Dear Melancholy Exhibition | Voices from beyond the grave

The exhibition Dear Melancholy by Manuel Mathieu (until October 22 at the Hugues Charbonneau gallery) could have been canceled because the day before the opening, torrential rain on September 13 flooded the roof of the Belgo building.

If Manuel Mathieu and Hugues Charbonneau hadn’t been there in the evening to prepare for the show, they wouldn’t have been able to warn the owners and the whole Belgo would have been there. The works were barely saved, the young Montreal artist of Haitian origin told me laughingly, who is being torn off all over the planet, just before leaving for Paris.

While everything smiled on him, he felt a melancholy while painting the canvas that was to give its title to the exhibition. A feeling he distrusted, because too many people have this cliché of the tormented artist. “But I told myself that I could approach it with freshness,” he said. I feel like after the pandemic, time has slowed down a bit, things don’t change that much. Has the pandemic been the excuse for a lot of discomfort? Now that there are no more, we face things that were already there. »

Manuel Mathieu is right. It’s the first autumn that we could call “normal”, without sanitary measures, but everything that we reintegrate does not seem to be better than before. We are only talking about a labor shortage. I have to admit that I’ve never seen so many “we’re hiring” signs in my life, when when I was young, we were queuing up to get a job at McDonald’s.

I’m dealing with an estate right now, which is a great test of composure when you spend hours on the phone, and each call starts with a very long, outdated automated message about the upheavals of the pandemic. Then there are the messages “we are receiving a greater volume of calls” or “we are affected by the labor shortage”. When we finally meet someone, the call sometimes gets lost when we want to put us in touch with someone else, and we have to start all over again from the beginning. It’s become that I pray every time my call is put on hold.

The other day, at the pharmacy, I was looking for something and I asked for help from a young employee who said to me, looking sorry, “Sorry, it’s my first day. “It’s not the first one I meet who is on his first day and sometimes it seems that they are trained by those who are only on their second. But at least they are there.

The aftermath of the pandemic is fascinating to watch, it is starting to impact our lives more than the pandemic itself. Nothing works as before and the problems that were already there are far from being solved.

Is it the autumn gloom that brutally fell like a cleaver on the summer? This electoral campaign where our future was being played out, at the crossroads of so many crucial things, on a division of parties in an electoral system that we do not want to change? The recent death of my stepfather Maurice, while I search his paperwork and his drawers full of memories?

I too feel a melancholy, like Manuel Mathieu, and I tell myself that, like him, I should try to approach it with freshness, since it risks being a lasting state of mind.

Receiving Augustino or enlightenment, the last unfinished book by the late Marie-Claire Blais, my heart ached. Usually, it was the promise of a discussion for an interview. At least we won’t have to worry about her, who refused to leave her island to stay with her cats when there were hurricanes. Key West where she lived was damaged by the hurricane Ianone of the worst on record in the United States, before it went on to ravage the rest of Florida.

I open the book and from the beginning, I rediscover with emotion the breath of the Blaisian sentence, which has followed the trajectory of storms for nearly a century. Augustino is in India: “You had to be everywhere where life reigned, hear everything, know everything, thought Augustino, no longer restricting yourself to inhabiting only your body, but recognizing living bodies as well as the bodies in ashes of which he breathed in the smell near the beach, wasn’t Augustino writing the book of his life in these gasps of agony of the Earth, would this Earth survive all its wounds that Augustino himself would be cured, as with a thread of silk she held him back, preserved him from dying, by this sound of the heart in his young chest…”

Finish Proust and reread the cycle Thirsty of Marie-Claire Blais, here is my retirement project, if I go there.

The gasps of the Earth, we hear them every week, while we write the book of our lives despite everything, with beating hearts. This summer, the heat wave in Europe dried up waterways so dramatically that shells and ships from the Second World War were found. In Nevada, drought has threatened 40 million people and brought up old bodies from Lake Mead, some possibly linked to mob murders. But the news that struck my imagination the most was the appearance of the “hunger stones” on the banks of the Elbe and the Rhine in the Czech Republic and Germany. They only appear when the water level drops too much. They are engraved with somber messages, written during periods of scarcity when the harvests have suffered. Some inscriptions date back to 1417. One of them reads: “We wept, we weep, and you will weep. »

There’s an ominous warning and the comfort of continuity here — see how I try to cool my burning melancholy.

As we get older, when we accumulate the missing, we end up seeing the world a little through their eyes, because memory constantly reminds us of their gaze that we miss.

This probably influences our behavior. I learned before the election that a friend of my father-in-law paid $100 to the Parti Québécois in tribute to Maurice, who remained a PQ until the end. My lover, who has been voting Québec solidaire for two elections, was tempted to vote PQ to also honor his father. Like many people, he hesitated until the last moment, and I don’t know what his final choice was, but Manon Massé was re-elected.

Seeing the results of the elections where the chessboard remained practically as before, which has reignited the debate on our voting system, noting the gap that is widening even more between Montreal and the rest of Quebec, between the generations as well, it looks like the melancholy is here for good. Unless, like Manuel Mathieu, it inspires us and we decide to refresh it a bit.