Seeing Michael Ondaatje, farre off.

Borson, Roo

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I have read and remembered, reread and misremembered this poem for over two decades now. For years on end I've seen someone in my mind's eye ducking beneath a fence in a blue jacket. Sometimes it's a nylon windbreaker, sometimes blue canvas, but either way, this event never happens in the poem.

It's not an image from the poem then, but an afterimage of the poem as a whole. It seems to have been grafted permanently onto my mind, a representation of the part that took longest for me to grasp.

Michael Ondaatje (or the persona Michael Ondaatje) is always there in his own work (to my ear, in somewhat the same way as the Tang poet Li Bai is in his, though personal pronouns are as rare in classical Chinese as they are ubiquitous in contemporary English). But what does the information "I have on my thin blue parka" have to do with a nightscape about Wyatt and Campion and those ghostly naked women? Why do I need to know what he's wearing, or its colour? And don't "thin" and "parka" nearly negate one another? For the longest time I was disturbed by this one line. I tried reading the poem without it, and what happened was that the "I" became unbeatable, disembodied, neutral, just another seeing "I" of poetry. That blue figure slipping beneath the fence kept me in mind of the exact place on the bookshelf where I could worry at this problem. Sense it, "deep in the fields."

Pieces of clothing are strewn here and there throughout Ondaatje's writing. A shirt, an earring. And where have the wearers gone? Upstairs, or to the kitchen. Or they're in the bath together, like Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott-Thomas in the movie version of The English Patient. But what's important about the thin blue parka of this poem (very Canadian, very Ontario) is that it stays on, while the asses of the dogs slide beneath the gate and naked ghosts step into the bedchamber-into the mind, that is. All of them sensuous, elusive, self-aware.

And that's why I remember, or misremember, the blue jacket, or coat, or parka, so strongly: because in the midst of history this moment of literary arousal is so palpable. The weight of fabric, the night air, the feel of how very little separates Campion from Wyatt, from us, from the dogs, the plotting women-all brought together in the absolute presence of the moment. I need to know what he's wearing so I can see not only what he sees (what all the other lines of the poem show me), but see him as well--embodied--the elusive walker in the fields, the writer of the poem. The figure is clothed, but the moment is bare.

This brief essay exists only as a record of one reader worrying away at one puzzle in one poem, a puzzle which might never arise for anyone else. In fact I can no longer grasp how I could have failed to understand. And in the distance--whether the distant past of Campion or Wyatt, or the distant future's past of Ondaatje-this poem, this reader once more perform the beautiful disappearing trick: the blue figure slips under the fence, and there's no light, only ink.

COMMENTARY

Reactions to Michael Ondaatje's 'Farre Off

When I first started to read it I thought it was going to be about pirates (but I have no idea why!) When I read it through to the end I thought it was about a man who was reading someone else's poetry, and it was taking him back in time to the 16th Century. He was reading it on a dark and stormy night. He probably lives on a farm, since he talks about being around a barn, dogs, cattle and fields. It seems he is alone but with his dogs by his side. I think he is wishing to be in another time, perhaps a simpler time, but I can't help but wonder whether the 16th Century would have been a simpler time? Well, except for the naked women in his bedroom of course. :) I found it to be a little dark and a little lonely in places. I liked that it was short, but perhaps it was a little too short. I would have liked to have learned more about the reader. What was going on in his life at that time that prompted or influenced him to write this piece? Was he alone at that time in his life? Did he really just discover this other writer's work? Did he mean that he had read Campion's work before but never really "got it" until now? Did something happen in his life that made him "get it?"

--Geoff Lahey

As I have watched "The Tudors" mini series on the telly it reminds me first of that. Someone skulking around for the affections of someone else they should not be consorting with. I would ask: Is everything about getting some? That is what a Hawaiian musician I know said. He would introduce each song and comment in a roundabout way how this song was the boy vying for the girl's attention, and then the girl for the boy's--eventually he says all Hawaiian music is about procreating.

--Jorden Marshall