Going to the 3.9-star cemetery (as we’d resolved to do) meant leaving familiar ground. For whatever reason, we’ve only ever rarely gone east of Viau. We could, here, say that we’ve just never had good cause to go to that end of the city - but, really, we’ve rarely had good cause to do much of anything. We have neither a boat nor an interest in overpriced City of Montreal merch, but find ourselves amongst crowds of tourists in the Old Port sometimes. We don’t much care about the tops of mountains, but have ended up at the top of Mont Royal on more than one occasion. Our rationale for staying west of Viau is truly arbitrary. Our mental map of the city more or less ends there for no real reason. It never really occurs to us that there’s a there over there. Our habit of going to certain places and heading in certain directions has, in effect, disappeared a whole part of the island.
We normally imagine that habits are just a bodily, self-focused thing. They’re something you do with or to yourself. Sleeping at a certain hour, smoking, flossing, exercising, etc. are thought to be just a set of activities you perform and, thus, involve only you. But these activities require outside stuff. If you develop the (questionable) habit of juggling flaming torches every morning at dawn, well, you require a certain facility with or inclination towards juggling - but also a) flaming torches, b) an area such that flaming torches can be tossed aloft, and c) dawn. Your willingness and ability to juggle said torches is just one small part of the equation. What if you go on holiday and forget your torches? Or you’re visiting with friends and they live in a neighborhood that has a bylaw against juggling any flaming thing? What if dawn doesn’t happen? Well, then, the habit can’t habit despite your desire or capacity to enact it.
Habits are not only materially contingent on external factors, but they also affect how we conceive of external factors. As a torch juggler, you might see some area of the world as “a prime torch juggling space” whereas others would see, urm, just a regular old space unrelated to torch juggling at all. Likewise, this way of looking at the world will then influence how you engage with it. You might, for example, cease visiting or attending to or even acknowledging places that have prohibitions or prejudices against torch jugglers. And - because torch juggling is a habit - all this transpires without your being actively aware of it. You just go about your torch juggling business and your world is, subtly over time, transformed in such a way that it includes and excludes certain things, values and disvalues them, and so on. Habits, then, just ain’t in the body.
They subtly and drastically affect not only what we do and how we do it, but the world we quietly inhabit. If you’re feeling bold, you could say that habits are the means by which our world is organized (positively and negatively). They partially determine what is or seems possible. This is the case not only for unusual habits like torch juggling, but all the little habits we deliberately or accidentally cultivate (like, for example, thinking negatively about ourselves, writing every other day, etc.).
Our habit of not going east of Viau means that “east of Viau” doesn’t, for us, exist in any robust sense. We have no real idea what’s over there. We know, now, that there is a cemetery that, according to Google Reviews, is of a 3.9-star quality. We also, vaguely, know that there are probably houses over that way. That, though, is more or less it. Walking, contrary to habit, towards the vast, eastern unknown of the island wasn’t as intimidating or frightening as you may think.
There’s a widespread idea that folks in the far off past used to mark unknown or unfamiliar areas of land on maps with warnings like “Here Be Dragons” or “Here Be Lions” or by just straight-up drawing a scary creature in that area. There aren’t too many extant examples of this, but here’s one:
It isn’t, necessarily, that cartographers etc. thought that wickedly ugly creatures actually inhabited these areas - but rather that one should proceed there with caution as if some unexpected and frightening thing were present. The creatures serve as a practical metaphor. One ought not just chill, depend on one’s usual habits of seafaring a certain way, etc.
While there’re no unmapped parts of the world left to mark with dragons or lions - there’s still a version of the caution bandied around. It’s easy to imagine people’s mental maps of the city marked up with “Here Be Crime” or “Here Be Folks Who Are Not Middle-Class” or “Here Be French/English/A Language With Which One Isn’t Familiar.” None of these are dragons, but these ideas would motivate a peculiar kind of attention while visiting or ward off visits altogether. Most of the cautions or alerts we give ourselves aren’t, like the dragons, about safeguarding our lives. They’re usually about preserving, what, comfort? A sense of well-being?
As we walked east, the very narrow sidewalk next to a three lane street did have us, more than once, wondering if we’d be murdered by a bus while engaging in this silly task. “Here be Express Buses Travelling at 120438 miles per hour” isn’t, really, a universal caution but it is one pedastrians ought to heed out in these parts. There were more than a few stretches where the sidewalk legit tilted at a 45-degree angle towards the street in such a way that, well, it felt a little deliberate. Some city planner or sidewalk constructor aiming to do away with pedestrians one by one.
Alert, then, to the threat of buses and attentive to this unfamiliar land beyond habit - what wonders did we see? Mostly the same things you see everywhere. We saw the same chain restaurants you find doted around every place. The same mattress stores, gyms, etc. We witnessed new generic condo buildings and newer generic condo buildings being built. The only, truly, notable things that caught our eye were the mostly empty stripmalls and franchises with old signage.
It’s not like we were expecting a land of milk and honey out here, but we were a little curious if maybe there’d be features unrelated to retail that drew our eye. This unfamiliar part of the city, by dint of all the same of old stores, felt quite familiar. This meant that we very easily lapsed back into the mindless distraction that lead us to undertake this (ridiculous) quest in the first place.
There is, maybe, an argument to be made in favor of the homogeneity of contemporary urban life. The nondescript office buildings, the retail chains, and the franchise restaurants mean that one is never really forced to appreciate or really even attend to the world. It’s just there and it does the things you expect it to do. The Walmart does Walmart things. If you need nothing from Walmart, Walmart fades into the background. This is, maybe, good? If we have money enough, we can get whatever material things we might need with a minimum of thought. We can, then, tend carefully to whatever non-material needs we might have. What, though, are those even? A better life? Fulfillment? Inner peace? Are these things separable from strip malls? How so?
Before we could entertain this thought for very long, a very large billboard for what initially looked like a condo development or old folks home seized our attention.
So, well, it is in a sense an advertisement for something like a condo or old folks home - albeit a condo or home for the dead. Apparently the 3.9-star cemetery has begun pre-sales for space in this new columbarium [which is like a locker room for urns as far as we can tell]. It’s unclear whether the new building is called L’espoir / La Speranza [Hope] or if that’s the catchy tagline that’s meant to motivate sales - but either way “A Columbarium Called Hope” sounds like it could be a really great Willa Cather short story.
This advertisement for final resting places moved us to look online to see if we could find out what a little cubby for our eventual urn would cost. No luck on that front (they wanted us to call somebody or leave our email address) - but we did find the cemetery’s YouTube channel.
The world has been parody of itself for so long that it’s hard to say what to do with this. We could feign shock that the sacred needs as much marketing help as the profane, but of course it does. George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, is said to have said that “Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.” By argument it seems he means something like sophistry, like the empty rhetoric that passed itself off as philosophy (according to Socrates/Plato). Santayana, though, lived in a simpler time when advertising addressed value and quality. Now? Now advertising does more than argue for quality. It establishes existence. What is anyone or anything beyond promotional efforts?
After standing outside the gates of the cemetery, looking across at the conveniently located florist and gravestone/urn shop (for real), we ventured inside.
It looked like a cemetery.
There are, we looked it up, over a quarter million people interred here (in graves, mausoleums, or columbariums). Besides the quarter million dead, we were more or less alone.
It was impossible to think about all these underground strangers. We read some of the engraved names and messages. We looked at some of the photos affixed to the headstones. These stone advertisements for the formerly living rarely communicated much and, as we kept walking, we found a row of tombstones that said nothing at all.
We really didn’t know what to make of these unmarked graves. Didn’t know whether folks were already underground and, because they could wait, their names were still forthcoming. Or whether the plots were as empty as the surfaces of the tombstones.
Having, then, nothing to fix our attention on exactly we thought briefly about ourselves in various heavy-handed and melodramatic ways and low-key hated ourselves for deciding to write about any of this and then walked back home on the road too close to all the fast buses and looked at the old signage of the Jean Coutu and the mostly abandoned strip malls and then, back in familiar territory, entered our home and sat to review this place and found ourselves unable to take seriously the idea of mocking the reviews of a cemetery and ran into trouble even writing anything at all about this hallowed ground (or is anything even hallowed now?) because it is too overloaded with and empty of significance so got frustrated anew by a desire to attend to this place and an inability to attend to it meaningfully (or understand, really, what meaningful attention even is) so we took yesterday to really think it through to no avail and made ourselves anxious that none of this was funny or distracting in a good way and wondered if we should talk about Aristotle’s arguments against Solon’s idea that no one ought to be considered happy who is still living but then thought better of it (or got shy or self-conscious or both) and as focused as we were on the task at hand we couldn’t see any of it clearly and, like before, found ourselves all over the place and nowhere at all wondering if maybe that’s it maybe that’s what this is what all of this is - just a flimsy reason to wander around unfamiliar ground (both literal and figurative), an attempt to account for the everything and nothing that preoccupies us, to break or modify our unfortunate and maybe unavoidable habit of complacency, to request attention and offer distraction. And to what end? Unknown, but some end surely.
“What an unsatisfying conclusion! They just raised a bunch of loosely connected issues, but didn’t resolve anything at all! What’s the takeaway here? It’d be better if there was a clear message about attention or habit or something ‘cause otherwise what’s the point, y’know?”
“Totally! They should’ve said something about death! Or advertising! So unfocused and self-indulgent. I didn’t like this one. So boring. Didn’t even make it to the end to be honest. It didn’t seem worth it.”
Wandering Around Unfamiliar Ground
"The world has been parody of itself for so long that it’s hard to say what to do with this."
wanted to share a fun pic but can't so go here: https://welcometotwinpeaks.com/store/stickers/directed-by-david-lynch-sticker-pack/
"(or understand, really, what meaningful attention even is)" ohh this is so beautiful, I alove the idea that meaningfulness (in general) can't be pinned down in time/space - it's a/in movement!
"found ourselves all over the place and nowhere at all wondering if maybe that’s it maybe that’s what this is what all of this is - just a flimsy reason to wander around unfamiliar ground (both literal and figurative)"
Lol either flimsy quest or mercury RX probably.
Clearly, your Muse opted to stay behind and claim one of those blank headstones for his/herself...