Who is - or was - Montreal's Eddie "Do Nothing" Baker?We need to know and we need to know now!
In around 1969 Baker became an underground literary-and-lifestyle Montreal icon as a 41-year-old who'd wander around and do nothing all day, thanks to a stipend from his Massachusetts-based father, who ran a women's apparel business.
He attained boho-fame thanks to a biographical magazine article by Don Bell, which was included in the collection Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory.
Some of his quotes:
"I don't think I"m being pushed by something external and necessary. You can be so quiescent that it creates like an electric spark. And you may think: I should be doing something. Why don't I? I can't be wasted away by zeroness.
His jacket: "My canvas-covered, camouflage-coloured, pile-line army-type surplus-store Japan-made imitation transistorized ski-trouper jacket."
Why he likes the underground city: "You don't have to make decisions in tunnels; there are no options open to you. You must go straight ahead. There is a feeling of destiny awaiting you at the end, your footsteps echoing along the corridors, the denouement. It's like being in an Edward G. Robson last-mile movie."
His longest marathon was a 15-hour sitting at the Carmen Coffee house. "At midnight when I went outside, my buttocks felt manicured."
Why he felt compelled to write poetry: "I was like a balloon, being wafted aloft, without any gravitational pull. This caused an intensified state of lassitude and ennui. It was a sort of obliviousness, a total void. It eventually gets to jangle your nerves, like a quake inside yourself. I felt that a seismic tremor would seize me if I didn't get thrown into something."
On writing 50 poems: "it was like pulling out my gut as I tried to explain myself to myself."One of his poems:
I'm a bit
Withdrawn
If not
Solitudinous
"After sliding up to people for so long, tickling them and then slipping away, I was now drawn into the gears of human relationships. I felt that the machine was going to grind me to death."
"I realized that the literary world is no better than the financial world. One day I told Peter Desbarats: The best thing in life is the dream. Once it become real, it's no good."
"My insignificant slim little sheath of poems is probably no more than a few soft specks on a white collar."
"If I become famous it will be as a virtuoso of lethargy. I'll be just as cultivating my present nothing way of life and fallow state of being to live in a more affluent manner. I will be somnambulant in an eiderdown bed instead of broken down springs. It's a mystical dilemma. I can only do nothing. I must make a living. Therefore I must make a living doing nothing. If I can't make a living doing nothing, then the end is near and clear."
His lifestyle imitators: "the artisans of urban whirlpools"
"I am like a receptor of all the impulses and radiations of society. People who are taken up in the flux of daily life have their receptors blurred because they are creatures of actions: a wheel of a machine can't get to know what the total structure of it is. They need a quiescent being who can depict them in a concrete and concise way what the fabric of their existence is. I may be a barren personality but here may be a a part of me in everyone and I may illuminate those parts. But that's all a lot of crap. Let angels take care of angels and devils watch over devils. I don't care about the world and the world doesn't car about me. This is a porcine culture. People are like pigs grovelling in the world to survive. When you get right down to it, everyone is out for himself and anyone who says isn't is just deluding himself. But so what? It's nice once you acknowledge it. So one slumpy little Eddie Baker bonking around, doing nothing, shouldn't be any skin off anyone's ass."
"Time just seems to drag one. It's like it leaks out of a small-hole can each day until it is empty."We know that he lived in Lower Westmount, south of Alexis Nihon, in a home owned by the ex-wife of the director of Eliza's Horoscope, presumably Gordon Sheppard, who died in 2006.
He had six poems published in Parallel magazine in 1966, a small poetry publication run by Peter Desbarats.He played a zany guru in a Montreal movie called McBus, done by Lenny Cohen's pal Derek May.
We are told that he wasn't happy about Don Bell's article and didn't speak to him after that.
Some of those who might know more about Baker - and we don't even know if it's his real name - are dead. Desbarats, Bell, Sheppard are all dead and gone. If Baker was alive he'd be something like 88 now.
If anybody can shed more light on this great (great?- Chimples) Montreal character please let us know.