People | George
Davis
Memorial Service for Doug Canfield
It is an honor to participate in this Memorial
Service for Regents Professor J. Douglas Canfield. I first met Doug way back in the
70s, when we both served on Graduate Council. He always spoke
for excellence, quality, and high standards; his voice was incisive,
intellectual, and challenging, always, of the status quo. In
the background I was aware of his passion for the martial arts, sometimes
manifest in injuries he would bring to the table, most notably a well
broken arm.
I always admired Doug’s range of scholarship…evidence
of his enormous intellectual imagination and curiosity: Shakespeare,
Milton, Chaucer, Faulkner, …his work on Female Rebels and
then Mavericks on the Border (and his sense of what borders
are all about)…and then, not surprisingly, his love of the writing
of Cormac McCarthy and the border trilogy: All the Pretty
Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. I
didn’t know of his zest for McCarthy until one day I was describing
to him how much I enjoyed The Crossing, …and before the
conversation was over he dubbed me a “McCarthyite,” and
it seemed so honorific and authoritative that I feel that I should
put it on my CV.
There is a particular passage from The Crossing that I believe
that Doug would have considered a good choice for this afternoon, in
part because the passage speaks to why breadth and range of stories
and scholarship are essential; in part because The Crossing is
about courage and endurance and dignity, which Doug possessed in extraordinary
measure; in part because it emphasizes the relationships of all the
parts to the whole…e.g., the special relationships between teachers
and students, or the relationships between required readings and required
writings, or the relationships between Doug’s dissertation to
his very last publication. The 3D symbol might be like
a mobile, with a myriad of suspended parts, and the faintest movement
of one impacts all others.
The Crossing (p. 142-143)*: “I
am here because of a certain man. I came to retrace his steps. Perhaps
to see if there were not some alternate course. What was here
to be found was not a thing. Things separate from their stories
have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size
and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become
lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the
other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is
that place. And that is what was to be found here. The
corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately
told one story only, for there is only one to tell. …For
this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and
blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is
a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also
are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So
everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the
hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with . Nothing
despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The
joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have
no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have
no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those
seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the
tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and
there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done
with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. …I
say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
Of the telling of Doug Canfield, there must be no end.
I have a tale about Doug that cannot be dispensed
with. It has
a certain weight. It is the sum of many lesser tales. It
is a lesson.
From my Provost’s office perch on the 5th floor, I take strength
from looking to the mountains to the north…and in this habit
of mine one day I spot Doug Canfield, with oxygen bottle in tow,
taking a half dozen steps or more across the top concrete stratum
of the 2nd street parking garage, and then stopping to catch his
breath. He was heading to his car at the end of the day. I
witnessed this a half dozen more times over the weeks and months,
with shorter intervals of stepping, and longer intervals of rest. And,
of course, I marveled! I marveled, but was not surprised, that
he had not made arrangements for a handicap parking spot on ground
floor at the southeast corner closest to Modern Languages. I
marveled, but was not surprised, that he remained true to his students
to the very end of the semester. I marveled, but was not surprised,
that he committed himself to the very end to his passion for scholarship
and for the life of the mind. I marveled, but was not surprised,
by this symbolic act of courage and integrity on the part of one
professor. I believe I was witnessing heroic acts of
an adventurer, confident because of his knowledge of the support
of family and friends, crossing a part of the Altaplano on his way
to the higher ground for a better view of the totality and seamlessness
of this world of ours.
Rightly heard, all tales are one.
*McCarthy, Cormac, 1995, The Crossing: Vintage
International, New York, 425p.
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