By J.S. Porter
(for R.W. Megens, poet, teacher and media savant)
“So much of my life has been spent trying to figure out what others were saying, implying, whispering.” B.W. Powe, Outage
THE BACKSTORY
The year was 1995. Outage: A Journey into Electric City had just come out. I was on my way to Toronto to interview its author, a comparatively new voice on the Canadian literary scene – B.W. Powe—with my editor, R.W. Megens, of a small college journal named Kairos. Volume 8, featuring my notes on Outage and an interview with Powe, is a loanable item from McMaster University: https://mcmaster.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991001284899707371/01OCUL_MU:OMNI Hamilton, Ont. : Mohawk College, No. 8 (1996)
I had read The Solitary Outlaw and much admired it, especially the chapter on Pierre Trudeau, a man who always seemed alone and apart and, paradoxically, well connected. I had read A Tremendous Canada of Light. I had also read Outage, one of Powe’s unclassifiables.
Is it autofiction? Is it creative non-fiction? Is it a non-fiction novel in the contemporary tradition of Norman Mailer? A personal journal? A remaking of Pascal’s Pensées? An example of Robert Musil’s “Essayism?” Is it a movie script? It does move from scene to scene with different characters in each scene. All of the aforementioned? Hybridity is the nature of most of Powe’s work, particularly in Outage.
At its deepest, most mystical level, Outage is a novel about waves, currents, pulses, sounds and music. At another level it’s about a media-drenched man, a teacher, seeking harmony and balance on a Toronto walkabout. Certainly, it’s a book of confessions (St. Augustine), a book of questions (Jabès), a book of probes (McLuhan). I was eager to interview the author of such a mongrel work.
On April 16, 1862, Emily Dickinson, a poet much admired by B.W. Powe, asks the most important question any writer can ask of any reader: “Mr. Higginson,–Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” Of course Emily Dickinson’s poetry is alive, among the most alive in the language, but Higginson, shocked by the strangeness of the poetry, could only mutter a few platitudes and pleasantries in response. He was no Emerson who immediately grasped the revolutionary nature of Walt Whitman’s poetry. To Higginson, Dickinson’s poetry was unusual, untutored and raw.
In the presence of B.W. Powe’s work, if I ask myself if it is alive, the answer is invariably yes. Outage is alive, from its first sounds in the Wallace Stevens’ epigraph—“Throw away lights, the definitions,/And say of what you see in the dark,” to the narrative’s first sentence, “I hear the city,” until the narrator’s last sentence:
And now in this seacity [Venice], I’m settled and reminded by voices, both welcome and strange, that say a breakdown may be repaired through our ingenuity and patience, and that any attempt to see and hear what is real and unreal, nourishing and poisoned, always goes on, toward a still point of understanding, where the sounding still calls you and the current is still moving…
For the interview, R. W. Megens and I met Powe in Spinnaker’s at Queen’s Quay West in Toronto in November of 1995. Powe was dressed in a black jacket and a turtleneck. His parents, charming and delightful conversationalists—his mother a musician, his father a novelist—also showed up briefly. It was a windy day. We had a corner table, with a window overlooking the harbor. We talked for four and a half hours. Powe was open, generous, courteous, vulnerable. We were all exhausted by the end of the interview, although I recovered quickly enough to interview Powe again in 1996 at my home in Hamilton with Michael W. Higgins, the editor of Grail at the time.
https://spiritbookword.net/spirit/an_interview_with_bw_powe.shtml
To summarize briefly, these are a few things I took away from the Toronto interview, “Echoes of McLuhan: The Voice of B.W. Powe:”
- Our first question to Powe had to do with the observation that Canadians have had interesting things to say about technology. R.W. Megens and I mentioned George Grant, Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. Powe added Arthur Kroker, William Gibson, Derek de Kerckhove and Glenn Gould. He made a wry comment that there are advantages to living in North America’s attic (a phrase used by Robertson Davies): distance and political inconsequentialness give one a unique point of vision.
B.W. Powe himself belongs on the list of Canadian visionaries on technology along with Ursula Franklin, Douglas Coupland, Robert Logan and others. Powe’s unique contribution, it seems to me, has been to delineate the negative effects of technology on personhood (confusion, disorientation) while being fully aware of its great potential to inform and connect. Outage touches on both aspects, the positive and the negative.
[Comparisons between the US and Canada] “Canada is experiencing overload too, but we’re able to channel it to some extent because of the capacity for reverie, for privacy. I see Canadian cities having the capacity for contemplation, for silence. There are still spaces where that can be done.”
- “I should say that I wrote A Tremendous Canada of Light and Outage simultaneously. A Tremendous Canada of Light [reissued as A Canada of Light] was a chapter in Outage that I took out and decided to expand and use as a different book. The more positive reading of the electronic society is in that book, where Outage is a shadow of it. The two are an examination of the same phenomenon from two different points of view.”
- “The book [Outage] is about blurring, it’s about loss of identity, it’s about confusion. It’s about breakdown.” Scenes of a power shortage in the city, a stock market crash and a disintegrating marriage enflesh various intensities of confusion and breakdown.
- “The electric rhythm is an enhancement of the natural rhythm. One could even argue that the electromagnetic field is a little touch of eternity in our lives. The force on a television screen is, on a very small scale, the same force that drives the universe. What you’re getting flashing on the screen is the same electromagnetic field that creates stars…”
- “Yes, things can be black and white simultaneously—…both this and that. The darkness at the end of the books is, in fact, the moment of light. And the moment of light, which is the electric light, is in fact the darkness in the book. So that these things are going on simultaneously. As I said, Outage and A Tremendous Canada of Light are twins.”
- [The narrator and a woman making love in front of the television] “Yes. In fact, that’s one of the beatific moments, the moments of light in the book. All the way through there are glimpses and glimmers of what may be a kind of coherence in the electronic universe.”
- “To my mind the city, the electronic environment, is a new being. I think the electric world itself has a kind of consciousness…and in a sense, human destiny is to be a kind of mediator, channellor, voice for this cosmic energy…this electromagnetic energy.”
- “The electric world… enhances complexity. The irony is, of course, that the fundamentalism, the televangelists use the medium, the TV, which is the medium of flux and complexity, to convey a very simple message.”
- [Our question: “There’s great faith in Outage. I could call it a Pythagorean faith, that somehow it may be possible to link up the music of nature, the natural rhythms, with the music of the electric city.”] Powe: “…there is … a Pythagorean faith. It is a Pythagorean book, all of them are, in part because they’re ear books, they’re written more for the ear than the eye.”
- [The new novel] “…I go with what Henry Miller said: fiction will be a combination of philosophy, essay, poetry and storytelling. It will be a new form, and I think that makes a great deal of sense also in the electric age, which is a hybrid age where everything is mixing, melding, moving together. The novel is a wonderful form for this period because the novel is so flexible, so open.”
REREADING OUTAGE AND MY NOTES ON IT 30 YEARS LATER
As is my custom, when I’m reading one book, I usually have another in hand as well. During my first reading of Outage, I was reading Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information, his two thousand hours of videotaped television compared to a summer’s day in the mountains. In my second reading, I was reading The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes.
Missing Information helped me to see that the nameless speaker-narrator in Outage is so absorbed in the electronic world that he fails to see, or remark on, aspects of the natural world. Can one really walk through Toronto streets and not see dogs or birds or squirrels or even raccoons? The city is built around a lake, and a river runs through it. Would you know that if Outage were your only experience of the city?
The Sirens’ Call helped me to see that Outage is a journey from air to water, from Toronto as a city of air to Venice a city of water, but more importantly an interior journey where a degree of reverie and contemplation is retained despite the sirens of seductive electronica calling for the narrator’s time and attention at each stop in his journey. Is Outage a book of “Sirens?” Yes, in many ways it is.
As always in Powe, there is voice, a voice speaking to a listener. Remember Powe’s definition of a book: it’s one person speaking to one person. Outage is a book that speaks to you personally. The narrator, the speaker, undergoes experiences of dislocation, disorientation, discombobulation we all experience in the electrosphere from time to time.
I debate within myself whether to say speaker or narrator when speaking of the “I” in Outage. I settle on speaker or speaker-narrator because the work is so aural and one of its ancestors is Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground. (Is Outage Powe’s notes from the underground?) The speaker-narrator has similar urgency, insistence, even obsessiveness as the speaker in the Russian novel. He insists on speaking and insists on being heard.
Outage is also a book about a flâneur, a walker in the city, who speaks of his experiences of chance and planned meetings in Toronto, “outing” the age as he “outs” himself. Like all literary works, Outage has ancestors. It resembles a picaresque novel in some ways where the speaker (narrator) records his events, exterior and interior, as they happen to him. It has roots in The Odyssey, the archetypal book of journeys.
The speaker-narrator is a modern day Odysseus wandering through the city at night called by Sirens clamouring for his attention (a danceclub, a DJ, a TV studio, graffiti, virtual reality, drugs, etc.; Facebook and social media were not yet born.) As I’m re-reading the novel, I dip into Chris Hayes’ The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. A question arises, how does modern-day Odysseus get home, achieve balance and restore a degree of peace and serenity in the flux and chaos, in the constant bombardment of novelty and change? How are contemplation and reverie possible in an age of speed?
[From my 1995 notes published in 1996, “Notes on B.W. Powe’s Outage”] “Powe’s novel has an underground awareness of missing information too and an above-ground awareness of scrambled information. There are so many messages and signals and beeps in the electric city, how do you decode sense and meaning, how do you digitalize truths to live by? The speaker in Outage, the voice, attempts to decode the channels and bands of modernity into a comprehensible and harmonious music. He attempts to convert noise into music.”
As far back as Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways” in 1833, an attempt to reconcile the new world of technology with the old world of nature, Wordsworth in impactful words writes, “Nature doth embrace/Her lawful offspring in Man’s art” [my emphasis]. The poem is a dramatic shift in perspective from the anti-modernity poem of 1803-1804, “The World Is Too Much With Us.” In the 1833 poem, Wordsworth embraces the achievements of modernity – the steamboats, the viaducts, the railways. He sees the new coming naturally from the old, a natural outcome of man’s art, his extensions and enchancements. (If the poem were rewritten today it might have as its title “iPads, Smartphones and ChatGPT.”)
Technology is natural to man and hence natural to nature. It’s the art human beings perform on themselves to extend and enhance themselves, as “natural” as quills to the porcupine or spray to the skunk. The technological is not opposed to the human but is an outgrowth from it, a protective shield around it. Dundas Square in Toronto, for instance, is as natural as High Park.
In my notes of 30 years ago, I went as far as saying this about our two-nature lives: To some extent, “The trees and the mountains and the animals are a Disney Theme Park now. We go there as to a museum, to see what was. The old nature, as opposed to …[man-made nature,] now consists primarily of illness, pain and death. We encounter it at the point of breakdown.” Moving in and out of breakdown, vacillating between despair and hope, constitutes the power of Powe’s novel.
Graffiti, “alternative news,” in the book capture the mood swings. From
NIHILISM LIVES
IN THE HEARTS
OF THE DISPOSSESSED
to
THE MORTAL, THE GUILTY
BUT TO ME
THE ENTIRELY BEAUTIFUL [W. H. Auden]
The speaker-narrator comments, “Anonymous graffiti is a series of comments on the way that the information maelstrom feeds on affluence, on individual availability, the mayhem in minds, the soul isolation of people.”
Outage is an act of faith that the telluric and the electronic pulses are different currents from the same power source. As Robert Pirsig in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance says, “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”) Outage is a novel about “outing,” getting the world to declare itself, to reveal its nature, to play its hand.
The speaker in the novel looks for, and occasionally finds, coherence in the many dimensions of daily life. He fights off the demons of confusion and alienation. He asserts, “The wind blowing, love the sound. This is a Pythagorean aphorism and tenet: all things in nature manifest themselves through melody, variation, rhythm, a striving for harmonies, vital accords.”
Outage is also the speaker’s quest for identity. What constitutes the human in an age of technological makeovers? “With over sixty-thousand TV transmitters around the globe, our planet now emanates more low-frequency waves than the sun. The world remaking itself into a psychic livewire, new models of reality emerging. People alarmed, adrift, falling out of old stable identities.” In Wordsworth’s phrasing, Outage is an exploration of “the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense/Of future change, that point of vision, whence/May be discovered what in soul ye are” [my emphasis].
Or, in Powe’s phrasing, “get to the root of the rhythm…” to understand “the dance of the data.” We all live in the House of Technology (Ursula Franklin’s phrasing), the house our hands and brains have built, where many of us are still strangers to the premises, attic lodgers and basement boarders.
The speaker begins his quest in the city of air, Toronto, the city of a high tower, the city of signals, and ends the quest in the city of water, Venice, the city of ancient telluric rhythms as far from the electroscape as one could travel in the city world, the city of waves, material and invisible, “houses built over the tides, people living with the currents.” Is that another title for the novel – Living with the Currents? The quester muses: “The cacophony of bites and segments may be a polyphony, the song of all things joining.”
B.W. Powe asks questions in his novel as he is wont to do in all his books. Some of the questions are direct and some are implied. A part of his questioning is to have us his readers ask our own questions. We are encouraged to write our own scripts, adding to his, arguing with his, as if Outage were a book with which we were co-authors, readers who are also writers. We write on it, or to it, as we read it, either in our minds or in the margins of its pages.
One of the central concerns of the book, and one which Powe encourages us to think about, is human destiny. Are we a bridge to something else, a link on a cosmic chain? Or, are we an endpoint on the evolutionary scale hellbent on self-annihilation, meanwhile destined to change Being itself as we become a new being within it? As reality becomes more and more electrified, we’re spending more time on electrical devices, “virtual” realities, than on flesh-to-flesh contact and the “natural” world. We spend more time texting and channel surfing than we do swimming in lakes or walking in forests.
Quoting from my notes on the novel 30 years ago: What happens when “virtual” realities become our main realities, “the ones people talk about, react to, work on and live within. What happens…when our animal and human skins are shed or circumscribed by our techno-skin?” What happens when what used to be called reality is simply one option on an almost limitless band of choices? Are we destined to live in a Philip K. Dick novel in which it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between androids and “real” human beings?
Outage is not so much a book with characters you read, as it is a book with people you experience. It’s interactive. You walk where the speaker-narrator walks; his journey is your journey. You don’t so much read the book as stagger through it, dazed but fascinated. You enter a place of the imagination where “Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.” Outage puts flesh on Wallace Stevens’ insight and exposes current realities and future possibilities where reality is infinitely rejiggable, re-presentable, remakeable.
Powe keeps the mysteries intact. His speaker in Outage, and by extension, himself, will go on questioning, exploring, re-imagining. He concludes his novel with these beautiful and powerful words:
The wind churns up the water and after a time it calms down. In the rises and
falls I hear sources, the tide’s beat, the waves speaking. The Ursound, the
sound of our origins, before books, before technology. And beyond that?
The crackle of stellar pulses. And beyond that, music that escapes the ear,
a message outside the realm of articulate comprehension. Yet felt, here, close
to words, close to us.
When Venice makes its presence felt in the narrative, the agitation, the frenzy, the nervous energy of the narrator seems to stop. Everything slows, everything quiets. The narrator’s inner turbulence, which has mirrored the outer turbulence throughout the narrative, seems to reach a still point in a city “devoted to balancing the elemental with the invisible.” The narrator clasps the image of the gondolier, “an emblematic figure who’s learned from the waves.” This rider of the waves, reader of the waves, navigates passengers to their home. “He skims over the water, his motions confident, silent. He appears content to repeat his gestures, apparently unworried about whether the currents will ever be entirely knowable to him.”
“While the afternoon sun tints the palaces, hotels, and churches with yellow and orange and gold, he eases his gondola over lightstruck waves.” Like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” so often referred to by Marshall McLuhan, the gondolier is detached, calm, he rides the waves; he doesn’t fight them. He gets to know their patterns and trusts the currents that propel them.
For more Porter on Powe, see:
