Before the dawn

Our teenager friend Jessica and I spent eight minutes, on Saturday, immersed in a Virtual Reality show, and I am still thinking about its implications. Jessica is from Toronto, and so was the show. It was created by Anishinaabe film-maker Lisa Jackson in collaboration with her fellow artists and is entitled Biidaaban: First Light. It is an example of Indigenous futurism. Remember that term, because this is a new trend in art and literature, in Canada and elsewhere. We came across it on the ground floor of the National Arts Centre here in Ottawa, where the VR experience was being offered cost free to anyone interested, as part of the current Mòshkamo festival, the first festival of its kind, that celebrates " the resurgence of Indigenous Arts" in Canada. The Algonquin word mòshkamo apparently means something like "appearing out of water." Last December I went to a talk about the Indigenous arts by the festival's instigator, Lori Marchand, an interesting person! I helped to publish an article about that talk in the February issue of our CFUW-Ottawa newsletter (on page 6).

What you see in 3-D, when you put on the headset, are recognisable images of the Toronto cityscape, but re-imagined, as if some catastrophe had obliterated all of today's citizens and their accoutrements. All that's left of Toronto is the ruined buildings, like some prehistoric Inca palace rediscovered by archaeologists, wild plants growing out of the cracks, with pools of water inhabited by turtles in the subway stations. The city is silent except for bird calls and the chirp of crickets. There's a canoe lying by the subway tunnel and a tent made from animal skins. A girl dressed in white is digging something out of a hole. Crows hop around on the stones. You see the moon rise and the stars coming out. The other sounds you hear through the headset are the voices of Anishinaabe speakers intoning prayers to Mother Earth in their own language, as these images appear. Suddenly you are surrounded by stars, the Milky Way seen in all its splendour above the ruins of the city, unpolluted by man-made lights. The stars swirl around you. (This bit was so powerful that I felt I should have been given a rail to hang onto; I was quite unbalanced by it!) As the dawn comes, you find yourself on the roof of a skyscraper above the ruins of Nathan Phillips Square in the open air. If you step forward you can peer down to ground level, over a low ledge. It gives you vertigo, but it is all strangely beautiful, and peaceful.

Do I need to spell out the implications of this artwork? Perhaps there's an element of wishful thinking in this dream of a future Canada in which the native peoples are the only survivors, the only ones who would have managed to cope with an apocalypse and start over, in a way that's primitive but at least in tune with nature. When I described the VR film to Chris (who wasn't there to watch it) he was reminded of Edwin Muir's visionary poem about The Horses:

Barely a twelvemonth after 

The seven days war that put the world to sleep, 

Late in the evening the strange horses came...

from "some wilderness of the broken world".

And I have been thinking of Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung, an invented word meaning: der Untergang der Götter vor Anbruch eines neuen Zeitalters = the downfall of the Gods before the advent of a new age.