There's a Row of Pine Trees
That Won't Leave Me Alone*

Adapted from:
"There's a Row of Pine Trees That Won't Leave Me Alone"
The Ottawa Journal. March 25, 1967.

SATURDAY MARCH 25, 1967

"How life does tear us this way and that--what you ought to do and what you want to do; when you ought to force and when you ought to sit! There's danger in forcing but there is also danger in sitting."

The observation is from The Journals of Emily Carr, which she entitled "Hundreds and Thousands." We've been meaning to write about this book for some time, then latterly saved it as an Easter greeting of sorts. For there is a lot of living in this book, a great deal of inner joy and gratitude which is the essence of Easter.

One or two art critics and highly literary folk have said of this book which came out last fall (Clarke Irwin) that it would have been better had Emily Carr stuck to painting. It would have been better if they had stuck to anything but criticism.

Emily Carr wrote her diary to herself, doubtless knowing also that someone might come along later and print it if they chose. There are rough spots in it which editors and publishers should have eliminated, and they have put out a book utterly lacking in dates and background matter for the unknowing reader. But for all that it seems to us a wonderfully human and discerning journal. When Emily Carr writes about painting she writes about living. Ought not living to be an art?

Let's trace for a moment several references to painting which occurred in diary entries of different days.

"Oh, these mountains! They won't bulk up. They are thin and papery. They won't brood, squatting immovable, unperturbed, staring, guarding their precious secrets until something happens."

"I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It began to move, it was near to speaking, when suddenly it shifted, sulked, returned to obscurity. Why? Did I lower my ideal? Did I carelessly bungle?"

"I have uncovered the mountain. I am heavy in spirit over my painting. Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs."

"My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint and top her off with another picture. But I haven't done with the old lady yet; far from it. She's sprawling over a new clean canvas. My inner self said, 'Start again and profit by your experience.'"

*		*		*

Well, we don't need to have attempted to paint a mountain to comprehend her sense of failure. Almost anything any of us do that is worth doing has known frustration and failure along the line. What makes Emily Carr stand out among us was the willingness to dispense with the satisfactory and pursue only the good.

Occassionally in her journals we sense that this was her strength in life too. Often she admitted that her personal relationships with family and friends were inadequate.

"Maybe I've got to plough along alone and find my own way, going straight to God for knowledge and instruction. Direction, that's what I'm after, everything moving together, relative movement, sympathetic movement, connected movement, flowing, liquid, universal movement, all directions summing up in one grand direction, leading the eye forward, and satisfying."

Oh she was no angel. Sometimes the diary mingles pettiness with bitterness, sometimes she just blasts off unreasonably at someone or something to get it off her chest. But even in those moods there's a distinction to her. For this rich line opening a diary entry we'll defend her unto death: "How tired one can get and not die!"

Amen to that so say we all; but none of us said it that well!

Emily Carr also touches on loneliness from time to time, but in a way that should help the lonely rather than otherwise. "Every soul is so completely, totally alone. We don't understand our very closest, and half our trouble comes from thinking we do and reading them through our own particular colored glasses." It is far softer than was Balzac's cry: "Who can feel sure that he has ever been understood? We all die unknown." Emily Carr puts it from the other side -- asking whether we deserve to be understood.

And did she not catch, away back in 1933, the sense of life being too busy which we all think has caught us by the ears today?

"It seems there is too much of everything in the world. We're all 'over-produced.' Everybody does everything and there is a surfeit of all things and everyone wants to flap out from the flagpole at the tip top and nobody wants to climb the stairs and, step by step, get used to the higher air."

But she charges on, enchanted by living and working.

"There's a row of pine trees that won't leave me alone. They are straight across the field from the van. Second growth, pointed, fluffy and thick."

And again:
"I'm looking for something indescribable, so light it can be crushed by a heavy thought, so tender even our enthusiasm can wilt it."

Those clever people who feel Emily Carr should never have written -- could they do better than this paragraph on the anatomy of a thought?

"Thoughts are like wild birds singing above your head, twittering close beside you, chortling in front of you, but gone the moment you put out a hand. If you ever do catch hold of a piece of a thought it breaks away leaving the piece in your hand just to aggravate you. If one could only encompass the whole, corral it, enclose it safe, but then maybe it would die and dwindle away because it could not go on growing. I don't think thoughts could stand still."

In due course illness joined Emily Carr's loneliness, but she met it head on, continuing to paint, to houseclean, to stand up and fight. "I promise myself a day of recovery in bed but I cannot hoist myself high enough above minor details to rest."

The name of Emily Carr is large in the literature of Canadian art. There are many scores of passages in "Hundreds and Thousands" which own honorable place in the art of Canadian literature.

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