At the Medical Arts Building

The Medical Arts Building

23 August 2023

Old photo of Medical Arts Building, corner of Sherbrooke Street West
and where Guy becomes Cote des Neiges Road; photo from the 1920s.

Located on the corner of Guy Street and Sherbrooke Street West, the Medical Arts Building is still a location for doctors and other professionals. Many years ago I went to a meeting of the Theosophical Society of Montreal in this building; it was a small office with many shelved books wrapped in brown paper dust jackets. I was there to hear a lecture on the teachings of J. Krishnamurti; you might know that when Krishnamurti was a child he was discovered by Leadbetter, a friend of Annie Besant and a prominent member of the Theosophical Society in the early 1900s. The discovery was prescient and Krishnamurti went on the become one of the most important spiritual teachers of the 20th Century. 

    Recently, I was on the tenth floor of the Medical Arts building and looking out of the window, looking west along Sherbrooke Street, I noticed buildings that are important to my family. There was the Grand Seminaire (the College de Montreal), formerly run by the Sulpician Order that still owns this and other properties, for instance, Cote des Neiges Cemetery, on the Island of Montreal. My two great great uncles, Fr. Martin Callaghan and Fr. James Callaghan were educated at le College de Montreal and they both went on to prominent roles in the city; for instance, Fr. Martin was the first Montreal-born pastor at St. Patrick's Church; Fr. James was pastor at St. Ann’s Church in Griffintown. Fr. Martin and Fr. James are buried at the crypt below the church at the Grand Seminaire de Montreal. A third brother, Fr. Luke Callaghan, was the man who saved  St. Mary's Hospital when its survival was in doubt. Fr. James and Fr. Martin are buried in the crypt under the large chapel at the Grand Seminaire de Montreal; Fr. Luke is buried at Cote des Neiges Cemetery.

Above photos 23 August 2023

    Across the street from the Grand Seminaire is the Masonic Temple, where my grandfather and uncle were both Masons.  It is a magnificent building and I haven't caught that magnificence and size in these photos.

Above photos 23 August 2023

    Near here, almost next door to the Masonic Temple, is the Heffel Art Gallery with its Joe Fafard statue of "Emily Carr and her friends" outside. Very nice! We are all Emily Carr fans.

 

    Then, a few blocks west, still on Sherbrooke Street West, I could see the Mother House where my mother attended secretarial school. She completed her diploma at the High School of Montreal, it is still located on University Street but is now dedicated to art education, and then attended the Mother House. This was a popular secretarial school in the past and the girls got good jobs upon completion of their studies. My mother worked for a jeweler located in the Hermes Building; the family that owned the business invited her to their summer cottage, which my mother's protective father did not allow, and they asked her to stay working for them when she announced she was leaving to get married in 1940; she always spoke with fondness about this family and her years of working for them.

    And finally, across the street from the Mother House is where my son lived while he attended Dawson College (which now occupies the buildings of the Mother House). During the 1997 Ice Storm, my mother stayed with my son at his apartment in this building; I was in Vancouver during this time. When I returned home at the end of the Ice Storm the grounds of Dawson College were strewn with broken branches and broken trees. 

 

  

    This is what I mean by living in a community and the community giving back to you a sense of belonging, of history and remembering the ancestors and listening as they speak to you, of having a place in society that began with your ancestors and history and respecting the ancestors by remembering them and honouring what they did for society and for you in particular. I say "God bless them all!"

 

Night view of the twin towers, College de Montreal; around 2011

Just to conclude, this stretch of Sherbrooke Street West, from Atwater to Guy Street, is one of the places where I've always parked when downtown; usually I can find a parking space here; but it is also a street that I like to walk along, a street of apartment buildings and offices and historical buildings and people out walking to work or walking their dogs. Here is something of what it looks like.

Note: everything is years ago now, but years ago I visited an acupuncturist with a friend and when the Asian doctor heard that we were poets he said that one of his patients was Artie Gold; that must have been mid to late 1990s. Located in the Grosvenor Building, 1610 Sherbrooke West, north-west corner of the street.

Le Grand Seminaire (two)

A photograph (above) of Le Grand Seminaire from Sherbrooke Street West and then some photographs (below) taken on the grounds. 

Beginning with towers (one is seen above), I think of the Tarot cards, and then the Twin Towers in New York City. There is Joyce's tower in Dublin but, also, Yeats's famous tower; there is Robinson Jeffers' tower and C.G. Jung's tower. There is the poet's tower which is an archetype that exists inside the psyche of every poet. 

There is also a long pool of water on the grounds of the Grand Seminaire, overgrown and intimate, with its invitation to dream, to the unconscious, to other pools of water and to water itself, the unconscious mind, a timelessness and place existing beyond space, beyond the here and now but thoroughly involved in the here and now. Water to enter and find, at the ocean's bottom, strange fish from the water's cold depths and perhaps sunken ships and lost treasure. 

Doors are entrances, but they are also exits, and they are firmly closed (possibly not opened for many years and next to impossible to open), or left open and busy, part of the mercantile class, or ominous and forbidding, but always archetypal and evoking the unconscious. 

Always the invitation to the unconscious is there, that place of poetry and creativity, presented in archetypes, in that which is timeless and gives us hope against the soul deadening efforts of everyday life at the material level. What is life denial? It is existing in the here and now, with no God, no prayer, no meditation, no art, no poetry, no dreams, forsaken of the spiritual... and there are those people in our society with their efforts to eradicate the spiritual by condescension and ridicule and life denial. And then, the presence of archetypes, the unconscious, the mythic dimension. There are the life deniers among us, but no one can ever fully succeed in denying life because, always waiting, like water in a spring (so important to the Celts), are the archetypes, the spiritual, the divine presence, which is always there, always waiting to appear, as natural as fresh water bubbling up from a spring on the side of a road. And what is as natural as water from a spring? It is that the unconscious mind is seemingly hidden but always present, always showing itself in dreams and archetypal dream imagery or strange complex behaviour only explainable by psychology. 

The unconscious is present, it is always "behind the scenes" so that life is not as we might rationally want, but as the unconscious decides in its own way, almost a separate entity with its own rules and, importantly, always moving towards psychic wholeness, psychic healing. 

You ignore the unconscious at your own peril. The archetypes are portals into the unconscious, into poetry.

Revised: 31 March 2020; this is substantially the same commentary as when it was originally published; I have edited a few sentences, included paragraph breaks, and so on; some of this is no longer what I would write today. 

In the name of making money and nothing else, what you see in these photographs no longer exists.  

At Le Grand Seminaire, corner Atwater and Sherbrooke (one)

These are photographs (above) of the twin towers at the Grand Seminaire, which is located on Sherbrooke Street West near Atwater Street; the Grand Seminaire is a teaching institute run by the Sulpician Order in Montreal. I took these photographs a few years ago, and other photographs I have taken of the Grand Seminaire are on this site. The towers, built in the early 1600s, are at the top of Fort Street and Tower Street in Montreal, and were used for protection when French settlers were attacked by Amerindians. There is a narrow slit in the stone walls from which a rifle could be placed. I am interested in the Sulpicians because three of my great great uncles were students here and in France, and then, later, became priests serving parishes in Montreal. They were among the very few English-speaking students at the Grand Seminaire, and Father Martin Callaghan and his brother Father James Callaghan are both buried in the crypt in the basement of the Seminary. Only last week we attended a "light show" presented at the Basilique Notre Dame, in Old Montreal, and saw a history of the Sulpicians in Montreal. The Sulpicians once owned the entire Island of Montreal, from when the tiny settlement was called Ville Marie (City of Mary), through the time of the English Conquest, to modern times and the radical decline of the influence of the Roman Catholic church in all of Quebec. I recommend this presentation at Notre Dame to anyone who is interested in these things and who is visiting Montreal. It can be seen in only a half hour or so, and it is incredibly well done. The other Callaghan brother, Father Luke Callaghan, is buried at Cote des Neiges Cemetery, a cemetery that is owned by the Sulpicians. A few years ago, I went on a tour of the other Seminary, next door to the Basilique Notre Dame in Old Montreal (not the buildings shown here) and I'll post these photographs one day. This tour was organized by my cousin Sharon Callaghan. I remember thinking, at both locations, that I could easily stay living there the rest of my life, I felt so much at home in either location. And since I am both English-speaking and not a Catholic this is quite something! I think the Sulpicians made a very nice life for themselves, not one of struggling and penance, but one of teaching, apparent affluence (but not ostentation), and a life of devotion to the beliefs of the Church. Below are some photographs of the entrance to the Grand Seminaire and the grounds of the property. Adjacent to the Grand Seminaire, on east side, is the College de Montreal, where the poet Emile Nelligan was a student. Nelligan's father was Irish and Emile was baptised at St. Patrick's Church; he wrote all of his poems in French, by the time he was twenty years old, and spent most of his life institutionalized due to mental illness. He is one of Canada's best poets.