Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal

THE RULE DIALOGUES

She was a stranger I encountered in the Miners Bay Book shop on Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada. Over the next three months, she was my Saturday morning breakfast companion at the Sunny Mayne Bakery Café. Each Saturday, she joined me at the same table. Her words came to me in black on white. There were pauses in our dialogue, moments of silence to consider her carefully crafted but candid sentences. This is how it was and continues to be for me when reading the books of Jane Rule.

Jane, like myself, was born in New Jersey; she in Plainfield and I in Oakland. The distance between our hometowns is 59 miles. She was born in 1931. I was born 22 years later. We both found peace and refuge on the islands of the Salish Sea, she on Galiano Island, and I across the way on Mayne Island. Unlike Jane, I reluctantly returned to the States. We share dyslexia and arthritic bones― chronic pain in the spine⸺ hers was crippling, and mine is held together by metal.

What attracted me to Jane was the opening paragraph of her autobiography, Taking My Life:

“Writing an autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life. Beginning in the dead of winter, mortal with abused lungs and liver, my arthritic bones as incentive for old age, I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed. I have never been suicidal but often stalled, as I have been now for some months, not just directionless but unconvinced that there is one. No plan for a story or a novel can rouse my imagination, which resolutely sleeps, feeding on the fat of summer. And so I take my life, with moral and aesthetic misgivings, simply because there is nothing else to do.”

Those words drew me into her writings, those novels and essays that have come to mean even more since those Saturday mornings and the quiet evenings together on the porch at the home of the artists Terrill Welch and David Colussi. Now, those pages are marked with notes. You might say we were exchanging thoughts, sometimes agreeing, other times questioning and disagreeing with the other’s answers.

We contemplate our lives through the words of others. The commonality of shared experiences is viewed from different perspectives and emotions. Joy, love, lust, desire, rejection, anger, loneliness, aloneness, sorrow, loss, and grief. “Meaning in life is not discovered in role or destiny. We manufacture it as constantly as the trees do oxygen,” she writes, “and it’s often more useful to others than to ourselves, which may be the test of its validity.”

Those who knew Jane understood, as she did, her rebellious nature against authority figures and, to use her words, her “outsiderism.” We have that in common. Another shared characteristic is our generosity. She was supportive of many of her fellow islanders, teaching children to swim, lending money, and providing guidance. The label “Canadian citizen” was a source of pride, though, as in everything else, Jane was not reluctant to disagree with government policies.

The primary themes of her writing are truth and freedom. Jane’s honesty extended to her lesbian identity, which she acknowledged at age 15. At this age, she also realized her intent to become a writer. She once remarked, “I came out as a lesbian long before I came out as a writer.” Helen Sonthoff, whom she met in 1956, was her life companion/partner and died in 2000.

Most readers living in the States are unfamiliar with Jane’s essays and literary work, with the possible exception of the novel Desert of the Heart. The range of her material deals with more than lesbianism, though on this, she is clear-eyed and unapologetic. The characters of her novels and short stories are three-dimensional with real emotions. They live in our complicated world, asking the same questions we ask while acknowledging our differences. Beneath the surface of her stories and essays is the morality of the high church she worshiped in― freedom and personal responsibility― which gives voice to women, young adults, children, and the marginalized navigating life’s emotional and intellectual climate and their hopes and dreams. Our meaning, like the meaning of our dreams “is not found, it is made from whatever lies within and about us. We don’t search for and find love or a world to live in. We either make them or do without. Dreams are only one of the many raw materials which may work overnight like yeast in bread dough, ready in the morning for the heat of patience, will, intelligence and imagination that can truly feed our hunger for what matters.”

Writing for Jane, as it is for me, is an attempt to make sense of experience. I assume most writers would concur that they are attempting to make sense of their life experiences and discoveries, inviting others into the world of the self. We, as individuals, are multi-dimensional realities comprised of the life stages we pass through from infancy to death. To borrow from the mathematicians Felix Hausdorff and Benoit Mandelbrot, we are comprised of fractional dimensions (fractals). These fractals have a self-similarity, the way the whole resembles smaller parts of itself (e.g., a twig from a tree) at different scales that form the infinite detail of who we are that we integrate into our whole self.^[i] For Jane to understand her experiences, she must ask herself and her readers hard questions. The ability to ask difficult questions requires curiosity and the openness that difficult answers will result in more questions. What doesn’t apply to life experience are labels.

In her essay “Labels,” Jane observes: “From the time we are very young children, we are taught to label ourselves and other people in a variety of ways. But what begins as simple information soon becomes more complicated, colored by value judgments which are not always fixed or easy to understand.” She continues, “If we could be identified as many-labeled, which all of us are, we might be more comfortable in the world.” The essay concludes, “The real business of our lives is to live, to love, to write, and to remember, leaving the calling of names to others, names we may answer to or not.”

Like Jane, I have an aversion to labels, including titles. They create artificial barriers. When I am gardening, I am a gardener, a writer when writing, and a teacher when teaching. The fractals reveal themselves accordingly, but they are based on the life experiences of my whole self, my multi-reality.

Those Saturday mornings at the Sunny Mayne Bakery Café and evenings with Jane were special. She died in November 2007, seven years before my arrival, at age 76, four years older than I am now. I often considered taking the ferry to Galiano Island to pay my respects. Instead, I keep a photograph of her on my desk and turn to her books. Our conversations continue.

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[i] I recognize there will be those who will disagree with me in making this analogy. However, we use this model in describing the structure of the observable in nature. I believe this has application to the psychological and emotional make-up of the self in which the whole resembles the self at various stages of development with their various dimensions. 

Image: Jane Rule

Photo credit: Barry Peterson and Blaise Enright