Life in my city, Montreal, wraps itself around unseen centers of gravity. What makes all the difference in this city is not the particular architecture — a mix of old world aesthetics, some dashes of large scale brio, a livable human scale, and a few heroically bad judgments — but the ungraspable specters of place that lounge at every street corner.
One night in the fall, for the thousandth time, a francophone clerk at the corner grocery store wished me a “bon fin de journee.” As I walked home I thought about how, for English speakers, there really is no equivalent of a “fin de journee.” This is why I like the French in this city. Not only does their energy keep out the unilingual riff-raff, but they know at some profound level of their being that an “end-of-the-day” is a something, that it is worth noting and naming, and that, without this animating extra-being, a city is merely a collection of roads and structures.
This “extra-being” is what Gilles Deleuze — stealing from Duns Scotus with a flourish of philosophical shamelessness — calls a “haecceity.” The closest English translation we can come up with is “thisness.” What lacks thingness — the specific physical presence in a time and place — can possess a very identifiable thisness. In a walking city like Montreal, the first example that comes to me is of a walk itself. Where is “a walk” located? Surely not in the very act of walking. I walk often, but I am not always taking “a walk.” The walk is not my body in the act of walking, the space through which I walk (I can traverse the very same space while simply walking and later while taking “a walk”). It is not my intention to take a walk that creates “a walk” (I often have the intention that comes to nothing, or, conversely, sometimes find myself taking a walk that has somehow emerged from the act of walking). “A walk,” then is something very real, but unlocateable. It is what accompanies a certain set of actions in a certain place and done in a certain way. It holds the elements together but does not pre-exist them.
In the same way, the end-of-the-day is made up of a time (I’d say after evening, between 6 and 10), but also of a kind of gentle tiredness, an anticipation of pleasure, a perceptible slowing down of life around you, a communal sense of something — large or small — that has been accomplished, a purpling of the sky, the flickering of artificial light. Most of all, a good end-of-the-day envelops you in a sense of well being, of somehow having landed exactly where you should have. So, as strange as it sounds, not every day has an end-of-the-day. Some days simply end. Nothing happens. Nothing comes together in the consistency of the haecceity, the very particular thisness. But when the haecceity comes about, you don’t mistake it for anything else.
A city (or life in a city, which amounts to the same thing, since a city is not so much a place as a world in which a certain way of being becomes possible) builds itself on its haecceities. Its landmarks are filled to brimming with event. Any landmark that does not open itself as an expanding container of events — of haecceities — is a failed landmark, a white elephant, an eyesore. Yet even the ugliest landmark takes on beauty if it takes the shape of the events that have come to fill it. I am thinking of an abandoned factory across the river at the western end of the Old Port that is as graceful and dignified as a cathedral.
As with many things, this filling of the city with events is most easily exemplified at the personal level (though I will not stop at the personal). As a walk in my neighbourhood, I traverse not just spaces, but events, emotions, mnemic traces, colourings of spaces with affect. At one corner I remember the abrupt ending of a relationship. One block away, at Carré St Louis, I am taken back twenty five years to a tongue tied evening with a group that included a beautiful and talkative girl who was unaware of me. A block farther and I pass the location of a restaurant that served as a kind of testing ground for every new relationship. And on and on. I can trace a line from my apartment to downtown that will take me past breakfasts, reconciliations, the rediscovery of my brother, an evening of conversation with a virtual stranger on a balcony spectacularly overlooking the nighttime skyline. We who have lived large parts of our lives in a place have similar trajectories. This is how we lay claim to a city. It is a world that holds together precisely because we have lived in it in a certain way.
But there is something more than the personal at work in the life of the city. Haecceities are, in fact, always more than the personal. It is not merely because of a particular memory of mine that the street corner of the abrupt breakup resonates. It is not simply the recalling of an emotion. The street corner is wrapped up in an affect — the sudden impression of an ending that is not restricted to an emotional experience. The ending of the relationship was a matter of time. One life-world coming to a close. A new one opening up. It was made not just of a particular decision — the decision not to pursue the woman walking away — but of the act of decision itself. The sudden “no” that stopped the impulse to follow and talk. In walking past this corner I traverse a moment of myself that has left me to go take its station in the world. I traverse some impersonal creature that still acknowledges me, but has found its own life apart from mine.
These impersonal creatures — haecceities — that are both our own and forever apart from us are what any city’s life-world is made of. The particular haecceities are what give cities their singular being. I realize that the singular being of Montreal will take me more than one writing to trace out. Haecceities require a careful mapping. But the most detailed map begins with a single line (apologies to LaoTze). So I will begin my map with that most odd non-place place of our city: the “underground city.”
The Underground City is a slight embarrassment for most Montrealers because none of us knows where it is. I have been stymied by American tourists downtown asking me where they can find the underground city. I don’t know where to send them, and I am disappointed because I see in their eyes the anticipation of a place so magical — a whole city underground! — that anything short of a cross between Atlantis, Byzantium and Graceland will be a severe disappointment. The underground city — for those of a more prosaic bent — is mostly tourism department spin on the fact that our metro system links together a number of stations around which shopping malls have grown — Promenades du Catherdrale, Les Ailes de la Mode, The Eaton Center, Place Montreal Trust, Plaza Alexis Nihon, none of them particularly spectacular, but together…
Together, nothing, or next to nothing.
It is a collection of fair to middling malls. Period. Yet the image of the Underground City persists, and, persisting, it stands as the true incarnation of Montreal’s singularity. For anyone who has lived, shopped, worked in Montreal, it is clear that the true life is on the sidewalk. If you are looking for a used book store, an astrologer, a luthier, a tea shop, you will not find it in the underground city. If you are looking for a Zellers, a Canadian Tire, a Linen Chest or a Cinnabun, if you are, in short, from Calgary and homesick, the underground city is the place where you can forget that you are in Montreal.
The banal reality of the Underground City is not what makes it so much a part of the fabric of Montreal. In fact, it is more of a shameful necessity (so many shoppers, so little space) than a point of pride. We keep it underground for the same reason our darkest secrets are repressed: not just because they are painful but because they make us just like everyone else, the ugliness we have shunned in others — Toronto, I’m looking at you — reflecting back to us in our own image.
If a city is shaped by its imagination of itself, it is Montreal’s particular genius to turn its defenses into poetic image. We do not love this below ground strip mall, and we have some vague sense that term “Underground City” does not refer to that. “Underground City” — like “City of Gold,” “City of God” — slips its mooring from a location and begins to live in the extra-being of haecceity. There is an Underground City in Montreal, but it manifests itself in everything that makes this city singular. The marvelous city of the tourist’s imagination does not live along the metro line. We know that the Underground City — like the unconscious itself — is only to be found in flashes and fleeting glimpses. This is the beauty of our Underground City: it is everywhere and nowhere. It dodges your steps and haunts your imagination. Like an invisible companion whose invisibility is too often mistaken for absence, the Underground City reveals itself, not when you desire it, but when it decides that you are ready to see.
There is a street in Outremont that runs parallel to one of the busiest thoroughfares in Montreal, Park Avenue, and yet is surrounded by a silence so deep that it seems removed from space itself. There is — I swear I can remember — a restaurant that sprang up one night on the back patio of a family home in Mile End and was gone the next night. There is an outdoor terrasse near The University of Montreal, on a street as narrow as a medieval walkway, that I drank in once the night before my sister’s wedding and was never able to find again. Old men play cards in Jeanne Mance park by the glow of lanterns, and in their faces is a profound calm and humour. A luminous cross looks in my window. At night I see the tops of buildings outlined in purple neon as a lie in bed. And at night a searchlight goes across the skies, looking — so I was told in youth — for children who have run away from home. This is the Underground City. This is the city that lives alongside the city of brick and mortar. And when the happy tourist asks me where the Underground City is, I will tell them not to look for it. Find your walk. Find the stranger whose glance haunts you. Find the corner where people stand looking up at the skyscraper that was built to shine pink in the early evening… and then the underground city will find you.