Dispatches from Kelowna | Episode 3
Ruminations on Patti Smith's "M Train," memories from Berlin, and talking to the dead right before I'm about to give birth.
I’m reading Patti Smith’s M Train. I snuck it from an overwhelmed shelf of books at my sister-in-law’s house and told her I had it weeks later. It’s special to her, the story of how she got it is short but I love hearing it— a giveaway at The Strand essentially, an NYC bookstore I long to visit— so I felt a little guilty borrowing it without permission. It was an impulsive, selfish choice. I wanted to be able to read the book without the pressure of a library due date and I like that it’s from a place I long to visit.
Consequently, I’m doing my best to ensure my toddler does not rip out any pages.
Reading a Patti Smith book has been at the top of my literary to-do list for some time and I guessed this would happen to me: the book’s dredged up a sadness. A beautiful, melancholic whirr of feelings for travel prose; for the version of life where I could (and would) fly overseas every couple years to look at art and faces and books; to visit friends; to be in the presence of others— here and gone— in cemeteries and galleries and the homes of people I love; for when I was a traveller who travelled.
Thirteen years ago, I flew to Berlin a few days after a breakup. I was caught off guard by the sudden loss. I’d planned the trip for two and felt like I was being punished every time I had to confront that I was there alone.
“Bike tour for two?”
“No… it’s just me today.”
Five years prior to this moment I was living in Berlin. It was a wild year in which I fell head over heels in love with the city, with its resilience, its brutal honesty, its fortitude about its history and future. Berlin brought out a lightness in me. A feeling of home. I have Polish grandparents, family born in Germany, roots in the area and across the border. A familiarity coursed through my bones. It wasn’t entirely logical, not everything can be, but it felt sensible.
Going back was supposed to be restorative. A return to Self. I was eager to take someone to my old haunts— (arguably) the best donair cart (Mustafa's Gemüse Kebap) and Curry 36 (both with excellent vegetarian options), the ping pong bar I once frequented (and performed terribly at). Instead, I moped around, ate at those U-Bahn pizza stands far too often, and perused the markets and bookstores with only my thoughts.
In spite of my mental state, I found myself pleased to be there on a Sunday, and this is the memory that Patti Smith’s M Train has dredged up.
It was summer. The Mauerpark flea was in full swing. I walked from my hostel along the same side streets I once frequented when I was a resident noting the bright, new façades on many of the buildings. Sunshine yellows. Deep oranges and blues. The colours cheered me up until a memory struck me. The first time I saw these buildings they were a dull, concrete grey and had bullet holes strewn about their front walls.
Bullet holes from the Second World War.
I spent a long time taking this in when I first learned what these concrete scars and little craters were. It’s not that they were on display. They weren’t hidden either. They simply existed. Clear signs of artillery fire. Bombs. A reminder of the horrors of war. I’d never been so close to a piece of the past that said,
“Look, and don’t look away.”
These walls presented a truth, a truth spattered along narrow residential streets all over the city.
Five years later, on this sunny day in July, I did not see any bullet holes on my walk. I looked for them, but much of Berlin had morphed since I had last been there and I received an indisputable message:
We all change.
I spent the day laying in the grass in Mauerpark after walking through the market. I purchased two Sylvia Plath poetry books from a quiet vendor and an orange drink from a stall made of sticks. As I read the books, I found myself pausing to converse with Plath, to talk about her intergenerational link to Germany, much like my own.
“Do you think it’s so hard to talk to our fathers because of where they’re from?” I asked.
She shook her head and only offered two words: “Ach du. Ach du.”
The sky was a bright blue and young Germans tossed frisbees and picnicked around me with their dogs. I struggled to eavesdrop, to understand what anyone was saying, my once passable German lost in my grief, and I cried at some point, then I peeled myself off the grass and got on with my life.
This memory is a vivid one. As my pregnancy hormones ebb and flow and I find myself crying on the edge of the bed, in the backyard, or on a walk, for what feels like every reason and also none at all, I think of this day in Mauerpark, of my time with Plath, the city, the way I wandered through it noting every little change, and what I remember is not the sadness that possessed me but the transformation.
Years later, I am 38 weeks pregnant and I find myself at the mercy of transformation. I am literally transforming. Every day. As I grow this human being.
“Are you ready to be just one human again?”
This is the question my friend Christy asked me today and I laughed, then promptly replied, “YES.”
The baby grows, descends, kicks, wiggles, and hiccups. The heartburn comes, my knees quiver as they struggle to bear my weight (so much more weight than my first pregnancy!), and my body sends my brain this singular message: The baby is coming. The baby is coming!
I never stop thinking about this. Them. Labour. Birth. Seeing our second baby for the first time. Wondering what they look like and how it will feel to hold them in my arms.
Will everything go alright?
My anticipation has intensified. I am a spinning top. I am on the edge of my seat, for it’s not simply “giving birth” that I am about to endure, but the whole-body, unrestricted experience of it. The raw, unhindered pain of it. The labour of birth. The pulse, push, burn, and exertion of it.
Is everything ready? Are we ready? Is our toddler ready? Does everyone else think about and dissect and consider all of these things as much as me?
Every night I dream of going into labour. Some dreams are wildly ungrounded scenarios (an endless and absurd obstacle course to the hospital) and some are plausible (giving birth standing in my kitchen alone as I grunt through contractions, my toddler sobbing, as we wait for someone to come get us). Because of these dreams, I feel like I have been labouring for over a week. I’m already exhausted.
Then daylight pierces our dark bedroom. My toddler wakes, climbs into my lap, and wraps their small arms around either side of my belly. As I hold them close, I feel both my babies wriggle, the three of us alive in each other’s arms. In an entirely contradictory way, it feels as though we are all already together. Labour has come and gone and time is nonlinear. What will happen has already occurred.
Is the grass in Mauerpark any different than the grass in our Kelowna backyard? I feel like the same person and, yet, I am entirely different.
One day I will return to my Self, the same yet entirely different. I will be a traveller who travels again. I will take my babies to the places I have been, to the ones I long to show them— the cemeteries and galleries and the homes of people I love— either on a plane or through story. Memory is a complex thing. Birth, too. I am struck by how many visitors come and labour with me in my dreams each night— those here and those long gone.
As I traverse, page by page, through Patti Smith’s past, as she converses with different versions of herself, or with the bust of the long-dead Nikolai Tesla outside an NYC church, I find myself peering through a small gap in the fabric at an imminent, new world.
One in which I am already familiar.
One in which I have yet to enter.
One in which is filled to the brim with a hopefulness I desire and it is here that I receive an indisputable message:
Everything is as ready as it needs to be.
Hopefulness: The Warrior Emotion
I recently discovered a project by musician Nick Cave called “The Red Hand Files” where he answers questions from fans once a week on this website. Many are philosophical, some mundane. I saw a video of Nick reading a question and answer on Stephen Colbert — you can watch below. It was this idea that caught me:
“Hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”
I found this articulation beautiful and validating and I wanted to pass it along to you. I have clung to hopefulness a great deal these past few years and, in doing so, I felt I was able to navigate some very dark moments. I agree, it is a warrior emotion that screams:
“The world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.”
Thank you to the algorithm for putting this in my lap.
Read the question and answer on Nick’s site here.
Songs for the Unborn Second Baby
When the exceptional American poet, Alice Notley passed away two days ago, I found myself re-reading her 2024 interview in The Paris Review which includes another mention of speaking with the past, with the dead.
Notley talks about where a great poem comes from. She says it has to do with suffering and how you perceive things after suffering. “You might just freeze,” she says, “But if you don’t, other worlds open to you. I started hearing the dead, for example.” She explains how you can “get a lot of messages in dreams, from alive people and from dead people.”
“Most people have had this experience.”
Have you?
In rereading her work, I came across this limited edition publication she released in 1979, Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. I’m trying to find a copy as it seems like a wildly timely find. Reflections on being caught off guard by her second pregnancy after moving to a new country with her partner and toddler? Could I relate to anything more?
She visited me while I was in a labour dream last night. She said I wasn’t going to get to read the book before the baby came, and that I should write my own.
“I’m kind of busy,” I said to her, yielding to a contraction, and she scoffed.
“I don’t mean right now. I mean, whenever you’re ready.”
Lastly, a quote from M Train that sparked all of the above thoughts
“A drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood. Soon abstracted, the book slips off my lap and I am off, diverted by the calloused heels of a young lad delivering loaves” (67).
— “The Flea Draws Blood” in M Train by Patti Smith
