Shunk with Ahren Strange and Checkmate Bullseye, 6482 Saint Laurent, 11 August 2024

Harmony is rather behind us than before. —Henri Bergson

I often think of those stereotypical pep talks that coaches give in the locker room when their team is down. Or the speech that generals make to their troops on the cusp of some important battle. Something like, “I’m not going to lie to you: you’re going to have to give this everything you’ve got — more that you ever dreamt of giving — and half of you ain’t coming back.”

I recite this speech to myself sometimes just for leaving the house.

It seems as if every quotidian operation these days has the potential to erupt into all-out war. And I hate to fight. But more than fighting, I hate to lose. Particularly in a battle I never asked for. Especially in a fight I did everything possible to avoid.

Adversity in life can strike at any time. Usually, it occurs when we least expect it, when we are least equipped to handle it, when our resistance is lowest. It’s as if the universe somehow knows when we’re down and picks that moment to kick. Then, we are faced with the choice to accept or reject it, to flee or to fight.

I propose that flight is no longer an option. There’s nowhere left to run. We are all living on the same planet, and when we are attacked where we stand, we have a duty to stand our ground. It is an obligation to defend ourselves. Because if we don’t, our attackers will attack again, and worse, they will move on to attack our neighbours, our friends, our family.

Survival is not a right. But surviving is your responsibility.

Rendez-vous sur l’Esplanade du Parc olympique, OSM, 14 August 2024

If I never saw the sunshine, baby,
Then maybe I wouldn’t mind the rain —The Ronettes

The TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s sad science fiction short story, All Summer in a Day, traumatized me as a youngster. I recall that we watched it in junior high school. And why kids at such a tender age should be exposed to this specific depressing chronicle is now becoming clearer to me.

In the original tale, which was published in 1954 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Venus is a planet beleaguered by constant rainstorms, with the sunshine only being visible for two hours every seven years.

The story centers on a class of Venusian children who finally get to see the sun for the first time, and an Earthling child named Margot, whom the cruel native Venusians lock in a closet, depriving her of the solar spectacle.

In the screen version, the director extends Venus’s sunless period from seven to nine years, presumably to punctuate the brutality of its moral. The ending is also altered when the children, apparently out of guilt, give Margot a bouquet of flowers that they gathered under the Venusian rays.

The message of this story is frequently interpreted simply that people behave with brutality towards those who are different from them, especially to immigrants, and towards those who have had enviable experiences. Margot came from Earth, where she routinely saw the sun, comparing its warmth to a fire in the stove.

But the underlying message is that we are compelled to behave with brutality to the great Other in order to understand the consequences of our brutal nature.

Nature is violent. When we strike out against it, nature strikes back.

Roundtable with Rito Joseph, Acouetey Junior Jocy and Leith Hamilton, Black Summer ’91, Fonderie Darling, 15 August 2024

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. —Ecclesiastes 3:15

The most powerful moment in an especially poignant symposium around Fonderie Darling’s Black Summer ’91 exhibition came when the civic leader Leith Hamilton admitted to the audience that competition within Montreal’s most marginalized communities had historically proven counterproductive.

Rivalry, for example, for grant money, or prestige, ultimately led to further rifts in already-divided communities, setting back the project of unifying and uplifting various diverse peoples within a system that colonialism and capitalism had already rigged against them.

Nothing is as useless as an angry peace activist. To arrive together we must walk together.

Fine Food Market with Nick Bendsza and Nikolas L.B., La Sotterenea, 16 August 2024

All temporal goods are vanity and delusion; there must come a time when they are taken away and lost. —Solomon Ben Isaac Levi

Every time there’s an election, the familiar chorus through the campaign bluster is always the word “change.” Every candidate promises change. And yet it would be a greater challenge, verily an impossible one, to promise durability.

Change is inevitable. Indeed, the only constant in life is change. This is a cliché, a paradox that we take for granted and seldom truly stop to consider.

Life is a factory churning out change. Time’s chief function is to produce difference. It is up to human perception to ascribe value to the harvest of time, to determine whether this or that change is positive or negative — or both, or neither.

However, nature’s ruthless indifference suggests that there is no such thing as good or bad transformation. Furthermore, change as a process itself is ambivalent.

L Con with ciber1a, Ambient Music in the Park, 11 August 2024

All the dreams and promises
That we give
We give away —INXS

Dream time differs from the experience of temporality in waking life.

We might sleep for only a few minutes and experience sprawling narrative dreams that seem to span over hours or even days.

Moreover, these dreams can feel convincingly real, altering our perceptions well into the morning, colouring our moods and shaping our interactions. What happens in a few seconds while we are asleep can have a lasting impact that resonates long after.

Which is the illusion: an instant or eternity?◼︎

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_{Cover image: Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.}