Yellow idols and flights of fancy.

  Mainz Germany 1918, in a prisoner of war camp, two English officers discussed the importance of imagination. Both were writers, Alex the brother of Evelyn Waugh, and John Milton Hayes, who penned these lines.

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

Can’t you picture this scene?  How these words set imagination loose and now our flights of fancy can continue for ten more stanzas. This is light entertainment, but is our ability to imagine, frivolous? The writer, J. Milton Hayes saw his ability to spark imagination in his reader as essential and Alex Waugh agreed. Why else would he have so carefully recorded his fellow prisoner’s words?

“The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God …isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be,"said Hayes. "But it does what it sets out to do. It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere. Then India, everyone has his own idea of India. Don't tell the public too much. Strike chords. All you've got to say is 'India' and a man sees something. Then play on his susceptibilities.

“His name was Mad Carew. You've got the whole man there. The public will fill in the picture for you. And then the mystery. Leave enough unsaid to make paterfamilias pat himself on the back. 'I've spotted it; he can't fool me. I'm up to that dodge. I know where he went.' No need to explain. Then that final ending where you began. It carries people back. You've got a compact whole. 'A broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew' They'll weave a whole story round that woman's life. Every man's a novelist at heart. We all tell ourselves stories. That's what you've got to play on.”

Is it important to develop the ability to imagine? Corporations think so. John Cleese is highly sought after as a speaker who can engender creative thinking. New ideas in any field are dependent on creativity and imagination. But think of this. Can empathy occur without it? Do we not have to use our imagination, in order to walk in another person’s shoes?

Hayes made no claim to be a great writer. He was an actor who wrote his own material for the popular stage. However, his understanding of what it means to spark the reader’s imagination proved invaluable to his fellow prisoner. How else could Alex Waugh create empathy for personal situations many readers may not wish to confront? Situations that may in fact repel them?

Homosexuality in the early years of the Twentieth Century, was just such a topic, but thanks to the Waugh brothers, and other like-minded writers, readers’ imaginations ignited empathy for those oppressed for their sexuality. Such writers’ ability to have their readers walk in another’s shoes, lead to society modifying its viewpoint. We should never downplay the importance of this. Developing imagination is a vital building block in creating an empathetic and compassionate society. Frivolous? Not at all.

Can one be a writer and not read?

“How can you become what you don’t know?” Asked Dani Shapiro in her essay On reading while writing. “I don’t understand when my students don’t read. I don’t understand when they want to be writers and they don’t read. It baffles me and it pisses me off. How can you not have the kind of passionate curiosity of what came before you?"

I heartily agreed with her until a 2017 conversation. How the topic of some writers and reading came up, I don’t remember, but at the Saturday Organic Market, my friend’s viewpoint on the issue, caused me to rethink my point of view.

“Perhaps,” said Christine, “these writers have a reading disability.” She went on to explain that she came to understand her own reading problems when her school-aged son received therapy for the same issue.

She explained how she successfully complete courses of study by perfecting memory techniques, paying close attention to what her lecturers and fellow students said. But can someone who takes writing seriously, can they possibly have debilitating problems with reading and still be a successful writer?  Surprisingly, yes and a Canadian author proved it.

A visit in Toronto with my sister, brought about a chat over tea with her neighbor,  author Howard Engle, A prolific mystery writer, he is best known for his Benny Cooperman series. In 2000 Howard suffered a stroke that left him with alexia sine agraphia, a condition which resulted in an inability to read, while retaining the ability to write.

 That afternoon he was happy to answer my questions on the subject. I asked if he was able to read a paragraph he had just written? He said early on in his recovery, not at all. The words were an utter mystery, however some years after the stroke, he could read such a paragraph with difficulty. Certainly without the facility in which he had written it.

Since the stroke he wrote Memory Book (2005), in which his character Benny Cooperman suffers a blow to the head and is similarly affected. Later he published The Man Who Forgot How To Read (2007), a memoir of the time he spent recovering from the stroke. The afterword  for this was written by neurologist Oliver Sacks, known for his case histories about brain disorders. He wrote about Engel's reading problems in his book The Mind’s eye.

The inventiveness and ingenious nature of our brains never ceases to amaze. Yes indeed you can be a writer if you don't read. Surprising, eh?

New Year backwards

As 2018 begins so does the discussion on resolutions. In Hope for the New Year Ellen Peterson talks about words of intention, their success and failure. And then she mentioned (tongue in cheek) her success. The year she chose perseverance.


“I succeeded to make it into the following year because all I really needed to do was KEEP BREATHING.”


In this blog snippet, Ellen encapsulates my thinking at this time of year. Instead of looking forward, it has come to make more sense for me to look back.


Buz and I, like many Canadian seniors, winter in Mexico and I joke that we all come here to meet life lessons we cannot seem to learn back home in our comfortable cocoons. I joke but there’s truth in the fact we sometimes need our equilibrium unraveled, our ordered lives upended, in order to confront something we’ve been avoiding. Like we find ways to avoid, rather than learn, how to really get along with the old codger/old crone with whom we’ve cohabited for fifty-some years. We can give all the advice we like to our squabbling grand kids, but how do the two of us fare when confined to one room – for four months.


Looking back, what lessons have I learned, or recognized that I need to learn? The latter perhaps a lesson in itself…










We walked this morning along a malecön in a state of reconstruction AKA bedlam and traffic mayhem, laced with a level of garbage promiscuity that sent both our dogs into orgies of sniffing. Cappuccino, our geriatric Cairn, is slow at the best of times, but so lured was she by the prolific enticements so freely available, a snail would have coasted to the finish ahead of us. Patience. Our patience has grown in 2017.


There was ample time during this dawdling ambulation, to ponder the nature of our conversation and how it has subtly changed over the last year or so. It lacks the familiar tension that impatience once brought, but there is an addition. It is as if alter-egos with our worst habits and behaviors had taken to skipping through our conversations like goons, making faces and having fun with any residual earnestness.


This humorous lightness was present earlier in the morning, when I noticed the freezer door had been ajar all night, its contents sweating benignly in the warmth of a tropical winter. That once would have brought a meltdown of another kind, but not at the demise of 2017. And the joyful celebrations Mexicans do so noisily in the courtyard of our winter home, no longer sends a pajama-clad banshee raging from our door.


We laugh about those selves that had to come to Mexico to learn the lesson to lighten up. Launching into rant-mode can be the default, but this can be reconfigured. Life-long learning. One year at a time. If I have a resolution for 2018 it is to look backwards at achievements, and forwards, realizing there’s a jagged peak up ahead I didn’t see from lower down. I can just make out where I need to set my steps. I'll tell you how I’ve done on my journey, this time next year.Inshallah.