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Antigonish Review # 149
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As Teacher and Mentor
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Cover
Family Photo by Brendan Sanderson
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Motorcycle Elegy
Stewart Donovan
i.m. George Sanderson 1935-2005 |
If time had been different you would have
sat astride
some low riding Harley or rice rocket and
ridden
back to St. Catherine's St. or south to
Appalachia where
Vietnam vets still ride and hide from memory
and home. They forever seek some solace
of calm in the
endless line and motion before them. You
could
have brought a seven lakes stillness, George,
a V twin
Zen of understanding, a knowledge of the
night.
Born for the blackboard you were recruited
by a Cape
Breton polymath priest, the "Moonbeam"
Buddha
of Ironville. We were his protégés, but
only you possessed
the DNA of wit pure enough to battle the
divine
comedic dragon of his need: to know, to
speak, profess and
know again. You should have been a battered
Boswell,
but a deep current of electrified laughter
let you surf above
the barbs and battering ram of books mentor
MacSween
hammered home with all the love of "Dad"
not "Father".
We know how you nurtured him for us.
And philosophy at StFX? No dry Thomistic
text or pseudo-
Derridean disciples miming the limits of
language.
Probes, puns, and pop cult were the McLuhanesque
tools you
used to lower the level of entropy; and
you sailed
in class longer than most, not out of youth,
but simply
because you understood the new chaos of
the eye:
the grand narrative could not compete and
so like some Ivan
Illich of Antigonish you took to carving
gargoyles in
the fields of Lanark, something to awaken
the suburbs and
engineers, a talisman for the tourists
of education,
a warning round technologies and ethics,
a cairn for the
classroom marking the price of corn, the
flight paths
of mariposas, raccoons at night.
Requiescat in pace is now the tattoo
you wear across that
nomadic mind; let it be your colours and
ride again
the recovered fields of France and Belgium
with your bride,
her arms round your waist as you become
one again
with movement and, later, in some cobble-stoned
side street
of Louvain you visit a Boutique des Cahiers
Erasmus
may have passed fleeing from Paris, or
Charles Péguy inspired
before he fell that first day on the Marne.
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