Death and birth are complementary stages of existence. Death is the oldest, life its youngest; we humans are wrong to oppose death to life.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
So says African wisdom. As proof, at the end of life as at the end of pregnancy, care is important: a dying venerable must be accompanied with the same attention as a vulnerable baby. While some are packing their suitcases to begin the last journey, others are preparing to disembark and settle down. I almost see a certain complementarity in the fact that nature takes the last breath of one to make it the first breath of the other.
Why am I telling you about the reaper? Because another old branch of the family tree of Quebec artists, director André Brassard, left us this week. In recent years, many of us have been saddened by the departure of all those people who have dilated our spleens, touched our hearts or stimulated our minds. This feeling lived in me after the death of Pierre Marcotte, Serge Bouchard, Paolo Noël, Rita Lafontaine, André Melançon, Pierre Légaré, Janine Suto, Andrée Lachapelle, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Gilles Pelletier, Claude Péloquin, André Montmorency, Bob Walsh , Paul Buissonneau, Frédéric Back, Pierre Falardeau and many others. There are also the more dramatic cases of Karim Ouellet, Patrick Bourgeois or Dédé Fortin who left in their prime.
All these creators, who are so many markers of the socio-cultural evolution of Quebec, left leaving a great void behind them.
Faced with this observation, a mixture of sadness and nostalgia, it is the image of the autumnal cold that sets in, taking with it the songs of a generation of cicadas that comes to mind. Before going further, I must specify that by mixing songs and cicada, I perpetuate the same false conceptions as Jean de La Fontaine in his famous fable. The grasshopper and the ant.By crediting too much virtue and merit to the ant, one almost hears the storyteller reprimanding the cicada for its laziness and lack of foresight. However, beyond the value judgment indirectly posed on the life of an artist, this fable has it all wrong about the biology of cicadas. In the 19the century, a scientist named Henry Fabre was already rebelling against this legend which he said testified to a great ignorance of the cicada by its author. More recently, my friend Jean-Pierre Bourassa, the eminent Quebec entomologist, broached the subject on my radio show with the same critical conclusion.
The cicada does not eat flies or worms. On the contrary, it sucks the sap of plants by pushing its rostrum into the branches and roots. She uses this mouth apparatus as a drinking straw. She also cannot suffer from cold and hunger in winter because she dies at the end of the hot season. It farts at the fret just before the fret. With such a shortened adult life, there is no need to imitate the ant and store up reserves. Why buy RRSPs when you’re sure you won’t benefit from them?
As for its musical performances, no offense to the storyteller either, the cicada is not a singer, but a kind of percussionist, an insect that has more rhythm than voice. In fact, his music is a simple courtship tool that we enjoy without being the recipients of it. Coming out of the ground, the males perform these serenades to attract a mate and mate before dying. Females “prefer” to remain silent. It must be said that playing music exposes males to the risk of being spotted and eaten by a predator. But what wouldn’t we do to find love?
Once the reproduction is over, the cicadas fall silent and give way to a sad silence in the trees and the flowerbeds. So also goes the life of these old artists and creators whose curtain is lowered without salvation and far from the public. At least, until the television announces their departure and broadcasts the film of their life already shot and edited while waiting for the bad news.
But, there is another way of seeing the destiny reserved for the cicada by a natural selection which may seem ruthless to us. Indeed, while the males and females are dying, their tiny offspring begin a new cycle. These larvae will remain well hidden underground where they will find food in the roots of trees. When they become adults, these insects will come out of their hiding place during the summer months to gratify us with their soothing music. The cicadas die, but the cicada remains! Such is the framework of the dramatic musical comedy of the cicada which can be called Eros and Thanatos (sex and death).
It’s his way of thumbing his nose at the grim reaper and finding his way to eternity in the biosphere. A bit like a great artistic work survives its creator and also guarantees him a form of immortality. After all, isn’t art also a way to sublimate the consciousness of death, so difficult to bear for the intelligent bipeds that we are?
Selfishly, we would like the artists who do us good to be eternal. Unfortunately, our story is not far from that of the cicadas or the autumn leaves that turn colored before giving way to the next spring’s spurt.