Peter Sanger

Keeping: The Cameron Yard

As master of a vessel and sailing up to the Cameron Yard for the first time on a spring tide in October 1885, you would have read this, or something like it:

              Shubenacadie River

 The entrance to this river which is on the
 South side of Cobequid Bay near its head,
 lies East-Southerly about 13 miles from
 Burntcoat Head Lighthouse, and
 Southeasterly 61/2 miles from Spencer
 Point Lighthouse ... Mean rise and fall of
 Tides, 48 feet.  This is the highest rise
 in the Bay of Fundy.1

Those directions come from Eldridge's Coast Pilot, No. 1, Eastern Section (Boston, 1884). Elridge's Pilot might have been wedged on a shelf in your stateroom by the side of another necessary book, one of the many editions of Nathaniel Bowditch's New American Practical Navigator: Being An Epitome Of Navt'gation Containing All The Tables Necessary To Be Used With The Nautical Almanac In Determining The Latitude, And The Longitude By Lunar Observations And Keeping A Complete Reckoning At Sea . . ., and so on, for nineteen more lines of a title page which was nothing if not inclusive. Inclusive also was the owner of my copy of Bowditch's Navigator, a fourteenth edition published in 1844. He wrote on its flyleaf. James Foote, Pictou, N. S., July 3rd, 1858, adding for absolute surety, His Booke.

But then, neither books of navigation nor navigators can afford to be inconclusive. Perhaps children have the same sense of what is at issue when they end ownership inscriptions in their schoolbooks with the world, the universe. And since on that October day, on a spring tide in 1885, you now face a run up the Shubenacadie River of about five miles to the Cameron Yard, and since you must make this run up one of the most tidal rivers in the world, rising and falling nearly fifty feet, and since you must gauge a safe distance to catch the highest water and not catch up with a tidal bore cresting ahead, blocking the river's outfalling current with a rush of four or five knots, you might also want to turn from Eldridge's Pilot to a section of inclusive Bowditch headed "Evolutions at Sea" and read this note "On a Ship's Driving":

 When it happens that there is not
 sufficient room to work in a tide's way,
 through a crowd of ships, or in a narrow
 channel, but that the ship must drive by
 the help of the tide, it may be done,
 provided the tide be strong enough in
 proportion to the wind. This art consists
 in keeping the ship in a fair way, by a
 management of rudder and the sails .2

Therefore, ...it may be done... and: Can you do it? Whatever else may be involved, clearly it is a case of drive or be driven.

What else can be made of such a passage? In one way, there is the obvious reading that can easily be re-stated. Running up-the Shubenacadie in a displacement hull can only be safely done if the hull moves either at the same speed or slightly more quickly than the tidal current it follows. If the hull is driven by the wind more quickly than the current flows, its bow will dig into the water and its stern slew. Then the hull will set sideways to the current, become unsteerable and possibly even capsize.

In another way of reading, Bowditch's words provoke psychological reconstruction and self-reflection. As a master reading them in 1885, how would you have reacted? Would you have felt sardonic irritation at Bowditch's self-sufficient cogency? Or would you have felt a faith in yourself confirmed by Bowditch's assumption that what may be done you could do?

There is a third way of reading Bowditch's words, one to which we are less directly driven than to the former two. You would rather drive, though not now master of that ship in October, 1885, not now sailing it past the village of Maitland (to starboard, at the river's mouth) where eleven years before W.D. Lawrence launched from his yard the ship named after himself which was, at 2,459 tons, he claimed, the largest ever built in Canada. Now, you will never steer by Black Rock (to port), past Eagles Nest Point (to port) and Big Plaster Rock Quarry (to starboard) between two hundred foot high cliffs of red sandstone, limestone and shale shot through with veins of gypsum. Now, you are almost completely released from the real context of Bowditch's words (it seems). Your desperations are not the immediate ones of wind and water and matching them both to arrive at the Cameron Yard. You are, in fact, there, at the Yard already. You are here, in a place not yet clearly identified or described, carrying with you perhaps from Bowditch only this much, these words released from the context of his time and taken over into our time: This art consists in keeping . . . z'n afair way, by a management . . .

What lies in our keeping here? At the simplest, this: between 1880 and 1894, William P. Cameron built eight vessels in the Cameron Yard in South Maitland. They were the Isabel, Eva Maudell, Linnet, Selkirk, Savonna, Canadian (later named Ensenada), Katheen Hilda, and Edith. Of the four largest, the first, the Isabel, was a barque of 1,260 tons, launched in 1880. Two others were true ships, rigged with square sails on each of at least three masts. They were the Selkirk, 1,757 tons, launched in 1886, and the Savona, 1,659 tons, launched in 1891. The fourth large vessel was the 1,072-ton, four-masted barquentine, Canadian or Ensenada, rigged with square sails on her foremast, fore and aft sails elsewhere. She was launched in 1889. The smallest and logically the last Cameron vessel was the steam schooner, Edith, 45 tons, launched in 1894. Her sails probably served as an economical auxiliary to the speed, reliability and manoeuvrability offered by her engine. She must have been the issue of Cameron's attempts to keep up with changes in patterns of trade and in technology.

We know something of what these vessels looked like. Not only does the record of their types - barque, barquentine, ship, and so on - indicate how they were rigged, but also some pictures exist. An oil painting of the Isabel hangs in the old Lawrence house in Maitland. It shows her running before a gale with most of her sails furled. She is painted white, as white as the crests on the wave scuds which make a grid of static violence all around her. The sheer of her bow is as sleek as the chine of a salmon. Also to have survived is a set of photographs which shows not a Cameron vessel but the Calburga, a 1,406-ton, three-masted barque, built by Adam McDougall, but built in the Cameron Yard in 1890. She was a blockier vessel than the Isabel, black hulled. It is pleasant to think (on insufficient grounds) that the Cameron vessels were characterized by fine lines. F.W. Wallace, the naval historian, found the Calburga in Digby, Nova Scotia, in 1913 when she was loading a cargo of deals for Buenos Ayres. He took photographs of her, including her deckwork, which show the careful beading, trim, Palladian ornamentation, capping, coping and balustrade work of the poop deck, cabin trunk and aft companionway. The craftsmen who did this work must have also been those who worked on the Cameron vessels. As for the Calburga, she foundered off the Irish coast during the First World War. She was the last Canadian-built square-rigger of substantial size still registered in Canada.3

How are we to read what else is left? There are some stories. There are also some names whose own defining stories have vanished, leaving the names at the mercy of present interest, assimilation or appropriation.

One story concerns Wilson, second mate on the Savona. He was nearly murdered during a voyage from Calcutta to Bombay. An Austrian seaman tried to stab him with a sheath knife. Wilson caught the knife's blade in his bare hands, snapped it off at the haft. Drive or be driven.

And there is this story, really without a name, current still in local hearsay, about a daughter of Cameron's, young, in her teens, tossed from her riding horse and killed while riding down the road to the river and Yard.

And there are names without stories. In the graveyard of what is now the United and was once the Presbyterian church, a squarish, steepleless, clapboarded, white painted, snug little building, trim as a dough box, there are three related headstones. One reads: In Memory of Annieldau of William & Abbie Cameron / died Nov. 28, 187O/Ae 1 yr. & 3 ms/Safe on the bosom of thy God/Fair Spirit rest thee now/tho' here on earth thy stay was short/His seal was on thy brow. The second stone bears a flower carved at its crest, a rose perhaps, almost erased by weathering. Its inscription reads: Flora/dau of W. P. & Abbie Cameron/died Feb. 28, 18 75/aged 5 mo's. The third is a double stone, a diptych. Its serrated crest is divided into two pinnacles with a common valley between. Each pinnacle caps a column of lettering surmounted by a carving depicting a recumbent lamb. The left column reads: Jessie/died june 7, 188O/Aged I yr. & 8 mo's. The right reads: Innis/died June 3, 188O/Aged 3 yrs. & 5 mo's. Running across the botton of the stone beneath both columns is lettered: Children of W. P. & Abbie Cameron/Sleep on sweet babes and take Your rest/God called you home he thought it best.

Are those stones also part of Bowditch's art . . . in keeping a fair way, by a management? W.P. Cameron launched the first of his vessels, the barque Isabel, in the year of the last and double burial. Had he heard a saying favoured by W.D. Lawrence, the great shipbuilder in Maitland, at the mouth of the river, who was to die in 1886: Kites rise against, not with the wind? After Cameron sold the yard, local tradition has it that he went to California. Perhaps one can rightly guess some reasons why he chose not to finish where he began. Ortega Y. Gasset wrote: When we stand before the universe unmoved by any personal interest we see nothing well. 4 That quotation implies an antithetical corollary: we may be moved, and must see the universe only too well.

Somewhere between the stories with names and the names without stories is something else to consider. There is another photograph, undated, untitled, but clearly taken at the Cameron Yard because the shape of the river's banks, the cut of an entering creek, the white patch of exposed gypsum deposit in the river cliff to the south of the Yard have softened, slipped and, shifted over the years only enough to make them still recognizably similar to older appearance. In the photograph, what is now forest and intervals marsh is cleared land. The photograph's ground is covered with short, rough grass, patched by what appear to be white chips of gypsum. In the river, a tugboat is either pushing a small barge to shore or preparing to pull it clear. Smoke from the tug's seemingly excessively tall and narrow stack drifts an arrested plume southerly, probably driven by that north wind which always comes with an inflowing tide on the Shubenacadie. On the bank are two buildings. One is a small peak-roofed shed sided with vertical rough planks. The other is a square, horizontally planked structure. It seems to be flat-topped. A ladder-runged derrick projects out of the structure, slung on a balance of guying cables. To the left side of the photograph, watching the tug, is a group of four or five women. They wear dark, heavy-looking skirts which reach the ground, white shirt waists and wide-brimmed hats with thickly ribboned or massively floral crowns. Each woman slants a parasol across her shoulder. Standing in the centre of the photograph is a horse. Behind it trails a loose drag rope. The horse hangs its head low, from hunched shoulders, as if the horse-collar it wears is burden enough for any horse to have to bear. That horse was old and probably righteous.

The scene in the photograph has the same kind of calculated tensive repose as a Seurat painting. A granular stipple suffuses the photograph's surface and makes uncertain the time of day when it was taken. No one and nothing in it seems to cast shadows. Their time is an arrested, overcast noon of forever. You wait for the parasols to spin and pose new angles reflecting a flash of silk from the invisible sun. You wait for the tug's smoke to drift further south, thinning into haze. You wait for the righteous horse to lift its head and shake its harness with a sound of flapped leather and whipped lines. You wait for the photographs's world to break loose in movement, colour and noise, and nothing happens but the intense, silent exclusion the photograph insists upon, seemingly shadowless.

By saying "seemingly", one acknowledges shadows which must be there. Without shadows there can be no images. One's language, technical knowledge, feeling and immediate perception shift from the facts of the photograph to a metaphorical extension of those facts and back to the photograph's facts again in such a situation, trying both to accommodate and contradict the cast of repression which inflects the photograph's images.

But what are really repressed in the photograph are past and future. The photograph's antiquity and atemporality are deceptions. Its time is wholly present. For us, its subject may seem to be the past, but that assumption contradicts the truism that no static, spatial re-presentation can re-present the past, which is always time passing. The apparent permanence of the photograph's images is an immediate present which we, living really in historical time, cannot enter.

The physical substance of the photograph, the condition of the paper upon which it was printed, the chemistry of its surface, these can enter time in various states of deterioration and preservation. But the photograph's images cannot do so, at least not without our help. Like a language, like a poem, like the meaning of the words "Cameron Yard", the images in the photograph of Cameron Yard are in our keeping. Either we make them appropriate (if never fully adequate) signs of what they purport to show, or we allow them to rest in mere presentness. If the latter happens, the photograph becomes only an object. If it is used at all at any more complex level than that of subjective, sentimental self-projection, it is judged by a deracinated aesthetic of form and found adequate to canon, or wanting. For many of us, the verses the Camerons chose for the graves of their dead children have become such objects.

Now, the time is October. It is too awkward and too dangerous in this part of this century to come to the Cameron Yard by river. Even if you did, no wharf stands to receive you. Though the old books of pilotage still fit in principle, they do not deal with new channels and shifted sandbars. The White Square building with lantern on top which Eldridge noted at this date (1884) as showing a fixed White Light at Black Rock, on the south side entrance to the Shubenacadie, is no longer there. Neither is the place where the photographer set up equipment to take the picture of Cameron Yard. Among the spruce, maples, birch, alders, poplars and apple trees which now cover the north side of the Yard is no elevation where a camera could have been placed to account for the p hotograph's angles. An explanation which does account for them is that the photographer stood on the deck of a vessel still shorebound on building stocks. The camera looked out some thirty or forty feet high from what now is air and once was a place that went to sea. As a navigator would put it, present position doubtful.

Now, the time is October. Leaves are becoming what you expect them to become but are always confounded by. Yellow light in the birch and poplar or red and yellow light in the maples pulls you up through balancing colour into somewhere inside you outside, lifting away. Here is a place to walk not on eggs but on apples where old trees have tipped up their roots to lean an elbow on earth. Your clothing flecks with the points of fluff where seeds ride, and in the old fields of drying goldenrod outriding grasshoppers flick themselves free and rattle clear of your stilted confusion.

For nearly two years, three or four times a week, I have walked this way to the Cameron Yard. When I started, most of the way was a game trail. Since then, I have made it into a path. Before my walking and before the recent walking and running of deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits and squirrels parts of this way to the Cameron Yard were called the Plaster Road. It carried wagons loaded with gypsum, hauled down from a quarry in the ridge above the river. This gypsum was loaded onto vessels at the Cameron wharf. Before that nineteenth-century road, there must have been other variations on the same ground, built and travelled by the Scots, who were granted land there after the American Revolutionary War, and before them by the Acadians, who were expelled before the Scots arrived. Before the Acadians, a Micmac path and earlier game trails probably defined where later roads and my path were to follow.

About eight years ago, I wrote an essay in which there was a young poet who advised me to walk such roads. Perhaps he was thinking of Alistair MacLeod's road to Rankins' Point, Charles Bruce's Mulgrave Road, Ernest Buckler's unnamed, unnameable road up the South Mountain, or Douglad Lochhead's High Marsh Road. Or he could have been thinking of unliterary roads he might have travelled: Rabbittown Road, Lintlop Road, Salem Loop. That young poet with his own mind, an old poet, to walk with me on the Plaster Road to the Cameron Yard. When I call him old, it is meant in the same sense as calling a fiddle old for having played so many good tunes for so long. Both he and it will play more. This old poet can tell you that the real way of roads is no way's end.

We began together where the Plaster Road has been almost elided with forest. Fifty foot high columns of spruce, three foot thick at the butt, cumber the road's sunken crown. Splays of alders spring lodged branches across all the spaces clear of spruce. Walking is dodging and ducking, lifting and holding down and kneeling sometimes to crawl in the road's trough of green moss. From midsummer on through fall, orange, yellow, white, brown, even black mushrooms play puckfist and push out of that moss. In summer, the light beneath the great trees is greened by moss and feathers of spruce, and living inside it is like hanging head down looking down into steeps of a leaf-stained lake where banks of elodea cast sunslight in their colour.

This submarine part of the Plaster Road ends at the old boundary of the Cameron Yard, Cameron Creek. The creek's bed is a fault, from twenty to a hundred feet deep, running back into the face of the escarpment which parallels the river's course. Slabs of sedimentary limestone, fissuring in thin flat plates, tip out of the fault's sides. Everywhere there are signs of sliding, slipping pressures, of the earth having been fractured, tilted, a'lmost having lost hold of its bedrock but hanging on, hauling back.

Over this creek the Plaster Road lofts itself on a vanished trestle bridge of logs and squared timbers. A few weeks ago, after the old poet left, I found all that remains of the bridge. I was climbing about in the creek's almost dry course when I saw a wet stain of oxide, reddish, in a pocket of rock. Underneath the oxide's skin were the eroded stubs of three iron spikes, about an inch in diameter, which had been rolled into a crevice by the force of the creek's spring and fall freshets. The last voice of iron is rust. Those stubs were nearly ten yards downstream from the point where the old bridge must finally have fallen to be torn apart by the creek and thrown into the Shubenacadie. Now, it is a dry October. The creek's bed is filled with leaves as if they had seeped through earth's veins like water to be gathered back up into some kind of rain again.

Once again that invisible bridge, the Plaster Road now disappears among trees, weeds and bushes which cover the north side of what was the Cameron Yard. In effect, the whole yard must once have been a road. The Plaster Road simply entered a ten-acre expansion of itself made of cleared, ditched, tamped down woodland and marsh.

Among all the present obscuring growth in the old Yard, it is the wild apple trees which are most apparent now, with their green, yellow and red fruit hanging on that ultimate stem of stillness which one tap of wind can shake from the bough. A language almost extinct, one which used, needed and delighted in such distinctions, called these kinds of trees wildings. As wildings, the trees are also keepings, for their fruit carries the sign of more civil scions: Maclntosh, Starr, Roxbury Russet, Fall Pippin, Gravenstein and King. All the poems worth reading are wildings.

A hundred years ago when you came into the Cameron Yard on the Plaster Road, you would have seen the originals of those wildings planted close to the buildings which then were there. To your left, by the riverside, were the stocks, probably with a partly finished hull resting upon blocks, its stern square to the river. After frost or a light scatter of early snow, I have seen a quick, warm sun melt into the earth where the stocks stood a series of parallel lines, about two or three yards apart, which shows where the bed logs that carried the weight of the hull and stocks were half buried. After leaves fall and weeds die back you can also see that the earth has been dug out into a shallow, ship-shaped depression some sixty feet wide by five hundred long. Ditches run down both sides of the depression, and on both sides of it are bowl-shaped, almost filled holes into which props were driven to hold up the top-heavy hulls. At one side of this depression, near the river, is a small pile of fire stained stones which were part of a forge's construction. The pile is now almost hidden by spruce. Where the roots of one tree grow along and above the ground before slipping under, a neat covey of half a dozen foot-long forged iron spikes is laid in a row. Their heads are tilted up by the growing root as if they were still being offered to the hand which laid them there.

To your right if you had entered the Cameron Yard on the Plaster Road a hundred years ago you would have seen the cookhouse. Now it is only a cellar filled with goldenrod or snow or seep water, as the season insists, and by a bii-ch whose multiple trunks lift out of one great, squat bole. The cellar's walls have been pinched in, undermined and tumbled by frost and the saps of water and shifting soil. The cellar is slowly levelling itself up with the surrounding ground. A neighbour has told me how he played in the cookhouse while it still stood fifty years ago. Its floors tilted then and made him run and slide over them as if he were, as he says, in the world of a crazy mirror. He remembers the cookhouse being still filled with crockery. Now there remains in one corner of the cellar a shattered half cup, white porcelain, with ears of wheat braided around its rim. Scooped in the moss it seems midway to the lips of whoever stooped there to take a supple drink of soil.

Apart from these remnants of stocks and cookhouse, little else is left of the Cameron Yard. At the edge of the river there are three mighty logs, almost completely buried, set at right angles to the bank and projecting over it by several ice-scarred inches. Probably they are hemlock and once grew in the aboriginal forest of hemlock which existed in some of the more inaccessible places close by even as late as the nineteenth century. One guesses they are hemlock because only that wood could have survived. As the old people say, hemlock kept wet never rots. Upon those logs, Cameron wharf was built. Another set of embedded logs lies two hundred paces back from the river on land which has broken free of trees to revert to intervale marsh covered with spartina grass and English hay. Spikes three foot long protrude from these logs. Perhaps they were a foundation for the boilers which powered the Yard's saw mill and provided steam for the steam box where planks and small framing members were bent into shape.

One other place remains. Behind the cookhouse cellar, on a knoll whose south side looks out upon the Yard below and whose north side drops sheer one hundred feet into the fault of Cameron Creek, is a graveyard. Its original extent has disappeared beneath the growing trees. Spruce grow in and around it. Only one lettered stone makes it still really recognizable as a graveyard at all. The other marks are intuitable as memorials because of the lettered stone's presence among them. They are only slabs of limestone, sunk vertically almost completely so that only the rim of each juts above the layers of spruce needles. The lettered stone is marble. It has been snapped off its base and leans against a spruce tree's trunk. Its inscription reads: In Memoly of/william Cameron/Died july 183O/Aged 56 Yrs Also His Wife/Mag Cameron/died May 7, 1868/Aged 85 Yrs.

Which Camerons are those? Mary Cameron was born in 1793, her husband, William, in 1774. He was too young to have held the first grant of this land after the American Revolution. Was he the first owner's son? Were these Camerons, William and Mary, William P. Cameron's parents or (it is possible) grandparents? How did they live? Was the Yard, in an earlier part of its existence, the site of a succession of two, perhaps three, Cameron farms? Was there a house, were there houses where the cookhouse cellar now slowly fills with earth? Who else is buried on the knoll, marked by those limestone slabs? Upon how many layers of fact and meaning is even a short, fairly simple civilization like the one which has taken a fall at Cameron Yard built? Are the layers as many as the years lived by those who created it? Is that civilization still falling? This art consists in keeping . . . in afair way, by a management . . . If those words are meaningless now, it has fallen. If they are not, certain acts and re-enactments are possible. As Auden wrote: Man is an analogy-making animal,- that is his great good fortune. 5 ' Or, as Emerson said in Chapter IV of Nature: . . . man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the Centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from eveg other being to him. An neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. Drive, or be driven. Understand, or be misunderstood.

Early last spring, not far from the graveyard knoll, I heard the sound of water forced over a spillway. Through a gap in the trees that faces east towards the river I saw for a moment the white head, dark body and white tail of an adult bald eagle flying south towards the Cameron Yard. The noise of water spilling was made by leaves on a four foot bough the eagle carried crosswise in its tallons.

The latest provisional dominance in the Yard is that of the eagles. A pair has nested for several yeares in the flat crown of a battered white pine which grows from the side of a cliff rising on the south margin of the Yard's marsh intervals. To get close to the eyrie quickly and easily is impossible. The cliff and its pine are separated from the Yard's portion of intervals marsh by a tidal creek which is uncrossable, except by boat, at any point but a mile up its stream, where it ceases to be tidal. At the cliff s foot, there is a small margin of marsh on the far bank of the creek. Then there is the creek, which at low tide is a clear runnel of fresh water at the bottom of a ravine formed by mud, one hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep. And then there is the near bank of the creek which is the old south property line of Cameron Yard.

Apart from its flat crown, the eyrie pine is nearly bald. Only two or three thinly needled plateaus of bough grow from the upper half of its trunk. The eyrie is far larger than anything the tree has visibly grown. It is like a wadded tangle of tree roots, like the whole ball of root ripped up when wind tips an old tree over.

For nearly two years, I have watched this eyrie in season a few minutes at a time. With one exception, I have kept back in the trees on the north side of the Yard. The adults have raised two broods of two eaglets each during that time. The one exception I made to keeping the width of the intervals between me and the eyrie happened during August of the first year. I thought all the birds had gone hunting on the tidal flats and walked to the near bank of the tidal creek to a point opposite the pine and the cliff. Then I watched as a sack-like broken stump on a low dead limb on the pine slowly became the sullen, fuscus hunch of an eaglet, hiding from me, hating and fearing me. I walked away, trying to tell the eaglet by means of my carriage that I both knew and did not know it was there, that its imniobility had both concealed it successfully and had shamed me. Eagles, unlike chickadees, seem to have little interest in comedy.

It was to see the eagles, their young and their eyrie from the right distance that I brought the old poet over the Plaster Road to the Cameron Yard two months ago. As soon as we crossed Cameron Creek, we could hear eagles screaming. Far off they sound like screaming gulls. But heard close, those screams are the sound of breath overdriven and split on beveled, living bone. Like primordial music, the screams are pentatonic, absolute, unanswerable except on their own terms.

The old poet and I stopped at the edge of the trees where the intervale begins. Five hundred yards south of us, across the marsh, across the uncrossably tidal creek, standing on the narrow strip of intervals at the base of the cliff where the eyrie pine grows were two men. They wore dun coloured clothes. Each carried a video camera. They stepped towards the cliff and backed away from it, trying for angles, the cameras held up to their faces almost continuously as if seeing anything in any other way were impossible. The old poet and I could make out one of the eaglets standing at the base of the main bough supporting the eyrie. It was as still and as silent as the eaglete I had injured the year before. The two adult eagles were screaming. One was just coming in from down river, flying in low and screaming in answer to the other, which was halfflying, half-jumping from treetop to treetop. One of the dun men lowered his camera, looked down to find new footing in the mud, turned to find better and saw us. He must have spoken to the other. Both faced us. The old poet and I waited for the cameras to lift and be directed at us.

Of course, the cameras were not. We did not fit the pattern those dun men had in mind. We were the awkwardly present witnesses. For them, we should not exist. We were not meant to be there. In truth, we really did have no legal permission or authority to be in the Cameron Yard, let alone in the property next to it where they stood. They, on the other hand, may have had a right: dun coloured clothes suggested as much.

As they looked at us briefly before turning back to filming, the dun men must have decided on a non-existence for us like the one they planned for themselves in the final filmed scheme of eagles they were aiming to show. It is not likely the subtext of that film is to be an analysis of torture. The dun men had not, therefore, crossed the creek a mile up its stream. They were not standing at the base of the cliff where the pine lofted an eyrie. The eagles were not frightened and angered by them because the dun men were not there.

What was there? An abstraction called "nature" whose specifics were "eagles"? A scripted present, appropriated in camera (since the old poet and I were not there)? A pre-coded object? A parody of what might be called a form of real presence? For no doubt a reverence was involved, though the eagles did not think so.

Now as I write this and read a way into it, I think of how Auden qualified the words quoted earlier in this essay. He wrote: Man is an analogy-drawing animal; that is his great good fortune. The qualification adds:

 His danger is of treating analogies as
 identities, for instance, "Poetry
 should be as much like music as
 possible." I suspect that the people
 who are most likely to say this are
 the tone deaf.  The more one loves an
 art, the less likely it is that one
 will wish to trespass upon its domain.

You know the kind of people, the mad, the foolish, the incapable, Auden is after. But you must also know some who are none of these who can see and hear the play of logic, form and feeling common to both music and poetry for which words and tones, script and sound are only alternative codes.

For the latter listeners and speakers, what Auden calls identities, the specifics of an art, are defined by the available analogies. Some might name this play of identity and analogy, in which each of the two exchanges its place with the other so swiftly that neither ever settles as the other, a myth, and mean by that word either nothing or all.

For what is the Cameron Yard - analogy or identity? And where must we place Bowditch's words: This art consists in a keeping .. . in afair way, by a management . . . ? Are not all our arts and acts navigations? What are the eagles screaming? Identify or analogy? For the dun men really neither, though one might guess they come closer to considering those screams identities, of a rightless, nearly meaningless kind. What is clearer is that for dun men, eagles scream in no empyrean.

Other humans have often enough thought otherwise. Remember, in the fourth chapter of Revelation:

 ... the first beast was like a lion,
 and the second beast like a calf, and
 the third beast had a face as a man and
 the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

Are those beasts analogies or identities? I do not just speak of the traditional conversions to Mark, Luke, Matthew andjohn, the last being the flying eagle, Dante's aguglia di Cristo. For are those beasts not involved in a ceaseless exchange of analogy and identity which is myth and is life itself.

The eagles screaming at Cameron Yard lead to one other myth (or life) which accords with the sense being tried here. In Canto XVIII of the Paradiso Dante ascends to the sixth sphere, governed by Jupiter, and sees the spirits of the just singing in sheaths of living light, moving to form a script of light which spells, Dilgite justitiam qui judicatis terram. Englished, the Latin means: Lovejustice, you who udge the earth.6 Its source is one of the apocryphal gospels, the first chapter, first verse of The Wisdom of Solomon. Dante watches.

 In five times seven vowels and consonants
  they showed themselves, and 
   I grasped every part
 as if those lights had given it utterance.

The translation used here is John Ciardi's. Probably like many other present readers, he is discomfited by this moment in Dante's vision. At the least, discomfiture is betrayed by the annotation Ciardi offers on the passage just quoted:

 I do not know why hearing a letter spoken
 should make it "graspable" than seeing it
 flash across the sky, but Dante, a
 primitive art critic at best, was always
 filled with awe by the sort of visual
 presentation that seemed to make the
 viewer hear what he was seeing.7

In comprehension here is nicely balanced by condescension. The reply to both is: Dante was a poet. The identity of his art and the analogical form of script in which it was coded were indistinguishable for him within the myth and life he found and was given. In a sermon meditating on Psalm 19, Donne wrote:

 How often does the Holy Ghost call upon
 us, in the Scriptures, Ecce, quia os
 Domini locutum, Behold, the mouth of the
 Lord hath spoken it? he calls us to
 behold, (which is the office of the eye)
 and that we are to behold, is the voice
 of God, belonging to the eare; seeing is
 hearing, in God's first language, the
 language of works.

His limitations also, of course, were poetic.

And the spirits of the just in Canto XVIII continue to their next showing forth in a logical way, discomfiting again present neutral notions of language by transforming themselves and the "m" in terram, the earth of living light, into an imperial eagle of light which throughout the rest of Canto XVIII and in Cantos XIX and XX speaks and sings to Dante (and us) about divine justice, which it both is and signifies, of which it is both the identity and analogy.

What I must now call back from memory
 No voice has ever spoken, nor ink written.
 Nor has its like been known to fantasy

For I saw and heard the beak move and declare
 in its own voice the pronouns "I" and "mine"
 when "we" and "ours" were what conceived it there.9

For the dun men in Cameron Yard, seeing is seeing, not seeing and hearing, not hearing and understanding the eagles' screams. But no doubt seeing is there for the taking. It could be all you get in the end.

The old poet and I went back the way we had come, past the site of the stocks where the Isabel, Linnet, Selkirk, Savona, Ensenada and the other vessels were built, past the site of the cookhouse cellar with its one shattered cup, past the graveyard knoll which we must visit for the first time together later, for we had seen and heard what we could, and each of us had keepings and new reckonings to manage.

Footnotes and Bibliography

1. G. Eldridge: Eldridge's Coast Pilot, No. 1, Eastem Section, From Chatham to Canso, N.S., Including the Bay of Fundy: S. Thaxter and Son, Boston, 1884, p. 317.

2. N. Bowditch: The New American Practical Navigator ... : E. & G. W. Blunt, Proprietors, New York, 1844, p. 314.

3. F.W. Wallace: Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1924, pp. 145, 161, 304-305, 315, 318.

4. J. Ortega y Gasset: The Dehumanization of Art: Doubleday, Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., N.D., p. 77.

5. W.H. Auden: The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays: Faber and Faber, London, 1963, pp. 51-52.

6. C.S. Singleton: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, 2, Commentary: Bollingen Series LXXX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ., 1975, P. 309.

7. J: Ciardi: The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., New York, 1977, P. 506.

8. J. Donne: Donne's Sermons: Selected Passages, with an Essay by Logan Pearsall Smith: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 142.

9. Ciardi: Op. Cit.: P. 509.

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