Just Fine (5 page)

IX

M
ARIE WANTED TO HELP.
“Sure, but isn't there some pill you could take?”

I didn't fault her for asking, but there was no easy answer. Of course, there are pills of every colour and kind.

I didn't mention the little green pill they gave soldiers who were charged with dangerous missions during D-Day, a pill that caused instant death and was to be swallowed to avoid divulging secret information if they were captured by the enemy. Because, unlike me, Marie is easily upset, among other things by the idea of suicide. She might have concluded I was depressed when, in fact, I'm more angry than depressed.

I tried to explain to Marie that, since it's primarily women who suffer from agoraphobia, prescribing a tranquilizer seems like too easy a solution, like a Band-Aid on a wound, like a way to keep them quiet and to put off examining the root of the disease. Medication, in calming the effects of the illness, risks attenuating the search for a cause. I added that many agoraphobes detest medicines: exasperated at being so dependent on friends and family for their slightest movements, they can't bear the idea of further dependence. For them, no drug could ever be synonymous with a cure.

To make certain Marie understood, I told her about the spring, some fifteen minutes by car from our neighbourhood, where lots of people go to draw pure, clear water at no charge. Marie hadn't heard of the place.

“Well, as far as I'm concerned, that spring might as well be a bloody mountain. And yet, there are houses all along the road. Alright, it's not spectacular, but it's no brush land either. And though it's more of an Anglo place, it seems to me I ought to be able to go there anyhow.” Marie sat perfectly still. I'd hit on the right topic. “Worst thing is, I can't stop thinking about it. I'd like to be able to go whenever I want, but I don't feel I can and it turns me inside out. I think about it every day. I try to get ready to go, I start weighing all the pros and cons, and in the end I just stay home because there are too many things against me. Either too many clouds, or not enough time, or too many Anglos out there, or the car could break down and I'd have no one to call, or there's nothing good on the radio, or nothing good in my life. There's always something or other to stop me going. It's pure madness, I tell you!”

Marie seemed to understand. “You ask me, I'd say you're thinking too hard on it.”

“Probably.”

“. . .”

“Do you suppose a man would give himself so much trouble for a jug of water?”

The question took shape on Marie's forehead as she rested her hands, dripping with chicken fat, on the edge of her pans.

“If there was a commercial dispenser of spring water not far from home where you could fill up your jug in a flash for a couple of dollars, do you suppose a man would bother himself to go for water some place he knows he'll be scared?”

Marie didn't know what to say.

“And if a man couldn't even think about giving himself all that trouble, how could he even imagine the possibility of being scared?”

Marie eyed me quizzically. She wasn't sure she'd understood, but she had an idea. “You mean a man who can't see farther than his nose ain't smart enough to be afraid?” That was another way to put it. And Marie concluded, “No, I don't guess I know too many men'd give themselves such a heap of trouble just for a jug of water.”

*

Not all human beings are constituted in the same way; that is, they don't all have the same capacity to adapt. Genetic and sociocultural factors come into play as do the limits of perception. Difficulties in adapting can also arise from conditioning: women, for example, are more inclined to phobic neuroses than men are, perhaps because their place in society tends to be predetermined. Statistics show that anxiety generally takes the form of phobic neuroses in women, whereas men tend more toward alcoholism and drug addiction. As for agoraphobia, the fear of wide open spaces, women make up three quarters of those who suffer from it.

Phobias also tend to take root in adolescents and young adults. These sensitivities among young people are particularly revealing, especially about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. When adapting to adult life is too difficult, as is often the case in rapidly evolving societies, young people may simply refuse to grow up. But not all such refusals are signs of an inability to adapt. A refusal to adapt to a reality that one considers unhealthy can be a conscious decision and indicative of a social, rather than biological, malaise. As a given society evolves, it gives rise to new types of anxiety: the fear of flying, for example, appeared with the first commercial flights.

*

Marie was beginning to know me. This wasn't the first time she'd read my mind. “You're going anyway, I hope.”

“. . .”

She looked me straight in the eye. “You've got to go. You wouldn't do that to us.”

“. . .”

“Don't even think about it. You're going, I tell you. There's got to be a way.” And with that, she took the sieve full of chicken bones, shook it to drain the few last drops, and poured its contents mechanically into the organic recycling bin. “These new bins sure are convenient. Can't imagine how we made do without them.”

*

Bruegel must have been about twenty-three years old in
1551
, when he embarked upon the traditional voyage to Italy that so many artists and thinkers of his era undertook in pursuit of Italianism, or the grace of ancient and distant beauty, which was in style at the time. Although he had recently been inducted into the guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, Bruegel, like many of his fellow artists, must have had trouble earning a living during such a difficult economic period and, therefore, would have been easily persuaded to make the classic voyage in order to complete his training. During this period, historians tell us, Antwerp was crawling with artists: they were certainly far more numerous than bakers or butchers, whose livelihoods were quite secure because their products were essential.

It is also possible that Bruegel undertook the trip at the suggestion of his publisher, Jerome Cock, who owned an engraving studio and one of the most active print shops in the Netherlands. Cock hoped to produce a series of prints of great alpine landscapes and may have convinced Bruegel to make the trip in order to sketch the countryside along the way, which it seems Bruegel did. A number of these drafts were discovered in the works of other artists employed by Cock, who published his
Great Landscapes
series in
1555
.

But all of these very good reasons to go would not have sufficed had Bruegel himself not been curious about new landscapes and people. Whatever the case, his decision to undertake the pilgrimage and the manner in which the experience subsequently permeated his work has led some to conclude that the voyage marks the true beginning of his artistic career. Like so many details of Bruegel's life, the dates of his departure from Antwerp and his return to his native land are uncertain, but it would appear that the trip lasted three years. Whether he went alone or accompanied and the precise itinerary that led him to Sicily remain mysteries. Our knowledge of the historical period suggests that he covered an average of fifty kilometres a day on horse-back, that he rode mostly during the day through the silence of the countryside, and that he was often obliged to stop to let military troops pass.

*

One of the most important psychological assets humans can possess
is the ability to feel completely at ease in their environment. Any fear of this environment leads inexorably to a decline and confinement, even a sort of slavery. These unfortunate consequences are probably the reason fear has taken on a negative connotation, since as an emotion, fear is really neutral, simply a reaction to a given situation.

The affective dimension of personality, from which fear emanates, is one of the three great components of the human psyche: the first includes cognitive activities, or processes relating to consciousness and knowledge; the second encompasses affective processes, those that relate to feelings and emotions; the third is comprised of the conative processes that deal with the dynamics of human motivation. These three components represent the forces at work in the processes of knowledge, feeling, and action.

Emotion is not easily analyzed but, as its etymological root indicates, the term implies a movement, a displacement. In the best of cases, emotional movement triggers a kind of internal reorganization of the senses, which enables one to adapt more or less rapidly to the environment. More than simply a matter of behaviour, emotions are really a human being's adaptive response to the environment. In cases of behavioural disorders, emotions are nothing more than an inappropriate response to a stimulus. Excessively difficult tasks, novelty, surprise, and over-motivation are, generally, the causes of emotional behaviour. Often an emotion corresponds to the difference between the requirements of a situation and the means at our disposal to respond. Even too great a desire to respond appropriately to a situation can negatively affect an individual's behaviour or efficiency.

*

There are those who believe that Bruegel began his voyage by dallying, leaving what was then the Netherlands near the end of
1551
and then slowly crossing France from north to south. There is proof of his passing through Lyons and one of his paintings may be a view of Vienne, which is not far from Lyons. He appears to have descended the Rhone valley, with a possible detour to Briançon and to the little village of Pont-de-Cervières, around August
15
,
1552
, more than six months after his departure. He would then have gone through Avignon to reach Marseilles, where he embarked upon a ship that sailed along the coast of Italy to the Strait of Messina. It was along this route that Bruegel presumably drew a live sketch of Reggio in flames, a Calabrian town torched by the Turks in
1552
. He would have landed in Sicily and visited Palermo before making his way up the Italian boot as far as Naples. He probably passed through Fondi en route to Rome, where he stayed for some time in
1553
and from where he made several excursions, notably to Tivoli. He is then said to have stopped in Florence, visited Pisa and the Emilia region, and befriended the great geographer Scipio Fabius in Bologna. It is possible that during this time, Bruegel was travelling with another Antwerp painter, Martin de Vos, who lived in Italy from
1552
to
1558
.

Probably Bruegel waited until the spring of
1554
to cross the Alps, a perilous journey to undertake in winter. He took advantage of the good weather to explore the mountain chain from one end to the other. All signs point to his having visited the Dolomites and the Tyrol as far as Innsbruck, travelled through the Grisonides and Saint Gothard Pass, and reached Geneva and the shores of Lake Leman. Though no one knows the exact date of Bruegel's return to Antwerp, all agree that he was there in
1555
.

X

T
ERRY
T
HIBODEAU PRESUMED
everyone felt the way he did, a bit lonely, never quite like everyone else. Since he'd always felt this way, it never occurred to him to fuss over it. He carried the feeling naturally, just as he carried his Saint Christopher medal around his neck.

Terry Thibodeau remembered the day his third-grade teacher gave him the medal. The young woman knew that Terry liked the story of this saint best of all. Terry was impressed with Saint Christopher's idea of helping people, especially children, to cross rivers. For a long time, he'd imagined the saint standing by an abandoned bridge on the Wisener River, ready to take him, Terry, on his shoulders, if ever he went by there again. He could even picture, some way along the shore, the small cabin in which Saint Christopher slept and kept his basic provisions. Terry didn't know if the Wisener froze in winter and he hardly dared think what happened to Saint Christopher if it did: did he hole up in his cabin until spring or did he pack up and continue his saintly duties somewhere farther south? Since Terry could only imagine the Crossing Saint barefoot and wearing a light tunic, it seemed cruel to think of him at his post in winter, sitting in the snow waiting for a passenger or wading through icy water between two snowbound shores.

*

Under the sign of Cancer, the fourth astrological house is, strictly speaking, the house of houses; that is, it relates to property, to the comfort and improvement of the home. The house of private life and reclusion, it also encompasses hidden treasures and mined riches. As the house where life begins, it includes heredity and ancestry, psychological roots and atavisms, or those needs and drives that emanate from the depths of the unconscious, and that also often give rise to works of art, music, and poetry. The fourth house expresses the weight of our destiny at birth, with all the assistance and obstacles it carries. It's the house of all that we inherit at birth and of our familial environment during childhood. It's the house of good and bad feelings, of attachments, of the subjective self as the foundation for one's personality and interior life. The fourth house ensures the passage from childhood to adult life. In that sense, it is the generator of power. House of life's beginnings, the fourth house is also that of life's end, of posthumous celebrity, and of one's burial place.

*

Even had he tried, Terry Thibodeau would have found it difficult to pinpoint the reasons for his feeling of solitude. He'd had plenty of support from friends and family during his childhood in Dieppe on Lafrance Street, between Gauvin Road and Champlain Street, not far from the Second Stream, beside the Champlain Body Shop his father and brothers operated. During his adolescence, not being especially interested in dented sheet metal, he'd found a job as a bagger at the Champlain Place supermarket. He could probably have made a career of it but the motivation was lacking. After high school and failed attempts at community college and university, Terry ran out of ideas: most trades didn't interest him and those that did seemed out of reach. Actually, he couldn't even have named one. What he wanted was something inexpressible, incomprehensible. He struggled along for several years, looking for a job at a time when jobs were increasingly scarce, and then one day he got lucky.

*

An escape from frustration for some, a longing for new experiences for others, tourism today allows the individual human being to enter into a new relationship with the world. This victory over space, which is the result of a victory over time, allows each of us to create a kind of personal geography of the world, a geography defined by explorations that reconcile the myth of the traveller with our unconscious image of what constitutes a voyage. This attempt to correspond to ancient and modern archetypes, to link up different times by travelling through space, is not so different from the human dream of immortality.

As it rattles and breaks open societies by redefining social relations, tourism changes how we think and make sense of things in as yet uncharted ways. For, everywhere tourists go, they remain outside of the political and of politics. This temporary suspension of responsibility is undoubtedly good for vacationers, who are generally trying to escape the demands of a highly industrialized society, but it has entirely different repercussions on those societies that depend on tourism for their survival. As a result, the new existential norms attributable to tourism have opened new areas for study in economics, the science of logical action, and in sociology, the science of alogical action.

In psychology, when travel is not simply discredited as pure escapism, it is seen as a reflection of the interior quest, the search for a centre, a ground of truth and peace. To the vast movement of people in our planetary space, psychology posits a corresponding and equally modern interior voyage of the individual into him or herself, a descent into the unconscious. In a curious reversal, the psychology of tourism and travel leads to a rereading of several classical myths: in particular, those of Poseidon, or the rush to water; Minerva, or continuing popular education; Sisyphus, or the impossibility of leisure; and Heliopolis, or the city of reassuring portents. Another mythical image, that of desertification or ecological imbalance, also comes into play and is linked with the idea of collective disaster. All this means that alongside those who travel unselfconsciously, there are also those, mostly women, who struggle to understand their behaviour and wonder why they feel like tourists — individuals at once complex and suffering from complexes — five kilometres from home.

*

Baron of oil and paper and pretty well all their subsidiary industries, from shipping and trucking, to newsprint, to toilet paper, not to mention frozen vegetables (which are also rich in fibre and sold to the proletariat by the thousands), the Irving multinational corporation had recently restored the dune of Bouctouche. And like God when He created the world, the Livings saw that it was indeed good. They now searched for another opportunity to do good. They forged ahead therefore, as they had when they built the upscale ecotourism centre, with its convenient cottages for tourists who came unprepared or lacked relatives, along the dune on the beach. The cottages were clustered in small groups — tourists tend to be gregarious — near the water or along the bicycle path that encircles the greater Bouctouche region from the back of the bay into the Pays de la Sagouine, a region made famous by Antonine Maillet's Acadian characters. All along the route a number of scenes inspired by the work of Maillet were enacted. As these performances were well received, the Irving family made plans to build a theatre school in Bouctouche, dedicated to the roles engendered by Madame Maillet's work, and meant to preserve Bouctouche and all its people, both fictional and real, for posterity.

The ecotourism centre was rolling along splendidly, just like a bicycle wheel all shining and well-greased. The smooth and efficient planning of activities succeeded in extending the summer season beyond its natural inclination and allowed some one hundred people to accumulate enough stamps to get back on
UI
, unemployment insurance, a program that some clever national strategists had unnamed in order to erase all notions of leisure or free time and renamed
EI
, employment insurance, to promote a spirit of enterprise and productive labour. Thanks to the Irving empire's intuition about its tenth house, almost no one had time to brandish picket signs in protest against the insensitivity and inaction of governments in the matter of job creation. And in the excitement over the promised opening of the Bouctouche École Nationale, anger even died down over the closure of the theatre department at the Université de Moncton.

*

Sisyphus or the myth of impossible leisure time. In a dream one January night, I take a pleasure trip to New York with a friend. But once there, I am called to work: it seems I am to replace a truck driver who has fallen ill. I'm to drive his trailer truck to some other American state, a trip which will take about a week. Somehow, the assignment doesn't strike me as abnormal; it's as though I were already a trucker or as though I knew how to and could do anything. Then I see the mammoth truck in question, parked between skyscrapers on a narrow street, boxed in among a dozen other vehicles in dense traffic. I also see all the poles and street signs I'm likely to hit as I try to drive off this street. I realize the enormity and absurdity of the task. I realize that what is being asked of me makes no sense, that I don't have the required skills. So I go back to my employer and explain my concerns. Three guys in a small basement office listen and quickly concur. They decide to find someone else to take care of the truck. All this is done calmly and reasonably. I leave the tiny office, find my friend in the street, and continue our trip without further ado. What strikes me about this dream is the ease with which normal and absurd situations coincide. Its harmonious denouement makes it a good dream, and yet I can't help wondering why it's necessary to go through it all.