Pop 89: Lilac Carcass and Moon
By Madonna Hamel
Last night, on my walk along the Frenchman River, I encountered the two deer carcasses that have been disintegrating there since April. They are mostly elegant skeletons and piles of hair, now. It was a rough winter for deer. It was not unusual to drag five or so dead ones from the town at the close of any given day. They would come into the village to find something to eat, and they pruned just about every unfenced shrubbery.
Apart from the sad demise of so many deer, I am fascinated to watch Nature take her own pound of flesh over this Spring season. I am reminded of the year I came across a dead bison in the park. I smelled it before I saw it. It was laying on its side in a draw.
Already the maggots had gotten down to lunch. It’s fascinating to watch the troops march in a line along the dead creature’s hide, gorging themselves until they fall back, a waterfall of engorged scavengers, only to see the next line of devourers take their place. It’s a good argument for cremation.
I appreciate being able to see the life cycle up close and unhidden, not swept up or disposed of. It’s a good reminder that we all return to dust. It’s why I also like to collect animal skulls and appreciate the candle and candy human skulls of The Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Memento Mori. Remember: You Will Die. The concept and practice has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity. I’ve written about it before. But that was before my brother’s stroke, before life threw its fragility in our faces and tripped us on our feet and kept us up all night.
I don’t find the skull ghoulish or cultish or even disturbing. I appreciate its democratic nature: no one gets out of this alive. We could go any day. So, what have we done for each other lately? As someone once said to me: I’m pretty sure when I’m laying on my death bed, the last thing I am going to think is NOT: Gee, I’m sure glad I got my BMW detailed. No chance of that, I joked. I don’t own a BMW. However, to paraphrase Hamlet, there is more to heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies.
Later, in the same play, Hamlet roams the cemetery and comes across the skull of the court jester who played with him when he was a child. “Alas, poor Yorick,” begins the soliloquy that earmarks perhaps the most famous of all of Shakespeare’s soliloquies. He continues to wax on about the ability the jester had to make everyone laugh and be filled with joy. It’s a worthy memory - better than saying- Yorick? He was a miserable SOB. Or Yorick, he made his first million by the time he was thirty. But I never knew him.
Another brief candle this time of year is the lilac. Every time I walk past a lilac bush in Val Marie, I slow down and inhale deeply. I know within a week or two, the mauve blossoms will turn to rust and dwindle eventually into the dust. It is touching to see the various random blushes, still bursting boisterousness in an open field, a field that was once someone’s yard or farm, but now only the flowering hedge remains. Some woman needed lilacs as badly as she needed her embroidered tablecloths and rows of pansies, which invariably were smote by wind and eaten by bugs, so she stitched them on things instead.
Looking at those bushes reminds me of a section in my own performance, “Mother’s Apron,(which I will shamelessly self-promote right here: I am performing at Grand Coteau Gallery in Shaunavon on the 16th of this month at 7 pm. Doors open at 6:30. I hope you can make it.) In it, I talk about how women created a home, a sanctuary, out of a shack, by placing a candle stick here, a doily there. Perhaps a sachet of lavender tucked under the bed. All miniature portraits to quell a maximum expanse. Each stitch, each tatt, a mediation, a footstep bridging civilizations.
Seeing those lilacs also reminds me of my mom. She was born here and raised here, and she spent her evenings reading poetry. Who exactly introduced her to Walt Whitman I do not know. But one summer evening, as a university student visiting the family home in Kelowna as mom and I sat in the warm Spring breeze on the back porch, she began reciting him. Two enormous lilac bushes drooped themselves over us, and we inhaled deeply, and it reminded her of Whitman’s “Ode to a Dead Abraham Lincoln.” “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
The last of the lilacs are dropping away. It’s been a rough Spring. But it’s given me that awareness we all experience when we know how brief life is. How fast the years speed past. I notice how absurd I behave at times, especially when I have no patience for the impatient! What’s the hurry? Why are we so eager to get to the end of each day? Don’t all days add up to weeks, months and years? And then what? Shall we brag about our debts? Will that prove we are adults? Or just good consumers? Will we gain admiration? Or garner pity? Or, as one of my favourite characters in “Mother’s Apron” says: “Another day, another transubstantiation- turning water into tea. Raising flour into bread. And what have we gleaned?” He also says: “Let the quiet you.” And, from a time before computers and tv screens, he warns the young, “Do not measure your life by gain, but instead, go out walking again, out under the rising moon, out on the open plain.”