Kourosh Keshiri for EYE WEEKLY

In a new book inspired by his film My Winnipeg, Canada’s most acclaimed art-film director — Guy Maddin — investigates the not-completely-factual history of his hometown and his relationship with it, and illuminates the love-hate relationship many of us feel about the places we come from. EYE WEEKLY is pleased to present this exclusive excerpt from the book, complete with explanatory annotation from Maddin himself.

(For more about My Winnipeg, be sure to read EYE WEEKLY Senior Editor Edward Keenan's interview with Maddin, wherein the director talks about melodrama, the mythology of cities, his Hollywood prospects, his plans for a hockey film and the way in which Canadian films “create a sense of discomfort in the room as if a loud and inappropriate noise from the body had just been heard.”)

All aboard!

Winnipeg.[a] (click letters for endnotes)
Winnipeg.[b]
Winnipeg.[c]
Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.[d]

My home for my entire life.[e]
My entire life.

I must leave it.
I must leave it.
I must leave it now.

But how to escape one’s city?
How to wake oneself enough for
the frightening task?
And how to find one’s way out?

The greatest urban train yard in the world.
Arteries! Iron veins! Ways out!!!
The dream train!
Chugging, dreaming, sleep-chugging,
out of the lap of the city.

Out of the lap described by the Forks:
of the Red, the Assiniboine.

The forks:
Assiniboine and the Red.
The rivers that forced animals and hunters alike
onto the same waterside pathways.

The forks, the lap.
The forks, the lap.
The forks, the lap.

The reason we are here, right here,
in the centre of the continent.
The heart[f] of the heart of the continent.

The hunted lap.
The woolly lap.
The lap[g] of my mother.

Arteries. The forks beneath
the Forks:
an old tale from the First Nations has it
that there are subterranean forks,
two secret rivers meeting,
directly beneath the Assiniboine and Red,
this double pairing of rivers being
extra supernaturally powerful.[h]
The animals, the hunters,
the boatways, water and rails.
These are the reasons we are here.

Pulling out of the station.
Pulling out of the station.

What if I had already left decades[i] ago?
What if? What if?
Winnipeg.

Always winter.
Always winter.
Always sleeping.
Winnipeg.[j] Winnipeg. Winnipeg.

The train[k] tracks cross the streetcar tracks
and in turn cross the streets and the alleyways,
everything beneath thin layers
of time, asphalt and snow.
Are these arteries still here today?
Are they dug out every night
and reconcealed every dawn?
We Winnipeggers are so stupeed with
nostalgia we’re actually never quite sure.
I never really know anything for sure –
except that after a lifetime of trying
and many botched attempts,
this time I’m leaving for good.
Again.

Back in Winnipeg’s earliest years,
the Canadian Pacic Railway
used to sponsor an annual treasure hunt.
This contest required our citizens
to wander the city in a day-long combing
of our streets and neighbourhoods.

First prize was a one-way ticket
on the next train out of town.
The idea being that once someone had spent
a full day looking this closely at his own
hometown he would never want to leave.
That the real treasure was right here
all along.
And you know what?
Not one treasure-hunt winner ever
got on that train and left.
Not one, not in a hundred years.
Well, I don’t need a treasure hunt.
I’ve got my own ticket.
I just have to make my way through town,
through everything I’ve ever seen and lived,
everything I’ve loved and forgotten.
Through the thick furry frost
and out to the city limits.
Then I’m on my way.
Out of here.[l]
Out from the heart
of the heart of the continent.

The woolly, furry, frosty lap.
The Forks!
The animals, hunters, boatways,
trains and Mother.[m]
These are the reasons we’re here.
These are these reasons we’ve stayed.
These are the reasons I’m leaving.

These are the very things that are going to
help me get out of here.
The forks, the lap, the fur.
The forks, the lap, the fur.

Mother appears occasionally on the train
to check on the passengers.
My mother. A force as strong
as all the trains in Manitoba.
As perennial as the winter.
As ancient as the bison.
As supernatural as the Forks themselves.
Her lap, a magnetic pole,
a direction from which I can’t turn for long.

It must be the sleepiness
that keeps[n] Winnipeggers here.
If only I can stay awake,
pay attention to where I’m going, where I’ve been,
and get out of here.
Stay awake. Stay awake.
Stay awake, Winnipegger!

We sleep as we walk. Walk as we dream.
Winnipeg has 10 times the sleepwalking
rate of any other city in the world.
And because we dream of where we walk
and walk to where we dream,
we are always lost, befuddled.[o]

Asleep on foot,
the Winnipegger is a citizen of the night.[p]
The Winnipeg night.
Why is this so?
Why are we so sleepy?
Why can’t we just open our eyes?
Is it the mystically paired river forks,
the bio-magnetic inuence of our bison?
The powerful northern lights?
We don’t know.
We sleep.
We sleepwalk.
We sleepwalk.[q]

We[r] show up on old doorsteps …
old homes … our old homes …
those of our old sweethearts …
and we are allowed by civic law to carry
the keys of these old dreamy domiciles.
Of these old dreamy addresses.[s]
And those who live at the old homes
must always take in a lost sleepwalker.
Must let the confused one stay till he wakes.
In Winnipeg, it’s the law.

These old dreamy addresses, keys, keys.

Winnipeg.[t]

Home.

________________________________________________
(Endnotes)
[a] The name Winnipeg is a transcription of a Western Cree word meaning murky waters. [back]

[b] Winnipeg was originally spelled Ouinipique by Sieur de La Vérendrye, the French ofcer who built the first fur-trading post on the site in 1738. [back]

[c] A resident of Winnipeg is a Winnipegger, or ’Pegger. Signicantly, peggered, the Winnipeg bastardization of the Yiddish past participle gepeygert, which means dropped dead, suggests, by working backwards to the innitive, that to pegger means to die. I am certainly not a Yiddish scholar, but this word is generally well accepted and utilized here, with much morbid glee and civic self-awareness. [back]

[d] Winnipeg — like Columbus, Ohio, long one of those guinea pig–packed cities where product innovations are test-marketed — became, in 1959, the rst city in the world to amalgamate emergency phone numbers into the 911 all North Americans use today. To make matters worse, just a few years later, we became the first city to use Touch-Tone phones. (Available in the CBC television archives is a December 8, 1959, broadcast of the local show Eye to Eye that visits our emergency switchboard, talking with the people who run the service and hearing some of the calls – including one from a girl whose sister has swallowed a marble. [back]

[e] I was born on the 28th of February, 1956, at old Grace Hospital, corner of Arlington and Preston, just as Canada’s rst candystripers were introduced there — surely a salutary omen. (Legendary Hollywood teen movie star Deanna Durbin was born in the same ward in 1921.) Fifty years later, after the end of a long relationship with a girlfriend, I found myself crashing at my friend Robert Enright’s apartment, right across the street from the old Grace. Nice to know that in half a century, much of that time spent planning my escape from Winnipeg, I’d ended up precisely 100 feet from my birthplace. [back]

[f] The “Heart of the Continent” is what local ’50s TV weatherman Ed Russenholt used to call Winnipeg. He would draw a big black grease-pencil heart around a Plexiglas map of our frigid environs at the end of each ghostly broadcast, then let out a soul-weary sigh. Many people have asked if, with this juiced-up version of Russenholt’s shibboleth, I was paying tribute to William Gass’ short-story masterpiece “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” a tale set in the deeply hallucinatory cold of a snowbound prairie landscape identical to Manitoba’s. I must say that I was not. But I’ll accept this highly pedigreed accidental literary buttressing up of this, my humble travelogue. [back]

[g] The lap: I’ve often said the hardest part of shooting My Winnipeg was tugging the girdle off my mom for these nude shots of a female lap. But almost everyone believes these snug thighs belong to my ex-girlfriend, Erin Hershberg. I promised her I would set the record straight in these notes: I do hereby swear that the naked lap in My Winnipeg does not belong to Erin Hershberg! [back]

[h] It was my good friend Noam Gonick — Winnipeg’s notorious Night Mayor, or Nightmare, also known by the Wilhelm Reichian moniker “that Jewish pornographer of the most dangerous sort” — who told me of this deeply moving Aboriginal legend while helping me walk Spanky. Over the years he has, during such strolls, lled my head practically to bursting with Winnipeg dazzlements, many of which I have wafted into my movies.

Like all of us Winnipeggers, Noam has had his own rst-hand experience with the wintry waters and mystical transformative powers of the Forks. As a fourth-grader, he invented the now-­popular Winnipeg sight gag of kneeling in the deep snow that lies upon the frozen river crust, ailing his arms as if he’d just broken through to water and was crying out for help.

 One day he wandered too close to an openly owing sewer outlet at the edge of the river. (Perhaps the sweetly perfumed bathwaters and fecal deposits of wealthy Tuxedo-area residents were luring him, he who was already a child of Bolshevik tendencies, to a shortened and therefore less dangerously effective life as the Winnipeg middle class’ subversive enemy?) Suddenly, the ice beneath his feet opened into a chasm, collapsing the boy into the fetid stream. He was treading water but, garbed in a thick, sponge-like snowsuit, he knew it was a matter of seconds before he was sunk and lost.

Initially, his mates thought he was still playing his short-legged game, but eventually they came to his rescue. A friend’s older cousin, an all-around athletic star who was in Grade 7, knew exactly how to lie splayed across the ice while pulling little Noamie out, a trick all Winnipeg children learn but pray they’ll never have to use.

Noam, with the help of his lithe rescuer, scampered up the riverbank, his winterwear freezing into a rigid girdle, to his friend’s house, where he was hauled through a housewives’ sherry party and into the bathroom. There, the athletic cousin took charge of operations: steam lled the washroom as Boy Noamie was summarily stripped and plunged under a hot shower to thaw the hypothermia. With alacrity, the resourceful boy-athlete-cum-nurse laid out the oor towels for the now-naked little shiverer, all the better for a good daub at his eisschweiss. Noam, the soaked pup, was instructed by his new hero to lie down, and was given a vigorous body massage that focused manfully on his still-chilled nether regions. The friend’s more experienced cousin had saved Noam’s young life but, in that moment, this suave and strapping youth also gave Noam a brand-new life, indefatigably warming the lad till somewhere a little ame ignited. And to this day, Winnipeg’s Nightmare, now grown to fecund adulthood, thanks to the spirit of the city, still gives his blessings to the gods of lust and ice water for his life, and this life’s life – his Desire. It is the way of the Forks. [back]

[i] Darcy Fehr, who sits in for me in the train-carriage sequences, was thirty-two years old at the time of production, precisely the age at which I should have left town for good. [back]

[j] I stumbled upon this perhaps too frequently used rhetorical device of repetition in triplets when I accidentally hypnotized, or at least sent off to sleep, my recording engineer Michel Germain while improvising narration for My Winnipeg in the studio. As was my practice whenever I stepped behind a microphone in those days, I attempted to riff on Winnipeg in one continuous ow, without ever stopping — not even once — and whenever I ran out of facts, laments or historical accounts I would simply keep repeating the last phrase spoken just to keep the clock running until I dreamed up ­something new to say. Excited by the coma of my studio compadre, who was slumped face-rst onto the buttoned panel of the recording console, I realized I possessed the power of a Mesmer, Reveen, Romane or any of the immortal stage hypnotists and their ilk, and that rather than squandering this eerie power pulling the bras off beautiful women — oh, the ephemeral vanity of that gesture! — I would use it in the service of cinema… to hypnotize my entire audience. How naive I was in those earliest days of what has become a fearsome new era for me. [back]

[k] 1914. Two great events happen without Winnipeggers really noticing much, though these events will determine forever the quality of life here for me and my fellow citizens. They occur almost simultaneously.

First, the ribbon is cut to open the Panama Canal, the beginning of the end for Winnipeg as a major hub for all transcontinental shipping by rail. The result? The city’s downtown, booming for decades, suddenly stops growing, suspends itself, as if in amber. No new buildings have been erected in our central Exchange District since the slicing of that ribbon!

Then, a second laceration – that of my father’s eye. Clutching her infant son to her bosom on his rst birthday, my grandmother pierces his eye with a carelessly unpinned brooch. Doctors are unable to save it. It is removed and buried with the rest of the city’s medical waste – its amputated limbs and its dissected med-school cadavers – in a mass grave at Brookside Cemetery. It is sixteen years before my father’s family can afford to buy him his rst glass eye.

The doctors try to relieve my grandmother’s guilt by telling her they discovered a tumour in the little one’s eye socket and, had it not been removed at this opportune time, his life would certainly have been claimed by this rampaging infantile cancer. She doesn’t believe the doctors, choosing instead to dedicate her life to removing eyes. She spends the rest of her days poking the eyes out of her own likeness in photos – never forgetting the role she played in scooping out a little hollow in that baby’s head. Never forgetting. Now there isn’t a single photo of my grandmother without her eyes poked out.

Strange is the role of memory in this city that no longer recollects why it’s even here. Even stranger is the way the city buries its amnesias in further layers of forgetfulness. [back]

[l] This annual contest now traditionally starts at our war memorial, which rises out of the centre of what no one remembers was once called the Mall.

Emblematic of our city’s curious ways of remembrance is the saga of this cenotaph, erected to honour our war dead. In the 1920s, there was a contest to determine who would design it, the only condition being that it must commemorate the lives lost in the Great War. After it was built, there was a public outcry when it was discovered that its designer, one Emanuel Hahn, was born in Germany, the very country responsible for snatching all those precious lives away. It was torn down and another contest was held. The winner this time was a Canadian-born sculptress, Elizabeth Wood, and after her cenotaph was built there was more outrage when it was discovered that this sculptress was in fact married to Emanuel Hahn. Finally, in typically cautious Canadian fashion, the designer who nished second to the sculptress was passed over and the third-place nisher, the very Anglo-Saxon-sounding Gilbert Partt, was given the commission to build the memorial that, to this day, stands as the lone ofcial civic commemoration of Winnipeg’s World War I dead. [back]

[m] My mother was born with the very Icelandic name Jörina Herdis Eyolfson. (When spoken with the proper Icelandic singsong accent, her Christian names are pronounced “you’re gonna hurt us.”) She came into being in Vestfold, Manitoba, on the 9th of November, 1916. I’ve always used the year of her birth as the pin for my credit and debit cards, and Herdis has for years now been my trusty password for all my online purchases. [back]

[n] The E Gang! In the 1980s, Winnipeg trembled beneath the thumb of the E Gang, an elusive group of nocturnal criminals whose sole crime, repeated endlessly and always with impunity, for the identity of its members was never ascertained by the police, was stealing the letter E from every piece of signage in the city. Our city became even more elliptical that decade: The Winnip g Ar na;  arl Gr y and Gr  nway schools;  aton’s; Th  Paddl wh  l; Th  W  vil Caf ; K-T l Int rnational; even Lil’s B auty Shop. We realized this was a letter we could easily live without, that even in its absence it was really still there. One exciting night, perhaps because I expressed so much public support for these mischievous gangsters, I was blindfolded and taken to their lair to behold the booty of their long exertions. What I saw mounded there, or hung about the place as queer trophies, was nothing less than gorgeous. The letter E in every possible font, in all sizes, fashioned from every conceivable material — moulded plaster, carved wood, cursive driftwood, neon tubing, tin, cast iron, punched zinc and incandescent clusters of glass! A garden of Eeeeden! [back]

[o] Rejected narration: Bedless shadows befuddled. [back]

[p] Rejected narration: The Winnipegger, a man of great sleep, bedlessness himself, is a citizen of night. [back]

[q] Winnipeggers are very forgetful, and often repeat themselves without realizing it — and not just the things they say. Often they entirely redo things, just to be sure. A certain amount of repetition has made its way into acceptable public behaviour in the city. Ritual repetitions help people achieve certainty in life — a handshake in greeting or a wave goodbye is never considered complete until it’s been performed as many as 12 times. Winnipeggers meeting out in society are considered rude whenever they don’t ask each other how they’ve been at least a half-dozen times. In this fashion we make of ourselves human palimpsests, concealing one gesture or persona beneath its identical issue. [back]

[r] Rejected narration: Berimed, slush-splashed and soiled with mourning; heavy-footed, heavy-legged, heavy-headed with the weight of leaden dreams, we show up on old doorsteps … [back]

[s] Rejected narration: And bedlessness seeks doors, doorknobs, keyholes! [back]

[t] In 2005, breakcore musician, Budapest resident and expat Winnipegger Aaron Funk, who records under the name Venetian Snares, released on Sublight Records Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole. Its track list:
1. Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole
2. Winnipeg Is a Dogshit Dildo
3. Winnipeg Is Fucking Over
4. Winnipeg Is Steven Stapleton’s Armpit
5. Die Winnipeg Die Die Die Fuckers Die
6. Winnipeg as Mandatory Scat Feed
7. Winnie the Dog Pooh (Not Half Remix)
8. Winnipeg Is a Boiling Pot of Cranberries (Fanny Remix)
9. Die Winnipeg Die Die Die Fuckers Die (Spreading the Hepatitis SKM-ETR Style) [back]