Bill C-3
“WITHOUT FREE SPEECH THE STATE IS A CORPSE”
Scissors in hand, I lean back to admire the man I just cut out of his newspaper, skin bloodless in his colourless photo, like a mugshot. Honestly, he looks pretty cool with his big white sign and bold black letters, sat proudly in the middle of the sidewalk. I know I couldn’t do that, not without getting honked at or interviewed by men I don’t know about how old I am, how legal I am. Yeah, he looks pretty grunge actually, especially with those uneven edges I snipped in my impatience, like some sort of anti-government punk. That poster slogan would look even more punk if he spray painted it on the drab grey walls of some building in the financial district.
I drop him on top of a blue chunk of sky I took from an article about how images from the Hubble telescope bring us closer to god with a capital G, and next to some phrases that caught my eye like “be merciful” “change minds and hearts” “bloody Herods in our” “faithful flocking to these” “precious blood” and “physical death is not our end”.
Heaven seems like a conspiracy theory to me, that the aluminum bodies of angels will hover in the sky, a flashing rave of stars, and pull me off my feet to float through a beam of holy light. Physical death is not our end. Wasn’t that also the sentiment of a suicide cult a while back? Their site is still up, if you search for it, a trippy diary of outer space travel plans, pixelated clip art of aliens, and the last traces the grieving families left behind on earth have of their loved ones; Heaven’s Gate.
Corpse. That’s a heavy and grim word to use. I wonder where that man’s mind goes when he contemplates his own mortality; mine goes to the words bone white, like porcelain. Porcelain and the tea it cups takes me to colonialism, to Jesuits and genocide. Kateri Tekakwitha died of smallpox, and I pause, remembering the soft watercolour of her smiling face in one of my favourite childhood books about female saints. All of them were dead, but most of them were murdered. I return to smallpox quickly and the story of the “first vaccine”; milkmaids who would touch each other with rosy sores on their hands, sharing blood and breaking the delicate crust of their scabs to infect each other with cowpox - saving each other from smallpox.
There’s a closeness to death, as a woman; to know better than to plant myself in the middle of the sidewalk downtown without consideration for others. An intimacy with death artistically rendered in The Pear of Anguish, sculpted like a blooming flower to fit inside my body and rip it open. Dread knots itself into a thick rope, the type for execution, the loop thrown over my lower belly as I read the page I cut this man from.
The article that stood next to his picture explains exactly what has inspired his punk-looking solo protest; Bill C-3, which criminalizes the intimidation and harassment of medical personnel or patients within a 50 metre exclusion zone outside health facilities. He’s wearing a very big pair of sunglasses like a plastic mask over his eyes, and every inch of skin is covered, except for his little smile. There’s something I just don’t like about his smile, lips pursed tightly as if he’s trying not to laugh; what’s the joke?
It occurs to me suddenly that he isn’t wearing a mask. On the next page, I find more words I like and cut them out too; “For you do not know on what day your lord is coming.”