Places Where I've Lived: Robson Street 4

I read amply and copiously during my tenancy on Robson Street.  But what I kept returning to were the Four Quartets by TS Eliot and the writings of Carl Jung.  Here's the link if you have time to read it: http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/.  Eliot and Jung complemented each other well and I found myself living in an odd sense of time meaning no time.  The intense rhythm of life, the contact with death and danger and the sense of living while straddling extremes made it necessary for me to find and maintain a still calm centre.  The sense of eternity evoked in the Four Quartets and the Jungian analysis of dreams, the anima and animus, the shadow, archetypes, the collective unconscious and mandalas all synthesised into a grand mystical poem that I was inhabiting without ceasing.  It was madness, yes, but a delicious invigorating madness.  I was inhaling the air of Heaven while languishing in Purgatory.

I was always visiting the library, just less than a half block away, taking out various volumes of Jung.  During the summer I would read his essays and studies while lying on the grass in the rose garden at Stanley Park, feeling strangely transported into another dimension, where the crimson or yellow rose petal shone always and perpetually in the light of the forever midsummer sun.  The stillness was in itself an unbearable beauty that I could not sustain, but simply lie back and allow to consume me in its golden flame.

Here is some of the poetic prose I began writing then, dated 18 August, 1986:

"A damp forehead and the cool morning yields quickly, though not eagerly, to the desperate heat of the dying summer.  The chopper with its stealthily rotating blades atop the roof of the city police building promised a day of supervised mayhem.  Joy, a golden thread guided by a silver needle weaves and stitches its sometimes futile though inevitably triumphant pattern across a ragged, drab and gaudy garment of urban misery.  The people who see each other, who pass each other in the street, who chat interminably in restaurants, coffee shops and cellar bistros, who meet clandestinely, though by accident, in the parks, near public fountains and along public causeways--people without joy, too stifled to have sorrow, they speak reasonably, with caution but without passion.  The sirens have already begun to rip across this obdurate false calm, but each of us remaining steadfast, unmoved, banal, perhaps seeing too little, with sleep-encrusted Monday morning eyes, to be blinded momentarily by midmorning light casting its frenzied brilliance against a white tiled wall.  But there is too much work, or not enough, too many appointments, or not enough, and responsibility upon responsibility or no responsibility at all to make possible, to render delectable the seeing of that wall, too blindingly bright to behold.  There is nothing to see, we are unseeing, and we are being seen, being watched.  The eyes are everywhere, beholding, and soon the light becomes tolerable for our capacity, for seeing anything of value becomes quickly diminished, left behind with the already forgotten cool of the morning.  The summer is dying and the rest of us have yet to live."

That's all I'll bore you with today, Gentle Reader.