Solitude: by Luanne Armstrong

Solitude:
I have now had three weeks of fairly intense solitude and it has left me wondering how people who sail around the world solo, or row across the ocean, solo, or go on long journeys alone manage. Or what abut all those early European explorers, freezing in the arctic, dying in the jungle, crossing deserts and dying of thirst? Why did they do it? What drove them? How did they cope with the solitude, the loneliness and the absence of their friends and family?

And in all the stories of early pioneer days, there are always stories of hermits, recluses, people who chose to live alone with almost no human contact. On the hill just to the north of our farm are the remains of a man named Bill Haley, who lived very much alone with only a herd of goats for company. But there are lots of other stories in our area of people who had left family or friends to live alone. It was the pioneer era, and so many people were naturally separated from everything they had known.

I have often wondered how that was bearable for some people. What was it like, in the days when a letter took three to six months to arrive, for people to be separated for the rest of their lives from everything they had once known as familiar and dear? And I know it still goes on but at least, e-mail is now almost instantaneous.

Research reports that prisoners stuck in solitary confinement go crazy fairly quickly. What happens to people who voluntarily choose solitude – to monks in caves, hermits in their wilderness? Herd animals in zoos separated from their natural habitat and their natural companions also go crazy pretty quickly – we’re not much different than them.

Human beings are animals who live in groups; we live in families, tribes, clans, communities. The more I read novels, the more convinced I am that the basic human plot, at the centre of all of our stories, is the unbinding and rebinding of a sense of family. John Gardner, a famous novelist and writing teacher, said that there are only two plots in all of literature: someone comes to town or someone leaves town. Very much the same thing. Because human beings desperately need to be with other people and often have an equally hard time getting along with them, the endless human saga is full of the push and pull of people leaving their families and then coming home again or leaving one family and forming another kind of family.

In my case, I have briefly left a very full chaotic, and rewarding life, full of people, animals, plants and community, at my farm, for one that has had mostly only books, words, language and writing in it. Despite all the best gadgets of modern communication: internet, email, Facebook, phone, I still felt alone. Electronic people are not the same as real people. My electronic students, however brilliant, are not the same as living, breathing bodies in a classroom.

It was a productive time, in terms of writing, no question, but one can only live with words and idea for so long. After that, I, at least, need people, need voices, need contact. And I also need to be outside, with animals, plants and the living, breathing world. Here in Saskatchewan, I did go for long walks and soaked up the smells and sights and sounds of the prairie, a place I really only know from stories about it.

The future vision that some science fiction writers have had, of people living in self-contained rooms, surrounded by electronic toys, is so impossible that it is almost funny. People simply wouldn’t survive like that, or at least, not for long. I believe that many of the problems of modern life are caused by sheer human loneliness, people who no longer have sane and structured human contact. By this, I don’t mean the right wing vision of rigid and hierarchical nuclear families, where initiative, ideas and creativity are stifled. But of families that nurture, sustain and care for each other. I am quite sure they exist and they are still the best way for people to live. When they work.

For most of its history, humanity has lived in small groups of two to three hundred people and evolved distinct ways for such groups to get along. The survival of our ancestors depended on such communal understanding. We no longer no know much about this because now because we believe we always have the choice to leave. But for those of us who have chosen to stay in one place, take care of the place we love and the people who live there with us, leaving is never a choice at all. And maybe that is a very good thing.

Finding your balance: by Luanne Armstrong

Equinox and balance:

This year, full moon and Equinox happened at the same time. For the first two weeks before Equinox and the week after, bad new filtered in from various friends. Many people were ill with deep chest colds; three friends had floods in their houses. One who had a flood also had a beloved family member die suddenly. All kinds of tension and sadness suddenly pervades our lives.
Just coincidence, of course. The moon, the seasons, the rhythms of life don’t affect us anymore. So most people believe. And yet, there are many rhythms in this world and the animals and plants play no attention to human lives and go on living to the rhythms of light and seasons and the turning planet.
I read a sad and moving article this week in New Yorker about the people of a small town in Colorado named Uravan, where once they made a living mining uranimum. The main point of the article was that, even though many former residents of the town had died of lung cancer, and that after uranium mining was shut down and the whole town shredded and stored away as toxic waste, people still missed it, wanted to move back, wanted the mine to re-open. Both the writer and the people he interviewed seemed unable to articulate why the people would miss this place except for the fact that it had once been their home. Once a year, they have a reunion. They press their faces up against the barbed wire fence around their former home and feel nostalgic. They remember the voices of children playing and they long for a place that was never really their home and that killed many of them.
I do something similar to this as well. Five miles from our farm is another farm, known in our family as the Mannarino Place, after Jimmy and Victoria Mannarino, who cleared it and farmed it and then sold it to my grandfather as a wedding present for my mom and dad. We lived there until I was two and then my parents moved away to a small mining town and then to our present farm on Kootenay Lake, where I have now lived since I was five.
And yet, I still miss the Mannarino place. I loved to go there when I was a child. I felt peculiarly at home there and I still do. And I dream about this place. Over and over, I go back there, but it has changed. A strange family is there, a man I hate and despise and try to get rid of. Whenever I come to this place in my dream, I recognize it, even though it is much different than the real farm. There are houses around it; there is mine high on the mountain, there is a deep woods, there is a huge frightening house full of ghosts.
I rarely go there now in reality. The place has been sold and sold again. And still I miss it, long for it, scheme as to how I could get it back. Why? I have no idea, other than in my child’s wild true heart, the place was, is mine.
Once I was riding my mare home from the farm where I had left her to get bred. On the way, we passed through the place where I had bought her. We went by the temporary corral where the owner had housed her with another more. The barbed wire was falling down, the fenceposts were leaning, and yet my mare went eagerly towards this corral. I let her, curious to see what she would do. She went inside, nosed around, sniffed the ground, poked her nose, sniffed the empty feed bin. Then she stopped and relaxed, obviously expecting me to slide to off, take off her saddle and bridle, let her be at home and relax. I disappointed her, made her leave that place she had once felt at home, and continue on to my home.
Do the places we have once lived leave shadows and ghosts within us? Are we, as biological creatures, tuned into these places in ways we don’t understand. Why do my dreams of the Mannarino place haunt me, in particular, the old house, long destroyed and in my dreams, full of terrifying voices from the distant upstairs.
And what scars are left within people torn from their homes and displaced by war, genocide, famine, industrialization or any of the other infinite ways in which people have been shoved around the globe from place to place, particularly in the past two centuries of colonization, exploitation, industrialization and globalization?
Before modern industrialized warfare, there was also war, but a different kind of war – over territory and boundaries and resources but this rarely resulted in a mass displacement of whole peoples. What scars and traumas are left in such people? No one asks this question? Does anyone even want to know?
I am still determined someday to go back to Scotland. I want to find the place from which my ancestors left so long, long ago. I want to imagine myself back into the scene that must have taken place, somehow, when a whole family of Armstrongs, the mother, the father, and their seven children, made the decision to leave for Canada, to leave the place that had been their home for as long as anyone could remember, and make an entirely new life. In my lifetime, I have never been displaced. I have camped in many locations but always lived at ‘home’, at the farm. So it will take a writer’s leap of imagination to sit in that place, with my ancestors’ blood thrummng in my veins, and understand why they did that, and what it meant.