A Quarterly of Criticism and Review ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B $ 1 5 144 the Border Before I knew about the absurdity of American gun laws and inadequate health care, I knew about the border. It cut a wide swath through the bush, between Tsawwassen on the Canadian side and Point Roberts on the American, and we could reach the western end of it by walking south along an agate-strewn beach. A boundary marker declared the power of division here (the Peace Arch, by contrast, at the Douglas- Blaine crossing a few miles further to the east, intoned an odd insistence on dependency: "Children of a Common Mother"—a stone engraving that led readily to infantile ribaldry). If we climbed up the cliff beside the beach and strolled along the right-of-way, we would come out between the two customs houses. "How long have you been away?" the guard would ask (an entertaining, enigmatic question). Had we in fact ever been "away," wandering back and forth across a shrubby numbered parallel, or had we just been pushing a little at an almost unseen, only half-appreciated edge? Consider the clichés: Threshold of Opportunity, Key to the Future, Window on the World, Gateway to (fill in the blank). Nice notions. But where are the sidelines to the frontier, the exits from loss, the keyholes to the out- posts of civilization? Conventions make us think along worn paths, easy routes, well-travelled thoroughfares; and even the other path in the woods and the road not taken have come to seem like bromides and old saws. If there's a window on the world, who's looking back? If there's a gateway opening in one direction, why does it so often close against those who travel the other way? Inside these conventional paradigms, ego seems to construct the world. Those who seek aggrandizement, the extension of their own power boundaries, claim alternatives as their right, the prerogative of self, and at the same time they will not permit alternatives (by whose authority, these verbs?) to others. "I" may declare "myself" separate from "you," say the pompous, presumptuous, and power-preoccupied, but "they" (now in "my" command) may never separate themselves from "me." This world of planned perimeters shows the danger of the unexamined platitude, the toothy smugness of the Barnum smile. And yet we seek—even need, depend on—borders. Are they the same as boundaries? Perhaps borders line the edges of possibility, and boundaries the edges of permission. Perhaps bor- ders declare a guarantee of shared values, the codes of community—and boundaries assert the limits of a self-declared centrality of rule, the codes of hierarchy and authoritarianism. Before I knew about neighbourhood, I knew about the house next door. The old woman who lived there uttered crusty imprecations at the universe, grousing daily about other people's children and generations of impending change. Once, when the group of us were playing softball on the street, she even took an axe and chopped away the bridge that crossed the ditch in front of her own home, to keep us from using it as first base. Perhaps each of us put a different face on this act, this occasion. I saw it contradictorily as threatening and comic, vindictive and absurd; I remember it now as sad. She cut herself off, blaming others for a self-inflicted wound. Maybe she even construed what she did as saving her own skin; certainly, living in a shell, she kept mistaking the way out for a way in. Refusal, rejection, denial: she saw contact as a danger, touch as an attack, connection too uncertain to endure. Grey areas: the slippage zone between cup and lip, the flank that got left behind (and then left out of the history books), the blur between adjoining rooms, activities upon the pale but not quite yet beyond it, the difference between listening and hearing, looking and seeing, can and could. Could still. Editorial Before I knew about the Ottawa River, I knew about the muddy Fraser, and the untrustworthiness of surfaces and seafogs. If at all, we swam there warily, conscious (we told ourselves) of the movement of the unattended booms, our apprentice skill (we said) at birling the giant Douglas fir logs, and the dour tales (our parents told us) of entrapment and death by drowning. Undertow. We are not always prepared for the way the current rips, however, nor for the ambiguities of what looks at first like choice. Desire connects more complicatedly with daring that we sometimes admit. Decisions are fixed inside the slanted limits of available (or is it made-accessible) informa- tion. What distinguishes the regional, then, from the parochial? familial rela- tionship from enforced apart-hood? interactive understanding from overactive authoritarianism? Identity is real, or real enough positively to affect people's lives. Yet the parochial categories of identity are mirages, illu- sions concocted by the politics of rule, in the name of purity and in the shape of slogans. They, too, can alter people's lives, but seldom in the cause of freedom. The free flow of communication is far more often dammed, dis- torted, caulked, contained, curtailed, restricted, tied. The bars of ostensible purity are often overt, and coded for praise; yet the barriers to freedom they carry with them are often hidden. Indeterminacy. The round earth's imagined corners yield surprises, not the least the ones that juxtapose experience and myth. We live inside perimeters of trust and faith, distrust and fear. It is ignorance, not stupidity, that sepa- rates us. The problem is that faith can be as ignorant as fear, distrust as thick as trust, the brink disguised as centre, with centres already dispersing. Before I knew about the meniscus (early chemistry class confirming yet again the unlikelihood of physical behaviour), I knew how to reach a milk- glass brim, and knew that it divided the cautionary about to spill from the active (and reactive) already spilling. We know this space between, in other words. For we often live there. Naming it is just a way of reminding our- selves we can resist the easy binaries of boundary lines and the temptations of a so-called "perfect" separateness. There is no such thing as perfect sepa- rateness. There is only contiguity, which keeps changing, placid and con- frontative, equable and arranged. "At this juncture," we say, constituting each moment as the site of consequence. "From here on in." "Never before and never again." We speak memorized lines, playing on the verge of absur- dity, giving credence both to brain and membrane. As in film. ,•*• Both/and (instead of/in addition to) either/or. It is the difficult, ambiguous rhetoric of living with and without borders. Repeatedly we need a sense of circumference to secure that which we share, recognizing always that we usually share more than we think we do, and that the margins move. And still, still, repeatedly we need to walk close enough to the borders to recog- nize where they lie, sometimes to cross them if we can, if only to know that they can be crossed, to affirm that, while the world is not picture-perfect, we also know we do not constrict the world we already accept by the way we (and others) draw the frame, W.N. Wayne Keon it ain't exactly heaven bein mistaken for some kind of créole man that night not really knowing what to make of the scene and followin me home like that chicken was boilin on top of the stove getting it all really fully seasoned and pretty good spilling the cayenne spice and stuff into the mixture kind of heated it up a bit and caused all that smoke over the pot but i once heard some one talkin about this creolized language and how subordinates took over the major language or something like that sounds like some kind of a weird mutiny going on down in the kitchen all right and maybe that's what this is all about but really this ain't no insurrection goin on here for christ sake and this ain't even louisiana or any of those other bayou places with alligators floatin around this is just my way of cookin up a bit of a storm before the winter sets in but what do you expect i guess she can imagine whatever might be different late on a Sunday evening when you don't have to bother goin home anymore and hang around someone that seems to be a little far out on what everyone wants to call the far side or dark side or other side of what appears to be your normal everyday other side anyways i ain't no cajun and i ain't no créole and i sure as hell ain't no louisiana back water slug lickin a wooden spoon clean in some boilin down town back street restaurant off the main in new Orleans so pay attention missy and the next time you get invited in try not to stay longer than three days and try to remember that this is just a soup pot cook out and really doesn't have anything to do with native ancestry or anything like what goes along with all that cross cultural crap they're always lyin to you about down at queenspark or any place else uptown for all that matter Susanna Egan The Book of Jessica: The Healing Circle of a Woman's Autobiography I have been drawn to write about The Book of Jessica— against the advice of all my friends and relations1—because it crosses a number of significant boundaries: between life and art, between context and text in autobiographical genres, between ceremonies of religion and of theatre, between oral and written narratives, and between two women, one Métis and one white.