Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty 

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August 17, 2018

I feel like my entire life is being compressed into the next six hours. I’ve completed all my courses, and finished all but one exam, the dreaded English 440: Foundations of Western Literature, a four-month intensive summer course taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one.

After the exam, I’ll have my B.A from UBC. I’ll then have all the time in the world to work, travel, and see what it is that I really want out of life. I imagine slinging martinis and cappuccinos for a year and then wandering through the Tuscan countryside, stretching out on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, drinking coffee on the humid banks of the Mekong, somewhere on the outskirts of Vientiane. Yet at the moment I feel constrained and frozen in time. Every hour feels like an Ice Age.

The exam is at 8:30 A.M., and it’s now 2 A.M. I have six and a half hours, yet it seems that the one thing I don’t have is time. So I decided to draw all at once on everything I’ve learned, and to stop worrying about everything I can’t remember. I’ve decided to remember everything I know, and forget everything I’ve forgotten.

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I was born in the conservative province of Alberta. Both my parrents were brought up on farms. Yet my father went to school and became a lawyer, and eventually worked for a French oil company, and this allowed our family to live in Europe for several years. At the tender age of fifteen I was set loose in the streets of Paris, where there was no enforced drinking age. Whereas in Calgary I had to find some friendly cowboy with a pick-up truck who was willing to bootleg, in Paris I could just walk into any corner store and come out with a golden six-pack of Kronenbourg or Stella Artois.

In Paris I also learned that throwing rocks at policeman was a viable form of political expression, and that it wasn’t necessary for me to act like an idiot in order to impress girls (although I still acted like an idiot). Coming back to Calgary from Paris wasn’t easy. One year I was having desert with a Russian girl on the Champs-Elysées, and the next year I was at a keg party in the bush somewhere near Okotoks, acting like an idiot. Here’s a picture of the Russian girl outside my school in Paris, and here’s a picture of me on my Suzuki 90 two years earlier, acting like a maniac from the fourth dimension:

You can take the boy away from his motorcycle, but you can’t get the motorcycle out of the boy.

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Ever since I started living in Vancouver, I’ve loved the city’s mix of grit & polish, beaches & skyscrapers, mountain vistas & funky cafes. Renting a tiny apartment in the old Greek district of Kitsilano, I spend most of my days at school and at different cafes all over town — from the Italian caffès on Commercial to the student hang-outs on Main. Although I’ve always loved the city, I grew up in suburban Calgary, and could never really get used to the darker side of Vancouver: the skid row of the downtown east-side, and all the angry, fucked-up, drugged-out people on the streets, buses, and Skytrain. I often wondered, Would my two years of karate help me against a knife-wielding maniac? Vancouver still makes me think of San Francisco: a city of cyber-geniuses and broken, angry souls.

In my spare time I write stories about epic journeys and existential wastelands, angels and devils that fight it out in your head, spies and sorcerers in faraway galaxies. I keep these stories in a ringed blue binder, with the working title, Demons & Wizards. I used two-sided tape to attach the CD cover of the album Demons & Wizards to the front of the binder, to remind me where I came from.

The main reason I write about demons and wizards is that I feel adrift in the world. I hope that some day, by some magical chance, I might find himself again.

There are at least three reasons why I feel adrift, which I think of as the three smallest layers of an onion, lying at the core of my vegetable soul. The outermost of these three (which are of course buried beneath about ten other layers…) is that I was traumatized by a first-year course at Queen’s University: Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West. This course explored a staggering range of ideas, from Plato’s Republic to Sartre’s Nausea. It was taught in a small square room in the basement of the Physics Building by a visiting professor from Paris, Brigitte Dupont.

In 26 weeks Madame Dupont took us from myth to quantum mechanics. One week there was Greek democracy and the next there was war with Sparta. One week there was Reason and a Chain of Being, the next there was riot and the Plague-Journal. One minute DNA brought human evolution into focus, the next an alienated Frenchman was staring at a slithering black tree root that he refused to call Satan.

Madame Dupont’s course blew my mind. Everything I’ve done after it is a vain attempt to bring it back together again. Which is why I intend to call my finished writings, The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty.

Another reason I write about demons and wizards is that I read The Lord of the Rings at the age of thirteen — a trauma magnified by the later movies, where the orcs of my imagination became Uruk-hai birthing from within the inner membrane of my nightmares.

The third reason is that at the age of eleven I went to a summer camp where the counsellors professed to know all about angels, devils, and Jesus. At this pivotal point in my life, I also wanted to know about Jesus, especially if he had something to do with demons, priests, and wizards. Yet some of the counsellors also wanted to get to know the boys too, in the biblical sense, which was very confusing. Yet I didn’t want anything to do with their interpretation of theology.

It wasn’t long after this experience that I revolted against the entire system — Heaven and Hell, priests and politicians, and all the other golden-tongued liars and institutional fantasies. I was soon smoking pot, dropping assorted chemicals, arguing with Saruman, and thinking that Gandalf and the departing Elves had a point.

The heroes of fantasy became my personal heroes. At least the authors of these fantasies never pretended their characters were real. It was because Tolkien never lied to me that I willingly humbled myself before Strider, who sat hidden beneath a dark hood, the unrecognized King, in some dark corner of a bar. It was because Tolkien never expected me to believe in the characters he wrote about, that I believed in them.

I swore that I would never become like Ron Hubbard, and allow fantasies to be turned into theology. Least of all, a theology that had the word science built right into it. I boil this belief down to the phrase, Old Mother Hubbard kicked the dog Ronald Hubbard into her cupboard.

I remember Madame Dupont, and the square little room at the bottom of the Physics building at eight in the morning. I remember her grey hair and thick glasses, as well as the way she helped her students to understand Plato’s cave, Augustine’s City of God, Galileo’s Dialogue, Pascal’s abyss, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s sense impressions, Candide’s voyage, Mill’s optimism, and Sartre’s pessimism.

I wonder what Madame Dupont would think about the stories I write.

I wonder even more about what I’ll write tomorrow morning at 8:30 A.M. during the final exam for English 440: Foundations of Western Literature. Dr. Rexroth isn’t nearly as likeable as Madame Dupont.

The final exam will be a nightmare. It will consist of one topic, chosen from six topics that Dr. Rex gave us beforehand.

All six topics have no thesis or point of view, just a title. In other words, I’ll have to make my own argument, from scratch.

It’s now 2 A.M. The exam starts in six and a half hours.

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Next: ✏️ The Homework Blues

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Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines