FIRST MEETINGS between writers ? particularly young male writers ? are usually guarded and unproductive. My first meeting with Christopher Dewdney 10 years ago was an exception to the rule, and it set our relationship on a permanent course. It began in Vancouver with a rather abrupt telephone call.
"Hi," said a voice. "This is Chris Dewdney." Then without waiting for a response, he got right to what was on his mind. "Someone told me you would know where I can find an arbutus tree."
I didn't know it, but it was perfectly logical that Dewdney would be more interested in meeting a tree than another poet. The arbutus is an old and specialized species, with smooth, cinnamon?coloured bark and waxy, semipermanent leaves. Bark and leaf shedding is irregular, usually in response to extremely dry summer conditions. The tree prefers rock, dry acid soil, sea winds, and (strangely) generous amounts of rain. By comparison, I had almost nothing interesting to offer.
Consequently, there was no idle gossip that afternoon, and none of the fire?hydrant routines common among young poets. We were on a purely scientific expedition, and, to my embarrassment, finding an arbutus tree wasn't as easy as I'd expected. Greater Vancouver possesses nearly a dozen distinct biotic zones with annual rainfall variations as great as 100 centimetres and many more equally dramatic differences. Vancouver's Point Grey, with its sandy escarpments, just didn't yield any arbutus trees for Dewdney to examine. Across the bay at Point Atkinson they were plentiful, but by the time I remembered this, we were onto the tidal marshes near the air port, and the focus was the interrelationships in that ecosystem.
Four hours passed that way. We hadn't mentioned poetry, and I hadn't found an arbutus tree. Finally, I recalled that there was one in Kitsilano, in a front yard where no arbutus would naturally grow. Some gardener had lovingly created the correct soil conditions for an arbutus, and the tree had not only survived there, it was positively thriving ? a beautiful, if somewhat irregular specimen. I was explaining all this to Dewdney as I pulled up in front of the garden. He didn't care ? he was out of the car before we'd come to a full stop.
I watched him examine the tree with the near?ecstatic care that is his trademark. It was, he said, much as he'd expected it to be, but the colour of the bark was more vivid, and its texture smoother. He then went on to provide me with the tree's taxonomic relatives and its probable evolution.
When I dropped him off at his next engagement, I'd learned considerably more about my own environment than he had. Dewdney hadn't said more than a few words about himself, nothing at all about poetry, and he hadn't asked me for a single one of my many opinions. He'd asked a very large number of questions, but they were all the same kind: how deep is the sand?base in the Fraser delta, what are the tide variations in the salt marshes, what are the ecosystem requirements and relationships of the various native tree species, etc.
That's typical of the way Christopher Dewdney operates. He makes most people feel slightly uncomfortable at first, and so do his books. He approaches both the world and poetry without the usual chummy formalism or empty social posturing. It's almost like dealing with a perfect ego, or the appearance of it.
That isn't what it is, however. Dewdney was born with a very odd silver spoon in his mouth ? odd because the wealth and privilege it provided were cultural rather than economic. He grew up in London, Ontario, the youngest son of the late Selwyn Dewdney, novelist, muralist, natural historian and one of the founders of the C.C.F. His mother Irene is a respected art therapist. One of his older brothers, Keewatin, is the author of the remarkable The Planiverse, a novel based on a creature who lives in a mathematical two?dimensional universe. Keewatin also writes the computer recreations column for Scientific American. Another, Donner, is a paediatric psychiatrist, while the third, Peter, is a social worker. All four brothers have a keen interest in theoretical science.
"My family was always empirically located," Dewdney explains. "My father was always able to answer those why questions kids ask ? any part of my environment that I chose to examine was explained to me."
Throughout his childhood, Dewdney's brother Keewatin, 10 years his senior, used him as a kind of miniature sounding board, a pliable subject for trying out (in Dewdney's phrase) "'his private dreams and existential nightmares." But the elder brother also took him on numerous field trips and provided him with the aquariums and microscopes that are a child's necessary scientific ? and imaginative building blocks. His family's connection with the C.C.F. was likewise seminal. "I came out of my childhood, he says, "with a background of empiricism and humanist social responsibility that it wasn't psychologically necessary for me to rebel against. Any disagreements I might have had with my parents came at an aesthetic level."
No, that last sentence is not a misprint. How many people do you know who can even discuss aesthetics with their family? In the Dewdney household, one suspects, conversations around the breakfast and dinner?table ? even about the weather ?must have been pretty stimulating.
What this background gave Christopher Dewdney, first of all, was the confidence to proceed as an empirically grounded artist. It also gave him a very long head start. At the age of nine he produced a little crayon drawing?illustrated book he called, with an intellectual ambition he still exhibits, From Dinosaurs to Guided Missiles.
His first published book, Golders Green, appeared in 1971, when he was barely 20. His second book, A Paleozoic Geology of London, Ontario, appeared a year later in 1972, and was the announcement of a very unusual project that is still in progress, and an association with Toronto's Coach House Press that is also still active. It also showed that the From Dinosaurs to Guided Missiles project was alive and well.
Fovea Centralis followed in 1975, delayed by a private tragedy that awakened Dewdney's continuing interest in neurophysiology, Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night in 1978, and Alter Sublime in 1980. Since then, Predators of the Adoration (1983), The Immaculate Perception (1986), and The Radiant Inventory (1988) have each garnered Governor General's Award nominations. That none of those books won is a better testament to Dewdney's originality than winning would have been. He's the sort of poet who is so good he can't be ignored, but the originality is so extreme that it tends to frighten the main?streamers away from full acceptance. Like most awards, the GGs tend to go to those who reflect the mainstream values (and prejudices) of the juries, not to those with ground?breaking skills.
Dewdney's primary poetic project since 1971 has been the natural history of Southwestern Ontario. That may sound like a somewhat strange or arcane pursuit for a poet, until you land amidst the 18 years of poetic data Dewdney has accumulated. Then the singularity and richness of it quickly gets to you. It's unusual, but it's far from arcane.
One would be hard pressed to argue that there is any poet in this country with a more singular opus than Dewdney's. From Golders Green on, it is an attempt to penetrate and enlarge reality rather than encapsulate it in the kind of self?referential linguistic fields poets have come to think of as "style." Dewdney's voice is unlike anyone else's because there are identifiable and consistently purposive perceptual methodologies at work within it. None of them are literary or self?aggrandizing. Dewdney himself seemed nonplussed when I told him that the judges who awarded his long poem "Elora Gorge" the CBC poetry prize several years ago instantly recognized it as his work, even though the entries were presented to them anonymously.
What Dewdney does, and what no one else ? anywhere ? has done with quite the same singlemindedness, is to develop a series of empirical bases for his writing and then to transform them simultaneously into conceptual and melodic glosses that penetrate much further and deeper than the surfaces he has etched them upon.
The work is grounded empirically, in his knowledge of natural history, neurophysiology (the subject of The Immaculate Perception), cybernetics, and physics. Each of these disciplines provides him with a conceptual and linguistic frame that he uses as a transformative gloss or matrix. By shifting these glosses back and forth across normative reality, he shifts the receptor planes of normal discourse or description in order to examine objects and units of language in new ways. The result is, according to his purpose, conceptual disjunction, heightened melody, or both. Take this example from Permugenesis (1987), which I chose at random: Triassic afternoons blending imperceptibly into early forest morning. Each huge spring bud a transparent Cenozoic asylum. All mammals quickened wings unfolding into bats. Every organism burning more fiercely. Distant radar tunnels. The glass machinery intact as remoras vacuous and cold that lurk in hearts burning bittersweet dreams.
What occurs in this passage is a refraction of normal expectation and a conceptual extension of chronological fields ? the present telescopes into the geological past and vice versa. The intended result is an involuntary disorientation of the reader's perspectives on the subject at hand. A conventional reader looking for a conventional nexus of ideas, images, and processes will suddenly discover that Dewdney has moved them to a less certain realm where concept and melody can transmute one another.
I Sound complicated? Not really. Dewdney's work, for all its density, is neither obscure nor unapproachable. Unlike most conventional poetry, which requires the reader to know the formalities of a narrow and largely confessional band of traditional (and largely obsolete) expression, his work offers a wealth of possible informational entrances and handholds. That what he does isn't common in poetry today is more a reflection of how far behind other forms of human knowledge poetry lags than a signal that Dewdney's work is unduly difficult.
In any case, his musical ear is first rate. The phonemic tonalities he builds are often so hypnotic they would be interesting for their musical phrasing alone. His poetry, like the empirical disciplines it reflects and interrogates, is much more than mere data gathering. Years ago, after decades of attempting to isolate the pragmatic code of birdsong, scientists discovered, to their acute embarrassment, that the chief reason birds sing is for the sheer joy of song. Dewdney's work contains a powerful measure of play and pleasure at being human and in possession of language and consciousness.
I His last two major books are his best. The Immaculate Perception is a sophisticated manual of how the human brain uses language in order to interact with a series of conceptual or phenomenal environments. It's really a layman's guide to neurophysiology, and it's loaded with insights and metaphors that should be of equal usefulness to both scientists and artists.
"In The Immaculate Perception," says Dewdney, "I'm confronting people who have not been able to accept the miraculous in their lives, and who've had spiritual or political crutches which defer miracle for them, or which become vehicles for simulating miracles. . . . A religious system which has the notion of a supreme being is a renouncement of the human miracle. Any kind of system which defers that miracle, any belief system which centres on the immaterial soul, or, say, UFOs ? all become insults to humanity." More than any other book he's published, last year's The Radiant Inventory is an accessible showcase for the range of Dewdneys skills and information. A finely tuned lyric voice is evident in a number of poems, as in this one, titled "Open Heart" and dedicated to his late father: through all the others' eyes by which I have seen you grow stranger each one a little death I still know you know your will a single curved muscle a fine obsidian blade suspended for an instant above the rapids catching the sun like a fish leaping above the foam & spray before it falls back into the commotion the background radiation of the universe. Also evident is his sense of humour. Witness this piece from "Knowledge of Neurophysiology as Defence against Attack":
You are taking a short cutthrough a city alley at night when alone thug lunges in front of you, a knife in his right hand. Although you are not trained in any form of self?defence you can rely on brain lateralization interference to get you through this situation. Since he is right handed he is already taxing his dominant or left hemisphere. You can cause a deteriorization of his vigilance in his left visual field merely by asking him a question to which he has been programmed to respond with his right hemisphere, i.e., a spatio?temporal dilemma such as 'Are you underneath me?" Bark out this question concurrently with a right hook with all your force behind it, focused on the chin. During his left hemisphere interference crisis, he will fireeze momentarily like a shortcircuited automaton. You must produce unconsciousness during this interval.
Over the years, I've managed to find out a few things about Dewdney the man. He lives in a modest west?side Toronto neighbourhood with his second wife, Lise Downe, who is a painter, and his son Tristan; he makes his living, teaching at York University. He collects leather jackets, distills his own water, and likes to eat extremely hot food. Aside from his fellow Coach
House Press editor David Young, he's the most frightening driver I've ever ridden in a car with.
In the past two or three years he's become heavily involved with the Society For the Preservation of Wild Culture, for which he acts as an eminence verte, and gives landscape readings at various significant geological locations across Southwestern Ontario. As always, he is widening his conceptual bases, reading Freud, Jung and, as he puts it, "a lot of philosophical texts I never thought I'd read."
About his next book he is suitably guarded. "I'm fascinated by the software of consciousness," he says, "and I'm improving my understanding of psychological models." The next book, he hints, will work with those very general parameters, extending the field he entered in earnest with The Immaculate Perception.
"Science," he writes in the foreword to that book, is holding an increasingly clearer mirror to ourselves and like vampires our reflections are gradually fading into pure difference, invisible against the background of total phenomenology.
Why then, you might be tempted to ask, isn't Christopher Dewdney a scientist instead of a poet? Well, why not both? Poetry comes first for him because it offers a processing system that is inclusive rather than exclusive. As a poet he is better able to deal with the questions of how to imagine a whole political reality in a living interconnected world rather than the narrow questions of how best to extract what is profitable, amusing, or egogratifying ? questions that too often preoccupy scientists and artists alike these days. He's motivated by a love for the impure phenomena of consciousness, not by a desire to purify the sensation?seeking private sensitivities that are, after all, fairly minor byproducts of consciousness.
Dewdney once told me that his fondest wish in life is to see the inside of a tornado. When he said it I sensed instantly why it interested him so much, and why he is unique. Here is a mind that is content to be neither a dinosaur nor a guided missile. When he gazes up into the dead calm centre of the swirling contrarium we're all in he will try to see its substance, and its panic. This poet's eye, trained to more than the usual fine frenzy rolling, might just succeed.
