Artist Marc Séguin offers his unique perspective on current events and the world.
January. A little snow on the ground, finally. The children are happy. Snowmobiles, stranded on the lawn since New Year’s Day, are once again used to work in the woods to maintain the trails for sugaring off.
One evening this week, with one of the girls, we were coming back from somewhere. The white cover reflected the light. In the distance, about fifteen kilometers away, a huge glow. Huge like an Olympic stadium. Or a flying saucer, I said. We never know.
We were driving on Roxham. Parenthesis here: I will not talk about the news of this path that I take twice a day. In fact, I will come back to this a little later. Still, I tell my daughter that I find it beautiful, this light, like a dome, in the night. She asks me if I know what it is.
” No.
“It’s the Greenhouses of S…
– Wow, I say, it’s good, it looks big, it must produce a lot and it’s a good deal that we produce here at home.
– Not really, she answers me, everyone complains about it on Facebook, because it’s too light. Light pollution.
“Misery… is there anyone who writes that they’re happy about that?”
— No, no one. »
We want to eat fruits and vegetables that don’t come from California or South America. We like to say that we eat local. We love the idea of eating tofu or tomatoes or strawberries that come from us.
In a greenhouse, light and heat are concentrated to reproduce summer. Elsewhere, in the fields, it takes tractors, diesel, and before being in a plastic pot at the grocery store, it’s in the ground.
What’s more, these are workers from South America who are in the fields. Official (and temporary) migrants who are welcomed because they relate to the economy. In winter, many also work in the greenhouses.
When I was a child, one of my grandmothers read with a magnifying glass. One day I tried it and it was fascinating, like magic; it made it possible to magnify and see words and things differently. Later that same day – after a warning – I realized that by orienting it at a certain angle on a piece of paper, you could make a hole in it. By concentrating the rays of sunlight on a small point, enough heat was generated to make a fire. I remember making a smiley face on a French homework.
The president of the next COP is the CEO of an oil company and we talk about it intensely for a few days and then, presto, it falls into the ditch. Ditto for just about every hot topic, from a snowstorm to gas prices.
Is this a magnifying glass effect of the media? Social networks? Is there anything in the world other than unhappiness, injustice or indignation to express? When the magnifying glass isolates a word, a sentence or a social state, we seem to lose sight of the whole.
Let’s get back to this oil CEO who will chair the next COP. Me, I find it fun (no irony here). By taking its equal gas; we must not forget that the Canadian Minister of the Environment is a former extreme environmental activist who, once elected and member of a government, also offers “futures” to the Canadian oil industry. Seems to me like it’s give and take in the budget of karma?
But we are moving away. Back to the greenhouses. Of course, complaining seems easier than rejoicing. In the name of what exactly? This (free) right to cry seems to fill a natural and biological human lack. Kind of like porn replaces the other real thing.
This magnifying glass effect is worrying. It has become a mass reflex that pollutes as much as greenhouse light.
Is it impossible to accept that nothing is perfect? We could also tell each other a few beauties from time to time.
Or, we hire a consulting firm to manage our feelings or a situation since we have lost an overview in favor of a strange limited freedom of expression. Social competence seems to be lacking in public power, it has taken refuge in the private sector for some and in social networks for others. People complain for everything and for nothing, as if the only possible hold on reality was to be grieved by it.
I was about to forget. Roxham Road.
Last January 3rd, I swear, there was a guy who was plowing his field on Roxham, not a poet’s field or a television show. tivi, but a hundred acres of black vegetable soil. Never seen this in winter. Stopped to watch it. It was wonderful. The tractor was pushing, the wheels sunk almost to the axles, the plowing was coming out of the ground behind the plough. The land will be ready early this spring for seedlings and seedlings. Happy to see that people are busy feeding the world, away from the spotlight, a magnifying glass and the indignant living room.