the plaza after rain [part i]

The opening entry of the blue journal is dated for the last day of the year 2019. Plaza Notes is the headline and below is a messy list in cursive. A closer examination of life through poetry, reads the first item. A refusal to acculturate (Dominatrix as a figure of this). Poetics of uncooperation for all the brutal strategies built to sustain capital gain—C.A. Conrad. Then poetry is a blueprint for who we are at the time of writing it. Finally, Somatic Exercise for the Plaza: Buy a ten-dollar gown. Walk the Plaza in it.

I find a note in my mailbox that morning. I call up Ari. I have an exercise for you. It’s from Walter Benjamin. He had recently time-travelled to the Saint-Hubert Plaza. I saw him there, on the wide grey sidewalk, bespectacled under a big black umbrella. He was unmistakable, looking up into the sky. I caught him by the arm and drew him into Lana Café, my haunt. She says she’ll do it. I type his instructions into an e-mail and click send.

NB: Digression or transgression encouraged.

Your route will be to go down the Saint Hubert Plaza starting from the Jean-Talon entrance on the east side of the street to the small park on Bellechasse with the iron statue, and to return. As you move through the Plaza, record your observations via voice recorder.

Because this is an exercise you are doing on behalf of a poet, write or record a line of bad poetry at the end of each block. Bad because it will release the pressure to be good and more likely become good.

During your walk, take a seat on a bench. Close your eyes, what do you hear? What disrupts your reveries? What thoughts intrude?

Find a storefront that is remarkable. Stop in front of it. Why this one? Describe it in great detail, as if to someone in a letter. Does it remind you of anything? Are there mannequins? Can you picture their afterlives—

If you were to choose a garment or a wig or hat or pair of shoes, etc. to wear that is currently displayed and for sale on the Plaza, what would you choose? Outfit yourself. A flâneurian must.

Do you see a pigeon? What is it doing?

What is the Plaza’s detritus? In other words, what bits of garbage do you see? Can you imagine the journey of one of these bits of detritus? Describe.

There were more instructions, but I culled transgressively. It then devolved into a scrawled series of questions, as if he was rushed. This was his last:

If you were to describe the Plaza to someone who’d never heard of it, say, a Berliner who lived a century ago, how would you describe it?

*

Typical store displays on the Plaza Saint-Hubert are maximalist no matter what season. Panes of glass house crowded mannequins with wigs askew in gowns or erotic regalia, or display motley fantastical goods, plastic saints, glass Buddhas, eight-inch Stardance heels in black rhinestone, imported lamps with stained glass shades and mini disco lights which flash and spin as you pass by. To walk the Plaza is to whirl, the gaze in orbit as the feet plod on. The afternoon of my visit during the plague month of December 2020, everywhere’s a sheen of satin. Cloud light brushes the panes and reflects my spectral version of me amid pleather and crinoline. Winter boots at $100 off, small statues of Mary with her head piously tilted at various angles like a pigeon, Jesus, set behind two twirling gold and green siren lights, crucified in a plastic gold frame with plump, poorly-scaled cherubim at his feet, polyester wall of veils like a limp coral reef, a bra of metal “dragon scales” slung on an armless torso in the window of the fetish shop. I catch the shopkeeper’s eye as I scrawl, and turn away, wondering how to describe the sense of COVID and renovation-induced anxiety I feel in the salespeople on the Plaza, pushing me to buy, promising to take off the taxes. As shopping intensifies in the plague month of December, a sense of urgency for shopkeepers heightens, and the relation between Plaza loiterer, me this month, and Plaza merchant feels tense and alienated. Our relationships suffer or do not exist at all. There’s a sign behind the merchant: BDSM lessons with Johnny.

I pass the sunburnt saints outside the Jean Talon metro, Vladimir and Estragon, who have sat there every day for years, saying hello whether one gives them change or not. I approach the holy ghost of Victor Varacalli’s prize-winning post, La Foule, a little further, at the entrance of the Plaza, the first of the many posts to hold up its ornate 1.2-km long glass awning circa 1984, now gone. In French, they called it a rideau de verre, a curtain of glass. The city had hoped to boost sales by 25% by adjusting the physical setting of the Plaza, though earlier attempts had been made. Plans to establish “the world’s biggest shopping centre” on Rue Saint-Hubert by a “thorough ‘face-lifting’ and beautification program” were made as early as 1959 by Wilfrid Sauvé, president of the St. Hubert Merchants’ Association. The curtain of glass covered the wide sidewalks at a steep angle that ended halfway up the second storey windows and the posts, curved like canes, were a soft bluey-green I find three layers of paint down in the old Montreal apartments I inhabit, or the algae in the tidepools of my British Columbian childhood. Between the awning and the road were elderly trees, apparently sick. But now the awning is gone, the street’s dug up, trees cut down, and a new awning has emerged, right-angled and soldier-like. I called Varacalli last week to ask him about his post. I’m sad the art was not recuperated as they took down the old awning—he told me. I’ll give you one piece of advice. Archive, archive your shit. The new awning’s posts are a sleek pale grey, but someone put a sticker of a forested island the same green of the old posts on the first one, under blue skies, that I fall into and drown in, and hear beneath its surface a voice that says other worlds are possible.

At home on Reddit I find a post titled “Plaza St-Hubert sans marquise, sans arbre.” Hypersky writes, looks just like Fallout 4 when you first walk in Concord looking down the street towards the Museum. Someone who then deleted their name wrote, Berlin, 1944, colorized. Maybe it was Walter Benjamin.

*

The next morning there’s a message on my phone. He’s agreed to meet me. I make a coffee and watch the light come in. It has rained. I go to the place I first saw him and look up. On the new awning’s flat glass surface, pooled droplets become hematite in the slanting light. When he arrives, Benjamin tells me that as a child, he’d get hypnotized watching raindrops sidle down his bedroom window the year he was sick and kept home from school. I tell him I’m not from the Plaza, not from Quebec, and unlike many Montrealers, I love the rain (my soul’s default weather) but I feel that I belong here, on the Plaza, as one who is cast under a spell. He nods, seems lost in thought. This morning, I knew I’d feel better if I just went to the Plaza. I could watch the pearls of rain on the awning evaporate, leaving faint white outlines of what they once were. Benjamin interrupts my dream: I don’t know why I’m here. These are not arcades.

*

When it rains, I learn how small a world can be. The strong nucleus and the visible surface of an intact droplet work in tandem to enlarge it to a critical scale. But on the Plaza in 2020 I can’t help but see an economic ideal of neoliberal capitalism establish itself in the structure of a drop: its invisible centre, its glossy surface, and its ability to “overcome tension” in order to grow. I also feel that the rain soothes the Plaza, but of course it could be just that it soothes me. I like the sound of it falling on the glass, a drumming with the soft pads of one’s fingers, then with nails, though the new awning doesn’t protect the Plaza’s loiterers much and I watch the concrete beneath me darken and the dry path narrow.

[To be continued]