While I hesitate to write this text, mysterious balloons float in the North American sky, adding a background of strangeness and anguish to the drama that shook Quebec this week.
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. Stuffed with images, I largely unhooked. Then I came back to my TV. Then left. Like all Quebecers, I am appalled, upset. I don’t want to add to the misery of the world by talking about the incomprehensible. The doggies accumulate in Sainte-Rose and the stuffed animal does not absorb the rage.
However, we must talk about it, carry out a quest for meaning. Bringing order to an extraordinary event, which brought us all together in what we have that is most human. We try to find causes. Very quickly, the argument of mental illness was brought up. Sanity has a broad back, it has become a convenient catch-all. Some hallucinated and blamed vaccines, racism.
Lacking logical explanations, concrete grips, we turn to our emotions. Desperately, we search for meaning.
Faced with the inexplicable and the atrocious, we would like reassuring explanations, so that it doesn’t happen again, that it doesn’t happen to us again.
The media did their job. Some in a very zealous way, confusing information and spectacle, attempted explanations and voyeurism. The helicopter above the murderer’s house was not necessary to exorcise the collective pain or to illustrate the grip of Evil. The accumulation of pathos, the constant onslaught of looping images has worn down more than one citizen already demolished by these simple words: a man deliberately killed children in a suburb without history, in a quiet Quebec where apparently nothing bad can’t happen, but where it’s been happening, for decades. Polytechnique, Mégantic, Great Mosque of Quebec, Sainte-Rose. Markers. Accidents or deliberate gestures, we are not outside the world and its share of revolting misfortunes.
While we search for meaning and I can’t write about this intimate but national drama, balloons hover in the silent sky taunting NORAD. Times are dark and strange.
Wednesday’s tragedy descends on our weary souls, imprints itself in our gazes stunned by so many horrors already in a short time.
The terrible earthquake that has ravaged 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 more and more worrying aspects, the Roxham Road is a humanitarian disaster, Iran is devastating us, financial anguish awaits us. We are stunned, dejected, depressed.
From all this emerges an impression of disorganization of the world, so difficult to understand that only our emotions manage to apprehend it. In an attempt to organize meaning, we turn to the media. Soon, however, anxiety sets in. Our world and its out-of-tune mosaic appears to us to be unstable, disturbing. Yet the media are doing their job: showing, commenting, endlessly repeating dark themes, constructing theories, trying to explain, and thereby adding to the general anxiety.
We might be tempted (we all have) to turn away from screens. Close the image factory to escape the looping horror. However, it is counting without a strange phenomenon.
We feel a guilt to turn off, as if TV were a place of solidarity, connecting us, bruised and compassionate to the bottom of our souls.
So, we light up again, we look at each other to the point of breaking our eyes and butchering our hearts, but ALL TOGETHER. As if we commune, once in a while, through the drama and its televised narrative.
After, and even during, how can we find the courage to continue to move forward, to make up our minds, to wash our eyes? Turning to his loved ones, hugging his children. By surrounding oneself with gentleness, by fleeing sensationalism.
Silence also helps. Or nature, the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow, the sound of ice melting on the roofs, drop by drop. The brutal energy of the sport, the music at the max in the ears. The fireworks of Valentine’s Day, the drive of the Super Bowl: a forced joie de vivre, of sweet love, of strong sensations that trigger another rhythm in our tired heads. And culture! A sentence read, a word sung, a dazzling image to which to attach oneself to find the strength to bounce back.
I was going to add: and look at the immensity of the sky.
Ultimately, no. Not much.
He drags pretty balloons there, but which carry the mystery and which symbolize all the concern of the world.