Presence, and what it means.

Before getting into the narrative/exposé part of this project, I want to first share a guiding notion that will remain prevalent throughout. Shamelessly, I’ve lifted this directly from the pages of my MA thesis on three Canadian TV commercials. There’s nothing as gratifying as recycling your own labour when it has already been declared dead and forgotten.

If you don’t know what any of this is about, read the previous post.

Presence emphasizes the choice to make positive and lasting investments of time in the lives of one’s family members. In Proud Fathers, Lou’s stern, affirmative presence in Jimmy’s formative years, as well as his covert presence at the rink, is worth noting.

               In A Bike Story, presence is demonstrated through silence. The narrator’s modesty illustrated by his reluctance to ask his father for a bike is in turn rewarded by his father’s decision to buy it for him. Silent presence appears in the attitudes of both the boy and his father: the boy’s quiet humility, patience and devotion to his father and the man’s silent awareness of his son’s thoughts, wishes and credibility. Embedded in the dialogue and scenario in Dieppe, presence can once more be found. Mark’s conversation with his grandfather is mediated by the distance between them. On a personal level, Mark communicates with his grandfather to include a veteran first-hand voice from his own family into an experience he has created in the spirit of past events. Dieppe is an important place for Mark’s grandfather. It resides in his memory and in the memories of others who lived through its darkest days. Part of his life remains there despite that many of his compatriots lost their lives. Mark travels to be close to that memory. Steps are retraced, the town is explored, and sand and stones on the beach are physically touched, picked up. They are the sediment of the foundation upon which this memory was created, long before Mark’s birth. This memory was then supplanted into his mind through stories narrated by his grandfather. Therefore, by placing a long distance phone call, Mark is able to be remotely present for his grandfather, and reciprocally and involuntarily, his grandfather is spiritually present in Dieppe for Mark.

               Through the notion of presence and the different ways of being present (for one another), the characters’ personal ethics within the narratives can be illustrated and typified. Furthermore, these depictions of ideal forms of presence are the first step in the process of collective identification.  

While collective identification may not be my focus here, personal identification molded by meaningful relationships to others, be they positive or frictional, best suits this particular idea of presence. Presence is love in its many forms. It is life-sustaining and preserving. It is, in a very fundamental way, a linear facilitation of the basic need of self-making. An extreme example comes to mind.

One summer there was suddenly a family of squirrels living in the awning above the front door at our house. This is because, when building it, my father mistakenly left a three inch opening just above the storm drain. Sitting out on the front porch we could hear them running around inside the large triangular space above our heads. I wondered how any animal could see in there, as they seemed to be located beyond the archway that would cut off what little light the entrance could possibly provide. We would hit the ceiling with our hockey sticks, laughing at the ensuing audible fuss. Sometimes when I was quiet I would find the mother squirrel sitting sentinel with her nose jutting out from the opening. I would carefully leave almonds and peanuts on the branch saddles of the large magnolia jumping distance from the hole, only to sit back and watch as she cautiously collected all of them, freezing still at equal intervals, her senses on high alert.

            My father boarded it up eventually, but not without a struggle that demonstrates the kind of panic a mammal parent has toward its young. For days, the squirrel gnawed at the half-inch slice of particleboard, littering a bed of sawdust on the ground beneath, in order to create an opening just large enough to squeeze through. I imagine the babies lived through the ordeal since no smell of decay or spike in housefly numbers occurred. After that, it was business as usual. I’m not a naturalist but I imagine that after a while, those little ones, however many, were by the summer’s end old enough to climb down and start living autonomously.

            One November evening, when the temperature dipped well below zero overnight, I arrived home for dinner, the street dark. After I walked inside, my brother pointed out that I had just walked past two young squirrels parked on our front porch. We could see them clearly from the window. They were nestled quite tightly together, bracing for a cold night. Why had they had not scattered when I was keying the lock? Had I stepped five inches to the right I might have flattened a tail. I got down on the floor and put my face right up against the glass. The pane was all that separated us. I knocked. One of them looked frightened, concerned for the other, who was virtually immobilized with what looked like a terminal disease, but conscious nonetheless. These two were siblings and I was willing to bet nice dinners for a year that they were the summer pups that had lived seven feet above their current uncertainty.

            Fascinated, I grabbed a small blanket and a shoebox, closing off the window gap with the lidless box and throwing the blanket on top of the squirrels. The caretaker worked furiously – really, what luck to have a makeshift shelter fall out of the sky – to entangle its sibling into warmth and security. A frozen breeze still made its way through gaps in the shell, rippling the blanket. The able-bodied sibling braced for a tragic night, staring at me sidelong with its one visible eye, the other squirrel fading away, twitching less with each passing moment, eyes greyed over, waiting for an impending appointment.

In my neighbourhood, squirrels did not trust humans like those in an Algonquin camp site who stage territorial feuds, scream from the tops of trees and beg for scraps of bread and fruit. Pointe-Claire squirrels remained pinned to the sanctity of thinner treebark if people were anywhere within earshot. To dispense with their dependence on the ground they created highways along branches and electrical wires spanning almost the entire block, hardly needing little more than a two-metre leap of faith at the most. The scene in the front door window, however, reminded me that personal tragedy transcends levels and lines of nature and habit to disassemble barriers, and that those in dire circumstances can be driven to reach for olive branches from the devil’s mouth. As a real life metaphor, it also revealed the most basic operation of the notion of presence down to the last transmissions of a flickering flame. We are present in spirit, in growth, in deed and in death. We are visible to one another; we undergo radical passage in communion, in concert. Even major movements achieved through solitary action rely strongly at the fringe, in the margins, on interaction, fleeting human companionship, favours taken and offered, regardless of the terms of social contract.

I woke up late the next morning to the sounds of my grandmother rearranging pots and pans. When I asked her about the previous night’s squatters, she reported to have thrown the dead squirrel, wrapped in its small blanket, into the garbage, shoebox and all, its companion absent; a dark chapter in an already spirited family saga, of which we would never see the next installment.

"Doodle" (for lack of a better title)

Once in a long while, I sit down and think about things. The problem is it usually happens when I don't have the time to be thinking about things. Here's a thought that may end up leading to other thoughts down the road:
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Rudy Wiebe, one of most under-read of the greatest Canadian writers, introduces us to the Inuit conception of spatial structure in Playing Dead. Any area whose dimensions are undefined or unknown is understood de facto as long and narrow. Likewise, anything that is stationary and visibly bounded becomes “areal”; relatively equal are all of its perceived geometric dimensions. When something is in motion, it becomes “linear”, presumably because of the trail it leaves behind, the tracing of a path through what is both familiar in its enormity, and in its details, new and wondrous with every individual step.

            He’s transforming local spatial concepts into linguistic metaphors about the Canadian North, or any north for that matter. What’s important to remember is that death comes to those who remain motionless in the Arctic. If we move, and therefore become linear in dimension, he writes, “on the so-called barrens of the Arctic it is impossible for a living person to stay lost; or by the same token, it is impossible to hide.” This idea, as I understand it, is readily applicable to the pluralistic civic nation and its problems, problems that arise as a result of being made to share a plot of land with one another. Political tensions that gave birth to the rights revolution, the recent reasonable accommodation debates, suspicions predicated on, in many cases, the subtle differences between ethnic groups and the dominant faction can all be remedied if we choose to see them as spatial.

            Different peoples organize, create, use and deploy space in their unique ways, which often end up interfering with others’ plans. My idea, condensed, was to connect this conception with how space is articulated by the relationships between characters in narrative commercial ads on television. By looking at these relationships and the gestures that represent them as rhetorical, I hoped to characterize them as influential of an ongoing program for Canadians: the program of the mundane and its pivotal role in defining who we are as a collective body. I wanted to prove that these commercials - like Tim Horton’s Proud Fathers and Canadian Tire’s A Bike Story and Bell Canada’s Dieppe - show us the kind of nation we aspire to be, despite seeming contrived and melo-cinematic. They convince us that the poetry-in-motion of everyday life diminishes and renders insignificant our political demands and the conflicts they ignite. We are all stuck on the same grid, and so we must smile, nod, wink, and practice community through reciprocity and compromise.

            The kind of thinking this type of assertion requires (What did you say? Commercials are actually culturally beneficial? An ideal society is one in which cultural identity is upstaged by consubstantial order?) is usually met without fail by raised eyebrows in today’s post-secondary, especially north of the 45^th parallel. That is, among other factors, why it never saw its own expression in dissertation form (other factors were money, cash and funds). The freedom one relinquishes in such a constrained and misdirected process can be quite suffocating, a premonition that caused me to politely jump ship partway through a potentially destructive doctorate. So with the umbilical cord cut, and the world beginning just outside the old wooden door of my Montreal home during the first snowfall in autumn, I will tell this story at my own variable pace, drawing on my not-so-carefully selected bedtime literature collection for guidance and friendship, and seeking momentary inspiration in each gulp of espresso.

            The last four paragraphs cover a lot in a short span without much indication as to what kind of story is worth telling. As a preamble, I return to the Inuit conception of spatial structure, extending it to a global scale to test its conceptual parameters. There are two types of motion in the circulation of people around the world. On the one hand, we have local motion. Mrs Retiree leaves her home in the morning to go do volunteer work, after which she has afternoon tea with friends at her favourite coffee shop, after which she stops in at the grocery store to buy some fresh vegetables, and upon arriving home, brings in the mail. Local motion is linear, but is also repetitive and cyclical, is highly structured and scheduled, and occurs with fluidity, depending on one’s abilities and energy levels. Above all, it is a reflex to stay alive and kicking. Basic socialization and association takes place in the realm of the mundane. It is very much a matter of our survival as individuals with interests and as agents in a structured system. On the other hand, we have at our disposal the type of movement that is linear, unidirectional, covers significant distance and is intended as a permanent reconfiguration of one’s reality. Radical passage is the reduction of the human nomadic reflex into a moment in which we recognize the incompatibility between our personal mode of survival and the surrounding (and luckily regional) organizing principles that engage us. It is sometimes also a response to the recognition that despite the competence of one’s current assurance of the ongoing provision of basic needs, one has a better chance or is certain to “live better” elsewhere.

            In both instances, the concept of space operates, either as a tool of familiarity, proximity and routine, or as a measurement of distance, discovery and renewal. While living in a city, we may be “areal” or sedentary at a global level, but on a local scale, the linear paths we create crisscross endlessly, forming a complex web of interconnections, recognitions and assurances - in other words: waves and winks, meetings, dinner parties, and car accidents. By the same token, distance plays a pivotal role as a measurable degree to which we remain separated from all the places in the world we (sometimes subconsciously) long for. Radical passage as new beginning requires a necessarily violent rupture; spaces once familiar crystallize into memory. Languages, cultural codes, ways of relating to one another (or not) no longer serve us how they used to, forcing us to adapt and discover how easily we can exceed our once thought limits. Meanwhile, we grapple with our reflections, never quite facing this complex relationship we have with our skin, with our origins, often making our return during years of good harvest to reassemble our identities.

            All of this to say that while communication technologies (in the broad sense) and the global economy have cooperatively eliminated the caribou hunt (or rendered it almost exclusively ceremonial), they have created alternate exigencies our nomadic instincts can be resuscitated momentarily to solve. In modern societies, a once reflexive type of movement can now be understood as a rational, calculated leap of faith. In what follows, I chronicle two such leaps almost two decades apart: those that eventually led to my existence. The stories of the migrations of my paternal grandparents from war-scarred Italy in 1955 and my maternal grandparents along with my mother and uncle from one-party Portugal of 1972 are not unique. They are at once every ethnic Montrealer’s narratives. What, then, is the use of telling them if they are simply joining the established chorus of voices? A responding analogy would ask: Why record an album of popular Christmas carols? Two reasons jump out here. The first and most obvious is that beauty and authenticity reside in the singular interpretation. However, I have far from sat down to interpret the life and times of anyone. Rather, I’m filled with the Christmas spirit, to extend the metaphor, with an irreversible compulsion to give, to receive, to communicate, to examine a historical trajectory and finally, to feel the same unity carolers share.

            So the second reason is simply to inscribe. The hours of interviews conducted with family members are themselves timeless and infallible inscriptions. Therefore I write in the hope of providing a display case for their preferred arrangement, but unlocked so as to invite future changes, elaborations. I write for my unborn children in full knowledge that they will grow up far from knowing the “foreign” cultures that gave them their unique names. Take myself and my brothers for example. As a first generation born Canadian on my mother’s side, the fiction of the mosaic (perhaps appropriately) ravaged what potentiality I had of learning her language, or that of my father. I am another Anglophone Canadian with a Torontonian drawl given to me by that slice of Ontario within Quebec we call the West Island. I see what traditions my parents grew up with now in a constant state of reinvention. In this day and age, the way we run our lives needs to serve our momentary needs and desires, and it is so shallowly set, it can all change in an instant. I see fewer and fewer people, myself among them, who adhere to deeply entrenched principles in their decision making. Improvisation is the new mantra.

            So this act of inscription will ideally help me to discover what’s left, if anything, of an authentic way-of-being brought here from somewhere else, whether it amounts to familiar reactions to social stimuli, the simplicity or complexity of emotions, of psyche, or perhaps how we are often hardwired to deliver humour like others in our lineage. Regardless, I’m almost convinced for the record that there is nothing left. After all, spatially speaking, the neighbourhood raised me, and I am a son of this country through and through. One element that threads the generations is our need to be surrounded by family. Though not unique in any way, our heavy reliance on and willingness to support and be ever present to our siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, is the only responsible factor to our privilege and prosperity in so short a time. With confidence I can say that this relationship of warmth has not been in any way drained by the washed out watercolours of multiculturalism many so overzealously tout.

            Of this movement I write.