Paying attention primarily to the meanings of words, one loses so much. In retrospect it almost seems as if we went to Montreal for the music — those of us with no French — and on the weekend of the Pentecost, no less. We saw how the stones of language make ripples in the pool of a stranger’s face, traveling outward in rings of gesture and posture and gait. Flakes of poplar down made the air visible, and in lieu of tongues of flame, we were beset by schisms of drizzle.
Uncertainty about meanings and intentions can spawn misreadings that are both unsettling and delicious. There was graffiti that resembled publicly sanctioned mural and mural that imitated graffiti, and in each, the letters turned vegetative and sexual in defiance of the canons of legibility. “Choose your noodle,” said one restaurant menu, and we did. The rain ran between the cobbles in the Old City and we heard a loudspeaker from somewhere overhead like the voice of God saying “Testing, one, two!” in the absolute language of Descartes.
“When I travel, I just go,” said the self-styled vagabond, whose skills at packing made him far more useful than the ordinary run of poets. And so we went, for hundreds of miles aiming the car’s tires straight between the painted lines, until arrival released us into the blissful wandering of a small school of fish.
On Sunday, dissonant blasts of the pipe organ — a postlude by Olivier Messiaen — released us from the spell of the Anglican service, and we spilled out of the hard pews and stood in a circle in the square with the cathedral’s arched entrance to our backs and the double arches of a McDonald’s facing us from across the boulevard. The hymns had made us weep for no particular reason. “The language of ritual is not the language of reality,” the poet intoned.
Next to the polyglot angels of merchandise, I felt inscrutable. The robotic money changers under the temple effortlessly translated between currencies and denominations. A couple blocks away, we posed for pictures in front of a giant, anthropomorphic cairn made by the Inuit. It shone bluely among the glass skyscrapers, arms extended to either side like a squat traffic cop. Whatever site or trail it once had marked must now be bathed in the unbroken light of a day that lasts all summer.
Read other accounts of the blogger meet-up at the cassandra pages, Hoarded Ordinaries, Velveteen Rabbi, 3rd House Journal, mole, and frizzyLogic.
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Beautifully written. You were receptive. And it was given unto you.
Ah, I was waiting for a poetic take on the weekend. I like this. The meaning/illegibility, circle in the square, mural/graffiti, arches/arches, and as always sacred/profane.
I like the humour in the photographs… ( we should all have birds perched on our heads from time to time :0)
Oh, Dave, I’m so glad you were here. And I really really hope you’ll come back. This is a poetic and beautiful take on the city and your passage through it.
Thanks for the kind words.
Amen!
Thanks. I hope I can. I don’t feel I saw more than a fraction of what the city has to offer.
omg…does that last store window say “Gender mannequins”? I might have to head back to Montreal simply to soak in the sight of gender for sale.
Wonderful, as always…and only partly because I was there to choose my noodle. ;-)
Yes, wonderful. All those poetic eyes seeing one city all at the same time – in different ways and words – reminds me of the many-armed Indian goddess.
Yeah. That was right on Rue Sherbrooke, between our hostel and your hotel, on the other side of the street.
Makes me wonder, though — is there such a thing as a genderless mannequin?
I’m more familiar with the thousand-armed boddhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteshvara) from my time in Japan. I wanna be the hand holding the fly whisk.
[...] I first encountered Dsida Jeno’s “Poem of Darkness” on my friend rr’s blog frizzyLogic. Like rr — who, at our bloggers’ confab in Montreal last spring, turned out to have some rather strong notions about what constitutes a proper cup of coffee — I love the central image of the poem: But tell me: have you ever let a snow-white sugar-cube soak up dark liquid, dipped in the bitter night of coffee in its cup? Or watched how the dense liquid, so surely, so insidiously, will seep up through the white cube’s pure, crystalline body? Just so the night seeps into you, slowly rising, the smells of night and of the grave all through your veins, fibres, cells, until one dank brown evening, so steeped in it, you melt and sink – to sweeten, for some unknown god, his dark and bitter drink. [...]