We Are Not Romans
for J.W. (Jim) Burnett
Winter always comes here. It is this more than anything else that makes us what we are. Our reserve is no shyness nor any kind of humility but merely the careful allotment of the strength we need simply to get through the six months of white exile. In our faces an observant person, even in summer, can see the strain of control. In the back of our minds we remember the months of being locked inside and in the hottest sun we can shiver, remembering. And the more enclosed shopping malls they build and enclosed tunnels connecting he buildings downtown and heated garages only make it worse because it reminds us of the extent to which our lives are shaped by what we cannot control. We rush from centrally heated houses to already running cars to enclosed parking lots without even gtting our feet wet and we shop in vast opulent stroers while the muzak murmurs eunuch music but the shaping by winter of who and what we are can no more be denied than can the design the years make on our faces.
I was born within earshot of the trains that run through this city and I can remember that at night, lying in bed I would listen to the whistles and the throb of the engines. My mind would race imag- ining the band of steel stretched from coast to coast and in my mind eye I would see, at each curve of the track, adventures that what was then a a small prairie city didn't seem to offer and the whistle of the trains reminded me each night in my bed that a world existed that was far away from this small town built on the confluence of two rivers.
Winter always comes here and came early this year with the promise of being long and hard. Already the tires of the cars on the iced streets pass with the sound like the crunching of bones. The new and unfinished buildings of this most impetuous city stand stark against the white winter sky, ash white, as if they will stand for a thousand years but then, from the chimneys of the smaller buildings closer to the window where I sit comes a shadow of smoke and ice crystal softening a contour, blurring an outline. Sometimes the equipment and cranes of the half-built on even the highest of them for a moment, disappear. I heard a while ago that the guy who was the project manager on the newly completed phone company building won't walk within blocks of it on windy days and I wonder if in the shoddiness of materials used now and half-hearted crafting a tacit agreement has been reached with the inplac-able; all things will pass and become dust, why not sooner than later they shrug and join the long lines of cars driving away each night from the centre of the city they help to build but in which they live only by proxy.
I remember once taking my grand-mother who had come to visit from Saskatchewan to the river bluff on the south side near our house and proudly showing her what was to her and I our enormous city. The largest building on the skyline was the Palliser Hotel and the Pacific 66 sign on fourth street could be seen for miles and we could see clear across the valley to the homes on Crescent Road. We took her downtown and drove up onto the Bay Parkade. She wouldn't look over the edge but I did and I think I could see forever. Not much of that Calgary exists but much of me is still that boy sitting at the counter with my dad in the Pig 'n Whistle drinking the orange stuff that came from those swirly coolers and eating a bismark.
We are not Romans. What we build here will not last the two thousand years of the Appian Way. No millenial viaduct, mortarless, lovingly crafted stand in this city, the concrete beds the transit trains run on have to be rebuilt already and they are only two years old though like Romans we too have our Centurians but their chariots have four hundred horses and shot guns on spring mounts though like Romans they arrest Plebians much quicker than Patricians. Class prejudice is now so old as to be practically time honoured. No, we are not Romans, in the stadiums the gladiators do not fight to kill. We are not Romans the crowds still shout kill, empire that stretches as far as the strands of optic fibres and we too have a bureaucracy: swollen, lazy, self-serving paper shufflers staggering under the weight of computer belched statistics and plotting intricate schemes that will allow them to keep their jobs but do less, less each day. We are not Romans but like Romans we too steal from the Greeks, etymology forms the lines of continuity from their form of democracy to ours and English, like Latin could die but the next linguistic inheritors will probably receive a legacy less robust than that which we received. We got the idea and word democracy but I'm afraid we will pass nothing more resonant than "Atari." No, we are not Romans, our civilization started with the same approximate health as theirs ended. We are our own Visigoths, smashing the walls down and like Nero we fiddle our time away not while the city burns but crumbles.
They gave me a set of plastic knights in armour with little swords and shields that moved and later the classic comics of Darwin's Origins of the Species and Homer's Illiad. At the old Memorial Library there was a whole history of Canada series that I took out two at a time until I had read them all and I collected those gory American Civil War gum cards that still haunt my mind. When I played war games with my friends I forced them to enact the historical scenes of my imagination and after my sister took me to see the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire the game we most often played was Barbarians sacking Rome.
This city like the civilization of which it is a part crumbles into premature dust. Pound said the whole thing was "an old bitch, gone in the teerth" and that was fifty years ago. Imagine what he would think if he drove into this town on Macleod Trail and saw the nearly five miles of Taco stands and car lots and roller rinks, saw the greeny brown scum rising into the air from the oil refinery? If we look at this town from fresh eyes we would note with terrible clarity the white knuckles on the thousands of steering wheels and the pained but vacant stares as they drive from jobs they hate to houses which are not homes perched uneasily on a prairie landscape they pretend does not exist. With fresh eyes we would note the averted gaze on city streets as two humans pass and the immobile gray faces on buses staring at nothng just slightly above or beside where you sit. We cannot love what we cannot understand, we cannot understand what we have not loved and we build cold towers deeper into the brown smeared sky and pave once fertile prairies without love and without understanding.
It was with regret that I hung up my swords and guns. I fought against it as long as I could but the city and I were growing up and I unwillingly tied myself into the strait jacket of adolescence, smoking badly and necking with the species that the year before had fleas and were never allowed to play. Frantic lest the cut of my trousers wasn't quite correct and discussing endlessly with whom we could score and listening without discrimination to pop songs on the radios in parents' borrowed cars exploring a city that was changing while we ourselves changed. Some-times late at night walking home alone I would still hear the trains.
Rome was not built the saying goes in a day and this shibboleth is trotted out to encourage deter-mination and patience but what the saying ignores is that Rome was not built in a day nor was it built of free will, it was built by the effort of slaves. When the Greeks haggled over the nature of democracy and freedom they drank from golden cups served to them by slaves. The pyramids are no testaments to the glory of man but simply another symbol of venality and likewise the other six wonders of the world and really the only wonder is that so many humans could be controlled by so few. At the time of the proclamation of emancipation there were four million blacks south of the Mason-Dixon line and many, when informed of freedom, refused to leave their old massa's and therein lies the secret of control. Keep 'em ignorant, keep 'em hungry, reward the obseuious, promise them heaven and they're yours for life. Without a vision of freedom only the throbbing insistence in the back of the mind informs the indentured of another way to live and sometimes throughout the history of this oldest institution could run far enough and fast enough to ever get away and the others, minus a foot or a scrotum, cloaked any vision of freedom, in fear.
The city grew and I got my first job as a labourer on a construction site but I still hadn't got my growth and my hard hat dwarfed my face and my boots were three sizes too big and I never did figure out which way things loosened or tightened and the workers called me girlie because of my long hair but they paid me $2.25 an hour so I didn't care. Diamond Jim Brady to my friends taking two cars full of kids to the drive-ins and buying whiskey to drink with cokes. We sat on the river bluff one night high for the first time on mesclaine looking at the city with fresh eyes and for the first time in years I remembered the excitement of knowing that with my imagination everything could be what I wanted it to be and nothing was what it seemed. I swore that night that I could see creepers and vines growing up the side of the tower.
But then, are we not all slaves to one master or another? Fear is the ultimate mechanism of control and who among us is unafraid? Isn't the great clinging together of cities themselves a manifestation of fear? In North America the cities perch uneasily on the surface of the landscape, denyng he seasons and denying the ancient people who, if it weren't for tuberuculosis and alcoholism and malnutrition would be watching, as the oppressed always watch their oppressors and would be laughing at the near insane spectacle which a modern city must be to their eyes. I guess it is just a coincidence that the major credit company is called Master Card or at least no one gets the joke or maybe it just isn't funny to see poeple caught in an intricate web of their own design, a job they hate to buy the things the television shrieks at them they must buy, buy. Freedom, if untested, is not freedom and this city perhaps even more than most has allowed its freedom to be described. We are free: free to become trapped in the consumer cycle, free like pacmen to devour each other in our race to an imaginary top. Imaginary because even the masters are bonded to yet another master. Yes, we are free but the horizons of our freedom are limited to our ability to march in quickstep to the drummer who pounds the relentless rhythms by which we live our lives.
The day I quit school I was standing in the office with my release form and the principal came and said I thought I told you to get a hair cut. I stood there for a moment and let the form float across the desk between us and turned and walked away from where they teach that learning is a chore and sometimes for punishment they would make us read a book and in all those endless poetry classes, plucking and pulling at it like nasty children pulling the wings off flies only about two teachers or three at most ever remembered to read the damn things aloud. The day I left I was walking home and I found a stick, I picked it up and swung it through the air like a Roman with a sword.
It is morning. The moon is pale winter white nearly lost in a western sky and the sun is a seething red hint in the east, the city begins to hum and throb with a bee drone sound and another day begins. The night crawlers, cops on the night beat, whores and drunks, janitors and desk clerks coming off the night shift have been swallowed into the red light and the scrubbed mobs of office workers read the morning paper to find out what didn't happen yesterday. A day begins on the sufferance of fate and maybe this will be the last ordinary day. The planet spun according to ritual and intention exposing the city to sun and moon in proper order: the sun rose, the moon sets, alarm clocks ring, cars are backed from garages and form into lines converging on the centre of town. Everything seems like it always does, winter always comes here, alarm clocks always ring, the sun rises and sets as does the moon but maybe, just maybe this will be the last ordinary day. Someone tells their boss off, maybe a storm hits and everyone has to sleep downtown and a secretary gets pregnant. This day will be ordinary on the sufferance of fate, the winter may turn into spring but in Pompeii, a city near Rome, there was one last ordinary day and then they were gone. We are not Romans but like Romans, we too shall pass. We are not Romans but we too shall pass.
On my desk I keep the fossil impression of a mollusc shell that I found years ago just west of town. Someone told me that it is four hundred million years old and dates from when what is now prairie was a great inland sea and what is now Calgary was a swampy shoreline. Sometimes when I can't write or if I'm hung up on some life problem I look at that fossil and remind myself that everything passes, becomes dust and only time itself can know what is worthy in each experience and what will continue to echo through the ages. It took billions of years to make a mollusc, from gases swirling in space to the first uniting of hydrogen and oxygen to form great oceans to single then multiple celled organisms. Now, not even that mollusc is left, only its shadow, pressed into much on the bottom of the ocean then turned by time to stone is left and I look at it and wonder. I listen to the sound of this city and I think about Rome.