“There comes a point in your life when you crave meaning, don’t you think?” Buddy explained, unable to stop himself. “I mean, something beyond the short term objectives we set ourselves, crawling up corporate ladders, buying houses in suburbia, living up to the advertising glitz? I thought, maybe, I could get beneath all that and reveal some deeper human motives.”
Buddy Hope
“Family?” Harry suggested. “Friends? Community? That sort of thing?” When Buddy didn’t answer, he carried on, “Religion? Philosophy? Physics? Do you want to hear the Big Bang or something?’ He laughed at that.
Harry Sanderson
Episode 29 of the Mural Gazer is a turning point. Harry and Buddy have got to know one-another better and adjust to a relationship that’s prickly but caring. Philosophically motivated, they each understand their roles, and can start asking about the ‘why’ of things. Why have they come together? What do they hope to reveal to each other as their friendship deepens?
The key event in this episode is Harry’s entrusting Buddy with the telling of the mural tales. He hands over his Mural Gazer journal, along with a few instructions about how the stories are to be treated. More importantly, the two men have a conversation about what it means for Harry to enter the murals. That conversation is foundational to the writing of the Mural Gazer, it’s the spiritual raison d’être of the novel.
As a resident, I walk by the murals of Chemainus just about every day. They have become part of my background, an aspect of my environment I don’t notice unless I deliberately stop, look and think about them. To tourists they are a novelty, attached to the story of ‘the little town that could’. In either case, the murals are a form of entertainment, artistic portrayals of history from a decidedly Eurocentric point of view. People delight in them, not for what they say, but how they say it. It’s fascinating fun.
Not so for Harry. For him the murals have become portals into his own personal and inherited past. His ‘quest’ is to connect the stories behind the stories of MuralTown in a way that expands upon and explains his own long-lived experience. He’s a philosopher, and has come to the realization – although he’d never say it out loud – that we all are. From this new perspective, the murals become symbolic of the mirages of sense and memory; the representations that need to be questioned, given depth and context.
Harry and Buddy talk about what it means to enter the scenes depicted in the Murals of Chemainus:
“You’re going to be a hundred years old in 2020, Harry,” Buddy said with deliberate admiration. “You caught the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, lived through the Great Depression, fought the Second World War, then prospered with most-everyone else in North America through the post-war boom. You lived all that before I was even born, then experienced everything I have since. Does any of it make sense to you Harry? What will you be celebrating on your hundredth birthday?”
Harry frowned. “When you put it like that, I have to say, ‘I don’t know’.” He leaned forward, holding Buddy’s gaze. “For a long time, after I retired, I didn’t think at all about that sort of stuff. Day-to-day seemed good enough, then I’d be dead and nothing would matter anymore. But that day Bernice made me look into Mural #1, everything changed… shifted, sort-of, beneath the surface, so that everything looks the same, but is somehow different.
“The walls we build, the forests that surround us, they’re not as real as we’d like to think, is all I can say about it.”
Coming to terms with uncertainty is central to Harry’s coalescing philosophy, and Buddy will be influenced by the old man’s search for meaning in a persistently existentialist world. The conclusion they are being drawn to, is that there is no meaning unless you construct one of your own. The murals, the actual walls they are painted on, the people looking at them and taking pictures… it’s all a mirage. What’s real is the love, hate, fear, excitement, camaraderie, compassion, will, determination… our responses to presented ‘reality…’ that gives our mirages the meaning we must take responsibility for.
An intellectual grasp of the physical, emotional and intuitive reality we are immersed in lies at the heart of Harry’s story, and Buddy is going to honour his new-found friend by emulating Harry’s working-man’s wisdom.