Process: Palimpsest

Went to the Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay on a rainy Sunday as part of the 16th annual Festival international de la littérature (FIL) and Les Journées de la culture 2010. Sébastien Ricard read Rainer Maira Rilke’s Lettres à un jeune poète (1929), a collection of ten letters that were addressed to Franz Xaver Kappus over a period of five years (1903 – 1908). The Austro-German poet (1875-1926) did not know this young man of only twenty years of age. The generosity, sincerity and modesty of Rilke's writing is even more moving to me considering he never once met Kappus. Any artist would grow with a mentor such as Rilke; a friend to help quell the unavoidable self-doubt that accompanies creation, which he himself struggled with.

 [...] Cherchez en vous-mêmes. Explorez la raison qui vous commande d'écrire; examinez si elle plonge ses racines au plus profond de votre cour; faites-vous cet aveu : devriez-vous mourir s'il vous était interdit d'écrire. Ceci surtout : demandez-vous à l'heure la plus silencieuse de votre nuit; me faut-il écrire ? Creusez en vous-mêmes à la recherche d'une réponse profonde. Et si celle-ci devait être affirmative, s'il vous était donné d'aller à la rencontre de cette grave question avec un fort et simple "il le faut", alors bâtissez votre vie selon cette nécessité; votre vie, jusqu'en son heure la plus indifférente et la plus infime, doit être le signe et le témoignage de cette impulsion.
— Paris, le 17 février 1903

To be read to is also a pleasure. It is one thing to sink into Rilke’s text and in one’s own thoughts when reading: it is another to let go and listen to someone read the poet's words out loud. Another form of concentration, especially in a crowded room. The act of reading out loud is also one of generosity: the inflections of speech and the rhythm, the voice that needs to project outwards to carry across the room and yet, be delivered in the proper tone that befits the style of writing. Ricard read with a respectful intensity, as if he were merely the messenger for the author’s lucid prose. I found solace in Rilke's quiet passion, his defense of the often-difficult embrace of solitude and contemplation as necessary parts of the creative process.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria Rilke. René is the French form of the Roman name Renatus meaning “is reborn”. A tradition existed whereas a baby that was born after the death of a previous child was named René.

It was his friend and lover, the Russian-born intellectual and writer Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), who suggested the name Rainer. She herself was born as Luíza Gustavovna Salomé. I’ve always been interested in this process of naming; the act of choosing a name or exchanging it for another — like a palimpsest of fleeting placenames on hand drawn maps.

 

Process: Sudbury Saunas

My interest in placenames started quite early at our cottage on Lake Panache in Whitefish, Ontario. As a youngster, I remember familiar sights all along the dirt roads off of Ojibway Road: tree trunks covered pêle-mêle with handmade signs. The cottagers’ names were as varied as the trees in the area with French Canadian, English and Italian names amongst many other ethnic groups. I always wondered why there were not more Aboriginal names in the area considering the proximity of the Ojibwa Whitefish Lake First Nation.

 

The ride to the cottage itself also piqued my curiosity about the neighbouring cottagers: we would pass a series of mailboxes on Little Panache road with unfamiliar names to me such as Juutinen, Kauhanen, Kannakko or Salmi. At the time, I did not know that these names were Finnish, though I suspected that they were Scandinavian. Still today, street names in the Louise Township are both Finnish (Salminen, Nurmi, Makala, Kusk and Suikkola) and French-Canadian, with names like Panache, Desormeau and St. Pothier — a country road where my maternal grand-mother grew up on a farm.

It was to increase my limited knowledge about Finnish settlements in Sudbury that I recently read Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Historical Geography of the Finns in the Sudbury Area by Oiva Saarinen (1999).

 “Reading Between a Rock and a Hard Place was a moving experience for me, as names and faces of people who were part of my childhood are not only placed in the historical context, but given respect and honour.”
— Judy Erola, former minister of State for Mines (1980), minister responsible for the Status of Women (1982) and minister of Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1983).

Judy Erola lived in the cottage beside ours. Though I knew that at one time she had been a federal Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt, I was unaware of her Finnish heritage. She was the grand-daughter of Thomas Jacobson, described by Saarinen as the "First Pioneer" in the Sudbury area. It was sad to say, but I didn’t know much about the history of Finnish immigration to Canada: this, despite counting several Finns as friends in art college and having lived in the Donovan for a period of time — a working class neighbourhood with a high mixity of different ethnic groups including a Finnish community.

 

 

A walk through the Donovan today still displays this interesting social mix with the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of St. Volodymyr, the Croatian Centre and the Serbian Club within a couple of blocks from each other. For a historical tour of the Donovan in the first half of the 20th century, I enjoyed perusing this wonderful website Sharing authority with Baba: A collaborative History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community, 1901 – 1939 by Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki.

 

 

My only window into Finnish culture was a handful of Arto Paasilinna books in my library, translated into French. This, and the sauna. Since all the cottages on Panache seemed to have a sauna when I was a youngster, I naively assumed all French-Canadians carried this family custom. I didn’t realize that it was the Finns who brought this tradition with them when first settling in the area.

 

 

Between a Rock and a hard Place proved to be a very interesting read. According to Saarinen, it was the Swedish-Finnish explorer Pehr Kalm’s Travels in North America, published in English in 1770, which first introduced Canada to Finland. However, the first wave of Finnish immigrants did not immigrate to Canada until early in the 19th century by way of the United States when workers found temporary employment in the construction industry: Montreal’s Lachine canal and the Welland, Ontario Canal between 1829 and 1887 (5). Direct immigration to Canada from Finland did not start until the 1880s despite recruitment campaigns that dated back as early as 1874. The Canadian Pacific Railway, amongst other companies in need of cheap labour, had sent representatives to Finland to entice people to immigrate and join the workforce (10). While Finns did work in the railway constructions camps from 1882 – 1883, Saarinen notes that the first site of permanent Finnish settlement was not Sudbury but Copper Cliff, a company town.

As the Canadian Copper Co. (CCC) owned 75% of the area, occupational segregation was used to establish dominance: the labour force was distributed through sections of the town according to a “hierarchy based on occupational status”. In this way, Copper Cliff, Orford and Evans housed the Anglo-Saxon miners and mine officials, Shantytown gathered the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians and French Canadians in one area, and Crow’s Nest was reserved for the Italians. However, this ethnic concentration also helped to created a thriving “Finntown”, that is, a close-knit working-class neighbourhood. The first Finnish hall was constructed in 1895 and commercial enterprises like general stores, public saunas, a bakery, a shoemaker, a tailor shop and even a movie theatre and billards room sought out the business of what was generally young single males. Saarinen emphasizes this fact to account for the popularity of the many rooming or boarding houses known as poikatalo (37).

Canada then saw a second wave of immigration in 1921 due in part to immigration restrictions in the States (16) as well as the promise of employment in the mining and construction industries North of the border where unskilled labour could command high wages (30). Between World War I and World War II (1921 – 1951), the largest non French/English ethnic group in the Sudbury district was Finnish, soon taken over by Italians in the 50s (29).

There were also Finnish homesteads in rural enclaves such as Wanup, Waters Township, and Louise Township. In 1923, Oiva Svensk, Kalle Hotti and Rev. Heinonen applied for provincial help for the construction of a wooden bridge across the Vermillion river enabling the recreational development of Little Panache Lake (82). Finnish communities began to settle in the Louise Township, located around Grassy, Kusk and Little Panache lakes while French-Canadian settlements were concentrated in the northern parts of the township (84). In 1934, the construction of a bridge across Little Panache and the opening of the road to Marina Bay made it easier than ever to commute from Sudbury to Panache (84). Judy and Voitto Erola bought the marina in Dieppe township in 1971, renaming it Erola’s Panache Landing before selling it five years later to Louis Dozzi. My cousins and I were frequent visitors to Penage Bay Marina in the summer, slowly making our way across the lake in our beat up pedal boat.

More so than the marina or the Finnish placenames, it is the sauna that remains the surefire symbol of Finnish culture in the Sudbury area. Saarinen describes how “[i]n rural areas such as Beaver Lake and Wanup, it became part of a circular farmstead featuring a house, barn, hayshed, ice shed, milk house, woodshed, tool/implement shed, root house, outhouse and garage” (248). What I found surprising was that the rural tradition followed suit in urban centres: before World War II, a slew of public saunas were in operation such as Copper Cliff Finnish Baths (Jaakkola’s Sauna), Sudbury Steam Bath (Sepällä’s Sauna) and Alavo Steam Baths amongst others. After World War II, the sauna tradition flourished and other ethnic groups adopted the practice in cottage country (251). Still today, a canoe ride on Panache is not complete without seeing the many saunas — with the telltale puffs of smoke — dotted all along the shoreline.

Progress: September 10, 2010

I've always wanted the Tongue Rug project to be multilingual. I chose to write the blog in English simply because writing in French always necessitates translation — elaborating my thoughts in my second language can be a laborious process. I am not so precious about writing in my mother tongue. Yet, despite the language choice, by the very nature of my project — where I am researching amongst other subjects the history and literature of French Canada and Quebec — other languages were sure to come into play. Indeed, my writing does include French and Aboriginal words, especially when referring to placenames.

I’ve been thinking about the icons that will adorn each of the tongues. For a long time I envisioned creating traditional sladdakavring icons like flowers and abstract symbols. In the end, I decided to use words; a fitting choice as the tongue swatches were sometimes initialized to represent people or important dates. It came to me while using Antidote HD: one of the filters combs though the text and lists all the recurring words. While this is a way to avoid repetition and to vary one's vocabulary, it can also be used to analyze the text for keywords. On a whim, I searched for an online filter to do the same in English and came across Martin Molch's site — find-keyword.com.

The process was interesting. The blog postings for each tongue were easily transformed into lists of keywords. Some lists being considerably long, I had to go through each one and select about a dozen nouns for each tongue. As all the words were lower case, I encountered a few word slippages. For instance, Robin is both the name of a person and the name of a bird. Also, some of the tongues have saintly overtones because of the simple fact that placenames in Quebec have the “saint” prefix or other religious associations. Once the words were stripped from their context, they were reduced somewhat to the same status: the words that top the list are the ones with the most instances in the text.

Once I set up a list of the Sladdakavring Icons, I worked on a mock-up of the embroidered tongues. A first draft. Not sure if this does it justice? It is striking though how simply reading the list of keywords can trigger memories of place for me, as if the tongue itself has become a memory map.

 

Tension existed between the automated way of capturing keywords and the more deliberate action of choosing words. For TONGUE LA-3 the automatic process culled these words: september (8); saint (8); 2009 (8); lapalme (7); esprit (7); assomption (6); waterway (5); waypoint (5); french (5); route (4); town (4); time (4); québec (4); lanaudière (4). My selection process included these words: achigan, trousser, postillon, sarrasin, galette, jésuites, outaragavisipi. The former is descriptive and quantitative — focusing on the date, the place and the surroundings — while the latter is more evocative and qualitative — minor details, digressions and inner thoughts.

 

Progress: September 5, 2010

Now that I have completed the fieldwork for Tongue Rug — it was inconceivable to be able to document all of the waypoints by bicycle — I am free to simply explore the Montreal Island and its vicinities while I work on other aspects of the project. I stumbled across a nicely detailed map for The West Island Heritage Bicycle Trail while researching Legault placenames; four houses on the island can be traced to the Legault dit Deslauriers family.

 

View Historic Legault houses in a larger map

 

As it was a brisk fall day, I decided to venture out on a scenic ride to Pierrefonds. There was a dilemma however. If I were able to cycle north-west as the crow flies from the Lachine canal, it would have been a relatively short route. Unfortunately, the north-south cycling paths on the island leave much to be desired. I had to go east then north using the Christophe-Colomb route, then west again to reach my waypoint. The return trip ending up being a 70 km ride. Though there is surely another way to get there, I admit that the bike path is a safer alternative. Plus, it was a glorious day for cycling with a bright sun and a cool breeze. Everyone seemed to be out on the trails.

The ride to Pierrefonds was also worth the ride considering the varied architecture found on Boulevard Gouin and the ride through the Parc-Nature-du-Bois-de-Saraguay, home to many species of rare trees such as black maple (érable noir or Acer nigrum), swamp white ash (frêne blanc or Fraxinus Americana) and common hackberry (micocoulier occidental or Celtis occidentalis). Will have to return on a day trip to visit this park.

 

 

The Maison Legault dit Deslauriers overlooked a small park facing the Rivière-des-Prairies. The West Island Heritage Bicycle Trail had erected a small panel that listed the year of construction as 1789. The fieldstone farmhouse was inhabited by Legault family members and passed from generation to generation. The architecture adapts elements from the Québécois style (1760-1880) such as end-wall chimneys on opposite sides of the roof, commonly called “cheminées en chicane”. In 1908, it was transformed into a fashionable teahouse called “ Thé Habitant” by Mary Whitney Blaylock; the Duke of Kent was a visitor in 1930. It has since been a restaurant and a private home.

What was once known as the Lower Saraguay had changed considerably since the 18th century. Still, I could imagine a more rural habitat with meadows interspersed among the fieldstone farmhouses.

 

View Larger Map

 

I noticed a new function with alternative transport choices — public transport, cycling or walking — in Google Maps when I went to retrace my path. Now I can include one-way streets with cycling lanes in my routes. However, for this map the cycling option did not function. I used a beta version of the walking directions. Six and a half hours to walk that distance; four hours return on two wheels at a steady pace. How long would it have taken on horseback just a few centuries ago?