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.