David Neil Lee Reviews Sharon Butala's This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life
Butala, Sharon. This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life. Freehand Books. $24.95, 232 pp ISBN: 9781988298962
A few years ago, a Kerouac scholar from Italy asked me to recommend a book I felt was uniquely “Canadian” – one that they may not have encountered in their university studies. The next time we met, I brought a copy of Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning. Instead of apologizing for this particular copy’s stained and dog-eared condition, I pitched it as proof of authenticity: I had bought the book the summer before, in a thrift store in Eastend, Saskatchewan. It cost me 25 cents.
Eastend is the urban centre (pop. 503) of southwest Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills region and also the centre of the unique imaginative world that Butala creates in her writings. I recommended The Perfection of the Morning because frankly, I’ve always thought it’s the greatest – a book that could only have been written from this particular geographic place, over this particular late 20th-century time, by this particular individual, whose choice to leave urban academic life to marry a Cypress Hills rancher landed her in this unique situation. Butala’s amazing skill at depicting how everyday life so often feels – like a gyroscope wobbling between amazement, misery, and magic – makes Perfection a book impossible to read, and re-read, without hearing its words resound in your own life.
“Greatness,” is something Butala herself addresses in her latest work, This Strange Visible Air. In one of the book’s essays, “Vanished Without a Trace,” she critiques the early years of her growing dedication to writing, including the modernist/romantic notion that if she wrote well enough, some sort of inner greatness would be revealed: “I didn’t examine the new ideas about the illegitimacy of the concept of ‘greatness,’ ‘greatness’ being a fixed idea my generation grew up with, and in which we’d been educated.”
Although a long career in writing may have altered Butala’s priorities, with characteristic clarity she describes the moment she realized just how ruthless her literary ambitions actually were: “… I had not known the seriousness of what this unquenchable, ferocious desire of mine, this pact I had made, had gotten me into.”
Whether she is an icon of greatness, or not, Butala’s strengths as a writer include:
1) a methodical prose style that combines a measured tone with strong imagery, to create powerful emotional affect. Butala rarely tells you how she feels. Instead she describes the setting, the circumstances, the events leading up to those circumstances until suddenly, you just get it – you get the feeling yourself. I read Perfection shortly after it appeared in 1994, and this sentence in particular has always stayed with me through the long, unending process of learning about oneself and the world: “I didn’t know there is a place deep inside where one’s real life goes on, much like an underground river in parched, dry country, which flows whether one knows about it or not.”
2) a unique perspective on human beings and their relationships with nature, though maybe a better term is the natural world. Canadians interested in leaving behind town and city to return to “nature” don’t need to read about Thoreau and his two-year experiment; we are much better off with Butala, who published The Perfection of the Morning midway through her 33 years on the ranch. Even now, in “Open Your Eyes” from This Strange Visible Air, she describes the experience simultaneously as a near-ecstatic abnegation of loneliness – as she is immersed in a universe, all of it alive, even the rocks and wind, so many-faced and vast that to feel part of it is to feel never alone – and as a plunge into its bleakest depths, as she is forced to choose between committing her time to the local farm and ranch community, or to her own writing. “The more I published,” she writes, “the more the distance increased between me and everybody else, and this hurt me profoundly”.
3) an acceptance of the spiritual – even the supernatural – as part of everyday experience. In the midst of the fascinated pragmatism that Butala brings to observing daily life, she is liable to inject incidental details of prescient dreams, guardian spirits or after-death manifestations. In other writers this might seem a relaxation of that all-important writer’s muscle, critical thinking, but there is nothing easy or reassuring in these suggestions of links to greater, more intimate connections with the universe. Butala uses them to make life seem not less frightening, but more mysterious and complex.
The book’s central theme, however, is age. Not the process of aging per se; more the state of being old, a revelation that feels less like dawning wisdom than like a house collapsing on your head. We baby boomers, born in the postwar years 1946 to 1964, are facing the Final Frontier: with increasing frequency friends and family are crossing over, often unexpectedly, as if targeted and executed for crimes they didn’t commit.
This can’t be changed. If life is a long trip downriver, old age is an inevitable series of waterfalls that sooner or later, we all go over; not all of the plunges are fatal, but eventually one of them is the last. Butala, born in 1940, is downriver from most of us. She points out that because of the boom in longevity, the elderly now represent “a whole new class of citizens.” Although declared “old” while still in their sixties, they nevertheless remain active – energetic, opinionated, creative – for decades; not only a class but a constituency whose power should be acknowledged.
The best of these essays also show Butala’s particular talent for improvisation. “Cold Ankles” begins with a gas leak, and its modest length soon encompasses late-in-life affairs, the aging of the senses and Butala’s burning of her journals, choosing how much of the past she wants to keep. Ankles themselves are mentioned only in passing. “Vanished Without a Trace” begins with anecdotes about the present state of literary writers, and becomes a meditation on ambition, success and failure, on the writer’s ego, and how “we are all of us, in the end, only dreams of ourselves.”
As a collection, the book is not perfect. In Butala’s essay on evil, ironic touches seem to be added when the text needs it least and lacking when the text needs it most (eg. the author’s use of the word “despicable” feels like it lacks context). An editor’s touch could have made the work stronger. Overall, however, there is a lot of powerful work here, from a writer whose body of writing is one of the most distinctive in Canadian literature. In her last years, Butala’s mood here is sometimes sad, sometimes regretful, sometimes joyous, sometimes uncertain of just what she has accomplished, and whether it was all worth it. She can at least feel sure, however, that some of us think she’s simply the greatest.
David Neil Lee’s latest book, The Medusa Deep, is the sequel to his Lovecraftian YA novel The Midnight Games, which won the Hamilton Arts Council’s Kerry Schooley award for the book that “best conveys the spirit of Hamilton.” Later this year his 1999 book Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz will appear in Italian from Quodlibet in Rome, and he will finish up the Midnight Games trilogy with The Great Outer Dark (Wolsak and Wynn). davidneillee.com.