The quotation above isn’t exactly a lyric, but the way that Downie introduced the song “As Makeshift As We Are” during the 2004 That Night in Toronto show. Downie wanted to give people hope, to help them look on the bright side, to see that – even when things get dark – the world is full of beauty and blessings. Rather, by suggesting that Downie wanted to save people I mean something more mundane but nonetheless valuable (and surely enabled at least by common grace). Let me be explicitly clear that I am not talking about salvation in the transcendental sense made available exclusively through Christ. While it’s understandable to suggest that Downie was trying to save the nation, at heart his concern was for people. There is nothing compulsive or chauvinistic in Downie’s observational nationalism, and the poetry with which he gave recognizable pieces of Canada back to us made it all the more memorable and resonant. By covering an array of shared iconic moments and local particulars such as the one quoted above, Downie gave us both permission and a template for how to celebrate Canada in an ostensibly post-national age. It also showcases his attention to the particulars of place, in this case the waters off Isle Aux Morts, Newfoundland, where “The desultory sea grew more so through the night / And made one think of tawny ports / And aspen tremblin’ in tomorrow’s thorough light.” Much of the commentary on Downie’s work has focussed on its Canadianness, and this is not inappropriate. It exhibits Downie’s interest in heightened experiences, when everything else recedes beneath the immediacy of some particular moment. This line is from “The Dire Wolf,” a song about a rough channel crossing during a storm at sea. In this brief remembrance, however, I’d like to take a somewhat different angle and try to sum up Downie’s poetic ethos using just a few of his own words. Downie’s courageous last days have been well documented, and his career widely celebrated – including by two earlier articles in the pages of Christian Courier. He made us confront the scared creatures we are, as he likes to say, “at the lonely end of the rink.In October, a little more than a year after he and his bandmates captivated Canadians with a dramatic final farewell cross-country tour, Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, passed away from a rare form of brain cancer. He forced us to live our history from every point of view our victims, martyrs, demons the geography we’ve annihilated. His perspective in a song will often turn sharply from victim to perpetrator, from the character locked in the trunk of a car to the one who locked the trunk. To be intensely patriotic is to juxtapose your country’s tiny triumphs alongside its immense, overarching darkness. There is something to be learned from the strange consensus Gord has built. And imagine if, year after year, Springsteen drilled ever deeper into that terrain. Imagine, though, if Springsteen never broke outside the Mid-Atlantic, and imagine if the Mid-Atlantic had roughly 60 percent as many people and 20 times the geographical area. Gord sews together the same disparate audiences that are drawn to songwriters like Matt Berninger. The singular importance of the Hip is that they resonate with my friends who teach post-colonial studies as deeply as they touch the right-wing hosers I still hang out with from high school, who drunkenly belt the anthems out in the parking lot after hockey games.
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