Visual Inspection

Matt Rader

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780889713567
• eBook ISBN: 9780889711440
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader's own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessible to our minds and bodies. Part memoir, part essay, part poetic investigation, the text guides us through kaleidoscopic meditations on disability, access, vision, redaction, pain, illness and death. Set primarily in the central Okanagan, Visual Inspection is a codex of references, artifacts and associations that, taken as whole, revisions access as process and art as experience.

Notes

I hear the tangy slap of skin on metal as all the hands in front of me pass along the railing. My right hand waves at the air.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Then:

the railing,

round and cold, with what feels like an uneven paint job,

as though parts of what had covered the metal had

been picked away,

flaked off, so that

my fingers run across small ridges, tiny lips

marking the border between one layer⁷

of façade and the next.

We begin in an empty courtyard in the middle of what is called, on city signage, “the cultural district,” a Richard Florida-inspired project occupying roughly three-by-three blocks of the northwest section of downtown.

We are thirty-five people, each with an arm or two touching the person in front of us—

touch is never pure or innocent—⁸

our eyes closed, following a man named Carmen, a man with a cane who doesn’t see, through a city he visited for the first time two days earlier.

I’m near

the end

of the line.

To follow is to be guided.

When I was a boy, I knew a man who’d been a big-game guide in the Yukon until his cabin at Burwash Landing burned down and he came to live with us in our fishing village on the Salish Sea.

Dante’s famous guide to the underworld was the Roman poet Virgil, whose family had been displaced from their land in the shift from the Republic to the Empire.

In Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, a pair of doves⁹ guides Aeneas to the Golden Bough. Aeneas must return the bough to a sibyl from the Temple of Apollo.

In exchange, she guides him to the Gates of Dis, as has been prophesized.

Walking, we map a space in time. What exists in that space.

Many people have written about walking. Many more about existence.¹⁰ Will the real Martin Heidegger please stand up?

From Inger Christensen’s book-length fib,¹¹ Alphabet:

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium / citrus trees; cicadas exist; / cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cere-bellum // doves exist, dreamers, and dolls; killers exist, and doves, and doves; haze, dioxin, and days; days / exist, days and death; and poems / exist; poems, days, death

From the lake moving east and north,

the cultural district includes an outdoor skating rink,

a yacht club,

a Cactus Club,

a brewery,

a Delta Grand Hotel and Casino

where a famous mobster was gunned down

while climbing into a white Porsche suv

on August 4, 2011—

The Grand is sinking, our docent quips. We’re standing in the central room at the Sncəwips Heritage Museum, between her cousin’s mx̌ʷal / cradle board and the ćĺaĺqʷḿ display the docent uses to play this traditional gambling game with us. My friend and I keep winning.¹²

Then we guide our minds—the docent, her supervisor, my friend and I—to another time without concrete. Her colleague tells us what he sees: wetlands, tule, creeks completely full with dappled salmon, people.

A path has no beginning or end but in the direction you take it. You don’t have to follow an animal if you know where it is going, her colleague says. Only wait in the right place for it to arrive.

One August when I was nine years old, crossing from Experiment Bight to Nels Bight on the northern-most coast of Vancouver Island, our man from Burwash Landing spotted wolf tracks in the sand. He guided us, crouched and then on our bellies, to the lip of the dune from where we could see a she-wolf leading three pups at a trot down the beach.

—a community theatre called / The Community Theatre, a blackbox // theatre called / The Blackbox, Provincial law / courts, the city art gallery, // the city museum, a military / museum, an old indoor / hockey rink called Memorial / Arena, the main rcmp // detachment and city jail, / the downtown branch of / the Regional Library, the city / Mental Health and Substance Use // Clinic, The Wine and Fruit / Museum and The Rotary Centre / for the Arts which includes // an artist run / gallery, a theatre, dance / studios, arts admin offices, / a handful of artist / studios and a coffee // shop—

I’ve thought of those wolves so often I’ve not been able to write them down.

Until now.

“A story is a simple thing,” my friend Moshe once told me. “Just tell it.”

Tule. Dappled salmon. Merlin. Can you see them? In this phase, they are hidden like the new moon. Like a thimblerig. A card trick. The ćĺaĺqʷḿ sticks behind the back. Which hand?¹³

“Increasingly,” writes Karen Barad, “I find myself drawn to poetics as a mode of expression.” ¹⁴

—a youth theatre / space in one alley, a couple // of private galleries, a shuttered night- /club, and a mid-sized // hockey arena named after / a credit // union with a restaurant / called after // a borough of New York City / and a vip lounge // sponsored by a Canada- /wide realty company—¹⁵

Traffic exists. Slow traffic. Slowness exists; and sidewalks, bikes exist, bikes and traffic; pedestrians, sidewalks, shopping bags exist; slowness, sidewalks, traffic—

I’ve never heard a resident of this city use the term “cultural district” witho...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Notes
• Endnotes
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author