But no one else heard the singer, for what are a dead poet's words remembered by heart worth in an age when one can "google it"? Just standing, looking, and listening seemed so out of date, like the Virgin looking down upon the tourists as they scurried next store to the Bonsecours Market, a large commercial hall where rather than receive the good help of spiritual sustenance, they could buy apparel and accessories in the church of commerce. Tourists swam safely through the place, finding help and salvation in a buyer's paradise, the current wisdom.
So he turned and walked away, climbing the crosstown streets that would take him to the neighborhood around McGill University. In The Word bookstore, he spent an hour looking through the used books and talking with the owner Adrian. Here he felt at home, greeted as he was by a black and white framed photo of Leonard Cohen that welcomes all poets and dreamers who frequent this intimate storefront housed in an unprepossessing nineteenth-century brick building. He overheard a woman ask Adrian for directions, and his reply gave Curtin reason to hope. Adrian said to the woman, "Well, you can always get lost and see what you find. That may be more interesting." And he chuckled. But the woman wanted the straight way, the road more traveled, nothing serendipitous; getting lost was not on her agenda. And after a few minutes, she went outside the store to wait for her companion who was still looking at books. The woman was studying something on her cell. Curtin imagined it was the bars.
The way the bookstore was arranged seemed to mirror his mind, a mind that seemed out of tune with the times. For his mind moved from one category of thought to another, as the books on the shelves moved from art to poetry to philosophy without signs signifying a change. They flowed into each other. He knew, of course, that all thought was one continuous stream fed by tributaries, and even many of the tributaries couldn't be found since they ran underground. It was only the modern mind that wished to categorize and control, the instrumental reasoning mind that had come to dominate the Western world and had proclaimed that humans were machines, that wished for signs declaring separable categories of life and thought. He knew that the best writers in the books that surrounded him wrote so many of their truest words when they thought they were writing something else. This inadvertent way of living seemed to make the woman looking for directions nervous.
Curtin often got lost, for he didn't have a smart phone to give him directions. A colleague he had met for lunch laughed when he told him that. These phones are really indispensable, he had said; you really should get one. And then he showed him photographs he had stored on the machine. He had hundreds. Its power was awe inspiring, a small device that allowed world-wide communication in a flash anywhere you were. You could capture the past with it; travel the world in an ethereal instant without moving; never be out of "touch" without being touched. It made him wonder: Where does true power lie? Was he out of touch? What did he want to touch?
On he walked through the City of Saints, passing McGill University, where he noticed the innocent appearance of students walking to and fro. He wondered what it must be like to be beginning one's studies. Did they learn anything about what had gone on at their university? Did they learn about the deep currents that informed history, the true nature of current affairs, or were their professors spouting superficial nonsense that kept them safe in cushy positions? From his experience in academia, Curtin knew that the university had been co-opted by the state and now functioned as an appendage of the war makers. Liberal arts now meant neo-liberalism and political correctness. Dissent meant dismissal, and so he realized that only those students who might browse through used bookstores like The Word might serendipitously discover the truth about their world. Most would be brainwashed. But they won't know it.
He had no phone, but Curtin could hear the screams and groans coming from McGill, the people screaming no, no, no from Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron's "Sleep Room," as he fed hallucinogens and electrical shocks to "patients," the victims of his notorious CIA MKUltra mind-control experiments in which he wiped the brain clean of so-called negative thoughts and replaced them with "good ones." He was not dreaming. He heard Val Orlikow screaming, as the good doctor, the President of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations, made her mind a blank slate by erasing any memory of her husband and reducing her to toddler status. She thought she was being treated for postpartum depression. The sounds of torture rattled his mind, the sounds of human desperation and the sounds of Cameron's taped messages fed to almost comatose patients in what he called "psychic driving." The prototypical experiments for the age of digital dementia. Black sites. He saw Cameron smile, his legacy secure.
Curtin felt immensely sad as he saw a young college student cross in front of him. She seemed to be in a trance and almost bumped into him. She was beautiful, and her ears were plugged with ear buds, and when he turned to see her walk away, he noticed her backpack had a small pink teddy bear hanging from it. And he remembered the concluding lines to Cohen's "Suzanne":
And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind
Walking brought memories, associations, reveries, and thoughts. Drugs and technology could erase them. He realized that there was as much worth forgetting as remembering, as both were arts that opposed the sick science and technology that had overtaken so much of society. But what to remember and what to forget? Was that student trying to remember or forget something with that teddy bear that hung as a talisman? Were those earbuds drowning out memories or dangerous thoughts? Who had touched her mind? Thoreau had said it's very hard to forget what's worse than useless to remember. And Curtin realized that he had honed his own forgettery to rid his mind of all the useless data the corporate mass media were pumping out, data used to create chaos and confusion, when much was so obvious if one just opened one's eyes to the truth. If he had a cell phone, he mused, he might never have to remember or forget. The secret to communication might be solved. Maybe someday he could be downloaded or uploaded into a phone, whichever it is, and all his problems would be solved.
"Come here, I want to see you," Alexander Graham Bell said to Watson in the first telephone call. Watson remembered it differently. He recalled Bell saying, "Come here I want you." So much wanting and forgetting and remembering made Curtin's head spin. So much desire for the presence of the absent other. But whom to call? How? Or was it the absence of the present other? Could one turn and say, "What is it you want?"
He and his wife kept walking toward the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where there was an exhibit of Picasso's use of African art and artifacts: "From Africa to the Americas: Face-To-Face Picasso, Past and Present." Picasso, a believer in magic and the occult, was notoriously opposed to reason and logic and understanding. He once said that "people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree." Curtin and his wife had once attended a gala opening of a large Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The galleries were filled with celebrities, their masks intact, oohing and ahhing at the art work. At the time he wondered what they would say if he asked them how they understood this or that piece. Did they just stand or understand? Would they say, "What a genius; he had the magic touch?"
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