The Mechanics of Intimacy

We have to stop living the way we do, disconnected from our surrounds, taking what we want—what we think we need—helping ourselves as if the reserve were unlimited, because finally that’s not what we’re doing—helping ourselves. We’re not doing that at all. These are some of the concerns in Don Gayton’s book.

He introduces The Wheatgrass Mechanism by saying that his book is about western Canada and also plants, myths, dreams and mechanisms. All that but there’s more. It speaks of love and enchantment and has about it a religious quality—the kind of evangelical fervour you get if you talk prairie with people who’ve lived here.

Gayton wasn’t born here and by here I mean the flat part of the Canadian West. He’s from the western United States, like Wallace Stegner. But we’ve had Stegner define our place and how we see it, and glad he did too, so there’s no problem with Gayton either. He knows our prairie at least as intimately as people who’ve lived here all their lives. I mean it when I say intimate. He writes, “Prairie, prairie. I kneel right down close to the patterns, rubbing my hand lovingly over a tiny carpet of pussytoes. They’re cool and damp, somehow able to coax moisture from this hot and windy afternoon.”

It’s a natural thing when talking about the land to link it most closely to the farmers who work it. But living in a city on the prairies is like a shy girl in a short skirt, always tugging at the hem, pulling at the edges, knowing where the borders are and where they end. It’s a strength of this place, a bonus I believe, that I never forget the flat open spaces circling my city. So I didn’t want to be left out of Gayton’s group of observers and noters.

At the outset he describes the prairie as a “bioregion, a crude triangle running from Brandon to Edmonton, down to the foot of the Rockies at the 49th parallel, and back along the Border to Brandon again.” He adds that it’s also a region of the mind, turning over ground already worked by writers like Henry Kreisel, Eli Mandel and Robert Kroetsch, and he lists some of the contents of this mindscape: windmills, buffalo jumps, rock pickers, turtle effigies, rod weeders (whatever the heck they are) and landlocked ships. Here he’s referring to the isolated Finn, Tom Sukanen, and his folly but it’s no folly to dream, we know.

I like his notion of farmers jealous of people who knew the land before they did, secreting away the aboriginal stone hammers they’d find during ploughing. He may be right when he says that farmers won’t spook present dry spells by talking about the drought of the ’30s but I know we did—talk about the drought, that is.

We’d gone to Victoria in June. My first visit there. I’d never seen so much green. I had to take my shoes off and feel the thick mossy grass with my bare feet. I’d never seen anything like it, not even on a golf course. We were visiting Robert Kroetsch, who was living there, temporarily out of his prairie element. It was 1988. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba there had been little snow over the winter and no rain in the spring. Early in June the winds began. Fields lifted into the sky, obscuring the sun, mimicking clouds that looked like they might hold rain. It continued dry. You couldn’t keep your windows closed because of the heat. You couldn’t open them because of the dust. There was talk of rationing water and the mayor asked us to sprinkle our lawns and gardens prudently.

We’d eaten a wonderful dinner somewhere at the end of a long drive where Kroetsch claimed he knew the way. All the tree-lined roads confounded him and we almost didn’t find the place. There we ate, in a lodge by a lake, or maybe it was the ocean, and we talked about how things were at home. The dust, the grey, the wind and heat. Kroetsch was working on a novel and planting thyme in his garden. “Maybe I should come home,” he said, as we stood by the car near the water. Rubbing his jaw, worrying, maybe I should come home. Not a farmer but a writer—a teacher, a prairie dweller—who figured he should just be there if there was trouble. Prairie is like that. It’s home. Like Gayton says—among other things—prairie is shaped by loss. “Maybe I should come home.”

It’s the conjunction between science and art that interests Gayton—the bony ridge that pushes up when they bump that holds his attention. It’s here where things happen and he tells us that for Albert Einstein, for instance, his biases and personal feelings provided “the first critical step.” Gayton concludes his introductory chapter with a confession. “I like that word mechanism; the mere mention of it shifts a paradigm, and seems to threaten our intuitive enjoyment of patterns and experience.” It’s too bad, he adds, that artists let themselves be frightened by mechanism and scientists withdraw from myth and imagination. For Gayton the two worlds find unity in the landscape. It’s there he brings them together and The Wheatgrass Mechanism is his explicating document.

In an essay written in 1967 and included in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, published 20 years after it was written, Octavio Paz accepts that a poet can use a computer to select and mix the words of a poem. I suspect the computer he had in mind is not the machine that occupies first place on every writer’s desk today. In fact, his imagined use was probably more radical; he suggests that a computer is no more likely to replace or do damage to poets than do dictionaries or teatises on rhetoric. Cementing the seam to which Gayton refers, Paz writes:

Poetry enters the picture at the moment when impersonal memory—the vocabulary of the computer or dictionary—and our personal memory intersect: suspension of the rules and irruption of the unexpected and the unpredictable. A break in the usual procedure, an end to formula—poetry is always an alteration, a linguistic deviation. A creative deviation that produces a new and different order.

Paz notes with interest that technology is allowing a return to the roots of poetry. Mass communication and the accessibility of the machine bring it back to the oral, making poetry once again a collective act, a fiesta, a play, a ceremony. It comes off the page, apprehended by the ear, newly embodied.

Gayton himself leans to poetry when he plays with terminology, tossing in a handful of science—words wonderfully mysterious like pebbles on a foreign beach: lacustrine clays, relict grassland, grass and forb and rock and sky, mountain orogeny and phloem and xylem. There’s even the chorus for what could be a Cyber and Western hurtin’ song: “He was a grazier, a transhumant, a rangeman.”

For me and countless other prairie people the essential poem is Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue, a prairial, to borrow a title from painter Ivan Eyre, that gives us language that’s site-specific, and universal, if you have a heart.

Brome grass, Kroetsch tells us in the poem, flourishes under absolute neglect. He knew his science without Gayton telling us, “The exposure and dryness during the growing season discourages trees and favours shrubs and grasses that have tough, minimalist, above-ground structure and massive root systems.” There’s not much difference there between the poet and the agronomist.

When Gayton the poet lets the scientist in his soul come to the fore, that’s when the real sensuality comes in. Here he is writing about CAM plants (that’s Crassulacean Acid Metabolism, in case you forgot).

They have standard kranz anatomy but the gross morphology of these plants is always distinct: they are thick-leaved and fleshy, like cacti, the jade plant and pineapple. This is an adaptation to stress environments; thickening increases volume without greatly increasing exposed surface area.

And there’s a genuine sensitivity that’s not unlike the responsiveness in prairie artist Don Proch’s landscape pieces, pieces that inevitably become a woman’s body or dissolve into cumulus lips in a wide open sky.

I pluck a mature seed of western porcupine grass from the edge of the blowout and moisten its long twisted awn with my tongue. The awn begins to uncoil, slowly, following internal clocks. Moisture would be the minute hand here, and season the hour. The coiled awn is a lovely mechanism that, at the right hydrological moment, will drill its barbed and sharpened seed into the ground.

Here, and when he says, “There must be a way beyond condescension, beyond science fiction or simple gee whiz, to open up these territories of science. To analyze them the way a lover studies living flesh”—he reads like British critic John Berger. Not in subject or language so much but in his willingness to own up to a subjective stance and, beyond that, to put himself with deliberation right into the middle of the project at hand.

The things he’s chosen for close scrutiny reveal his particular stance, his own quirkiness, and it was at these sections in the book where I found myself most engaged. For example, I hadn’t thought about the “niche.” Niches, he tells us, are everywhere. It’s an idea fundamental to concepts of ecology. It’s simply the space that a plant or any living organism occupies.

Here’s another one—this one has to do with perspective and how it colours perception. Gayton observes that in the 1860s John Palliser explored the Canadian West for Queen Victoria. He was on horseback and his report reflected the height of the grasslands to horse foot and belly. Others moved through new country by canoe. Their sight would have been different. Gayton was bicycling. He would see other things. I hadn’t thought conveyance—the technology of movement—coloured historical record in quite that way. Similarly, before reading this book, cross-dressing was something I associated with sexuality, but Gayton observes that registrants at a range management research conference had switched costumes. Ranchers were wearing business suits and researchers wore Levis and chewed snoose. Or how about digging history? Gayton explains that in unglaciated locations “deeper means older,” but in North America the movement of the monolithic ice machines ground everything together into a strata stew. I hadn’t thought about that either.

Where the book doesn’t work is in its closing chapter. In our name Gayton berates himself for hubris in thinking he/we could have it all. I understand what he’s saying but it’s at the level of the personal that the book does its best work. Its appeal and its effectiveness lie in the individuality of his single voice.

It is necessary to ensure that we not add to the deadly catalogue of environmental disasters. We must reverse the ecological course we’re on or the journey will be brief. He makes a compelling argument that we can’t afford to applaud only at the level of rhetoric. So his recommendation that we adopt a particular site of industrial or ecological malfeasance and set about to correct it as a personal project is a small, albeit generous gesture.

It’s how we perceive time (and history) that’s the issue. It’s where we stand in all time, how we read history that’s the crux. But Gayton’s tie to the planet can’t be questioned, nor his sincerity in wanting to make changes.

Love is the spur he puts to his deeds. He says early in the book, “…I realize that love is hopelessly entangled in our landscape equations. We see new country as a conjugal garden, or occasionally as a boundless plain for cowboy solitude and misogyny. We have a recurring need to commit ourselves and the western landscape is always available.”

I’d say that commitment isn’t even voluntary. When you’ve lived here you have no choice. Like Kroetsch said that night, standing in green, green Victoria and picturing in his mind how the prairie looked—baked and hot and dry and dust-damaged—”Maybe I should come home.” ♦

Meeka Walsh is a Winnipeg-based writer and art critic.

The Wheatgrass Mechanism Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape by Don Gayton Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Fifth House Publishers, 1990 Paperback, 156pp., $16.95