A study in art and ritual focused on the
Great Work of the Venatic Sport
WRITING
ZODIAC FADED It’s late, and my car the only thing moving on the bridge. I pass a silhouette standing alone on the footpath, staring through the suicide prevention bars at the water that pulls with a low murmur, its face oiled with the lights of the city, heavy and incandescent. Hochelaga once stood here, a fortified settlement, where the St. Lawrence Iroquoians kept their place. Now the hillside is covered in glass towers, rows of brick townhouses that straddle the lands between the cross-bearing mountain and the river. Once an active member of an ancient volcanic complex, the dormant mountain stands as a humble remnant of a cataclysmic past. It is one of a chain of Royal Mountains that stand over the flatlands like wasted monuments, or tired and faceless angels. Visions of heaving earth and boiling rivers contrast strongly with the confidence of the metropolis, with its lights and bouts of smog that work to blind its citizens from the stars. There are records of records that tell of giant burial mounds discovered by the Iroquois on what is now Nun’s Island, the builder’s of which were lost to history even in those times. Now nothing of such ancient earthworks remains from those mysterious people – plundered, leveled, replaced and forgotten. It is law in Montreal that no building should exceed the height of Mount Royal – a classical mitigation on an increasingly synthetic city, and a preservation of a necessary symbol for the modern mind. A nod to something ancient, It’s a symbol for the mind, a clutch at some memory of the wild. An appreciation for the tension kept between wilderness and civilization is a bond akin to the sexual in a movement of heightened opposites enhancing one another. Or perhaps its a feeble act of mitigation against the synthetic world that rises around it, an attempt to preserve the illusion of something that used to be. I think about what kind of future of such enhancements while cresting the high point of the suspension bridge, pressing the pedal and speeding down the open lane towards the depths of the interchange. I cross a few green lights before coming to a red when in my window appears a sallow and scabbed face that fogs the glass. The homeless have become a growing, neglected shadow in the city, to which donating money becomes a matter of personal intuition. There are those who evoke the desire and others that do not. Some have become staples of the community and despite not wishing to establish too close of a relationship, I find myself enjoying their presence as tragic reminders to the over-civilized of their own potentials. Those caught in the matrix of the city, negligent of the overwhelming entropy that at every moment, works in continuous bleedings through the porous barriers in reclamation of its domain. Montreal still wears the brutalist marks of the sixties and seventies, but its shining thing is the random glass towers that rise like postmodern sculptures, softening the city’s former concrete harshness. Despite being a major Canadian city, it is dwarfed by the sprawling beasts of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Montreal, and its northern sister island of Laval stay relatively contained, the suburbs stretched along their northern and southern shores like fingers clinging to the edges of the known world, allowing for a quick transference between dense civilization and the Laurentian countryside. This proximity has permitted the preservation of certain agrarian roots that are expressed within the confines of the city; however, this connection is weakening. The landscape is one trending towards industrialization, and without a conscious effort to counteract, much of southern Quebec’s natural beauty will be swallowed by urban developments. A little more that hundred years ago, this was farmland, thick with the smell of livestock, with harvested field dotted with hay stacked thirty feet high amongst woodlands and wastelands that were rich in wild game. It was in those forests in the year 1826, where the continent’s first sporting club was established. British military personnel and fur barons were the first to engage in the sport of hunting with hounds, horns, and cries, as they rode down all manner of game in the wildernesses beyond the manorial farms on the south-eastern face of the mountain. Now it’s aging strip malls, parking lots, the sterile architecture of suburbia swallowing up what was once living earth. Once upon a time, men rode this landscape, their hounds, their horns, their cries carrying out across the flatlands, chasing down game in the wilderness that stretched beyond the manorial farms on the southeastern face of the mountain. In my mind’s eye, I can see a steaming mass of concrete and glass and human bodies, stretching from Toronto to Montreal where it will merge with the megalopolis of the eastern coast of the United States. If trends continue, the megalopolis will one day absorb this land and encircle whatever wilderness is preserved. If future generations are fortunate enough to experience any form of the venatic sport, it will be performed in confined forestlands, landscaped to mimic an ideal wilderness, corralled within fantastic high-walled operations. On the other side of the walls will stretch the endless city with thousand-meter towers. Tradition will be overlooked, and mountains will become sunken mounds among overwhelming structures and our wild animals will become ornaments. As the masses transfer to plant or insect-based diets, livestock species will be subjugated to even greater degrees than factory farming does today or simply left for extinction. My hunger strikes as I drive down the mostly vacant city street. Leaning over the dashboard, I look up to see strained constellations in the murk of the overwhelmed sky.
GROVES OF THE METROPOLIS There from the beginning and leading me astray, I follow her through sharpened shadows of dusk-canted towers on our walk to the old city. We are channeled through winding, cobbled lanes edged with ornate architecture—a fractured gathering of Palladian, Greek revival, baroque, neo-gothic, and art deco. Amid it all stands the basilica, its form a silent, looming presence. I watch her watch the clouds slip between the gray towers, moving slow like smoke. They look like they’re swaying. She speaks while shading her brow with the sweep of a hand, as if in salutation. Like trees. She adds, her eyes fixed and still – an embrace of illusion. I watch her move across the square, walking with a quiet grace. No natural landscape could contain the pull of her feminine. I follow her through the tympanum and into the quiet sublime of a gilded and cross-framed cosmos. An imposing enclosure that echoes the canopied groves of pagan times. The pillars which hold the pictorial sky stand as oaks whose arching branches span the length of the immense space. Flanking the nave are statues and paintings of the ancient fathers and mothers of the church; the faces of a mythologized past watching those who claim their banner. She takes soft hold of my hand, leading us passed rows of pews on approach to the altar where we admire the dramatic detail of the martyred Christ. The earliest memories held the symbol of the crucifix. Imprinted before language, it stood as an extreme reality within the mundane of early life. Hung on the walls of homes and schoolrooms was a potent image that came accompanied with myths used to formulate visions of the afterlife. Childhood had been in the fortification; the early matrix of life where definitions were unclear and primordial impressions spoke. Beyond the walls of tempered youth lay an endless movement. There came the time when the youth needed to learn where language is undone, searching in the liminal gaps of fallow fields, or in dust motes that swam within the shafts of sunlight that cut shadowed hay lofts. Places of expression without definition. The child was alone with all of himself, turning alive as a nation within a seed or as a tempest above an ocean. What are you thinking about? She whispers, her smile soft. Too much. I reply, slightly distracted by the Four Evangelists in the dome above.
THE AGORA I sit with a book on the sun drenched terrasse of a downtown café, feeling the black americano humming through my veins, a jagged current of focus. The street beyond flows a hectic rhythm of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians that move in a busy hum, when the rush is suddenly pierced by the squealing of tires and a guttural shout. I look up to a common sight – an incensed cyclist standing in the bike path while straddling his mount, slamming a fist onto the hood of a maroon Mazda, his angular arm an extravagant swath of tattoo book art. The two elderly women inside stare bewildered as the urbanite shouts curses at them from under the flipped flat brim of his five-panel cap. Fucking bitch! You nearly killed me! He punctuates his tirade with a raised middle finger before winding back and hawking a trail of mucus across their windshield. He proceeds to quickly pedal off. I wonder, as I sit there, why those old women—twilight years already on them—couldn’t have had a moment of righteous indignation. A chance to show that their time hadn’t passed, that they too could put an end to one of these lunatics. Maybe they could’ve spared their souls from further corruption if, in some twisted reality, their foot had pressed the gas instead of the brake, sending the cyclist’s Patagonia-clad body tumbling across the pavement. I wonder if desiring such things is blasphemous and I turn back to reading some analogy about Prester John. Time slips by, until the sharp, metallic clatter of what sounds like a bicycle frame meeting a bumper snaps me back to attention. I think, for a fleeting moment, that someone has finally done what was necessary. But when I look, the truth unfolds in all its disappointment—there’s a ragtag crew of degenerates, setting up a canvas tent along the wide pedestrian area. I return to the pages, but the hum of their voices intrudes, a cacophony of misguided political zeal, their eyes shining with the glow of self-righteousness. Every bite kills a fascist! Announces the chimera from behind a folding table, the words thick with virtue as it slops a greasy concoction onto an elderly Indian man’s plastic plate. Behind the table, a red banner flaps in the breeze, the words: MAKE RACISTS AFRAID AGAIN!!! painted across it in stark white. Such displays of contrived virtue are a normal sight around many North American universities, and for the most part, social activism is the leisure of the young urbanite student. Some are forever students, who even in their thirties and forties and long since graduated, find their nostalgia for youthful angst and college aged girls prevents them from moving forward with greater ideas. Modernity affords these people the comforts of acting with political passion with a double thumbs up from the powers that be. It is in the city where the tension of politics feels most suffocating. A necessity for reservation becomes something to amuse oneself with. I test people with my oddities. Sometimes I tell those fragile enough to listen that my initials—WHM—were carefully chosen by parents who were devotees of nominative determinism, determined that their son would remain, for all his days, a White, Heterosexual Male. I’ve done my best to maintain all three. Yet, despite this maiming hand of progressivism, there is a greater atrocity lurking in the metropolis—a more insidious wound carved by apathy wrapped in rebellion. The ironic man. The ironic man is one of modernity’s greatest symptoms, and Montreal, like many cities, is a breeding ground for his kind. I speak of the masculine, for our melancholy bears a shared theme, one expressed through irony—a hollow shield against feelings too heavy to bear. The existence of the ironic man is shaped by an unconscious nihilism. While the dogs of communism, fascism, and capitalism tear at each other in the global circus, the ironic man steps aside, content in his own silence. With the wordlessness of a hermetic, he believes himself wizened out of opinion, expressing the honed silence of an inner temple, when in truth, he is nothing but an expression of his inner vacuum. Living without direction, his libido a wilted sprout tossed by the wind; yet he sits content, getting off on his own virginity as he prances alone in the utopia of lame desires. Even if he has laid with women, he cannot comprehend the implications of his actions, nor does he care to, rendering the generated energy useless. Sex and power come as a convoluted mess of definitions, forging weakened dispositions leading him to faint at the sight of blood and prostrate at the sight of menstruation. Other times, his unintegrated anger leaves him hateful of the opposite sex without his conscious awareness. His philosophy consists of skipping across ideas like a stone over water, never diving deep, always at the mercy of the tide, swayed by the masses. The very existence of beauty is something to be mocked. He hides behind snide remarks and hollow laughter, never realizing that the joke is on him, on all of us. The ironic man is the willing agent of chaos, the lowest kind of being, for all he can work with is the material, and he pisses on the fire of life. I smile, a bitter appreciation blooming in the cracks of my pessimism. I pack my bag, let go of the tension, and leave the café. My style and appearance will, at times, bear a stern minimalism, aided in part by a heavy, Neanderthal-like brow ridge. For this reason, I am often taken aback when someone on the street addresses me directly. Passing by the anti-fascist recruiting booth, I privately entertain the question of why vegan food is either gut wrenchingly expensive or handed out for free by the bucketload, when I hear a directed sound. Do you own a Browning? I turn to see one of the sexless, peach-fuzzed faces behind the table calling out to me over the line. It takes me a moment to remember the logo on my cap. I wish. Maybe one day. I shrug. That’s too bad. I’ve got one coming in the mail. It says through a thin smile with a cock of the chin betraying a confidence I can’t place. I keep walking.
ON HUNTERS WHO CRY AND WHY I DON’T When performed well, the venatic sport serves as an embrace of the tragedy of life. It is bloodsport performed in fashions more delicate and refined than war yet bearing the weight of emotional transformation that contemplation alone cannot summon. In the face of this, there are those hunters who, after killing their quarry, express strong emotions of vulnerability. It is not for any individual to judge the hunter whose tears spill like brimming pools filled by righteous subterranean pressure amid novel sentiments. Whether a hunter is experienced or not, each experience in the field is unique in such a way that it will evoke equally unique sensations and emotions. The hunting and butchering of an animal is a complex endeavour. To hunt properly involves an interplay of skills that must be practiced and honed. It is a rich internal experience, and a challenging external one. Focus and attention on the goal is required, or else a hunt simply becomes a walk in the woods. A true hunt brings the hunter into a fresh state of being, one detached from the rhythms of human life. Rising before the dawn, he is uber-circadian, stoically leaving comfort behind and setting out into the darkness, hoping to strategically gain the upper hand on nature’s rhythms. The wild does not intimidate, for he is a predator in its own domain attempting to outwit its quarry. Mortality is heavily confronted during and after the hunt, including one’s own. It jars the spirit, transforms it, especially in the first instance. Pain, purposefully inflicted, awakens a deep chord of empathy—an acknowledgment of the shared fragility between hunter and hunted. Its death must stand justified by reasons that weigh heavy on the hunter’s own measure of worth. Such thoughts can unravel resolve, leaving one stricken with the existential dread of their own role in the grand cycle of life and death. The death of that which was once living, especially something bearing the majesty of a whitetail buck or the endearing passivity of a rabbit, will always register to the sensitive spirit as tragic. This tragedy, although small, is a fractal response to the greatest of tragedies, that being the death of all beauty and divinity. Tears honor the act, bestowing upon it immense symbolism. The hunter whose face glistens with tears before his downed quarry acknowledges the cyclical nature of existence. All living things must die, and sometimes the mark of greatness comes with a premature death. The hunter’s hand, when it strikes, must do so with precision and mercy, offering a humane end that mirrors nature’s ruthless elegance. His task is not annihilation but balance through a culling that conserves the species and the land. The chosen animal is often the elder male, a rival to younger generations and a harbinger of stagnation for his kind. The hunter kills as the hunter loves. I do not weep after the kill, but not for lack of feeling. My eyes have known tears, shed for the dearly loved domestic creatures whose spirits are woven with mine. Loved animals, through years of companionship, acquire a mythos in memory, their lives echoing long after their departure. Wild creatures, though, are different. They merit a far different understanding, with the maintenance of their existence as beings of the wilderness dependent on it. They belong to the wild, their existence rooted in its sanctity. Thus, there is no contradiction for the hunter who both loves his hounds and shoots his quarry. There have been instances where I found myself suddenly vulnerable after pulling the trigger. Shooting a rabbit or a doe is moving and evokes a pain that is to be felt and understood – a projection of an unknown self onto something delicate which has suffered a severe event. After some time, the pain floats into greater depths, and a familiar cycle begins to turn as emotions and ideas flutter as birds within the vastness of the inner temple. It is an alchemizing of tragedy’s induced mourning into something of an earthly glory and a smiling at the realized truth that there has only been a gaining through the ritualized cull. These new sentiments come with the desire to see every animal whose life I was fortunate enough to claim, trotting about the gardens of the great beyond.
VENATIC ART
William Hess-Martin
is a hunter, writer, and artist from southern Quebec. His work delves deeply into mythological and psychological themes, particularly the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world. Drawing inspiration from his experiences in the wild, he explores how ancient myths and modern sensibilities intersect in the human experience of nature.