Or the Fine Art of Displacement
I’m writing this from Toronto. Not really a newsletter; a few thoughts from somewhere closer to and farther away from home. The one undeniable thing about one’s birthplace are those inescapable ties, whether we deny them or wish to erase them, mythify them or embrace them. It’s not often that I go back to Canada, so there is a private and quizzical novelty involving any visit to my home and native land.
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Left: Looking out my hotel window, and thinking “Well, I’m certainly not in Neuchâtel any more…”
Center: I was so busy looking down at the street below that I never noticed I was actually in Gotham City…
Right: Toronto skyline, with tourist. Photo © Caitlin Sweet
In my desk there is a drawer that is given over to the dreary exercise of my accounting and general keeping track of my life. The labels on the folders, like much of my files, are an unpredictable mix of English and French. On the file reserved for business trips and like expenses, there is a sticker with “Déplacements” scrawled on it. Literally translated, this of course means “displacements”, in addition to the more accurate “travel” or “trips”.
It is starting to seem, though, that displacement is the far better term. There is a foundation of reluctance with a timid tremor of anticipation in the word that perfectly describes how I feel about going anywhere. Reluctance because any trip seems an uprooting of sorts, but there is no denying the eagerness to peer through the golden haze always beyond horizons otherwise familiar. When I arrive anywhere, it’s akin to waking up with a start. No wonder I’m never quite sure exactly where it is I am.
Waking up with a start was also more or less what I did at IdeaCity last week, with a growing sense of dread as each presenter shifted inexorably closer the scheduled time of my execution by audience exposure. IdeaCity is the most extraordinary conference I’ve ever attended, focused as it is not on any one domain, but on just about everything that makes the world go round.
After two days of presentations, each of which seemed to up an ante of already cosmic proportions, I stumbled up on stage and, sorting feverishly through the thoughts I had tried to assemble over the two days (picture someone trying to find specific pieces in a box of Lego – in the dark), then talked about something else entirely. (The secret, I have found, is to have a PowerPoint presentation which has nothing to do with the subject, so that the audience cannot concentrate properly, and is left with the subliminal but indelible impression that both the talk and the totally unrelated slide show were both of interest, without really remembering either.) It was definitely a rewarding experience (experience being of course the thing you acquire only AFTER you really need it, but at any rate, I survived, and was rewarded for my temerity by these few days off in Toronto, spent recording a show for Canadian Learning Television, wandering around the city, sitting in parks and working on a book).
While wandering through a bookshop, (any trip to an English-speaking country means I spend an inordinate amount of time in bookshops) I saw a huge sign over the Canadiana section: “The World Needs More Canada”. Cheeky, I thought, but clever enough advertising for books on the Rockies or the Maritimes and authors much lauded in Canada but unknown beyond.
And then I got to thinking.
Fresh from the IdeaCity conference, where I spent breaks and evenings enthusiastically exchanging ideas with an eye doctors, flamenco dancers, a political prisoner, a press magnate, a reconstructive bone surgeon, an Australian with no legs who climbs mountains, an optical illusionist, a sci-fi writer, a composting expert and many more. All equally fascinating; I thought yes, the world needs more of that.
Realized that for several days I had not ended up trversing wayward clouds of cigarette smoke at every turn. Smokers there are, certainly, but they are discrete. The world needs more of that.
Observed the three-part garbage containers on most street corners. In front of me, a cyclist pulled up, stopped, tossed his chewing gum into the appropriate bin and sped off again. I suddenly realized that the streets were clean. Naturally they are swept, but the people don’t litter. The world needs more of that.
Wandering about the Ontario Parliament Buildings (built in an extraordianry neo-Romanesque style, of which more in another newsletter) I asked a guard about clambering around and peering in every corner. As long as you’re up front and honest about it all, he replied, there is no problem. Goodness, I thought, a reasonable attitude for sure. The world needs more of that.
Listened to a couple of musicians, who switched effortlessly from English to French half a dozen times in the same verse, with an easygoing bilingualism. Canada itself needs a LOT more of THAT, I thought, and so the world does too.
Felt a pervading optimism in the air – in a land of hewers of wood and drawers of water, the slowly dawning realization that natural resources are a heritage not to be clear-cut or tainted. (Admittedly, a country of 30 million inhabitants sitting on some of the world’s largest oil reserves – as long as the price is around 70 dollars a barrel – has some serious pondering and planning in store.) A newspaper ad: Canada – Love It and Leave It (intact for the next generations). The world definitely needs more of that.
So, in the end, I have revised my stance as the reluctant traveller and decided to get out more. If the world needs more Canada, then I am determined to do my part.
NEUCHÂTEL
The NIFFF is coming up next week. (Always enormous fun, and of course one of the few film festivals I can bicycle to).
SUMMER
Holidays fast approaching, time to take a break. See you in the fall.
