PS 8527 134 Z53 1988 • Selected Organs , Selected Organs parts of an autobiography bpNichol Black Moss Press +he.. tons\ I~ for Deanna who shares the Workman hips and the rest of the legacy Some Words Of Introduction Selected Organs is, as its title suggests, taken from a larger work- Organ Music- which is still ongoing. I've been working on and at Organ Music for some eight years now. The basic idea was to come at the issue of autobiography from another direction i.e. through anecdotes which had their origin in the various parts of the body. I wrote the first one, 'The Vagina', in March of -r98o, and the form it took has been the pattern for all the ones that've followed. As befits an autobiography, all stories are true. They are told in a specific style borrowed from the oral story-telling methods of my Grandma Workman (Leigh) and her brothers & sisters. From a technical standpoint these are the least forgiving pieces I have ever written, by which I mean that unless I get the rhythm of the first few sentences absolutely right the pieces stop dead in their tracks and won 't continue until I've corrected whatever the problem is. Which explains why some 8 years of writing has yielded only eleven texts. When Marty Gervais approached me about publishing Organ Music as a book I told him the work wasn' t finished. But who knows how long it will take me to finish the rest? I'm not even sure how many the 'rest' are. For some reason the number twenty keeps flashing before my .-------------------------------------------- eyes. So I've decided to gather ten of them together into this collection, a kind of intenm autobiography as it were. There's more I could add but I'll leave the rest to you. I know most of the parts you'll read about in here aren't organs but who could resist a title like Organ Music? Not me. bpNichol Toronto, April1987. Contents The Vagina The Mouth 9 13 The Tonsils 17 The Chest 21 The Lungs: A Draft 25 The fingers )1 The l-1ips 37 The Anus 43 The Toes 47 )1 Sun1 of the Parts +he.. The Vagina 1. I never had one. 2. I ltved instde a woman for nine months & tnstde this male shell all of rny life. I floated around on that stde of the wall pok1ng & ktcktng her not looktng for extts tdl I needed them. There came a t1n1e I needed you vagtna to get thru tnto thts vvorld. F1 rst thing I say at the light of day ts ' waaah,' Ma. J· I thot they c.lll \\ere hairless even tho I bathed with my rnothe1 I that they all were hke the ltttle gtrl' s who came 11c.1kcd to the door I delivered the paper to when I was n1ne C\ en tho I read the typed porno stones rny brother brought back fron1 the navv \vhen I \\'as ten I thot they all \Vere 9 hairless like the nude women 's in the sunbathing magazines in the pool hall in Port Arthur even tho I had to know different somewhere I thot they all were hairless & they weren't. 4· I always wanted one. I grew up wanting one. I thot cocks were okay but vaginas were really nifty. I liked that name for them because it began with 'v' and went 'g' in the middle. I never heard my mother or my sister mention them by name. They were an unspoken mouth & that was the mouth where real things were born. So I carne out of that mouth with my mouth flapping 'waaah. ' Oh I said that. I said that. I said 'waaah' Ma again & again after I was born. 5· When I was eleven this kid I knew took me to the drugstore where he worked & showed me some sanitary napkins for men. He said, 'you wear these when you get your period. ' I remember he pointed the box out to me & it was way up in the back of this unlit top shelf. I figured I must have some kind of vestigal vagina which was bound to open. I waited almost two years. I never had one. 6. When sex happened I realized it was all a matter of muscles. I liked the way her muscles worked. She liked the way my muscle worked. It wasn 't the one thing or the other thing but the way the two of them worked together. And that was 10 where all the power & the feehngs sprang from - the muscles. Alive alive oh. 7· Doorway. Frame. Mouth. Opening. Passage. The trick is to get from there to here thru her. Or the way Ellie misread that sign on the highway for years: RIGHT LANE MUST EXIST. And of course its the old conundrum- the exit's the entrance. Exit Ma & I exist. And when I feel in love with Ellie I was entranced. Into a world. The world. This world. Our world. Worlds. ou I ( I \ I \ \ I n l l n u J I \ I \ u t r ;h n1 r l t \ 'h I u ull I f remember anything about it but the mouth remembers. The mouth remembers what the brain can't quite wrap its tongue around & that' s \vhat my life' s become. My life's become my mouth ' s remembering, telling stories with the brain's tongue. 3· I must have been nine. I'm pretty sure I was nine because I remember I was the new boy in school. I remember I was walking on n1y way there, the back way, thru the woods, & here was this kid walking towards me, George was his name, & I said 'ht George' & he said ' I don 't like your mouth' & grabbed me & smashed my face Into h1s knee. It was my first encounter with body art or 1t was my first encounter with someone else' s idea of cosmetic surgery. It was translation or composition. He rearranged me. 4· The first dentist called me the Cavity Kid & put 35 fillings into me. The second dentist said the first dentist was a charlatan, that all the fillings had fallen out, & put 38 more fillings in me. The third dentist had the shakes from his years in the pnsoner of war camp & called me his 'juicy one' , saliva frothing from my mouth as his shakey hand approached me. The fourth dentist never looked at me. His nurse put me out with the sleeping gas & then he'd enter the room & fill me. The fifth dentist said my teeth \Nere okay but my gums would have to go, he' d have to cut me. The sixth dentist said well he figured an operation on the foot was okay coz the foot was a long way away but the mouth was just a little close to where he thot he lived & boy did we ever agree because I'd begun to see that every time I thot of dentists I ended the sentence with the word 'me' . My mouth was me. I wasn't any ancient Egyptian who believed his Ka was in his nose - nosiree - I was just a Kanadian kid & had my heart in my mouth every time a dentist approached me. 5· It all begins with the mouth. I shouted waaa when I was born, maaa when I could name her, took her nipple in, the rubber nipple of the bottle later, the silver spoon, mashed peas, dirt, ants, anything with flavour I could shove there, took the tongue & flung it ' round the mouth making sounds, words, sentences, tried to say the things that made it possible to reach him, kiss her, get my tongue from my mouth into some other. I liked that, liked the fact the tongue could move in mouths other than its own, & that so many things began there- words did, meals, sex- & tho later you travelled down the body, below the belt, up there you could belt out a duet, share a belt of whiskey, undo your belts & put your mouths together. And I like the fact that we are rhymed, mouth to mouth, & that it begins here, on the tongue, in the pun, comes from mouth her mouth where we all come from. 6. I always said I was part of the oral tradition. I always said poetry was an oral art. When I went into therapy my therapist always said I had an oral personality. I got fixated on oral sex, oral gratification & notating the oral reality of the poem. At the age of five when Al Watts Jr was still my friend I actually said, when asked who could do something or other, 'me orAl' & only years later realized how the truth 's flung out of you at certain points r.:~ runs on ahc,HL And here I' ve been for years running ..1ftcr 1ne, tr ,ing to catch up, shouting ' it's the oral ', ' it al1 depends on the ornl ', everybody looking at n1y bibliography, the too Inany books & pnn1phlt•ts, saying vvith painful accuracy : ' that bp- he rc .1lly runs off ,lt the rnouth. ' +h«- tons\ Is The Tonsils 1.. They said 'you don't need them' but they were keen to cut them out. They said 'if they swell up they'll choke you to death' so you learned they cut things off if they might swell up. There were two of them in their sacs & they hung there in your throat. They cut them off. 2. I didn't have them long enough to grow attached to them but they were attached to me. It was my first real lesson in having no choice. It was my only time ever in a hospital as a kid & I wasn' t even sick. I wasn 't even sick but I had the operation. I had the operation that I didn' t want & I didn 't say ' no' because there was no choice really. I had everybody who was bigger than me telling me this thing was going to happen & me crying a lot & them telling me it was good for me. It was my first real lesson in having no attachments. 3· Almost everyone I knew had their tonsils out. Almost everyone I knew was told it' s good for you. ' Even tho none of us who had our tonsils out ever knew any kid who choked to death from having them in almost everyone we knew had their tonsils out. 1 1 4· I miss my tonsils. I think my throat used to feel fuller. Now my throat feels empty a lot & maybe that's why I eat too fast filling the throat with as much as I can. Except food is no substitute for tonsils. The throat just gets empty again. 5· I was told I didn' t need my tonsils. Maybe this is the way it is. Maybe as you grow older they tell you there are other bits you don't need & they cut them out. Maybe they just like cutting them out. Maybe tonsils are a delicacy doctors eat & the younger they are the sweeter. Maybe this is just paranoia. I bet if I had a lobotomy they could cut this paranoia out. 6. What cutting remarks! What rapier wit! What telling thrusts! Ah cut it out! Cut it short! He can't cut it! You said a mouthful ! 7· There are nvo of them & they hang there in your throat. There are nvo of them in sacs & the) svvell up ~ow there are none Gosh these words seem empty! "J. You Wt re obsessed '''it h it. Evervone was obsessed \Vi th it. n the edge of thirteen \vhen nrol \Visdon1 ' s chest started to dL·velop you couldn ' t take your eyes off it. Until you \\'ere twclv( everyone \\'ho was your age had a chest. But then you turned thirtC'L'n ?~ vou had a chest & she had breasts on her chL'St & your chest was pun ' ?.:: he real I y had a chest & she \Vas chest ' & all the bad puns began about being 'chest friends ' (z: it \Vas 'chest too 1nuch' or ' t\\'0 rnuch ' or ' t\Vo for tea anytirne ba b ,' (\\'h ich of course you ahva ' S said to a gu , coz rou \\'ere too e1nbarrassed to sa , it to a girl) & suddenly you had discover~.::d chests as if thev had never been there before & thev were l:Verv,vhere, ever ' '"here, & vou " 'ere obsessed \vith thcrn . J J ~ J ~ ~ ., -· Fron1 tht a "C of fiv to the,, [')e of si ·teen ) ' OU kept getting chlst colds. -1 nee ave" r for thr~.::e \\'ceks vou 'd bt: sick in bed, J ~ your voice getting deeper (which you liked) , your breathing shallower (which you hated), your nostrils redder, your face whiter, saying mutter for mother muttering for her. She'd bring you gingerale (to soothe your throatL vicks vaporub (to clear your head), & you'd say ' I'm gedding bedder' over & over again like a charm clutched to your hopeless chest, 'I' m gedding bedder' you'd say, sinking further into the sheets, ' I'm gedding bedder', til the bed & you were one pale continuous tone, white on white in white, 'I'm gedding bedderbedder.' 3· It was where longing resided. It was what you played your cards close to. It was one of the few body parts rhymed with the furniture & it held hope or tea or linen. It was a clear noun, substantial, the only named part that didn' t seem small, didn't seem somehow smaller thru naming. It had no funny names or corny names or dirty names & it was the largest part of all. You stuck it out. You puffed it up. It was chest. What it was was chest. 4· You didn 't think of the chest as sensitive until you danced with her. You were thirteen & the dance floor was crowded & tho the moving bodies of your friends pressed you together you would only allow your chests to touch & there was heat & pressure & movement between you & your chest was ten times more sensitive than your hands, felt more than your eyes could see, & your trapped heart pounded as if you would die, explode, right there before her eyes, disintegrate from the 22 ache & longing. You were in love, your chests were in love, as the music & the crowd carried you, pressing you closer & closer together, over that moving dance floor that dark warm August night. 5· When you went into therapy all the language changed. Now the chest was something you got things off of or bared, some place you shouldn't keep things inside of, as if it were a vessel & feelings held there grew stagnant, festered, expanded under pressure until released to air. In the shakey diagratnming of the unconscious it was where deep lay- deep feelings, deep disturbance- or you thot it was because weren't you always being told you shouldn' t be too heady, shouldn't talk off the top of your head, that it was bad to be cut off at the neck, dead from the neck down, & from the neck down is where the chest is. But not too far down because after all you weren't supposed to dump shit on anyone either, or talk a load of crap, piss on them, be a shit, & what was left then but the chest unless, of course, you had a gut feeling. But gut was too ambiguous, too subject to the charge you were just spewing vomit. No. It was the chest. It had to be the chest; that was where the heart was & the heart was good. You were goodhearted, had a lot of heart &, when you got right down to things you had a heart to heart, really opened up, bared your chest & spoke from your heart all your real feelings, your deep feelings, got everything off your chest, just like you were supposed to. +h fv h I un r • • I 1 has ~~ ,, br Jth l1n • I aJd lu IS a br ,lthlanc ltru.: up he.; , 1d u k u u r to n1, h an 1 hoI I don t \' an t to e ou bJ ·ath I dsdn l br ,uht.: 1ht~ \\J ,1 no l rc.;,uh lane.; lie.; saad S1 or c.;a~ht or t no u not br athsn, '' hll he ''~1lk d d '' n th lan · holdan, our brt:ath \\htl h lc kc.;d u~ O\c.;r v,htlc.; he.: h t.: on o us t 1 und1 an the "Ut to ho'' tou h ur t n1, h 111u lc.: '' r h md t )Jlh h pullt.:d 111 lun ... ~ u h d lUI ''aunt '' lulc.: he.: 1,, cd b.t k. nd ( rth \\ tulc he ~ .1 u c.; d an rcuu , c.: a h u" 1 nd t ht.: n 111 o \ d n t h1 rna H rn1l JIG\ an • a r ht' lap \ JUHl brc.:athlc line I a1d I ' ' .1 I Jl n t.l\ 111 on th..: ,u Bob ,1nd n rIll n1.lf 111 u 1 ~b 1n \\ HHl1J tud, I \\ l lllfl in the morning, like I tend to do, getting up early and going into the livingroom. I wa s sitting down in a chair and reading a copy of a new book on literary theory or literary criticism Smaro had brought back from some recent trip as she tends to do. I was just turning the page, just beginning to get into the book when Bob appeared at the top of the stairs, when Bob came down the stairs from th e upper floor, not really awake, came down the stairs anyway , Bob, muttering to himself, ' life, the great tyrant that makes you go on breathing. ' And I thought about breathing. I thought about life. I thought about those great tyrants the lungs, about the lung poems I' ve tried to perfect in various ways, the lung poems Bob's written, written about, lung forms. And I thought about the lungs sitting there, inside the chest- inhaling- exhaling. And I thought to myself, to myself because Bob was in no mood to hear it, I thought 'life's about going the lung distance. ' Just that. And it . IS. 3· We were maybe five , Al Watts Jr and me, no more than five, and we had snuck out back, behind the garage, to try a smoke. It was just the way you read it in all those nostalgic memoirs of male childhood. It was authentic. It was a prairie day in Winnipeg in the late 40's and there we were, two buddies sharing a furtive puff on a stolen cigarette. And just like in all the other stories the father showed up, Al Watts Sr, suddenly appeared around the corner of the garage and said 'so you boys want to smoke, eh ?' If only we'd read the stories. If only we' d had the stories read to us. We'd have known then how the whole thing had to end, we'd have known what part the dad plays in these kinds of tales . But we hadn' t. We didn't. We said yes we really did want to smoke. And we did. AI Watts Sr took us home, took us back to his study, the room he very seldom took us into, and opened up his box of cigars and offered one to each of us. We should have known. We really should have known when he lit them for us and told us to really suck in, to take that smoke right down into our lungs, we should have known what was coming. We didn 't. We did it just the way he said. We sucked that smoke right in, right down to our lungs, and of course we started hacking, of course we started coughing, trying to fling the cigars away. But he made us take another smoke, he made us take another three or four good drags on the cigar, until our bodies were racked from the coughing, until our lungs ached from the lunge and heave of trying to push the smoke out. And we didn't want to smoke anymore, I didn' t want to smoke anymore, I never really wanted to touch a cigarette again. Even when I was a teenager and hanging out with Easter Egg on his old scow down in Coal Harbour and he' d offer me a toke, I never could take the smoke into my lungs again. Except that after I turned 30 I started smoking cigars. And even though I didn' t take the smoke into my lungs, even though I just held it there in the mouth and let it go, when I thought about it it really didn't make much sense. It didn't you know. Look what had happened to me with AI Watts Sr and Al Watts Jr those many many years ago. This wasn't supposed to be the outcome. This wasn't supposed to be the way the story goes. But it was as if the lungs wanted me to do it. As if the lungs had a memory all their own and I was forced to relive it. Not a primal scream but a primal puff, primal smoke from a primal prairie fire. As if the whole childhood episode had been like one of those moral tales where the reader takes a different lesson from the one the writer intended. Or like one of those shaggy dog jokes, where the punch line comes way after the joke should hnve ended, \vny after the person li~tening h~1s lost all interest in \\'hat's being snid. Lung tu11e. Different frotn the he~1d 's. 4· \1\'hen do you first think of your lungs 7 vVhcn you rc young and tiny and turrung blue and vou cnn·t get vour breath because something is happening to \'OU hke 111 ' n1on1 told rne 1t happened to tnc 7 \'Vhen you· re flvc nnd choking over your first smoke ltke I JUSt told you 7 When vou start to sing In the chotr and the choirn1astcr tells you to really fill your lungs vv1th au, your stotnach. and support the sound fron1 do\vn there, instdc the body 7 When you take up running, gasp for that last breath hoping to bring the tape nearer, the finish line, hoping the lungs wtll hold for the final lunge' Do you think of thetn then? In a Inon1ent ltke thts, trying to remember, can you eYen say ' I retnember tlllc; about my lungs'? o. No. Ahnost no tnemones at all. Only the notion that they ' re there pumptng away, JUSt beneath the surface of these hnes, ho\vever much these lines do or don ' t ackno\vledge them. One of those parts you can't do without. Two of thcnl. 'The bellows,' he bellows, airing hts opinion. Because to atr is human. To forgtve the divine. Bellowing our prays, our songs. Bello\ving our Iung-ings . .... A draft he calls it. Ltke tt blew in through a crack Jn the n11nd. Just a bunch of hot air. As \\'hen you're really hot, get the cadences to fall , the syllables to trot past the eye and ear just the \\'ay you see and hear then1 in the rnind. As tho the n11nd tapped the lung and each thot hung there in its proper - ') !'\ place. ' Its just a draft. I'll get it right later.' l-Ie feels the breath heave. He hears the words start as the heart pumps and the lungs take all that air and squeeze tt In there, into the blood stream flows thru the mtnd. No next time when the lungs stop. Ltke that last sentence on the tongue, hangs In the atr after the lungs have pressed thelf last square tnch of It out in the absolute moment of death , only the body left: ' I' l1 get it right next time. ' ' The Fingers for Mary Griffin 1. There were ten of them. Or were there eight? Everyone always said the thumbs were different. They made you human. They let you know you weren' t a great ape. Even tho his sister told him they'd found him in the zoo, a forlorn hairless little monkey the other monkeys had rejected, that rna had taken pity on him and brought him home with them, he knew he was human. He flexed his eight fingers and his two thumbs and knew he was human. Even when the three year old from next door his sister had taught to call him 'monkey' came in and called him 'monkey' in front of all those guests at the dinner table, he knew. He flexed his fingers. He twiddled his thumbs. ' I' m human,' he said and he knew. Jl 2. In all the early photos he is holding his sister' s hand, his fingers wrapped around her fingers , grabbing hold, hanging on. He is doing this in photo after photo, the left hand usually, the left fingers , while the right hand hangs at his side or pushes his brother away as his brother attempts to hold his hand, pushes his brother away with his right fingers while his left fingers curl ever more tightly around his sister' s. And these are his write fingers too, grasping the pen he uses to describe this as he stares at the fingers of his left hand, open now and empty, his sister hundreds of miles away, his right fingers wrapped around this pen, grabbing hold, hanging on, full of these descriptions, while his left hand hangs at his side. 3· 'Take his hand,' they'd say, 'c'mon give him a hand. ' 'It's very handy,' they'd add, by way of explanation, 'when the kids lend a hand, very touching,' they'd say, touching their eyes with their handkerchiefs. And if he couldn't grasp what they were saying, couldn't handle it, they'd put their fingers to their heads drawing circles with their fingertips, touch their fingers to their brows tapping them, as tho they were giving him the mental finger, as tho they were fingering him as mental. And everywhere he turned there were fingers: pointed at him as they shouted 'bang bang you're dead'; raised to ask questions, raised to answer them; stuck out to signal this or that turn. Fingers like sharks as they wagged their jaws at him. Fins. GRRR. 32 4· They put him in the front line in the touch football game. They put him in the front line in front of Moose. They put him in front of Moose whom noone else would stand in front of. They put him in the front line where he' d lean forward, balancing on his fingertips, as the Quarterback called the signals, as the ball was snapped, as Moose trampled over him rushing to follow the ball in. They put him in the front line and Moose trampled over him again and again, game after game, until the day his finger broke, snapped as he tried to touch Moose, as he tried to lay a hand on him, tried to carry out, somehow, the rules of the game. He wore a cast for weeks, covering his wrist and snaking out along his broken finger like a hook and when they asked what had happened, how had he broken his finger, he told them ' playing touch football ' . And nobody laughed because nobody else would get in line in front of Moose. Noone else could or would touch him. 5· The thing was he couldn't control his fingers properly. First there was the writing, making the 0 ' s so large they travelled above and below the blue lines in his copy book, beyond the red margin lay to the left of his pen. And he was told to get more control so he learned to hold the pen funny, gripping it with three fingers as it rested on a fourth. And he learned to write small and tiny, learned to write between the lines, to leave so much white space around the writing that noone could read it. And they wanted him to write larger again and he couldn' t. He could contain the fingers but he couldn't control them. Like later with the model plane kits- balsa wood, plastic- trying to make the bits fit, trying to be so careful, so 33 precise, and he couldn't, wasn ' t , his fingers kept fumbling thtngs, snapptng them, clumsy in the attempt to apply decals , paint, glue, and he would finish these n1odels , hold them up on his fingerttps simulating flight, but they wouldn' t, didn' t , looked like they never had, never would , fly. They just sat there, on his finger s, on his shelf, making him feel guilty, useless, as if they were pointing the finger at him, at his failure , ht s inability to control his fingers. 6. This is the way it went. He was to keep his sticky fingers off the din1ng room table. He wa s to keep hts fingers to himself. He was not to finger himself (which made his fingers sticky), or her (vvhich made his fingers sticky), or stick his finger in his nose (which made his fingers sticky). He was to keep them out of the cookie jar, off of the pie, on the handlebars, inside the car, around the golf dub, above the table. But he was supposed to get a grip on himself, get a good grasp of languages, problem s, situations, a good grasp on reality, be able to reach people, touch them, get a feel for them , put his finger on the solution almost instantly. And you have to hand it to him, he handled the whole thing like a ftve finger exercise, kept hts fingers on the pulse of the notion even when his reach exceeded hts grasp, even when he was lostng his grip, even when h1s head was whirling with more conflicting messages than you could count on the ftngers of both hands, he handled them , he kept them in hand . 7· Fust he was always trying to control ht s fingers. Later he learned the ftngers controlled e\ erything. Everyone thot 1n 34 tens and had ten fingers (sort of) and when push came to shove anyone of them might be the one to push the big red button. Early on he learned the fingers gave you pleasure. You could feed yourself, play with yourself, finger things out, as you had to. Later he learned his fingers could give other people pleasure too, other fingers could give him pleasure, in the reaching, touching, evenhandedness of love. And when she married him, he took the ring that they had bought and placed it on her finger. And he cried. And she cried. And now he knew that finger had a real ring to it, there was something there, and maybe this was the first step in beginning to grasp It. 8. What he wanted to do was play a musical instrument so he took up the violin. He took up the violin because they had one at school noone else wanted to play and they offered it to him, a real hand-me-down, offered him lessons and the violin and he went for it, got his hands on it and off he went. Except everyone at home hated it when he played it, hated it because he couldn't get the fingering right no matter how hard he tried, stood in the other room their fingers in their ringing ears as his fingers tried to wring the right sounds from the strings. And he couldn't, he didn 't, he never will make that violin sing. Because he was all thumbs. Because his hands went haywire. Because his fingers fumbled it, his digits, dig it, didn ' t. 9· After he had been writing for awhile he became aware of how many times he used the word ' fingers ', the fact of them, 35 the image of them, in his poems. All that talk of reaching and touching, all those barriers his fingers seemed to encounter between him and some imagined other. The metaphors. The similes. The symbolisms. And then one day he realized that of course he was always staring at his hand when he wrote, was always watching the pen as it moved along, gripped by his fingers , his fingers floating there in front of his eyes just above the words, above that single white sheet, just above these words i' m writing now, his fingers between him and all that, like another person, a third person, when all along you thot it was just the two of you talking and he suddenly realized it was the three of them, handing it on from one to the other, his hand translating itself, his words slipping thru his fingers into the written world. You. 1.0 . Much later he began to write for puppets and there he was, day after day, watching his words come out of the mouths of fingers, watching hands turn to each other and say the lines he had spent so long struggling to perfect. And one day one of the hands turned to him and said: 'Hey, bp, what do you think? ' And it had always been his fingers talking, his fingers shaping the letters, the words, that funny grip around the pen, the language, and he lifted his hand up, opening and closing his fingers , and said: 'Nothing. ' The Hips 1. Not hip. 2. Maw called them ' the Workman hips. ' 'Too bad/ she'd say to me, 'you've got the Workman hips. Too bad,' she'd say to my sister, 'you 've got the Workman hips. Too bad,' she'd say to my nieces, shaking her head in dismay, ' you 've got the Workman hips,' she'd say, as generation after generation of family swayed past her on their way into history, 'you've got the Workman hips. Too bad,' she'd say. 3· We tend not to think of them as different. We tend not to think of them as unique. We refer to them by direction -left or right- and when they' re really wide we say 'hey, what a 37 caboose,' as the hips sway away, left, then right, then left, disappearing in the distance. We tend to think of them distantly, something that's there where the body gets interesting, interested, and tho we say 'nice pair of hips,' its usually the waist, the way the bum shapes itself, the belly, crotch, we're referring to. But then one day someone places their hand on your hip, lovingly, expectantly, and the hip they touch is different, unique, left or right, and it carries you away as they lay their hand there and you let it stay. You place your hand on their hip, press your bodies close together and say okay. Let the hips carry you away. 4· I was just a kid. We were living in Port Arthur and it was Saturday afternoon and I had nothing else to do so I rode my bike down Oliver Road towards downtown and there was this big crowd gathered in an open field near a lumber yard and tables had been set up made of saw horses and spare lumber where you could buy juice and pop and there were booths with people in them selling things and people standing outside them buying things and I rode my bicycle into that field under the fluttering banners someone had strung around it and there was a woman standing there in the middle of the crowd who had the biggest hips I'd ever seen. It turned out her name was Boxcar Annie or, at least, that's what the announcer said as I got off my bike, he said that we were about to see a logchopping contest and Boxcar Annie, who was also called the Queen of the Hoboes and must've weighed at least 300 pounds, was the lone woman contestant. The idea was that each contestant had to chop a log clean thru and whoever finished first was the winner and he told them all to wait until he yelled go and he yelled go and I watched the whole contest, sweating man aher burly S\\'eating n1an and , of course, Boxcar Annie, \vho had the biggest hips I'd ever seen and will ever see, and Boxcar Annie beat every man in the place, beat them all easily, and everyone cheered and said ho\v terrific Annie was, she really was the Queen of the Hoboes, and aftenvards Annie went off to drink beer \Vith the rnen she'd beaten and I got back on my bike and rode 1t all the way ba(k up the hill to home. And I never have forgotten the sight of her, the \vay she chopped wood so effortlessly, preo5ely, rhythrnically, ch1ps flytng, hips swaytng, the biggest hips I ve ever e\er seen. 5· It was be(ause of n1y htps I started \Vriting. I \·vas in Grade 4· It was late fall or early spnng, I can ' t ren1ernber \vhtch but I ren1ernber the dttch , the one near the school, and it \Vas full of Icy slush and a friend dared n1e to JUnlp across it so I d1d. I rernernber leaptng through the atr and barely making It halfway across before my left foot, wh1(h was pointed down , began to enter the thick 1cy mixture of slush and water, my nght leg sttll vmnly reachtng to\vards the far stde of the dttch as my left leg followed my left foot do\vn to\vards the untouched bottom, and I landed ltke son1c bad irnitatton of a ballet dancer, struck, my left leg burying itself in that slush right up to my htp, stuck, my nght leg floating on the top My htps kept rne afloat. Or at least that' s \\'hat the finnen said to rny Ma\\1 when thev brought me horne after rescuing rne. I'd been stuck In that freeztng sludge forO\ er an hour \vhde rny fnend ran and told the teacher who phoned the ftre departn1etH who ca1ne and latd ladders across on either ~tde of n1e and pulled n1e up and out, and the fircn1cn s,ud that that ditch was so deep and the sludge so hke qtuck'>and I would ' ve dtO\\ned tf it hadn t been for the strange position of my legs 39 and hips. And the cold I caught from being stuck in the ditch turned into bronchitis and they kept me home from school for over two weeks and during that time I wrote my first novel, The Sailor From Mars, all 26 chapters written by hand in a school copy book. It was all about a Martian sailor who came to Earth, went to work on a sailing ship and, along the way, fell in love with a girl called Luna who, I remember writing, ' was not of this world. ' I can't remember now how the novel ended, or even how it went, and my Maw threw it away by mistake three years later so there's no way I can go back and refresh my memory, but I do remember that when I went back to school I showed it to my teacher and she read the whole thing to the class, a bit every morning for a week or two, just like a real seriat the kind I used to listen to all the time on the radio, and she said she liked it, and the kids said they liked it, and of course I loved it. I was alive and now I was a writer too. And really, when you get right down to it, you have to admit it was all thanks to my hips. And whenever people ask me ' how did you become a writer,' I always tend to say 'I just fell into it.' Right up to my hips. Believe me. Hip hip hooray, they'd say. Two hips, hooray? There had to be some meaning in it somewhere, some symbolism. Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, which meant someone had done something, outstanding, unique even, was okay. But later, when I was sixteen and in Grade 13 at King Eddy in Vanco uver, I joined the Jazz Club and began to hang around jazz clubs with Sandy, whose brother was a jazz mu sician. And in all those clubs I went to- The Black Spot, Java Jazz, clubs that came and went and I can no longer attach a name to- in all those clubs I went to I learned it was not hip to shout hooray. It was not even hip to double the hip. It was only hip to be hip, single, unique, that was okay. So we sat there and satd nothing except 'yea h ' or ' hey ' when the band \Vas great, vvhen the soloist was tran sported a\-vay 1n an tmprovisation we nodded, maybe grinned, tho even grinning \vas suspect in those days. Htp. Ju st htp. 0Io hooray. 7· You can never forget about your h1ps. My maw \Vas always aware of her h1ps. She'd put on a dress and turn and look at herself in the mirror and s1gh and you knew she was sighing about her hips. And even when they were invisible, like the tunc my Maw wa s tn the hospital , the sheet pulled up to her waist, and the nurse came In and satd ' my aren't you petite,' n1y Maw couldn't rcstst saying ' watt until you pull down this sheet,' because she couldn't forget about her hips. And now n1ost days I feel this pain in my left hip, tf I sit in a chair that tsn ' t made just right, I feel this pain in my left hip, and I think about Maw, I thtnk about Grandmaw, I wonder tf all their ltves too there vvas thts naggtng II ttle pat n saying I won ' t let you forget about me. And you don ' t let me forget about you do you? You ' re there reminding me, every time I stand too long, reminding tne, every time the chair's too soft or too hard or too wrong. You ' re never going to let me forget about you. Are you htp? The Anus I. It IS an us - & yes we all have them. And as far as I can tell I never was able to see much difference between them. Just that lutle pucker among the cheeks. Whistle. 2. My mother stuck a tube up It to give me an enema. I rernember It was good for what ailed me. I remember It really cleaned me out. I remember lying over her knees with my pants down & her sticktng thts tube up me & me screaming ' THAT ' s ENOUGH! ' I remember thinking rna was the enen1a and the anus us. That' s \Nhat confuse us say. Confuse us say an us don ' t rnake we we 3· VVe talked about it more than anythtng else down there. Vve didn t so rnuch name 1t as allude to It. My maw satd ' \vherever 4J you be may your winds blo\v free ' or ' fox stne11s its O\\·n hole first. ' My ma\v said '\vhoe\·er makes a srnell ltkc that n1ust be rotten instde. ' It \vas one of the btg connections \vith the •nstde & thru it she knew whether you were sick or healthy & whether or not you needed an enerna. You ahvays looked to see 1f the thtngs that came from It \\'ere firm or n1essy. You never referred to "'"here they came frotn except to say the bu 111 & to wonder, really, whether you had wiped it. (4 When I read my first porno comic I found the \vord poot. People would be making love & fart & the sound effect read poot, poot, poot. Just the way the little engine that could satd toot, toot, toot. Just like the joke about the firetnan ' s big red fire engine going in & out of his wtfe' s firehall. Hoot, hoot. Oat. I was trying to figure it oat. 5· I came out of the movie with some friends & there was a christian recruiting group singing hytnns across the street (v: this car drove by with this guy' s ass stuck out the window hanging a moon for the world to see & the choir kept on singing just a closer walk with thee. 6. The bum isn ' t the anus . The moon isn ' t green cheese. The last rose of summer 1s impossible to determine but when he drops it you knovvn he's been there. Ltke my one brother 44 hung a rnoon over rny other brother's sleeping face . Then he dropped a rose that stnelled like green cheese & my brother woke up yelling 'get your bum out of my face !' 7· I just thot 'there's too many ryn1es in this piece. ' I just thot ' the anus rhymes both men & women. ' I just thot about this guy I knew who after another guy raped him said ' he used me like a wornan ' (~ the woman I knew \vho objecting to her lover's advances said ' he wanted to use rne like a 1nan. ' I just that about the anus ?~ wrote do\vn all I could. I just that that the \vay I should end this ptece IS \Vith the word 'a nus coz that's vvhcrc a certain process tn the bodv ends. I just that that r.>t nOV\' here I an1 writing thrs sentence s anuc;. The Toes 1. I was lytng on my back on the grass 1n the park tn front of our house staring at them & thot how ugly they looked. I was ftftecn & really depressed & the clouds blew over the park & I stared at these two great clubs of flesh & bone with five little stubs sticki ng out of each of them & thot how ugly they looked & how maybe I should kill myself. I lay in the long g rass beneath the oak trees & thot about killing myself & the ugltncss of my toes & decided my suicide would have to be because of something else. This was the first ttme I ever really looked at my toes & boy were they somethtng else. They \Vere ugly. 2. In Port Arthur we went to the shoe section 1n the big departn1ent store where they had the free X-ray machine & shoved our feet tnto It & stared Into the vtewer & saw the bones 1n our toes movtng. It \Vas like the pcepsho\v movteola 47 we looked into at the sideshow where we always ran out of quarters just before we got to see the woman with all her clothes off but we saw our toes with all their fle sh off & there were ten sets of bones we wiggled & there was no lead shielding & we did it almost every weekend for months. Maybe they mutated. Maybe they looked so ugly later because they'd mutated & it's all the fault of the shoe department in the big store whose name I no longer remember so there's nobody I can sue. Maybe this is the clue. Maybe postmodern writers like me all have post-atomic poetic feet & that's what makes them ugly to the pre-atomic eye & difficult to notate. Maybe this is THE ATTACK OF THE MUTANT POST-ATOMIC FEET! Maybe this is why we're always saying to the words: 'take me to your reader. ' 3· It was okay to talk about feet. It was okay to talk about toes. It was never okay to talk about toe-jam. If you talked about toe-jam you were really gross. I've never even seen the word spelt before. I think I like it best just the way I've spelt it here, with the hyphen between the two words 'toe' & 'jam,' like the dark grungey hyphen you were embarrassed to discover there, between your toes, inside your sock, your shoe, where you were never able to figure how the toe-jam got. 4· When Ellie & I moved in together we bought a house with six other people on Warren Road & the next door neighbours had a dog named 'toes.' It was like a sick joke & I felt fifteen again & the stupid dog chased me every time I walked from the house to the coach house & back again. It was like a bad dream where the repressed returns & there I was, toes yapping at me, toes jumping at me, toes trying to step on me, ugly & depressing & out to get me. 5· I forget when I first noticed my toenails grew funny. Probably the same day I realized my feet were ugly. The big toenail s were worst of all, flakey & fragmented, & the little toenails, almost non-existant, & the ones in between curling around the stubs of the toes, hugging them, so that even now, except for the big toe (which gets sharp & jagged & rips my socks), I don' t have to cut them for months unless, of course, I feel like it. But it is easier if you keep them cut because of the dirt that wedges under them. And toenails are dull, like this paragraph, & in writing we' re warned to cut the dull short. Except that no matter how short I cut them they're still dull & lately I began to think that maybe all you are saying when you say 'it's dull' is 'it's ugly & difficult to control'. And it really struck me the way the toenails curl around pressed flat against the stubby pink surfaces of the toes as tho they were hiding from me, fighting for their lives, feeding on the dirt & jam accumulate there, in the dark of the shoe, growing. 6. Why were toes ' piggies?' Why did one of them go to market? When that last little piggie went 'wee-wee-wee,' how come he did it all the way home? We all know pigs become sausages & sausages look just like toes. Where do these metaphors & similes, these symbolisms, come from? Who makes 49 up these resemblances, these languages, anyway? Why is it some days the words look so strange, so other, almost as if someone somewhere's speaking to me from behind them, thru them, trying to make me understand, instruct me, maybe even warn me- you know, trying to keep me on my toes? Sum of the Parts 1. So man y things inside me I am not in touch with. So many things I depend on that I never see, pray I never see. As in the horror movie when the monster's taloned hand reaches in and pulls out your living spleen. So many things with such strange names. The sound of them is enough to make me vomit. And when I do, well, there it is, something from inside me, and I am in touch with it, can smell it, ta ste it, feel it, praying I'll never have to again, praying it will stop, the contraction in the throat, the sound from beyond the tongue, more in touch with my insides than I really wanted. 2. If you're unlucky you get to meet thetn. If you're lucky you never get to meet them at all, they ju st nestle there, inside your body, monitoring, processing, producing, while you go about your life, oblivious. And this is the real organ mu sic, the harmony of these spheres, the way the different organs play together, \vork, at that level beyond consciousness of which all consoousness IS con1posed, the real unconscious, the unseen. 3· It's the old problem of writing about sorncthing you know nothing about. I can do the research , read the books, but it's not the same. It's not the same. Tho they nmne the organs and the names are the same they ' re not the same organs as the organs sitting here inside me- the bpNtchol liver, the bpNichol kidney, the bladder, pancreas, b p -collected workings I think of as me. Which is why I worry if the doctor knows me, my work, when I go in, worry that that doctor may be a renl collector, a completist. So you never ever say to the doctor, 'Doctor, please save me'. No, you never say that. You say, 'what's wrong with me? ' or ' I' m in rotten shape!' or, even better, ' I' m worthless! ', downplaying yourself, devaluing yourself, making yourself as miserable and undesirable as possible till the doctor says, 'Collect yourself!' And you do. And he doesn ' t. Which is how you want things to be. 4· I almost got to meet my thyroid. I had been to see the Doctor and the Doctor said well it looked like my thyroid was enlarged and really I should get a thyroid scan and before you could say goiter there I \vas in this tiny roorn strapped down under this big machine & the technician was saying not to worry because nothing bad was going to happen , I only had to lie there as still as possible for fifteen rninu tes or so and then I could get up and leave. So I lay there, as still as possible, ... ., )- thankan about n'l\ tll\ r 1d tlunk1n, about I J\ n1 111 n It lun rn throat dr Ia\ th ·r J\\~lr o 111\ th\ ro1d tho I ouldn t • u \ n tho I uldn t th t hntCHHl "hoC\ en th n \\,1 lookan[) tIt, p1cture of It 41\\Jrc o 111 un nth road, a'' r of th • un :.n tc hnJcaan '' h , had o ar • ulh lc t t h roon1 a t r he h~td trapped n1 do'' n under the bt n1, hu1 ·, '' ho h d o an.:fulh 1 d th I ad-sh1cldcd door llnd told 111 • not to ''orr . nd of our I '' onaed. I ah, a\ '' rr I\ n tho ou 3\ \ u'd IJkr:~ to c It, ou, h'a' '' 1rr ''hen th ·r" a ch, nee 1u 1111 ht fa nail et our \\l~h 1111 ht fanl II "· 11 the un cen, ana rtlll fu1c II enter tnto that \\orld lak • tur nan[) 111 Jde out, a r, '' feehn, 0, 10U don t '" a n t to c; 5 1\ft..:rl tlu "111 b,ckout J had rnore/-Rn\5, '-Ra, of th ·lusnba, 1 ~. nun r aon ()nl th I o tor that da , ''as g1\an' I· tull to th( c t\\'0 tr. 111 es and as th te hnactan 5hoved 111..:, round on tht.: cold t el t, bll he \\auld '"h1sper ht cornn'lcntan( It '', ltkt! tho e old T. \ . llan1c ho''' '"here the , nnoun er \\Ould , \ ''vhnt th( 5tudt audacncc doe n't kno\v J and the tr uble \\as I dtdn t kno'' rou ct. )ou lne \Our '"h lc Ia anakul do "uh onh the rcflc t1 n of ertmn parts, rnakn1 do ''It h unpl the narn of our ann r or :Jan , then· d n1 uon 111 book "h1lc all around ou aJe p ople ,,ho n tu, II ha\ een th n1, kno'' du cth ,,•hat ou onh lun1 l thud-hand. l1kc our b, k. [, er tran er on the u [') t hn had th han to look • t It but ou onh kno'' It th ru Ill Ill ors photo rapht; that th~ 1 p(oph; t ke of } ou. nd thet ear t: I t r and ut ho ha\ e ut ou op n, "atched ou~ blo d flo" c n \our h art pul kno'' the uul r n1 n 01 " n1an \nd th t; ar n t JU t nll:t, 1 hor ou kn " the c J' fj Cl '' aren't just similes. It is a discipline. \Ve learn to see with the third eye, to listen \Vith the third ear, to touch the unkno\'\'n \Vith the third hand, to walk do\vn dark streets in search of the hidden , the unseen , while in the a1r around us invisible presences pick up their zithers and begin to play the Third Man Theme. Most of these pieces were published previously thanks to the following magazines: Periodics, Writing, Malahat Review, Canadian Fiction Magazzne, Literary Half Yearly, Prairie Fire. 'The Anus' was also published in Shoes & Shit: Stories for Pedestrians (Hancock & Rikki, eds. Aya Press, -r984) ; part of 'The Mouth' in The Can Lit Food Book (Margaret Atwood, ed. Collins, -r987); all of 'The Mouth' in Moving Off the Map: From 's tory ' to 'fiction'- an anthology of contemporary Canadian Fiction (Geoff Hancock, ed. Black Moss Press, 1986). Design by Gordon Robertson. Art by Rosalind Goss. Typeset by Nelson Adams. Printed and bound at Coach House Press, Toronto. Published by Black Moss Press, P. 0. Box 143, Station A, Windsor, Ontario N9A 617. Black Moss books are distributed in Canada and the U .S. by Firefly Books, 3520 Pharmacy Avenue, Unit 1-C, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada M1W 2T8. All orders should be directed there. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Nichol, B. P., 1944- . Selected organs: parts of an autobiography ISBN 0-88753-167-9 1. Nichol, B.P. , 1944- -Biography. 2. Poets, Canadian (English)- 2oth century- Biography.* I. Title. PS8527.132Z53 1987 c811'.54 c88-093151-5 PR9199·3·N48Z47 1987 BRO K tJ lJ\IER rT'\' ~ I . CA III A RI N I· S, O N I \RIO LIBR R \' For some eight years one of Canada ' s best kno\vn experin1ental poets, bp tchol, has been \Norktng on a larger \\·ork called Organ lv1u sic. Selected Organs 1s a part of that ~tdl­ unpublished work. The basic 1dea of these prose pteces \va.., to wnte an autobiography " fron1 a dtffcrent dtrecnon ," says N1chol. That meant concentrating upon the parts of the body. As befits an autobiography, all stories 111 this collection are true and told in a specific style borrowed fro1n the oral story-telhng methods of Nichol ' s grandn1other. These are stories that are vivid, moving and clever. Nichol tnanages to blend the best of the oral traditions, with all their cliches and stereotypes , wtth an original and illuminating vtew of language and art. 00995 9 780887 531675