It’s Always darkest before the Dawn , livre ebook

Raymond Viger & Colin McGregor
It’s Always Darkest
Before the Dawn





Éditeur
It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn

Éditions TNT
625 Avenue de la Salle
Montréal, Qc. H1V 2J3
(514) 256-9000 ● Fax: (514) 256-9444
www.editionstnt.com info@editionstnt.com

Cover Illustration
Juan Carlos Sanchez Lopez

Project Manager
Delphine Caubet

Copyright
Colin McGregor - Raymond Viger. The words printed herein make up a small slice of the story of our world. They have not been written selfishly, to be kept to ourselves. They are to be shared, offered in all humility, simply presented, and with love for you, the reader.
The partial reproduction of passages from this book is authorized for non-profit purposes, as long as the original source is mentioned and referenced.

Legal Deposit 2017
Legal deposit Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec
Legal deposit Library and Archives Canada

ISBN PAPIER 978-2-923375-45-8
ISBN PDF 978-2-923375-73-1
ISBN E-PUB 978-2-923375-74-8





Printed in Québec









THANK YOU
A week spent at a personal growth seminar gave me the opportunity to step back and perceive the gulf separating my father and I. A few weeks after the seminar, shortly before my father’s death I took the time to reduce the distance between us, for death divides people forever. Thank you, Marcel, for the seminar.
After that suicide, I went to find myself. I buried myself in reading and in work. Among all the books I devoured in this period, two authors touched me most deeply: Anne and Daniel Meurois-­Givaudin. I read all their books. Congratulations on your beautiful work!
When my emotions hit their boiling point, a little phrase resurfaced, one that helped save me. Thank you, Jean, for that phrase.
In my cry for help I was aided by Manon, an exemplar of courage who helped me hang on during a profoundly difficult transition period. Thank you, Manon.
I was guided by Marcel to find the help I needed. Thank you, Marcel. The help came in the form of René. Thank you, René.
After the crisis had pass ed, I foun d myself alone, completely emptied. Without knowing who I was, I searched for who I wished to be, and who I was at that moment. By luck I met an artist. She was a painter. Looking out on a magnificent Sainte Adèle landscape, listening to the murmurs of a babbling brook, I felt inspired by nature. I understood, and I felt, all the love and the sincerity she poured into her art. Her sensitivity touched me. Thank you, Diane.
All this allowed me to once again take up the reading l’d dropped for 8 months. By accident I happened across a passage I’d read before, but at a different time in my life it had left no impression. Here’s the quote, translated into English, from Anne and Daniel Meurois­-Givaudin’s book: Wésak: L’heure de la réconciliation (Wésak: The Hour of Reconciliation):
“ So pick up a pen and write. Follow your heart and write about your commitment to humanity. Use the words and phrases that murmur to you within your very soul, even if they’re shabbily dressed. Let them billow underneath your pen. That way, they’ll take on more life than you ever thought possible. They’ll be your guiding force; a speck of the spark of life that, underneath your fingers, takes on solid form. ”
Ever since childhood, I have always written; be it as a sports reporter, a writer of technical manuals, writing for Habitabec ... l’ve always written with my head. But now, l’ve discovered how to write with my heart. l’ve found myself by expressing in words what’s in my heart. And since this moment of discovery, l’ve never stopped. The more I write, the more I find myself.
Thanks to everyone,
Raymond.


Translator’s Introduction
André Malraux is one of my literary heroes.
Not for what he wrote, which is often too filled with descriptions of the political divides in whatever far-flung country the novel is set in to be really relatable to my reality. André Malraux, archaeologist, novelist, military pilot and France’s first culture minister under Charles de Gaulle, suffered all his life from Tourette’s Syndrome. This odd brain affliction, which makes for comical TV scenes of people screaming obscenities at inappropriate times, is more common than you’d think.
Perhaps as many as 1 in 25 pre-teenage boys, and a smaller but significant number of young females, suffer the involuntary tics and spasms Tourette’s brings. For most kids, these movements fade with the onset of adulthood.
As they did for me.
That doesn’t mean that the effects of Tourette’s don’t linger on in many forms: the occasional eruption of odd movements just when you most need to appear stable; circular thinking; and, most of all, memories of a childhood full of ridicule, and of useless orders by adults to stop fidgeting or else the dunce cap awaits in a cobwebbed corner of the classroom...
Malraux contemplated birds much as does Raymond Viger, co-founder of Café Graffiti. Raymond, as you will deduce when you read The Bird early on in this work, is a former commercial airline pilot. He’s the original French-language author of the vast majority of poems and essays in this slim volume.
Malraux was a flier himself, a student of clouds and of wind currents, so he was always on the lookout for what the birds were up to wherever he traveled. In his memoirs titled Antimémoires , he quotes French-Algerian journalist and writer Albert Camus:
Alors que dans la journée le vol des oiseaux parait toujours sans but, le soir ils semblent toujours retrouver une destination. Ils volent vers quelque chose. Ainsi, peut­ être, au soir de la vie...
Which means, in effect : In daytime, birds appear to fly around aimlessly. But at night, they always seem to have a destination. They’re flying towards something. So too, just maybe, in the evening of our lives...
Malraux knew Camus, the Nobel-prize winning author of The Stranger , very well. And Malraux didn’t think the passage referred to gaining wisdom only when you reach old age.
Camus died young, at 46, of an automobile accident; he wrote those words 10 years before that. Le soir de la vie is the age at which the shadows of dusk dim the blinding sunlight of our most unrealistic hopes. Then, we can see things clearly; we see the world for what it really is.
Sometimes, the evening of our lives comes much earlier than old age.
Sometimes it takes personal trauma to bring on the wisdom of the evening. That was the case for Raymond. His poetry deals with this period of transformation.
Unbridled optimism is a hard thing to shed in our corner of the globe where the American ideal of “ You can be anything you want, just dare to dream it’’ is something you hear over and over again.
Some human beings seem born with the wisdom of the evening, tempered with a steely drive to help others. We call those lucky few: “ Old Souls. ” I may have met one Old Soul in the last few years, and her name is Delphine Caubet, desk editor of The Social Eyes , the youth magazine and this book’s project manager. She is from an ancient part of France. Perhaps that older culture manufactures more of them. Read some of her pieces on line, in the magazine, or in their Reflet de société French language versions, and you’ll see I may be right.
For we in the majority, it takes hard knocks, even a long prison term, to become that bird who knows in which direction to fly.
Malraux argued that his Tourette’s was an advantage. It’s a brain disorder that lets the two hemispheres of your mind communicate, opening up vast new inner worlds, he would say. Indeed, he became a dealer in Oriental art and antiquities, bringing a businessman’s hard mastery of facts and profits to a creative sphere. He brought the no-nonsense cutthroat intrigues of war and politics into the literary world in a way few if any politicians have been able to. If ever there was a right-brain poet laureate of left-brain subjects, it is Malraux.
Oh yes, and there is Raymond Viger. A trained biologist, once a flier, now he is a grounded social worker/humanitarian/entertainment impresario. He still soars, but only in his aspirations to help youth. He brings a left-brain math approach to right-brain problems of depression, addiction... And it all began with writing, to get him through the darkest nooks and crannies of the maze of his own construction.
One more thing before we end here: I grew up largely in the small Laurentian town of Sainte­-Adèle, 67 kilometers north-west of Montreal, population 6,000 back then. It’s where Raymond found healing at a dark time. It’s a vacation town and truck stop nestled around a circular crater surrounded by mountains. The crater is full of cold, murky water: Lac Rond. The lake is round, and so are the hills surrounding it. These hills are part of the world’s oldest mountain range, geologists tell us; a rolling series of rocky mounds carrying a few inches of loose topsoil upon which are perched, everywhere, some of the world’s most determined, stubborn trees. Hemmed in by these ancient hills, devoid of incoming rivers or streams, nobody knows how the lake fills itself up with, fresh water.
There are many mysteries in this wooded corner of Quebec. Artists like the one who helped save Raymond’s life have been drawn here seemingly forever. So have spiritual folk. A couple of generations ago, a group of wealthy and influential Hindus in India believed that they recognized the surrounding geography described in their ancient texts and quietly set up one of the world’s largest ashrams on the outskirts of town. They work and worship next to where communities of Orthodox Jews, seeing physical resemblances to a sacred place in their own texts, have been buying up land along the North River (riv