Grow

My b,

Regularly, you ask me why we do all this, why the power games, why this fascination with Rolexes and TSX growth, why buckle down when we are so small on our tiny pebble in the universe. You oscillate between childhood and philosophical questions, but tomorrow you will be an adult within the meaning of the law. Not that of biology, which would situate the maturity of your brain more at 25, but that of men, which makes you responsible for your actions. For my part, I have thought for a long time that you are an old soul. Much wiser and immense than your frame of gentle giant lets it see. You have grasped the essential, the rarity and the singularity, two fragile natures, endangered species.

For your 18th birthday, you wanted to go to Retrouvailles Osheaga with me. A way to forget everything, to have fun under the stars while dancing to the sound of Soran or JJ Wilde. We will be kicked out at 11 pm; Saint-Lambert is sleeping. You paid $ 10 to buy a sticker ” Fuck Saint-Lambert ”. My adopted suburb has become an extinguisher symbol for your generation. You are right. I doubt revolutions emerge from cobbled comfort between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. They will be born in the streets of Montreal, like last friday, in broad daylight, crippling the economy and traffic. Thousands of you went on strike and demanded climate justice.

Me, I read Firefighters and arsonists, the last essay by Martine Delvaux. It’s a quilt of powerful texts about our burning world, a sad song addressed to her daughter who is your age and that of Greta Thunberg, with burning words of topicality. You need to surround yourself to go to the front. And if this book is addressed to your generation, deep down, it denounces mine and those which precede it.

We shame you. One day, for sure, you will ignite the powder.

You know my fear of fire (I lived the fire that devastated everything), and reading this very well-written essay made me rediscover this smell of soot on an even larger scale, that of our whole little stone.

Let’s not kill the beauty of the world

The other day, I explained to you that there are many ways to fight. Some write books, organize demonstrations, brandish their fists. Others, like you, approach the subject, transpose it into images. Your language is silent and universal. We need beauty, silence and slowness to get through this crisis too. Your photos speak to me. Like the poems of Michel Garneau. Hey, this one I’m giving you for your 18th birthday …

“Quite delicately I die every day

and i live like i never thought

that one could live and that ecstasy be daily

and that I was responsible

that his happiness has no real circumstance

take everything

black and all light

all the flower and all the strength of age

the whole wound and the whole scar

all life and all death

we are all children of this singing water

and then which is abolished within the source ”

It seems to me that you can get lost and find yourself in these words.

There is also Delvaux who quotes the young writer Édouard Louis: “Art must make the world unbearable, by showing how much the world is in reality, and it is by showing how unbearable it is that ‘we can give energy and inspiration to others to make it more bearable, more beautiful. “

The problem is our inability to imagine another way of doing things

Martine Delvaux speaks to her daughter in her incendiary rant, but she speaks to all of you, Generation Z: “You, whose generation is afflicted by depression and anxiety, according to specialists. We’d rather think you are capricious than admit that we don’t want to hear your screams. Of your requests. Will we agree to carpool, sacrifice trips to Cuba and eat vegan bacon so you won’t be frying in 30 years? We are sinisters doped with the speed and the intoxication of a very temporary superiority in the great chain of life. But above all, we are distinguished by our blah-blah-blah, as Greta Thunberg pointed out this week to Youth4Climate: “We can no longer let those in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah-blah-blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is action. “

Dried up

I’m going to put a rosary on the clothesline so that I don’t run out of water. My friend Andrée washes her laundry with water from her old above-ground swimming pool and sprinkles her garden with water from the pond. The water of its source, always faithful for 40 years, suddenly dried up at the end of this too dry summer. She uses her toilet siphon to do her loads. I nicknamed her “the Donalda of the Pinnacle”.

After the fire, I’m afraid of drought. I was recently asked what would be a future niche? I would bet on dry toilets and lavender, both very economical in H₂O and complementary. Denial is not a bad niche either, with a few ice cubes and a dash of Campari.

Like Martine Delvaux, I wonder what color the end of the world will have. Her daughter does not want children. You and your friends are rather skeptical or categorical on the question. Your friend Yudé told me: “Me, I wait until I turn 30 and see what the planet will be like before deciding. Wise. Realistic. You are being asked to be the firefighters in history. And for the sake of hope, I won’t tell you about the IPCC, those global climate experts who use words like “Irreversible” Where ” unrecognizable “.

“You and your friends are in mourning for the future,” Delvaux told his daughter. This is what saddens me (despair?) The most. The wells might be dry, but my heart never. The tragedy will not only be Greek, it will be completely inhuman. This is a very curious way to become an adult in an adulescent world that refuses its responsibilities, while the IPCC stipulates that barely a fraction of the warming observed since the 19th century.^e century has its origin of natural causes. Man is a supernatural invention. May you act without blah-blah-blah.

Mom

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