron (1806)We learn that the five characters we will meet are in the vicinity of the Griboyedov Canal which starts from the Moyka River near the Field of Mars. It flows into the Fontanka RiverBefore 1923 it was called Catherine Canal, after the empress Catherine the Great, during whose rule it was deepened. The Communist authorities renamed it after the Russian playwright and diplomat Alexandr Griboyedov.We learn the five are dead. They are similar in that they have been forgotten- bodies never recovered by loved ones. They are conversing together and in the conversations we learn of their lives and deaths. At peace now they no longer are restless or alienated.As the title suggest all of the stories have to do with change. Change brought about by contingencies in the world or simply by acts of will (Don’t worry, says one character to his wife, I’ll be back in a year.)The journey through these stories is, like life, full of many emotions and the idea that change is inevitable and necessary in our trip from spermatorium to crematorium. Each of these stories will provide you with enjoyment and with a clearer idea of the way toward peace, contentment, and a kind of joy.Bob Lane is an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy and Literature at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia.