On animal instincts

The wild horse lived in a field on a green Colombian mountainside. She’d been fenced in, but no-one could get near her. I walked by her every morning, on the way to town. She’d watch me, from faraway, ears up, tail swishing. So each afternoon I’d stop at the fence, a bunch of long grass from the gully in my hands. I’d stand and look over the hillside for about twenty minutes. Then I’d drop the grass over the fence and leave. Each day she was a bit closer when I rounded the path by her enclosure. Until one day she was two armslengths away, watching me unabashedly. And then one armslength. She stood, I stood. We regarded one another. I could feel her curiosity, the tugging desire in her to approach and feel a live warm body beside her, to munch fresh grass. Her head jerked up, as if she were trying to toss off the conflict in her like it was a loose harness.

And I knew what to do, as if she’d whispered the words in my ear. Slowly, like a stretch, I turned and faced the road. Ever so slowly I pushed the grass tips through the gate slats, still holding the bundle.

Sure enough, I heard her legs shift, her body heave, and then felt the warm tickle of her breath as she pulled at the grass.

And so you will forgive me for finding my animal instincts a blessing, for rejoicing in their subtleties, for following them carefully but surely as a mountain deer picking her way through the rocks. As though I were being led by grace.

On Disintegration

 The FIFA is actually the festival of films about art—which, in Montreal, delightfully, no-one confuses with a soccer franchise. I was most excited about the Anselm Kiefer film. Kiefer had an exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum here about 5 years ago. I was captivated by his sculptures, particularly the one depicting a giant lead book with giant lead wings sprouting from its back. It seemed heavy and sad, despite the obvious symbolism.

The film did not disappoint. It let the cleverness, unexpectedness, and provocativeness of Kiefer’s work shine as sunlight through a clean window. But that metaphor is all wrong for today’s thoughts. You’ll never find a clean window in Kiefer’s maze of broken glass, concrete cubes, and metal sheets dappled with molten lead and dirt.

At one point, Kiefer mentions he likes imperfections, empty spaces. We see him flinging sheets of glass on the concrete surrounding a lead tableau. The fractured, the diffuse, the brokenness. Those things we avoid, see only to patch up or cover over, he forces us to look at them, think about them, marvel at them, grasp them without collapsing their disintegratedness. I’m reminded of the dazzling, shattered complexity of our current world. Wars are fought, not with armies but random little cells of rebels. Information is transmitted, not through a fixed number of newspapers or television channels but a multiplicity of organically, randomly interconnected internet sites. I cannot concentrate for more than 3 minutes on any task during my work day without being interrupted by my buzzing Blackberry.

What to make of this post-big-bang-style eruption of formerly packed particles into a million spots of light that has happened in the past 10 years or so? Confusion reigns, because our eyes are trained to see a music video as a seamless 3.5-minute flow despite the cut-a-second editing, because our minds yearn for perfect wholeness.

One of Kiefer’s tableaux, of the thick giant metal sheet variety, is textured with fissures. In the film, he pours molten lead and it runs along the cracks. Then he takes oversized plasters of molars and sticks them into the lead. “It’s the Greeks’ idea,” he shrugs, “they sowed teeth and harvested warriors. The legend of the Argonauts.”

Yes. Yes, how do we do that? How do we nourish ourselves in the multitudes of cracks, make ourselves at home in the brokenness, draw strength from the endless and unpatterned divisions, so that we rise up warriors?

On migration

Yesterday coming home on the 24 bus from Sherbrooke metro, I removed my earbuds to hear the conversation of 3 teenage kids standing beside me. I couldn't quite figure out what language they were speaking. After a few minutes, I realized it was Creole. Haitian kids, then. A rarity on the 24 bus indeed. For the first time, I realized how strange it is that with such a large Haitian population in Montreal I live near none of them. When the earthquake hit, a radio announcer said everyone in Montreal knew someone who was affected. There's a secretary at my work who is from Haiti, so I am no exception. But that's my only point of contact with a huge subculture in my city.

Cultural mixité was on my mind today, therefore, when I visited an art gallery exhibit at Parisian Laundry, in the Saint-Henri  hinterlands. Called Migrating Landscapes, it appears to be an illustration of the waves of immigration to Canada. The exhibit itself is not something that I will carry about as a provocative artistic treasure in my mind: blocks of multi-level wood stuck together, topped with elaborate strings of origami or little ceramic pots flowing into one another. I see how it visually describes the convoluted voyages people make to Canada, possibly even within Canada. There were some interactive features and videos of people reading short scripts about roots and identity, but these did not suffice to personalize or humanize the exhibit. It felt like a geological depiction of demographic migratory phenomenon. To me, migration is so intensely personal and wrenching it is almost a sin to emphasize the scientific aspects, especially in artistic productions. What is worse, the exhibit exuded the tired self-congratulatory "Canadian tapestry" tone. Unsurprisingly, it was part of the Canadian exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Yes, it's lovely that many contemporary Canadians originally sprouted all over the globe. To me, what is far more interesting and vital are the relationships and movements that occur once everyone gets here. I would much rather blocks depicting the ethno-cultural diaspora in Montreal, where and how communities mix, and when new communities form based on something other than country of origin. Of course, such an exhibit is not something we'd gladly send to the Venice Biennale. It is too painful to look at the pseudo-apartheid makeup of Regina, or the surprised looks on Plateau busgoers' faces when they hear Creole outside of a taxi rank.