As I hesitate to write this text, mysterious balloons float in the North American sky, adding a backdrop of strangeness and fear to the drama that rocked Quebec this week.
Posted at 6:00 am
I have absolutely no idea how to take this column. Actually, I didn’t want to write about last Wednesday’s event. Not courage or skill. Nor the words. Too angry, too much pain for loved ones and victims. Replete with images, I largely unhooked myself. Then I came back to my TV. Then left. Like all Quebecers, I am appalled, annoyed. I don’t want to add to the misery of the world by speaking about the incomprehensible. The puppies accumulate in Sainte-Rose and the stuffed animal does not absorb the anger.
But we have to talk about it, search for meaning. Bringing order to an extraordinary event that has brought us all together in the most human thing we have. We try to find causes. Very quickly the argument of mental illness was raised. Sanity has a broad back, she has become a convenient hodgepodge. Some hallucinated and blamed vaccines, racism.
Without logical explanations, concrete handles, we turn to our emotions. We are desperate for meaning.
In the face of the inexplicable and the horror, we want reassuring explanations so it won’t happen again, that it won’t happen to us again.
The media did their job. Sometimes very eager, confusing information and spectacles, attempts at explanations and voyeurism. The helicopter over the killer’s house wasn’t necessary to exorcise collective pain or illustrate the grip of evil. The accumulation of pathos, the constant onslaught of repetitive imagery, has worn down more than one citizen who has already been demolished by these simple words: a man deliberately killed children in a suburb with no history, in quiet Quebec where seemingly nothing bad can happen, but where it has been happening for decades. Polytechnique, Mégantic, Great Mosque of Quebec, Sainte-Rose. markings. Accidents or intentional gestures, we are not outside the world and its share of repulsive misfortune.
While we search for meaning and I can’t write about this intimate but national drama, balloons float in the still sky, mocking NORAD. Times are dark and strange.
Wednesday’s tragedy descends on our weary souls, imprints on our eyes that have already been stunned by so many terrors in a short time.
The terrible earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria can only devastate us. A family of six died in the fire at their home in Lanaudière. The war in Ukraine is taking on increasingly worrying aspects, Roxham Road is a humanitarian catastrophe, Iran is devastating us, financial agony awaits us. We are stunned, dejected, depressed.
All of this creates an impression of the disorganization of the world that is so difficult to understand that only our emotions manage to grasp it. In an attempt to organize meaning, we turn to the media. However, unrest soon spreads. Our world and its upset mosaic appear unstable and disturbing to us. But the media is doing its job: showing, commenting, endlessly repeating obscure themes, constructing theories, attempting to explain, and thereby contributing to the general concern.
We might be tempted (we all are) to turn our backs on screens. Close the picture factory to escape the repetitive horror. However, it counts without a strange phenomenon.
We feel guilty to switch off, as if television is a place of solidarity that connects us, hurt and compassionate to the bottom of our souls.
So, we shine again, we look at each other ’til we break our eyes and butcher our hearts, but ALL TOGETHER. As if every now and then we communicate through the drama and its televised narrative.
After that and even during it, how can we find the courage to move forward, to choose to wash our eyes? He turned to his loved ones and hugged his children. By surrounding yourself with gentleness, by avoiding sensationalism.
Silence helps too. Or nature, the crunch of footsteps in the snow, the sound of ice melting drop by drop on the roofs. The brutal energy of the sport, the maximum music in your ears. The fireworks of Valentine’s Day, the drive of the Super Bowl: a forced joie de vivre, sweet love, strong sensations that set a different rhythm in our weary minds. And culture! A sentence read, a word sung, a dazzling image to cling to to find the strength to recover.
I wanted to add: and contemplate the immensity of the sky.
Ultimately no. Few.
He drags pretty balloons there, but they carry the secret and symbolize all the troubles of the world.