An old man, his glasses propped on the crown of his head

painting wooded landscapes entirely from memory.

One day I found him there

gripping in one hand a bar of soap that looked like dust

and a small shoan pipe in the other.

And so I stood staring at a hazy painting of a small boy,

standing in a stream,

trying to hold on to a wet fish

as the man sat against the far wall

desperately trying to fill the room with smoke.

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What is community?

Community is an idea.  Community – that absent and encompassing body that you can give to and receive from and yet often never actually see.  Community is shared dirt and trees and buildings.  Community is the kitchen, the radio station, the hardware store – the classroom.

And yet this thing, this pervasive entity that so regularly works its way into our rhetoric, is often ignored as the most integral part of our discourses.

This brings me to the events of and leading up to November 10, 2011.

There is something about collective experience that unites people uniquely and solidly.  Suddenly, those you barely knew are your ardent supporters, colleagues, friends.  Time can bring people together slowly, but certain experiences can vilify a group in the course of a few minutes.  The later, for example, has been the aftereffect of violence on our campus.

Perhaps all of our interactions will soon be reduced to violence – not merely of batons, but of words, of actions, of our violently pervasive apathy.  I’m not talking about political apathy.  I’m talking about our fear of human connection.  We spend our lives in fear of rejection from the perceived amalgamated whole of the people around us.

As soon as you accept the inability of a few qualified students to attend university, you accept an entire ideology. Why should an underprivileged student with high marks be denied over one with ability to pay?  So should be the mantra of a public university.  When we stood together on November 10, we did so for ourselves, certainly, but also in defense of the rights of others.  Because regardless of the increase, the truth of the matter is that most of us will not be directly affected by the hikes.  Which is why, when I think about the truly life-changing peers, professors, and opportunities I’ve had access to, I’m thinking not about maintaining them for myself, but for absolutely anybody who has the drive and the desire to experience them as well.

Whether we say it or not, this is what we’re talking about when we talk about MUNACA, AGSEM, AMUSE, or any of the other groups whose voices are being silenced on campus.  We must acknowledge, accept, embrace the fact that the current power structures are strong, except for their ignorance of the fact the we are many. Whether we were physically or emotionally hurt, pissed off, or complacent, we care deeply about each other.

In the preceding weeks and months before November 10, I have seen some of the most strident examples of human activism, cooperation, and kindness imaginable.

At the peaceful assembly on Monday, November 14, (including those who watched online) nearly 2,000 students, professors, staff, course-lecturers, TA’s, and community-members showed, in a very visual way, what a forum looks like.  Surprisingly, this is not community.  Community is larger than that.  It is intangible, and all encompassing. What I actually saw at this event was a myriad of bright, burning individuals.  For this is another misconception.  Community is not a group or a label.  It is the undulating mass of fiercely strong, individual personalities.  It is that group that actualizes the self, makes us stronger.  It amplifies our whispers, listens patiently at our dissent.  Community is not something you can walk away from, like a rally, because it fosters (indeed it is dependant on) your agency within it.

Community is Campus Crops.  Community is the Gaming Guild.  Community is that patch of sloping lawn on lower field.

For, again, community is unthinkably large – it is all those who could possibly be touched by you – all those who have moved you.  Which, again, is why it is inside all of us.

What the administration does not understand is that self and community are one and the same.  When I speak, I think of all others, and yet think only of my self, for they are contained within me.  I support those on strike not because of the way it directly affects me, but because of what I see of myself in them.

This is what we talk about when we talk about accessibility of education.  This is workers’ rights.  This is any concern based on what is, fundamentally, a suppression of voice. We must recognize future students as our peers, wherever we may choose to live after university.  I see their struggle coming and I feel the need to do whatever I can to help.

What, then, can be done?  The answers are many, but the most important are the simplest.  First, reach out.  The more you come to know and experience the truly wonderful people that make up this world – the more you internalize – the larger your community becomes.  And, true, with this exposure comes the weight of realization. Namely, the concerns multiply.

But it is also grants one shares in the collective strength of the group – a group of people that are not brought together by a border or a workplace or a university, but by something much more human.  Call it empathy, love, kindness – whatever you’d like.

Finally, you can speak out.  Know, intimately, the words of those in our community who cannot speak them loudly enough on their own.  Because whatever action is decided upon, what’s more important is that the administration (or, more broadly, those who hold power – who reject voices) knows that we are selfless and yet fully, wholly ourselves.  For an autonomous, alienated governing body cannot do that which we hold so dear – it cannot love.  It cannot embrace.  It cannot internalize the hopes and dreams and concerns and voices of every single one of us.

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the whimpering lull of the oven
the soft catches and moans of a lip
or a thigh
meeting in the air as a single, resounding note

Straining—
aching to hear
Letting slipped breaths
pool in their upturned mouths

such ecstasy in merely
listening to it
or the radio
or perhaps the blind woman downstairs
singing to her pets
It never mattered!

When they fell in love the first time
it was as if they had only
fallen asleep and woke
to find they’d risen from the same dream.

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I made my loss a shadow

but one of weight—

a newspaper park blanket that I could draw up to my chin

to hide me from the arching eyes of streetlights

and though true it keeps me warm it reads itself to me

incessant

I hear it far away but I know it has a force

Like an impossibly loud horn sounding at the very bottom of a well

And if only I could draw it up

it would surely say that Seraphim felt fit to fall to filthy streets and burn

and wait

and animate

pleading,

humming like a breast,

watching two or three bodies

catch against each other

and burn

engorged—

pleading,

that enough of it

might diffuse

back upwards

Two or three beds

not warm but

unthinkably bright, hot

and we, a fraternity of ghosts,

staring skywards apologizing

to incredible frightening unseen expanses,

wondering

what would it be like to love at all

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Peter could touch an open flame, but only with that soft patch of skin between the thumb and forefinger.

Late at night, when he needed to think,
he would go on long drives, only to stop in a well lit area and pull his car across both lanes of the street—
just to instill a little
calm.

which is also how he met his first wife, now that I think about it.

Peter Punchkiss was all of the world’s right angles.

When he spoke,
it was like listening to six or seven people
talking in the next room.
It’s hard to explain it better than that.

Peter always sat in the first chair he came upon when he entered a room and then said, usually to me,
If you do not settle
you cannot
rest

And this is actually how he met his second wife.

One time he asked me if I ever thought about my father.

I know he always put his hazard lights on when he was speeding.

I remember being in the car.  It’s dark out and the tires are making such a noise.
I keep my hands cold pressing on the glass of the window.

Then I’m in a room full of beds.  I’ve strung my sheets from the innumerable crags in the ceiling so they look like sails.
I sit and watch our old neighborhoods float by.

The last time I ever saw Peter Punchkiss went something like this:

I’m in a car and the tires are making such a noise.  We’re driving through the country.  It’s too late, really, but Peter is in one of those moods.  Suddenly we’re blocking the road in front of an all-night diner.   We sit.

I think about how I’ve often heard Peter in his room at night talking to his mother—
the receiver to his ear, the phone unplugged

He thinks about how there are four meals he can cook that I will never, ever, tire of.

In my head Peter puts his four-ways on and we speed off,
but really, we just keep waiting

and after a long while Peter turns and says, I’m sorry I’m not your father anymore.

I close my eyes right as the light comes up over the mountains.  Just that much light gets in.

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Carmine Starino, one of the three anglophone poets and the coordinator of the event, made it clear that the billing was entirely intentional. “I’ts so hard to take your own language for granted in a city where a variety of languages are spoken fully and without anxiety,” he said over the phone. When asked about the lack of translations he replied, “That was part of the experiment – if you get it fine, if you don’t, you don’t. The feeling was that – not that any one of us articulated it – we had a sense of maturity about the city, about our sense of self. We didn’t feel like we had to spoon-feed everything to the audience – it was billed as a bilingual event. Also, the idea was that the poets would be able to work in their own language without…translation.”

It seems that writers other than Starino share a similar sentiment about bilingualism in Montreal. Sean Michaels, novelist and co-founder of the Montreal-based music and microfiction blog Said the Gramophone, told me about his experience as an anglophone in the literary scene. “I’m grateful for this city, and for the richness of Québécois culture. I think if you live in Montreal, you should make an effort to understand at least a little of both French and English. I write in English, but try to read French books as well, and see French theatre.”

In spite of the success of “Early Warning Systems,” others were more pessimistic about the anglophone literary scene becoming more bilingual. “I don’t know how that would happen,” Starino told me. “It’s such a work to put together any event and then, on top of that, to have to budget in a quota of bilingualism is just that much more difficult. I guess they should do it only if they feel it necessary.”

What few bilingual events there are in Montreal tend to present languages side-by-side, with little or no attempt to make the content accessible to monolingual members of the audience. This is not to say that such events do not exist. Starino mentioned attending an integrated festival in Rome that successfully incorporated writers from around the world. “They had this huge screen in the back that ran simultaneous translations as the authors read. … I thought it was fantastic,” he reflected. However, here in Montreal, different languages remain decidedly separate in literary events – even when they appear at the same festival.

Blue Metropolis, Montreal’s multilingual literature festival, features writers and speakers in a wide range of languages in a way that mimics the distribution of communities in the city. “We rarely translate, preferring to bring in the public that speaks and understands the languages of our events. That, so far as I am aware, makes us unique in the world,” wrote Linda Leith, the festival’s artistic director, in an email to The Daily. When asked about the future of multilingual events in the city, she replied, simply, “I think there is room for events of many different kinds. A lot depends on the writers and the language(s) they work in; also of course on audiences.”

While it seems redundant to say that the future of a multilingual literature scene would be dependent on the languages of those who are a part of it, such an observation does put particular emphasis on the potential Montreal has to foster such a community. Michaels wrote to me in his reply that, “Yes, I think [Montreal]’s in a fairly unique position. But I don’t think this is acted upon. Mostly, I guess, due to the anglo/franco scenes’ relative indifference to each other – but also because fluent bilingualism is rarer than you might imagine.”

Starino made a similar comment: “I don’t know if we would be a role model for other multilingual literature scenes – I think we’re a role model for the rest of the country…I think we’re a glimpse into the future for literary scene in other cities. As immigrants pour into other Canadian cities, the writing and the sense of otherness is going to change. Canada is still very much a monolingual country – I know we’re officially bilingual, but it’s true. We’re the only city in Canada where the citizens are forced to live around so many different soundscapes.” Starino’s comment speaks to another problem in Montreal’s literary scene. Even as the anglophone and francophone scenes show sparks of conversation and integration, many other languages remain marginalized. Blue Metropolis remains unique in its effort to integrate writing in languages like German, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, and Italian, though all of these are spoken in Montreal.

As an anglophone, sitting in the auditorium made me think only of my own inability to understand the poets who were speaking in another language – not about the lack of translations or visual ques. Indeed, the maturity that Starino mentioned came through in full form. This gives rise to another interesting idea: Is it the tensions between Montreal’s different linguistic groups that make Montreal’s literary community so vibrant? Starino seemed to share the sentiment: “I think as a writer living in Montreal, its just hard not to write without the sound of French in your ear or the sound of any other language, whether we want to or not – the force is in the city to make us more bilingual, to absorb other sounds other acoustics into our work. … We are already part of the experiment.”

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The multidisciplinary festival, which runs from September 10 to 26, boasts 30 performances, six film screenings, and two art exhibitions. What makes this event unique is its mantra; according to the event website, the festival exists to “democratize and decentralize dance by taking it out of the downtown cultural institutions.” For this reason, many of the performances will be held outdoors and in public spaces, and all of them will be spread evenly throughout nine districts of the city.

Many of the performances seek to investigate the more unspoken aspects of our day-to-day lives. On September 24, for example, a dance troupe led by Geneviève Bolla will be performing Others, an exploration of how people see themselves and their partners in relationships. Other events to look out for include Jane Mappin’s world-premiere multimedia performance “The Point at Which Movement Begins” at the Maison de la culture Maisonneuve, “New Creation” by Taafé Fanga at Place Pasteur in the Latin Quarter, and “Madness Tango” at the Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges – a crowd favourite from last year’s festival.

Your best bet for finding more information on this and other events is the festival’s website quartiersdanse.com, which has an easy-to-use calendar complete with brief summaries and maps to all of the performances, film screenings, and outdoor sites.

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Much of this sentiment undoubtedly comes from Nabob and Hughes’ connection – and subsequent disillusionment with – rural Alabama, where they both grew up. On their web site, they say, “We both left [Alabama] for the same reason, the environmental degradation due to corporate development is staggering & unchecked, it makes us disgusted. However, in the Western USA we are gathered with the many folks to protect wilderness, rivers & oceans. Ecology has a place in the West’s culture, even if it’s on a small scale right now.” This intimate relationship with nature is evident in the lives of both individuals. Before the band started growing in popularity, Nabob enjoyed a nomadic lifestyle, sleeping on the beach or in tents upon returning from tours.

Brightblack Morning Light has made touring a green initiative as well. There is a standing notice on the band’s web site: “If we are playing your town and you have some new information specifically on local environmental justice issues, please approach the band’s vending table with any printed pamphlets explaining the issue with ways folks can take action.” Recently, the band has also started purchasing carbon credits to counteract the unavoidable pollution produced as a result of travelling.

After returning from the tour in support of their album Motion to Rejoin, it was not the beach that Nabob turned to – but instead an adobe house in a remote and unpopulated area powered by only four solar panels. Described by Jay Babcock in a recent feature for Arthur magazine, the house is twenty minutes from the nearest paved road and complete with its own water tank and an extensive garden – making it completely off the grid. In an interview with Babcock, Nabob said, “I know I sound like a hippie going back to nature…[but] this lifestyle has the best karma for me. I look outside and have a relationship to the land. In the city, water and electricity are metered. Walking down the sidewalk, chances are there’s a camera pointed on me. Where do I draw the line between capitalism and what I define as freedom?”

The album, called one of the ten best albums of 2008 by UNCUT in the U.K., was recorded entirely using solar power. The lyrics contrast bucolic images of the American southwest with haunting undertones of anti-coal and anti-nuclear sentiment. Their meagre, understated way of life is reflected in the music they make. Propelled by crawling baselines, slow horns, trembling piano, and Nabob’s ambient vocalization, there is a simplicity and ease reflected in it – a comfort with the surroundings, sparse and simple though they may be.

What sets Nabob and Hughes apart from other activists is that their dedication to the environment is not merely a cause they are championing, but a lifestyle in which they have completely immersed themselves. They are not the sort of celebrities who speak out against poverty, only to return to lives of extravagance and excess. They are devoting themselves to something they truly believe in, completely altering the way they live. Though, as Nabob revealed to Entrepreneur, there are times when the solar power gives out mid-rehearsal. These are the times he pulls out the acoustic guitar and plays under the light of the oil lamps.

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