Through the Veil and Back
Review of Field Notes for the Self by Randy Lundy
by Natalie Co
In Field Notes for the Self, Cree poet Randy Lundy weaves a series of bleak, solitary meditations into a deep-rooted record of existence. This collection opens with two epigraphs. First, a passage from one of the principal scriptures of Hinduism, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, affirms the oneiric: “the human being has two states of consciousness: one in his world, the other in the next. But there is a third state between them, not unlike the world of dreams, in which we are aware of both worlds, with their sorrows and joys.” The second is a quotation from the poet Charles Wright: “proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise.” Indeed, Lundy’s poems prize “proper attention.” Each is a meditation drawn from observations of the real world. Yet this world is not the only space in which Lundy exists. Carrying generations of history on his back, Lundy navigates the liminal “third state,” the gauzy veil between the worlds, between the tangible and intangible, the living and dead, and the physical and metaphysical.
Lundy, a longtime resident of Saskatchewan, tracks and traces the physical landscapes around him in his Field Notes. Many works in this collection are prose poems in which the opening lines evoke matter-of-fact log entries. For example, “Saskatchewan, February, full moon, forty degrees below zero, and fifty-kilometre-an-hour wind-gusts out of the northwest” (“February: Full-Moon Meditation”). In a sparse, bare language, Lundy avoids imposing his own ideas upon the natural world. Instead, he lets meaning emerge on its own. He strives to read “what … the wind has written on the snow overnight” (“First of December”).
This is no simple task. The act of reading is fraught with “epistemological and ontological problems” (“Heraclitus, or Herakleitos: Spell It as You Wish, I Don’t Give a Damn”). In “Heraclitus, or Herakleitos,” Lundy laments that “people can’t look at the world, can’t really see what’s there, much less begin to speak, to say anything that corresponds to reality.” This difficulty is manifest when he notes “a female Richardson’s merlin” in his yard and recalls others who have observed birds: Leonard Cohen in “Bird on the Wire,” the Beatles in “Blackbird,” and the poet Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Because each person is looking at the bird from a unique perspective, each has a different conception of it. As readers, we consider which view is accurate to reality, and whether the words we use correspond to the things they stand for. If “flight patterns are Chinese characters, / and Arabic script, and Cree syllabics” (“Autumn, with Blackbirds”), which language and which words render these flight patterns most accurately? The act of reading the landscape and putting it into words calls into question the connection between the real world and our representation of it. Lundy, as an observer and writer, therefore inhabits the liminal space between reality and representation.
Such semiotic matters are not the only thing weighing heavily on Lundy’s words. His poems are haunted with memory. Along with his Cree ancestry, he has inherited the history of other Indigenous people who came before him, including those who suffered in life and remain restless in death. For Lundy, there exists only the slightest veil between the living and the dead: the latter have “stepped to the other side of a paper-thin sheet,” beyond which they can be heard “rustling like mice in the walls” (“Pense, Saskatchewan, 2016”). In the free verse poem “Arbeit Macht Frei,” Lundy further nuances the concept of ghosts. The speaker in this poem is “inconsolably angry” as he confronts the history and legacy of Canadian colonialism. Here, history is not simply a tormented whisper, nor is it an invisible burden to be carried by the living. Rather, the ghosts of the past are both ubiquitous and tangible in the present reality. Lundy uses the repetition of the word “rotting” to describe the corpses of slaughtered bison, missing and murdered Indigenous women, the teeth of the “children fed fat on McDonald’s,” and the “stench / of every Indian man in every Indian bar,” all tragedies caused directly or indirectly by the Canadian government.
The act of yoking a single word like “rotting” to multiple implications opens onto a complex subjectivity. As an observer of the world, Lundy encounters the “epistemological and ontological problems” discussed above in the endless possibilities that obscure the channel between words and reality. As an inheritor of his people’s history, however, he uses this ambiguity of meaning to solidify his nebulous dead and the injustices that shimmer at the edge of our cultural consciousness. Thus, Lundy is simultaneously the observer struggling with sign and referent, the navigator of the no-man’s land between the living and the dead, and the heir and embodiment of history and culture.
The complication of the subject occasions no abdication of the poetic tasks of seeing, feeling, and knowing. A virtue of this collection is its images, especially the observations that recur most often. Through the flux of the liminal “third state” are persistent things: across his collection of poems, Lundy documents “coffee and cigarette[s]” (“Must All the New Answers…”), birds—from “Tennessee warbler[s]” (“Pense, Saskatchewan, 2016”) to “great grey owl[s]” (Ceremony)—and his dogs, who “[sing] with the sound of a passing train” (“Field Notes For the Self”). His poems move from grounded observations of the landscape, to philosophical and metaphysical thoughts, and finally back to tangible reality. We see the simple parts of his life emerging time and time again both to inspire and to ground various trains of thought; we witness multiplicities emerging from singular elements. As a whole, Lundy’s collection expresses the theme that “in one there are many kinds; / in two there is no duality” (“Lines with No Opinion Regarding Indigenous Mythical Realism”)—–in other words, that the diversity in the world stems from a binding unity. A single thing can be read in an infinite number of ways. With this principle, one shared by semiotics, philosophy, spirituality, and poetry, the collection is ultimately true to the physical world in all its possibility.
Field Notes for the Self sees Lundy tracking and tracing things through the landscape around him. He struggles to read signs; surrounded constantly by his history and his dead, he struggles with the semiotics of meaning in a bleak world. However, by chronicling the cornerstones of his everyday life, he is able to navigate the world. All of Lundy’s thoughts, all the places his mind explores, find their way back to instances of simple existence in the physical world. “Believe your eyes and ears,” he says (“Book of Medicine”). Through bleak uncertainty, something else draws us on.
Works Cited
Randy Lundy. Field Notes for the Self. University of Regina Press, 2020.
Natalie Co is completing a degree in honours psychology at McGill University. She is co-president of the Mcsway Poetry Collective.
17 January 2025