And yet I am with you...
Post #14: John Wheeler
John Wheeler. Farmer. (July 2003, Ottawa.) A picnic on the clearest of summer days in the middle of the Experimental Farm, pondering what’s next. We’ve rented an apartment in Rockcliffe Park. Days in the National Archives exploring new research directions.
… (November 2003, Ottawa.) A side road has opened up in the Mackenzie King papers, thick files of so-called ‘crank’ letters to the wily leader whose psychic affinities clearly didn’t extend to these disturbed correspondents. Searching further, I unearth a rich trove of unrequited Prime Ministerial correspondence spanning the entire period of post-Confederation Canadian history. Here, dormant in collective memory and public culture, lies the “backcountry” of nationalism, a psycho-historical hither side to Canadian identity.
From overflowing file boxes, obscure letter writers emerge as occult marginalia to entries in the dictionary of national biography. Typically vexed by overweening authority, their idiosyncratic missives nonetheless project an open attitude towards the State as a lofty entity, an Ottawa whose essence isn’t bureaucracy but rather the ideal expression of the Nation.
To adapt Jacques Lacan, these letter writers would raise ‘Canada’ to the dignity of the Thing itself. Of course, the State’s impassiveness permits no dialogue, rarely even a curt reply; a silence that deepens its failure in the minds of the correspondents even as they sublimate and exalt its potential for dignity and care.
Why is the ‘crank’ writer considered beneath the civility of even the most perfunctory reply? Bureaucratic rationality here recoils from the irrationality of such correspondents while at the same time judging there is neither a political nor moral price to be paid for ignoring them. Indeed, high officials never see the letters. One envelope addressed to Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent had lain unopened for fifty years before I came along. Carefully I sliced it open to find an unsigned six-foot scroll on wafer-thin folded paper, each side an intense cascade of fine calligraphy and cryptic heraldry intelligible only to its maker.
Is it over-bidding philosophically to insist with Kierkegaard that a letter always reaches its destination? The unanswered letters before me on the desk have homed in like stray cats to their destined recipient. At one level, they address themselves to individual Prime Ministers or Ministers, but more generally they are engaging the symbolic order within which they feel silenced and threatened. Now, long after the fact, I’m deciphering their message.
There is a subtle and less emancipating explanation. Through these letters, the State—its symbolic order—addresses itself through the offset misery and disquietude it occasions among its subjects. Its assertions of ‘public order’ cannot reach recipients via the circuits of media, laws and institutions without triggering such expressions of repressed social and psychological dislocation. The very fact of their preservation, archived alongside ‘legitimate’ correspondence, supports such a holistic view.
On balance, I accept that this unidirectional correspondence at least holds open the possibility of adding to an understanding of history. The letters have reached their destination as shadows in the portraits of the past, as barely-discernible rear-ground entities rankling the stitched-up national consensus.
The crank letters are bewildering source material—inchoate, by times incomprehensible, disturbed, and disturbing. The self-styled ‘Queen of Canada’, writing to St. Laurent from a Montreal tenement in 1950, hints in desperation at priestly abuse of her son, of her own physical and mental decline, her possession by spirits, beseeching the Prime Minister: “Please, another kind word, that is all.”
Nisan Gilyana, “Citizen of Toronto, formerly of Baghdad, Assyrian, Observer, Translator, Servant of the Moon Phenomenon, Light above North America,” writes during the same period, offering “The Honourable Members of Parliament-Administration, for your justice and consideration, Moon Radiant Crystalline as a blissing light upon our King and country, a true unity and Liberality, Diamoondine light with the dazons of crystal amber and 64 united colours.”
Addressing himself correctly to the Rt. Hon. Sir John A. MacDonald, Prime Minister, on 5th May 1889, Isaiah Ryder M.D., reminds MacDonald of his previous letter warning of the inscription “XL 1:35” that had appeared mysteriously on his wall. “Yesterday, in my room, I saw the same again,” its reference to the “Hand of the Pharaoh” unmistakably signalling the government’s urgent need to take measures “against famine now impending.”
... (17 August 2006, Ottawa.) This material dissolves once rendered in narrative form. Only after carrying the transcriptions around for several years have I registered their obscure force as poetic. For one thing, there are sheer conceptual gulfs: a correspondent identifying only as ‘Robert’ pastes two postage stamps featuring Edward VII into the text of his letter to Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent, firmly convinced he’s mailing the ‘real’ living Edward to be safeguarded from enemies. (A postscript permits the Prime Minister to address him as “Bob, when we are alone.”)
These ‘poems’ have gradually formed a cycle, And Yet I am with You..., that I’ll publish one day. That biblical phrase is cited by John Wheeler in an 1897 letter to Wilfrid Laurier. He reassures the Minister of Justice that Jesus is always with him, along with all the poor and downtrodden. Piecing together Wheeler’s decades-long mood-swinging tirade, I bear witness to a barely literate farmer in effect teaching himself to write through his one-sided official correspondence. He is Canada’s “crank letter” poet, par excellence.
The foreclosure of his Ontario pioneer farm in Plympton-Wyoming near Sarnia during the Depression of the 1890s was hardly singular, but his stream of letters to politicians pleading for restitution, recounting local events, wrestling with his sanity, his religion, form an almost Dante-like dithyramb indicting hypocrisy in Upper Canada’s fin-de-siècle society.
He addresses the “Mouth of Justice” in his final letter, dated June 10th, 1920:
Dear Sir, is there a man called a Minister of Justice? My hard-earned farm, sold from me under mortgage over twenty-five years ago and never settled. Sick and tired of waiting my option: sell at any price even $100 million. Such fiendish work practiced under the British Flag. I will show you something… I demand settlement at once My hands shaking so, crowding 80 years old. Sent our first $200 to build the Church the first church in Wyoming 50 years ago. Well, so long. How will I get settled? a good horse died on the road side under seizure bare face robbery One of the best farmers in Plympton Township. Well, so long. John Wheeler, Wyoming, Ontario
This is intriguing on several levels: teaching himself to write by writing, the letters finding their true destination—you, the letters containing an unintentional poetry More evidence for me that anyone writing anything is contributing to that unknowable invisible but sacred consciousness that makes us human.
Fascinating. I remember you telling me about your discovery of this archive and the psychological toll it took on you to work through it, or parts of it. Unless I misremember, you then felt so baffled you were intending to let it go, relinquish. Good to know you intend now to publish a selection of the things eventually. The closing poem bears rereading.