Author: David Barker

Categories
City Life

Fuck Marie Kondo

A ragged comfy chair sits outdoors on gravel with a light dusting of snow. In the background is a wall covered in graffiti.
Chair under the Glen Road Bridge, Toronto

You know what gives me joy? Living in the midst of crap scattered everywhere. That’s what gives me joy.

I revel in creative chaos. There is a delicious pleasure in disorganization. It’s impossible to accomplish anything of substance without the nourishment of a messy desk.

Didn’t life begin in chaos? An ocean swirling with amino acids? The random collision of molecules energized by solar flares and lightning strikes? Life from chaos. The generative impulse.

The declutter movement aims for the opposite of creativity. Spare spaces. Clean lines. Organized closets. To me, these words suggest sterility. They suggest the rooms where imagination goes to die.

I see the eyebrows rise. After all, to speak harshly about the patron saint of orderly shoe racks verges on heresy. What am I? Some kind of consumerist who wants to swim in an accumulation of stuff?

Quite the opposite, I would argue. What kind of a sick mind would tell us we should only keep the things that bring us joy? Isn’t that the very essence of consumerism? To find joy in stuff?

In fact, environmentalists tell us that the declutter movement brings to light the very worst of our consumerist habits. When we get rid of our stuff, we transfer almost all of it to landfill sites. It would be better to repair it. Or repurpose it. Or find other people who can use it. But most declutterers never do these things. They just want to get rid of their stuff. And as quickly as possible.

For my part, I will treat my accumulated stuff as if it were a primordial soup. A place to birth creative ideas. Poems. Stories. Art projects.

Fuck Marie Kondo.

Categories
Street Photography

Buddies In Bad Times

A father and small child walk on the sidewalk while holding hands. In the child's free hand is a happy face balloon. On the building in the background is a large sign that says: Buddies In Bad Times Theatre.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Yonge Street and Alexander, Toronto

If you didn’t know about Buddies In Bad Times before, you certainly did after the building on the corner of Yonge & Alexander came down. Toronto’s premiere queer theatre took advantage of clear sight lines to tack a massive poster to the side of its building. Unfortunately, like everything else in Toronto, construction on a new condo began a few months later and the sign vanished behind scaffolding.

But there were a few good months when I could stand on the west side of Yonge Street and shoot east, watching people pass on the opposite sidewalk while the BIBT sign offered commentary. Oftentimes, on busy city streets, scenes play out in ways that are no less theatrical than staged productions. So I was pleased when a father and child entered from stage right. The child held a happy face balloon which seemed to contradict the “buddies in bad times” message.

I love it when I end up with a photograph that suggests an internal contradiction. Don’t ask me what this means. I have no idea. It makes me happy just to produce an image that raises a few questions for the viewer.

Construction worker surveys site of future condominium at the corner of Alexander & Yonge Street, Toronto
Categories
Street Photography

Crossing Rosedale’s Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge

Night shot standing on Toronto's Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge. A blurred person runs towards a group of people loitering at the far end of the bridge. In the background rise the apartment buildings of St. James Town.
Crossing the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge, Toronto

A place only becomes a place as it accumulates memories. Recently, the city blocked off both ends of the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and began work replacing it. The former bridge, the bridge I’d grown to love, had wooden slats reinforced here and there with sheet metal where the wood had begun to rot. It was almost impossible to set up a tripod and take a long exposure because the minute anybody else stepped onto the bridge, it began to shake. And in a mild breeze, the whole structure wobbled. My wife refused to step onto the bridge because she was afraid it would come crashing down into the ravine below. But I enjoyed pausing in the middle of it and imagining I was on a ship in rough weather.

Unless you look closely, you might miss the fact that the bridge is pasted over with memories. Some of those memories are public, some personal. Most obvious is the plaque at the north end advising that the writer, Morley Callaghan, used to walk his dog, Nikki, every day across the bridge. In fact, the bridge is often call the Morley Callaghan Footbridge although I’m not sure if that’s its official name. More recently, the bridge appeared in an episode of the Hulu production of The Handmaid’s Tale. I know, because I was walking underneath the bridge at the time and accidentally fucked up one of their takes. And just a few weeks ago, a psychopath gunned down an an innocent exchange student outside the Glen Road entrance to the Sherbourne subway station at the south end of the bridge. I didn’t say all the memories had to be happy memories.

Once the city has finished its project, dismantling the old bridge and replacing it with the new, will this still be the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge? I suppose this question is a variation on the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you replace each plank of the ship until none of the original planks remains, can you say that it’s the same ship? In the case of this bridge, if you reconstruct it and give it the same name as the original bridge, does it still support all those memories? Or does it hasten their disappearance? Like shadows running away in the night.

Categories
City Life

Green Umbrella

An upended green umbrella lies on the damp path beside Rosedale Valley Road while in the distance, obscured by fog, a bridge spans the valley.
Foggy morning in Rosedale Valley, Toronto

When I was a child, I was afraid of umbrellas because, viewed in a certain way, with their eight ribbed supports, they reminded me of spiders. Why would I want to hold a spider over my head? What if the umbrella collapsed and all the spider legs folded over my face? I imagined myself in the clutches of a malicious umbrella, waving my hands over my head, unable to see, running into the street and mowed down by a passing garbage truck. Long before the movie, Alien, there was my imagination breathing life into all the terrors of the modern world.

I once believed that my passage into adulthood would relieve me of my childhood terrors. My imagination would settle itself: a thing is just a thing, and not invested with terrors beyond itself. In a sense, that’s true. I’ve never once been attacked by a malicious umbrella and so my childhood fears have subsided.

However, my adult life is not without fears all its own. And like my childhood fears, my adult fears arise from an overactive imagination. I see a broken and discarded umbrella splayed on the ground while a garbage truck trundles past, and I imagine all the umbrellas that have ever lived since the invention of the umbrella. Billions upon billions of them heaped in a pile of dead umbrellas. Umbrella mountain.

I imagine the flimsy frames of unreclaimed metal, the plastic latches, the nylon fabric fading in the sunlight. In time, the elements work away at the monstrous pile of waste, dissolving bits of the metal, breaking the nylon fabric into microplastics, all of it washing toxic into the water table and borne from there into the hydrologic cycle. In a way, this is a horror far worse than anything springing from my childhood imagination. This is more like FrankenUmbrella: a billion billion arachnid creatures flip over onto their spindly legs and scuttle down from their high mountain on a long march against their creators.

Categories
Street Photography

Good Will Hunting

A woman in a winter coat walks along the sidewalk past a giant poster of a woman dressed in fur.
Advertising Poster on Bloor Street West, Toronto

I have a small wooden display case for Hohner mouth organs. It’s old and scuffed and my wife wishes I’d throw it out. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because it belonged to my great grandfather. Frederick (Fred) Barker, who died long before I was born, kept a small general store in a small community in a backwater of New Brunswick. This display case comes from that store.

I don’t imagine his store was much of a going concern, but it was enough to sustain him and his wife Mary and their four sons. Back at the turn of the (20th) century, Fred sold the sorts of goods that people living in the town of Sheffield might need. He didn’t advertise. I’m not sure it would have occurred to him that he could advertise his business. Even if he had advertised, I doubt it would have made any difference.

Fred relied almost exclusively on good will to attract his custom. He fostered that good will by being an active member of the community. He attended the local church (in fact, two of his sons grew up to become clergy). And when people entered his shop, he spoke to them by name. He expressed an interest in their lives, and in turn they expressed an interest in his life. Good will.

Nowadays, it’s almost inconceivable that somebody could rely exclusively on good will to sustain a business. It may have something to do with increasing urbanization. Maybe the way capital swallows up small businesses and integrates them into large organizations. Maybe it has something to do with changing cultural expectations. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of those things along with other reasons I can scarcely imagine.

Today it’s a matter of scale. When Fred ran his general store, it was a modest concern that fit hand-in-glove with the community it served. Now, retail concerns have grown so large, the customers appears as ants by comparison. It’s no longer the case that the customer is always right. Instead, the customer is always small.

Categories
Street Photography

Too Old To Fail

Shadowy outlines of the words "Hudson Bay Company" remain on the wall of the former Bloor/Yonge retail location after the sign has been dismantled. People pass on the sidewalk underneath.
Hudson Bay Company, Bloor Street East, Toronto

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve grown accustomed to the phrase “too big to fail” as a justification for using government funds to prop up large corporations. The rationale is that certain companies are so large that if they collapse, the consequences will ripple throughout the national or even global economy and take everything down with them. For example, if a bank defaults on its obligations to its depositors, they will then default on their obligations, too, and so on. Never mind that the people who lobby for government money by crying “too big to fail” are the same people who, at any other time, would declare themselves neoliberal small-government libertarians. But that’s a rant for another day.

It strikes me that the phrase “too old to fail” has some traction too, though maybe for different reasons. I feel no sentimental attachment to the Royal Bank of Canada, but I feel very differently about the Hudson Bay Company. As a boy, I read about how Henry Hudson and his son were set adrift in the spring of 1611 by a mutinous crew who were tired of masking wintering in the newly discovered Hudson’s Bay. They floated off, never to be seen again. I read, too, about the adventures of Radisson and Groseilliers and imagined myself paddling alongside them as they explored uncharted territories.

In 1670, a group of wealthy courtiers obtained a Royal Charter formally establishing the Hudson Bay Company. And in 1869 the HBC sold the region known as Rupert’s Land to the recently formed government of Canada (rejecting an American offer).

However, recent transactions have sucked most of the romance out of The Bay and remind us that it’s now just another company, as subject to the logic of free-flowing capital as any other. For example, in 1978, it acquired Zellers. Zellers for fuck’s sake! But that wasn’t the last shit discount retail store it acquired. It bought Towers in 1990 and Kmart in 1998. Holy crap! In 1979, billionaire Kenneth Thompson acquired a 75% stake in the company and, like an unsexy version of Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, proceeded to break it apart.

But the nail in the coffin of HBC romance came in 2008 when an American private equity firm bought the company for $1.1 billion. In 2020, they took the company private and that, as they say, is that. Earlier this year, they announced that they were closing the local retail outlet at Bloor and Yonge. The place where I buy all my underwear! Gone with the snap of a finger. Earlier this month, a crew came and pulled the sign off the side of the building and turned one of Toronto’s shittiest stretches of sidewalk into an even shittier stretch of sidewalk.

But I should have known better. As I boy, I could be forgiven for getting swept away by a romantic telling of the Hudson Bay story. But what took me so long to revisit the story with the critical eye of an adult? What took me so long to recognize that this is just another example of capital, whether in 1670 or 2020, deployed to make a handful of people obscenely wealthy at the expense of whole nations of people and the natural resources that sustain them?

A stain on a wall is easy enough scour away. But other stains endure.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.