The Confluence of Imaginations

The Confluence ofImaginations PHYLLIS WEBB Shortly after I'd returned from visiting Bill and Tiffin Cotignac, France in March 1997, I was showing photographs of my travels to friends over lnnch in Victoria, and they were showing me theirs of their trips. Maureen suddenly asked, "What is the one image that encapsulates your trip?" (I'd also stopped briefly in Paris, a village in Kent, and London.) Without hesitating, I answered, "sitting with Bill and Tiff on the patio in Cotignac, looking out over the valley and mountains, talking and sipping wine under the sun umbrella." In April, in Victoria, wejust happened to be sitting on a patio, sipping wine under a sun umbrella, but I don't think that was why the Proven~al scene flashed before me. In the lovely bloom-filled garden in Cotignac birds flitted and chirped in the trees, the cat Noel might be lapping water from the bird-bath,while St. Francis, a piece of statuary brought over from Cannington, looked on nervously. Below us, olive trees stepped down the terraced incline with blue blossoming rosemary bushes and tiny irises. It was out there one hot day that Tiff and I sat down to discuss the confluence of imaginations, the whens and wheres of who wrote what. I'm not sure why, but it was during this discussion that I decided not to write a semi-planned essay on this topic, the confluence ofimaginations, but to compress some ofits features into the commentary that accompanies these poems. "Remember the unicorn letters, Tiff?" "Yes." "The rose petals?" "Yes, yes." "Cats?" "Ofcourse." "Did we ever talk about our mutual interest in Ezra Pound?" "No." "I was the model for that character? You can't be serious." These are just buzz words to evoke that occasion because I lost the notes I took then. Tiffwasn't really monosyllabic. No doubt we rambled around our shared themes: imprisonment , enclosure, hiding, madness, animal suffering and other cheery things - the writing on the wall, despair, the dead. But trying to be precise and factual, we didn't consider thematizing to be at the top of the menu. Nor would we have ventured too close to the origins of such preoccupations. When we first met at the CBC in Toronto in the 1960s, did we recognize in each other the Hades-like undercurrents beneath our professionally casual exteriors? Perhaps. But it was after I'd left the CBC in 1969 and returned to the west coast that our lives as writers got talked about in letters, on the phone and on occasional visits to each others' homes. My collection of poems Wilson's Bowl came out in 1980 and included a poem called "The Days of the Unicorns." While Tiff waswriting, or preparing to write Not Wanted on the Voyage and was living on the blue barn property, the unicorn (who always seemed to be feeding on rose petals) entered our correspondence. Many years ago, I'd often visited the Musee de Cluny in Paris to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. I had my first sight ofthem when I was deeply in love and Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 33, No. 4 (River 1998-99 Winter) 13 that might be why they so moved me, becoming emblematic. When Not Wanted was published in 1984, I was surprised and puzzled and cbanned to find Tiff's unicorn miniaturized to an alarming degree. He even gives its dimensions: "As to size, the unicorn stood not more than 15 inches at the highest point of its horn - and from tail to horn-tip it was 17, maybe 18 inches long. The horn made up a good six inches ofthis- and very often the only visible part of the beast was its ambercoloured ornament, cutting a swath through the undergrowth." Well, it is an imaginary animal, after all, but I live on an island where deer roam all year 'round, and sometimes they'll look me iu the.eye, say Hi! or lie down on the dandelion lawn for a rest. That's why my imaginary animal is only slightly smaller than a deer, its design being influenced by those tapestries in Paris. Tiff...