...to History's Slow Tide
Walls of water do not the best neighbours make
Stripping the mask...
Meditation on a Lake View, Douglas Ord's latest three-part essay now at Lear's Shadow, begins with about as much excitement as the graphic illustrating it, a view of Lake Ontario's flat, featureless expanse from Sunnyside Beach, west of Toronto.
Ord's photographed lake sustains no mythology. It is a still, dull stretch of water which, depending on your point of view and knowledge of history, separates two people from or pits them against each other. It seems no Excalibur will rise from the depths of Lake Ontario and no Arthur will claim his sword.
It is as Ord portrays it; flat, calm, dead.
Yet, as the lake's placid waters, constricted by two breakwaters, rise to meet a sky as blue as itself, in the narrow line bisecting Heaven and the great body of water we find the author's vision of a near-visible Hell, the United States of America.
Writing with his trademark dispassionate style, Ord's measured prose first dissects a Time magazine [Canadian edition] cover story highlighting his country's declining fortunes, Would Anyone Notice if Canada Disappeared?
The accompanying cover and inside front-cover graphics show, on the one hand, only ocean where once the great northern landmass stood and, on the other, a shrunken Canada subject to the unblinking scrutiny of a United States personified to godly proportions.
Ord's gripe is that Time, its publishers, its content and its intent are about as Canadian as duck-billed platypuses. He argues that the article's U.S.-grounded, baseless view [permeating its editorial policy] stems from a mindset equating government to godhead and purposefully sets out to skew perceptions.
His reasoned wrath and compelling words boil beneath tightly-reined words while, beneath the skin of its water, Lake Ontario seethes with a potentially devastating anger.
Doug Ord sees much in little, but he eschews conjecture for its own sake. In the first of three pieces, his scathing words flense fat from the bones of deceit. Pink with a barely-suppressed post-colonial rage, he dissects the motives of those arguing Canada's demise as a force to be reckoned with.
He then flays them with turkeys. I kid you not. The map ain't yellow; it's chicken.
Part 2 objectifies his frustration, juxtaposing two contradictory graphics, highlighting fractured U.S. and Canadian perceptions, views and sentiments. It is here that he chooses his weapon and whips the waters of a lake that is at once a gateway and an insurmountable obstacle to white-capped fury.
He opts for the tried and tested, i.e. a play-off of perceptions. Where the magazine protagonists eliminate each other with water, Ord uses his photograph of the lake to sink Time's unctuous projection of the U.S.' as the self-ordained global guardian of all that is good and just.
...from Liberty's beautiful face
In Part 3, the lake yields not Excalibur and the possibility of redemption but the wrath of Apocalypse. Free of their underwater chains, the stories of myth, history, civilisation, culture, war, conquest, disease and genocide rise to speak for themselves from an American sky.
They do so unerringly and unnervingly. They speak with a voice embracing international, national, local and personal tragedy. Reading this climactic, telling section, the breakwaters impinging on Ord's graphic reminded me of Mulberries...
...artificial harbours designed and constructed by the British in World War II to facilitate the unloading of supply ships off the coast of Normandy, France, immediately following the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944. One harbour, known as Mulberry "A," was constructed off Saint-Laurent at Omaha Beach in the American sector, and the other, Mulberry "B," was built off Arromanches at Gold Beach in the British sector.
The connection made and the former adversaries identified, Ord reins in and focuses global anxiety, distilling it to a recollection of the brutal attack on Toronto by American forces under General Dearborn 190 years ago, not far from where the lake, now silent and unspeaking, laps a brooding, blood-soaked shore.
With a final, deft shift, the waters become the eternal guardian of a young and broken life and the air above becomes poisoned forever.
Articulating how those living 'across the water' see the United States of America today, Meditation on a Lake View should shock many to their senses. Whether it will, remains to be seen.
Note In outlining the content of Ord's graphic essay, I have sought to conceal rather than reveal. Meditation on a Lake View is nerve-wracking stuff, linking the seemingly innocuous and somewhat foolish to the blatantly threatening and devastatingly lethal without skipping a beat.
