Tag: Toronto

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City Life

Stone Angel

Stone angel in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery stands with right hand raised, fingers broken, with condominium balconies in the background.
Angel in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto

It’s dead on a Friday afternoon in the city. After the May long weekend, all the Gen-Xers head up north to open the cottages they’ve inherited from parents now laid out in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The Millennial kids don’t go with; they can’t imagine a worse way to spend a weekend than stuck on a gravel cul de sac, no dock in the lake, water too cold for swimming, and the air swarming with black flies. It’s better being stuck bored in town where at least they can make a run to Tokyo Smoke.

After a couple joints, they remember the angel standing guard over granddad’s grave. They call a couple buddies from school, the ones who haven’t turned domestic yet, and invite them over to do some wingsuit base jumping from their 50th floor balcony. A thousand years ago, we could only imagine what it must be like to wheel around the heavens, cherubim and seraphim sailing to glory on a wing. Now look at us.

Most of the friends say they’re busy, but at least one of the friends has the guts to offer the excuse all the others are thinking: you’re a lunatic. And maybe that’s true. But the divide between lunacy and holiness is paper thin. They used to say that someone whose behaviour was a bit off was “touched” as if to suggest that they’d been touched by the holy spirit. Because authorities weren’t confident they could tell which side of the divide a person stood on, they conflated the two sides and called the person a holy fool.

Years ago, when it was still fun to go to the cottage, they’d stand on the dock, toes curled around the rough edges of the pressure treated wood, arms pulled back in preparation for the leap. Always, there was a pause. Time hanging still in the summer air. They could feel the splash of the cold water even before it struck the skin. They could sense the approach of the dark nothing that would enfold them as they sank below the surface.

That leap was a perfect moment, poised in flight, held between sky and water, memory and oblivion. Only a couple friends come over, and then, only to watch. Everyone else is busy adulting. Everyone else has already sunk like a stone and the water grows dark overhead.

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City Life

Ghosts in the Landscape

Long pinhole exposure of a Go Train whizzing over the Don River on its evening run.
Evening commute up the Don Valley north of Pottery Road

I set up my tripod and frame a shot of railway tracks across the Don River. I use a 50 mm lens, then swap it out for a pinhole attachment that is roughly the equivalent of a 50 mm lens. I say roughly equivalent because pinhole lenses aren’t quite as precise as modern lenses. Technically, they aren’t even lenses. They’re apertures. To bastardize Leonard Cohen, they’re how the light gets in. But the light gets in unfocused so the images are blurred. And since so little light gets in (which is why I have to use a regular lens to set up the shot), the shutter has to stay open longer. How long is a matter of guesswork. In this case, I leave the shutter open for 135 seconds, which means that the train passing through my frame comes and goes all in one exposure. It leaves its traces in the blurred lines of the lights rushing past.

A commuter train like this carries how many people? 1000? 2000? There they are, rushing home after a long day at work, rumbling up the Don Valley to points north of the city. If I made this shot with a regular lens, you might be able to see faces gazing out of the train’s windows. Even then, because it’s dark and because the train is moving fast, the faces would appear blurred, almost ghostly. But with the pinhole lens, we can’t see the faces; the best we can do is infer their presence from the blurred lines where we would expect to see faces.

Whether or not we see ghosts in our frame depends very much on the shutter speed we use. Something analogous can be said when we gaze down a city street. A cursory glance is like a modern lens: we freeze the scene in an instant and have no sense of time passing. But a long hard look that engages the imagination and invokes deep time functions more like a pinhole lens and reveals how the street is inhabited by ghosts.

I offer the major intersection closest to my home as an example of how that works: Sherbourne and Bloor in Toronto. Today, the intersection is a hotbed of construction as condominium towers go up one after another. It’s hard to see the ghosts for all the concrete. But the writer, Hugh Hood, tells how, when he was a boy, Hooper’s Pharmacy stood on the southwest corner where we now have a Tim Horton’s. He remembers how a man spoke in a friendly way to the pharmacist, then walked onto the Sherbourne Street bridge and jumped to his death.

Long before that, from 1839 until the 1860s, a military blockhouse stood in the middle of the present-day intersection. It could accommodate 44 soldiers and was put there in response to the rebellion led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Looking even further back in time, before the first white settlers, we can imagine how Indigenous people used Rosedale Valley for transport, passing immediately beneath the site of the future blockhouse. And looking further still, we can see how melt waters from receding glaciers cut the deep ravine that would later become Rosedale Valley.

What we see depends entirely on how long we leave the shutter open.

Categories
Street Photography

The Advantage of Photographing Scenes that Disappear

A woman walks through a sliver of morning light on Yonge Street while behind her is a shop called Mind Games with a bolt of lightning above the woman's head.
Woman walks through the morning light on Yonge Street

One of the great advantages of living in a place where the cityscape is disposable and buildings are routinely demolished, rebuilt, and demolished once again, is that if you get a decent shot, the light just so, a person passing through the light just so, a thunderbolt above the person’s head just so, no one else can replicate your shot. The building that served as your backdrop is now a 60 story condo. And another 60 story condo across the road forever blocks that perfect sliver of morning light. Condo killed the photo star. Or something like that.

Fuck Ansel Adams and his photos of eternal natural majesty. El Capitan and all those other enduring scenes from the American southwest. Now, tourist photographers from all over the world show up at these sites, pick out the three holes in the ground where the previous photographer set up their tripod, and set up a shot that exactly replicates all the shots that have gone before. Boring. Worse than boring. All that tourist traffic to popular photographic sites is posing an environmental threat to the natural landscape. At least when I’m tramping through the city streets, there’s not much I can do to make the environment worse than it already is.

That’s why I say fuck Ansel Adams. Not because I dislike his work. I like it very much. But because we need only one Ansel Adams. We don’t need 20,000 tourist Ansel Adams. Be something else. Be you. It’s easier to clarify who you are in a landscape that changes before anyone else can replicate your shots.

Categories
City Life

The Human Scale

A tiny construction worker stands in front of a large upright slab of concrete as the last of a building is being demolished.

There’s a story—I can’t remember where I heard it and I have no idea if it’s true—about loggers in the late 1800’s cutting down trees in an old growth forest, maybe in California or the interior of British Columbia. They fastened guy wires to the top of an enormous tree, at least a couple hundred feet high with a trunk of such girth that it took a dozen loggers holding hands to circumvent its girthness, and they used block and tackle rigging to pull down the tree.

Once the tree was laid out on the ground, the loggers took up their enormous saws and set to work cutting it up, starting at the trunk. It took all morning to make a single cut, but when they were done, they had freed the tree from its upended root ball. Time for lunch. The loggers gathered in the shade of the root ball, made themselves a little fire for their tea, pulled out their sandwiches or whatever it is that late 19th century loggers ate for lunch, stretched out their legs, settled in for a short snooze. Ah!

The problem with pulling down a tree is that half the roots are still in the ground, bent at a 90º angle, but not broken. Those roots are under enormous pressure, but held in place by the weight of the tree. When the loggers cut the tree at the trunk, there wasn’t much left to hold the roots in place. Without warning, the roots snapped back to their original position, flipping the root ball flush with the ground and effectively swallowing all the loggers underneath it. Lunch. An entire logging crew vanished beneath an enormous redwood root ball.

When I heard this story, I think the teller intended it as an environmental parable, a case of tree revenge. The moral of the story was that, ultimately, we must pay for the ravages we inflict on the natural world. Something like that. But I was a kid at the time and didn’t care for parables with environmental messages. I evaluated all stories by their gross factor. By that measure, this was a good story. Almost as good as a dead baby joke.

Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920
Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Categories
Architecture

Honest Eds

People cross Bloor Street during a snow storm in front of Honest Eds department store.
Honest Ed's Department Store, Bathurst/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

I’ve devoted the month of May to images that suggest ephemeral concerns, so it’s natural to suppose that when I present an image of an iconic Toronto landmark, now demolished, you might suppose I’m waxing nostalgic for a place I miss. It’s true. I miss the famous discount department store founded by Ed Mirvish. I miss the vibe it brought to the neighbourhood. I miss how it stood as an acknowledgement of the people who live here. The real people. The immigrants and students. It was absolutely analog. It resisted slick branding and social media campaigns. Sometimes that meant it was tacky as all shit. But, hey, if polished international brands are what you’re after, walk a kilometre east to the mink mile for your Gucci handbags and your Rolex watches.

But I’m not an overly nostalgic person. I’m more concerned with what’s in front of me than with what lies behind. In the case of Honest Eds, what lies in front is what towers overhead. Westbank and The Peterson Group purchased the site in 2014 and while they acknowledge the history of Mirvish Village and will include signs of that history in their new development, it is after all one more of countless residential/commercial developments popping up like mushrooms all over the city.

Toronto is a boom town. That boom started with the first Québec referendum when Montreal businesses, most notably financial institutions, fled the province for Toronto. It got a boost during the 2008 financial crisis when the world discovered that Canada’s more tightly regulated financial institutions, now all located in Toronto, had little exposure to dodgy credit instruments and so had weathered the storm relatively unscathed. More than ever, Toronto became an attractive place to park capital. Among other things, that influx of capital translated into new condo starts so that, by 2012, there were 148 cranes operating in the city. That pace has only accelerated. In 2021, there were 208 cranes operating in Toronto, almost as many as the combined total (276) of the other 14 North American cities in the survey.

Apart from the chaos of perpetual construction and infrastructure that can’t keep pace, the big downside of living in a skyscraper nursery is that all the buildings start to look the same. I find myself walking down a new condo canyon, all the familiar landmarks obliterated, and I can’t tell where I am anymore. I could be on one street. I could be on another street. Who knows? They all look the same to me.

I commend a short article by Aaron Betsky, “The Case for a New International Style.” He notes the trend to generic design in contemporary architecture influenced “by global flows of finance and culture, as well as by similarities in methods of production and standards”. While the influence of safety concerns arising from the pandemic has yet to play out in large projects, Betsky calls on the building industry to resist the temptation to what he calls “relentless value engineering”.

A word that comes to mind is “sterility.” While this word suggests a positive value in the context of health care and epidemiology with clean surfaces and filtered air, as an aesthetic value, it is soul deadening. I fear that much of Toronto’s built space is sterile in this latter sense. What I miss most about the demolition of Honest Eds is the way it disrupted urban space. It was the opposite of sterile.

Categories
Abstract

Our Digital Legacy

A blurred figure in a red hooded coat walks behind a glass screen as water pours down the surface of the glass.
View through falling water, Yorkville, Toronto

There is a generational divide between the things my parents will leave behind for me and those things I will leave behind for my children. I’m not talking about the stuff that gets listed in a last will and testament. I’m talking about the other stuff. The sentimental stuff. The photos in the drawer. The family albums. The scrap books of summer vacations. The letters from dearly departed great aunts. My father, now 86, has gone one further, writing anecdotes and childhood stories that he’ll stitch into a more formal memoir to share with his children and grandchildren.

Although my parents now take digital photos and record their anecdotes on laptops, they make physical copies of everything. The photos and stories they pass on to us aren’t real if we can’t grasp them in our hands.

I on the other hand have crossed a generational/technological divide. People my age and younger tend to accumulate our memorabilia in virtual space. Our photos end up on Instagram or Flickr. Instead of letters, we have threads buried in gmail accounts or texts littered with LOL’s and emojis. For memoirs, we have posts moldering on long-abandoned blogs and forgotten rants on Facebook and Twitter.

Web sites like LifeHacker advise us to preserve our digital assets in much the same way as our parents have preserved their analog assets. In this regard, there are a few basic rules to remember:

  1. Don’t save digital documents in proprietary formats. Instead, use open-source digital formats. For photographs, save RAW images in DNG format. Alternatively, use .tiff and .jpg for uncompressed and compressed images respectively. Save text as .txt. If you want something with precise layout, save as .pdf but also extract text and images and save them separately.
  2. Store redundant copies of digital files because drives fail and digital files can degrade. Make sure one of those redundant copies is on a physical drive stored off-site or on a cloud-based server (or both).
  3. And don’t forget to tell people what you’ve done with your assets.

But let’s be realistic here. Part of what makes old photos and letters from earlier generations so valuable is their comparative scarcity. Now, each one of us generates so much information about ourselves that we can expect succeeding generations to drown in our digital assets. They won’t have the time to examine any of it. It will be useful only as fodder for algorithms that uncover stories about us in the aggregate, social memoirs expressed as statistical trends.

Categories
Wildlife

Outside Time

A buck appears on the rise of a hill with a thicket in the background.
A Buck Appears in the Don Valley Brick Works Park, Toronto

Whether I mean it or not, much of what I shoot ends up being a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life. This becomes especially apparent when I revisit images years after the fact. The building has been demolished. The flower has wilted. The subject has grown old or has died. These photographs remind me of the way things were and, depending on my relationship to their subjects, they fill me with feelings of regret or wistfulness or happiness.

But not always.

Every once in a while, I have an encounter that sets me outside time. I share today’s photo not because it’s a wonderful photo (it’s not) but because it reminds me of such an encounter outside time. I was out for an early morning walk along the abandoned rail line above Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works Park when I heard a rustling along a path that tracks alongside the rail line. Looking up the slope to the path, I saw a buck staring down at me. It was an unexpected sight in the middle of a major metropolitan city. I raised my camera and took a few shots as it continued to stare down at me. When I lowered my camera, it held still. We simply stood and stared at one another.

What I take from this encounter is the memory of a feeling, the sensation that this moment had been bracketed. It was almost a mystical feeling. Something had pulled the moment out of the morning, out of the day, out of my existence. I hesitate to call it “my existence” as if I can legitimately apply a possessive pronoun to something as numinous as my presence in the universe.

Perhaps other pronouns are more fitting for this encounter. I’m mindful of Martin Buber’s I/Thou dyad. In that moment, I ceased to see the buck as an “It” and saw it, instead, as “Thou”. Or maybe I have things backward. Maybe I saw the buck as “Thou” and for that reason entered into a state that placed the two of us outside time. I lowered my camera and ceased to concern myself with capturing the buck as an “It” on a memory card.

I’m mindful, too, of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

The wild deer, wandring here & there 
Keeps the Human Soul from Care

The same poem calls us to hold “Eternity in an hour.” Writing more than two centuries ago, Blake recognized how Britain’s nascent industrialization was regimenting time. No less than the coal-fired mills and the newly invented engines, our strictures on the passage of time were doing violence to the natural world. Given our current trajectory, an encounter with a buck in the middle of a large city strikes me as nothing short of a miracle.

Categories
City Life

Psychic Readings: What Does Your Future Hold?

Man walking along sidewalk gazes back at sign advertising psychic readings.
What Does Your Future Hold? Sign on Yonge Street south of Bloor, Toronto

NASA has released a photograph of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* which spins at the centre of our galaxy. With a mass of only 4.3 million suns, it is relatively small for a supermassive black hole, especially when you consider that the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 has a mass of 6 billion suns. Strictly speaking, the photograph doesn’t show us the black hole since a black hole captures all information and releases nothing back to observers outside it; more properly, it’s a photograph of illuminated gas surrounding the black hole.

Whenever I read news stories like this, it sends my mind reeling, partly speculation, partly existential musing. Thankfully, neither of these tendencies need be limited by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about theoretical physics. In fact, my general ignorance probably makes the speculation more fun and free-wheeling.

What I do know is that the technical term for a black hole is singularity. Extreme gravity pulls matter to a single point in spacetime. Because we’re talking about spacetime and not just space, the extreme gravity also affects the flow of time. Observed from outside, as something approaches the singularity’s event horizon, time appears to slow. Beyond the event horizon (the boundary beyond which no information returns to outside observers), it’s impossible to say how time flows within the singularity. This is where speculation comes into play. Maybe time stops. Maybe time flows backwards. Maybe time flows randomly. Maybe we get time soup.

Another speculation that occurs to me: maybe we already know what happens inside a black hole because, in effect, that’s what our universe is. Like a black hole, the universe has a limit beyond which no information can escape. It’s limits appear to us dark and empty, not because there’s nothing there, but because whatever is there is unknowable. And if our universe is like a black hole, then maybe the flow of time in our universe is likewise fluid.

In his book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wonders why time appears to move in only one direction. There doesn’t appear to be a reason why time can’t move backwards. An incidental consequence of Hawking’s observation is that the physical laws of our universe offer no reason why psychics shouldn’t be able to do what they claim they can do. This suggests a different kind of singularity: a convergence between theoretical physics and theoretical psychics.

Categories
City Life

Disposable People

Torn missing person poster on a utility pole
Torn missing person poster on a utility pole

It’s 10 years since we moved from Toronto’s suburbs to the downtown core and while, for the most part, we are glad for the change in lifestyle, one thing I find disturbing is the endless succession of posters pleading for help to find missing people. Most of the stories are tragic. One of the first posters I saw when we settled downtown turned out to be a victim of serial killer Bruce McArthur. The appearance of Covid-19 has brought no abatement in this epidemic of missing people.

I don’t like to confess such a thing, but I note a shift in my personal attitude to these posters. I’ve grown inured to their presence. It reminds me of the fire and police sirens that blare at all hours of the night. After years of exposure to them, I’ve grown used to the sound and often don’t even notice anymore.

But I think the issue runs deeper than that. It’s not simply a matter of growing so accustomed to something that we cease to notice it anymore; it’s also a function of a broader cultural trend. People have becomes units of labour, fungible cogs in the neoliberal machine. Marx and Engels had documented 170 years ago how a nascent industrialization was changing the relationship of capital and labour. Their problem was that they suffered from a failure of imagination. Today, their jaws would hit the floor if they learned about cryptocurrency and the gig economy. And it would astonish them to witness the manipulations we apply to persuade people that today’s forms of work belong to reasonable social arrangements.

People do express outrage. For example, Twitter exploded when somebody leaked a supreme court opinion on abortion that cites with approval a CDC report that addresses the “domestic supply of infants.” It suggests that maternity wards are production lines in a factory. But the outrage dissipates because the most active Twitter accounts are managed by gig peons. Nobody pays them enough to sustain their outrage.

Like our bottled of water, like our masks and hair clips, like our myriad plastic widgets, our people are disposable.

Categories
Street Photography

Garbage

A night photograph of bags of consumer waste piled up by the Dundas Street entrance to Toronto's subway.

Coming out of the pandemic, I had great hopes. I entertained a fantasy that, as a society, we would engage in serious introspection, we would learn valuable lessons, and then we would apply those valuable lessons to other areas of our collective life. Just imagine, I thought to myself, if the pandemic’s lessons in epidemiology could provide us with transferable skills, like an understanding of how exponential growth works, or how statistical modelling can help us understand the consequences of collective behaviours.

But here we are! On the down slope of the 6th wave. With no guarantee that there won’t be a 7th wave (although Sting tells us that love is the 7th wave). And no guarantee that we have the stomach to do anything about it even if there is a 7th wave. While I understand that people feel frustrated and worn out, I also recognize that what we have faced—a pathogen—does not reason, does not negotiate, and does not favour one ideology over another. All we have in answer to it is a commitment to apply public health principles and a willingness to learn as we go. For me, that means getting all the vaccinations to which I am entitled, wearing a mask indoors where necessary, and avoiding large indoor crowds of unmasked people. Ideally, I place myself in proximity to people who share my approach so that we can be mutually supportive.

Unfortunately, a pathogen is the least of our worries. There are things we do to ourselves that pose a far greater threat. However, these other things play out on a timeline that allows us to be distracted by more immediate concerns. Consumerism is a fine example of a threat that routinely stymies our collective imagination. We are smart people, aren’t we? It should be no problem to apply our lessons about exponents and statistics. It’s a straightforward thing to extrapolate from a few bags of consumer waste to a situation in which the oceans bloat with plastic and microplastics circulate in the bloodstreams of every living creature on the planet, including you and me. This doesn’t even take imagination. All it takes is a pencil and a calculator.

You think wearing a mask is an inconvenience? Jesus fucking Christ, wait’ll you see what’s coming 20 years from now. We’ll remember these as the good old days.

Categories
City Life

Life’s Too Short to Worry about Shifting Usages

Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto
Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto

My post yesterday featured a blank-eyed Roman bust and dwelt upon the old cliché: the eyes are the windows to the soul. I wanted to know where the saying comes from and, after a cursory search online, I landed on a web site called phrases.org.uk. I have no idea if it’s a credible site and it doesn’t really matter. For my purposes, what does matter is that it offers an interesting illustration about the malleable nature of word usages.

The web site suggests that an early source for the idea that the eyes reflect a person’s soul is the Roman writer, Cicero, who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. As you might expect, Cicero’s native language was Latin. But when the web site tells us this, it substitutes an asterisk for the letter “a” and gives us L*tin instead. Presumably the web site does this so that search engines don’t flag it as somehow derogatory towards a group of people. Not the group of people who lived 2,000 years ago and spoke the Latin language. Another group of people still alive today.

I think it’s reasonable to say that the word “Latin” accurately describes a dead language which people formerly spoke on what is now the Italian peninsula. “Latin” is not a word English people made up and imposed on another people; it is a word its native speakers applied to describe their own language long before English emerged as a distinctive language. However, as context changes, we find other meanings grafted onto the word “Latin” and we feel compelled to make adjustments to our usage.

Shifts in meaning happen all the time but most go unnoticed except by lexicographers. The shifts that attract our attention are the ones that do harm. The “N” word, for example, with its Latin etymology tying it to the Roman word for “black”, is now impossible to utter without racist associations. People twist themselves into knots over its appearance in literature and pop culture. Think Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

In the spirit of doing unto others as I would have others do unto me, I’m inclined to give Mark Twain a pass. He had no way to anticipate how the prevailing culture would overtake the “N” word. It’s important, too, to note that his usage appeared in a context that aimed to present a Black man as a flesh and blood character who warranted the reader’s empathy. I would hope for the same consideration in my own writing. I have no way to anticipate how context may overtake my own usages and end up casting a shadow across my benign intentions.

The concern nowadays is that humans no longer assess our usages. Bots on social media sites identify offending words and suddenly we find ourselves shadowbanned or our accounts temporarily suspended. Despite all the techno-optimism wafting through the air these days, there is no such thing as an algorithmic solution to the problem of context. The bots run roughshod over everything, so we protect ourselves in advance by inserting asterisks, dashes and numbers. What the f*ck? Oh my g-d! Quentin is such a sh1th3ad.

Categories
City Life

To the Museum or Bust!

A marble bust sits in a museum gallery while a young woman passes in the background.

Further to yesterday’s museum post, I note that museum exhibits serve as an obvious reminder about the fleeting nature of life. We who are gaze at those who were but are no more. Dinosaur fossils. Mummified remains. Roman busts.

Whenever I visit the local museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, I pay a visit to the gallery of classical busts. I like to pretend I’m schmoozing with people from the past. Afternoon drinks with old (really old) friends. Selfies to post on the ancient Roman social media site, VoltusLiber. Unfortunately, after a few drinks, their eyes start to glaze over.

Sculptors have always had difficulty with the eyes. They look blank and eerie. In fact, Roman sculptors working in marble had no trouble at all with eyes because they painted them in. They had no scruples about painting their work to make it as lifelike as possible. But in the intervening years, the elements have worn away the paint. It was the sculptors who came later—Renaissance and Neo-Classical artists—who complained about the eyes because it never occurred to them that classical artists had painted their marble. Even where they did suspect that their predecessors were more relaxed, conventions had become so entrenched that later artists couldn’t persuade their patrons to try new things. And so blank and eerie eyes gaze back at us across the centuries.

To my way of thinking, blank and eerie eyes may be more realistic than carefully painted irises and pupils. They say eyes are the window of the soul. It’s impossible to say who the first “they” is, but people have been saying this since at least the days of Cicero who, ironically, is the subject of many blank-eyed sculptures. The problem is that no matter how precisely we represent a person’s eyes, the sense of an essential personality conveyed by that representation is illusory. Maybe our belief about eyes has something to do with empathy. Humans are keyed to feel something when they look into another’s eyes.

However, personal experience (and rational thought) contradict this belief. People with visual impairments give the lie to the “window to the soul” conceit. When I gaze into a person’s injured or unseeing eyes, their eyes tell me nothing about them as a whole person. Conversely, the fact that they cannot gaze into my eyes in no way hinders them from perceiving me as a whole person. Whatever mysterious alchemy constitutes the self does not depend on eyes. Similarly, the belief that we can learn something about ancient cultures by gazing into representations of ancient eyes is silly. In fact, ancient sculptors may have done us a service by leaving us with blank and eerie eyes; they force us to seek out more credible sources for our convictions about what our predecessors were like.

Categories
City Life

Old Bones

Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum
Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum

There’s nothing quite like bones from the Late Cretaceous period to remind you that you’re going to be dead for a lot longer that you’re going to be alive. Compared to the millions of years you have ahead of you as a corpse, the handful of years you have as a living breathing creature pass in the blink of an eye. My wife and I didn’t set out with that in mind when we booked our tickets to a special dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, but it didn’t escape our thoughts as we observed how shadows of the ancient bones played across the floor and danced with our own footsteps.

I am a rational soul and tend not to tie myself up in anxious knots over the prospect of my own death. Age may have something to do with my willingness to entertain thoughts of death. Experience, too. A brush with death does tend to clarify one’s thinking. Then there are my vaguely Buddhist habits: for a time, I was a regular in a community that engaged in traditional Tibetan meditative practice (until surprise, surprise the leader died). Holding one’s own death in mind turns out to be a paradoxically liberating thing to do.

The deliberate contemplation of death is not unique to Tibetan Buddhist practice. I’m reminded of the Capuchin Crypt beneath the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini where tiny chapels have been formed from the bones of 3,700 monks. The purpose of the chapels is to remind worshipers that their time on earth is fleeting. A plaque declares: “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be…” As an aside, I can’t help but hear these words in the voice of Yoda.

Playing on the walls of the museum exhibit were animated videos featuring 3D dinosaurs. It seems that digital animation is paleontology’s answer to breathing life into Ezekial’s dry bones. The dinosaurs may be long dead but, like gods, we can bring them back to life. We watched to the end of a video then read the credits scrolling down the wall. Noting the name of the production company, we wondered why it sounded familiar, then realized that our son had just that week gotten a job working for the production company. It creates a lot of children’s programming, including a show about dinosaurs. It hired our son to do a job that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Children hold an ambivalent place in conversations about mortality. On the one hand, they are a source of hope insofar as they offer us an extension, both imaginatively and genetically, into the future. On the other hand, their youth reminds us of the very thing that is slipping away from us. Sometimes, they go out of their way to remind us that we are becoming superfluous. Never is our obsolescence so apparent as when they roll their eyes while explaining to us for the umpteenth time how the smart TV works. Now I understand how my parents felt and I hope they forgive me the impatience I showed while trying to set up their VCR.

Categories
Street Photography

Will public libraries become a distant memory?

Night shot of a woman walking past the entrance to the Yorkville Public Library in Toronto
Toronto Public Library, Yorkville Avenue

Carrying on with my May theme of “things that were but are no more” I give you public libraries. With the approach of Ontario’s June 2nd provincial election, incumbent Doug Ford has announced that he will be halving provincial support for both the Southern Ontario Library Service and the Ontario Library Service-North. Ironically, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have learned how to pronounce them. Instead, he routinely abuses our ears by calling them libarries.

This isn’t the first time Doug Ford has exhibited hostility towards libraries. More than 10 years ago, as a Toronto City Councilor, Ford found himself in a war of words with Margaret Atwood over his attempt to chop municipal funding to local libraries. Again, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have found himself better armed for the battle. Then, as now, he went on about libarries and said of Atwood: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” In the same CBC article that disclosed this nugget, we learned that his brother flipped his middle finger to a woman who yelled at him for driving while talking on his cellphone. Ah, Robbie, R.I.P. as you float around in the Elysium Field of witty ripostes.

The problem with defunding libraries is part practical and part symbolic. Libraries provide countless non-obvious benefits to a community. People who foster a social democracy cast of mind have little difficulty noticing these benefits. But for those more politically keyed to believe that people should get only what they deserve or have paid for, such benefits pass mostly invisible. That’s shorthand for: I don’t feel like listing the practical benefits of libraries because, if you don’t know what they are or don’t believe they’re real, then I’m not writing this for you in any event. Persuasion is a waste of time.

In symbolic terms, libraries represent a commitment to learning, literacy, research, and perhaps most importantly, to the written word as a shared resource. Politics aside, knowledge is inherently social, and if you hamstring its social dimension, it withers. The body politic withers. Civil discourse withers. We are all diminished.

Although Doug Ford can’t find the minuscule sum in his budget to ensure that his libarries thrive, he has no difficulty pledging $1.2 Bn for a new prison in northern Ontario. Let’s be blunt, this is just an overpriced housing scheme for Indigenous people. I wonder if Ford has the imagination to see how public institutions like libraries serve a prophylactic function, disrupting the path that leads to a prison’s front doors. For $1.2 Bn, the new prison better have a top notch libarry.

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Street Photography

Continuity Is For Wimps

A middle-aged woman with glasses carries a plastic tray with some plants and wears a white T-shirt with the words: "Continuity is for wimps"
Woman buys plants in Kensington Market, Toronto

I don’t know what it means to say that continuity is for wimps. I do know that I am capable of reading a four word sentence—almost any four word sentence—and egregiously overinterpreting it. Sometimes what makes a sentence great is that it provides fertile ground for overinterpretation. Without that possibility, it would be just another boring sentence.

In the context of words, continuity may have something to do with flow. In turn, flow may be related to the passage of time. When we read a good paragraph, we say it conveys a sense of continuity to the extent that it carries us seamlessly through time from start to finish. The conjunctions and, but, and or (language’s logical operators) contribute mightily to that sense of flow. But the use of conjunctions by itself isn’t enough; their use has to be apt. “Montezuma shouted at Mary, but the dog had died.” This may be a fine use of a conjunction. However, we can’t know this without context. The dog might have no connection whatsoever to the relationship between Montezuma and Mary. A dishonest author may have tried to falsify the existence of a relationship.

The word but can anticipate a reservation, too: “I like you, but … ” Nobody wants to hear the second half of that sentence. In situations like this, we cry out to the speaker: if you feel a compulsion to make your sentences flow, now would be a good time to resist; chop things up like a fresh green salad.

Speaking of fresh green salad, I think of all the times during Trump’s term in office when I heard people complain about how the orange wonder’s speech came off sounding like word salad. America’s foremost pussy-grabbing toupee wearer has a mind remarkably untroubled by concerns for continuity. The stuff in his brain at the beginning of a sentence may not be the same stuff in his brain at the end of a sentence. Pit him against a consummate prose stylist, Julian Barnes, for example, and the difference is stark. Reading Barnes is like drinking a smooth 21 year old single malt. Listening to Trump is like drinking screech scraped from the sides of a barrel and boiled in a tin bucket.

Even if we suppose continuity is for wimps, I’m inclined to think it still depends on who’s pulling the levers. There are extraordinarily discontinuous writers—most notably poets—who still manage to produce compelling work. It’s not so much that they’ve turned their backs on continuity so much as that they’ve foisted responsibility for it onto their readers.