Hope Against Reason, Guy Maddin
Encounter with a UFO, written by Guy Maddin, for a picture book of my paintings, 2008
On October 6, 2007, I was returning home from a weekend of collage making from my family cottage on Lake Winnipeg with artist, art dealer, and impresario Paul Butler, and visiting artist Brad Phillips, whose paintings and photographs I already admired greatly, but was meeting for the first time.
We had spent the weekend at the cottage, hemmed inside by howling rain and a gale blackened sky. There was much drinking and confessing, creative triumphs and failures.
Waking up hungover but exhilarated we had a brief breakfast of leftover meat and booze. The day and the drive back to Winnipeg lay before us, grey and bare. Brad sat in the backseat with my dog Spanky. Somewhere between Gimli and Matlock, Spanky began to shake like a convulsive. I thought that he was perhaps coming down with a cold. Brad comforted Spanky the best he could and we drove on. But my sweet dog’s bodily fervor increased, until he threw up dispassionately on the seat and floor. As we were driving along in the hopes of finding a place to stop and clean the car, Brad, Paul and myself all felt compelled to look back, and to the right - me while driving. We each asked the other, “Did you see that?”
What we had seen were five angularly shaped pieces of light in the overcast sky. They flickered briefly, moved in formation, then vanished. We were stunned by what we had seen, stunned by our shared compulsion to crane our heads unnaturally to see it, stunned by the cliche, the spectacle. We pulled over, found some newspaper to clean up Spanky’s objection, then drove around trying to find what we’d just seen, to no avail.
Then, as you read about in tabloids and hear in the countless tales of supposed lunatics, we spent the rest of the drive back to Winnipeg in silence, seeming to have forgotten what just happened. Back in my home, each of us spoke to his romantic counterpoint without mentioning what happened. Before bed, eight hours later, each of us suddenly came back to life. We excitedly exclaimed our disbelief not only at the experience, but at the identical nature of our experience. Just as on television, an engineer, a schoolteacher, a truck driver, all without reason to lie, swearing to their last days that what they saw, they saw. We were two artists and a filmmaker, each having a moment out of the movies, with no real understanding of what we’d seen, nor any desire to deny the reality of our experience.
In January Brad came back to Winnipeg to participate in a short film I was making about an earlier experience we’d had at my family cottage in Gimli. Paul was also there. All of us spoke with the same certainty about what happened in October. Brad made a drawing of the lights in the sky, and Paul and I could not dispute its accuracy. There was no talk of aliens, secret surgeries or implants. Just the shared experience of something that was, for each of us, totally unique, and as real as our own two feet.
So I, Guy Maddin, attest now and forever that in the first week of October, 2007, on an overcast day, Brad, Paul and myself each saw into the heavens, with the assistance of five golden antechambers cut into the very sky itself.
Guy Maddin
This is awesome