Hallow’s Eve & the passing of another month

Posted by in Broadsides

Me and my little brother, "L'il Ty"

Me and my little brother, "L'il Ty"

Days. The days go by filled with hours filled with minutes all of it filled with moments. Moments of seizing the time, living for the present, then the future, disembodiment from the past, thinking about wasted or at least foggy years, hours, minutes, moments. As I trudge through the trenches of a body of work – of literature on audiences – I’ve had many moments to pause and reflect on why it is we do the things we do. Why do I forsake the ignorant, malicious rich and all their playtime and profit-making? Why have I built a shaky moral fortress around my own body, my habits, my beliefs if I could call them that? Why do I feel it is good to do good and reprehensible to do nothing? Why do I think my version of good is the “right” version? How have I come to these conclusions? This morality-laden sensibility?

Rumour has it that a friend of a friend recently sold a celebrity titty website and used the megabucks to buy a home. Smut peddling, but not even. It’s really lowest-common-denominator facilitating and I don’t denounce its existence, I just denounce a system that elevates the purveyors of such seemingly worthless flotsum into self-sustaining, comfortable beings who can enjoy the material comforts of life while others go without. (But why?) And all the while we can distract ourselves with a nipple slip from some cookie-cutter pubescent starlet, so entirely irrelevant to the rhythms of life, to the cruel oscillations between the haves and the have-nots. But how long can we sustain the distraction? And here I am at this end of the spectrum, the activism-is-the-only-way-out-of-this-mess position that I certainly defend with the will of the vanguard, that is the largely inaudible few who rail against the currents of the mainstream only to sit in the world’s bars staring at old diaries, looking for old faces in the shadows of a past mis-remembered, a past kept gilded by the secrets of a conscience at odds with any sense of a present, reflective moment.

And yet here I sit, writing for a mis-remembered me – a disjointed, arrogant, talented (but in what?), awkward world traveller who stares back at me from old photographs and seems to say, “Wish you were here, chump.” But what do those moments add up to? I have my books, my friends, my partner, my love, my family. I have the endless patter of humanity to contemplate without looking into a past of moments that beckon me backward toward sunrises and sunsets so full of illusion and glory they should be in a museum. If, like atoms, I’m made up of these moments, and they all conspire in my bodyspace to invisibly guide me to the next moment, to each next moment, then how can I arrange them to make some right out of who I am, what I do, and who I think I am and what I think I do? Is being and doing enough? If you are right? Am I right? Do I show it? Feel it?

The costumed little ones are parading past our dark doorwell through cool but pleasant Montreal streets awash in the velveteen cover of leaves that burst in flames at your feet this time of year. They walk with ambition, insecurity, pride, oppression, smiles and secrets. Their moments are barely recognizable to them and shan’t be, likely, for many years to come. How can my Halloween wish of a more just, fair and equitable world transmit into their miniature but enormously important worlds? How can I make each moment matter?

How will I?