week 6 10 february 2010 geog 4280 | imagining toronto copyright © amy lavender harris 1 week 6...

Week 610 February 2010

GEOG 4280 | Imagining TorontoCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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Week 6

Possibilities of Dwelling

GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining TorontoDepartment of Geography

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional StudiesYork University

Winter Term 2009-2010

Toronto the Good:

“Every city has a self-image, and every city’s self-image is almost precisely a representation of what it is not, what it is least.”

John Seeley, The Underside of Toronto (1970: 9).



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“In Toronto poverty is not exactly a crime, but it is sufficient of an inconvenience to make everyone very desirous of not possessing it.”

C.S. Clark, Of Toronto the Good (1898: 27).



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“Toronto is a long street with doorways that cost too much to enter.”

Andrew Pyper, Kiss Me (1996: 125).



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“It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground. […] Even the homeless and the outcasts travel downwards when they can, into the ravines that slice around and under the streets, where the rivers, the Don and the Humber and their tributaries, carve into the heart of the city; they build homes out of tents and slabs of metal siding, decorate them with bicycle wheels and dolls on strings and boxes of discarded books, with ribbons and mittens, and huddle in the cold beside the thin water.”

Maggie Helwig, 2008. Girls Fall Down (2008: 7).



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“Derek Rae’s life in the ravine is, after its manner, a life well organized. His time is measured by the regular catastrophe of the trains passing over his head, thunderous and dirty, an assault of noise. The days and weeks are shaped by weather, the poison sun and debilitating humidity of late summer shading slowly into the long cold nights and the sheltering snow. [...] Though Derek is radically isolated, he is not in fact quite without human contact. He is known to the street nurses, for instance, who bring him the bottles of water and tins of Ensure that now constitute his entire diet.”

Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (2008: 149).Week 610 February 2010


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“None of this represents the truth of Derek’s existence, his passions and his miseries, the battles he wages all alone against pains and fears and the forces of universal gravitation. The raw courage that is required of him every day. His hard-won choice to continue living, when so many possibilities to stop are offered at every hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the tracks, an end to the daily loss. None of this represents Derek’s soul, scraped bloody, howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the world, unrewarded.”

Helwig, 2008: 149-150.Week 610 February 2010


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“Like every story you ever heard, this one is about the teller. I am a vagrant. A voyager, a wanderer, a citizen of the kingdom of free reign. […] That May I was living in a large packing case partially roofed with stolen tar paper and snugly nestled under a tree in the middle of a wood that could not be reached except by foot or horse.”

Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign (1997: 1-2).



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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the concrete that held it captive. …. I loved the sounds, even if they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city was life.”

Aubert, 1997: 104-105.Week 610 February 2010


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“Some afternoons the musician sat in the coffee shop muttering, a short pencil in hand, scribbling musical notes onto a tattered fragment of a brown paper bag. He kept a worn leather folder of music under one arm, sometimes shifting it to the inside of his grungy coat, sometimes to the table, then back to his armpit. .[...] Oku came out of the St. George subway one day, and as he walked toward the university, he saw the musician sitting on a concrete embankment, his leather folder in his lap, his large hands making a gesture of piano playing. Oku slowed his pace, trying to avoid another unpleasant encounter. But he saw that the musician was heedlessly playing his symphony. His face was a beautiful mask of pleasure, his long fingers lustful on some arpeggio.”

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005: 170-172).



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“A photograph in winter: the street nurses make their way up a snowy slope of the Rosedale ravine, carefully, sleeping bags under their arms, the emissaries of the comfortable world, toward an improvised tent, toward people who live without comfort. Another photograph: a very thin, aged man, surrounded by piles of plywood, his few possessions, a notebook in his lap, on the banks of the Don. His name is Fred. “I’m not homeless,” he says, fists clenched in determination. “This is my home.”

Maggie Helwig, “Downward.” In HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-Flow Toilets (Coach

House, 2008:180-181).



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“I’m not crazy, you know. I spent a few years on the streets, and maybe I was yelling, but I was never crazy. I was just confused, wondering where everyone had gone, my family, my friends.”

Pat Capponi, 2006. Last Stop Sunnyside. Toronto: Harper Collins.



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“Like a first year sociology student I keep coming back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I know there are five levels, and that the first must be something like food, water and shelter, because that’s what I work at all day. But the second? Human contact, a good book and pinball? The third, I guess, is the stuff you get jailed for: fast cars, cocaine and kisses that end in a sunlit morning by the sea. Above that would be enlightenment, an Academy Award and true love. And then finally, I guess, redemption.”

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, 2004. Down to This. Toronto: Random House.

“While others slip into the shelters, we’re building our own houses with our hands. While they crowd around the TV in a community centre, we’re stoking the fire barrel, watching sparks rise like new stars in the cold night. They’re under a blanket of rules, and we’re making up our own then tossing them off with a laugh. Some of them keep it tough—they live alone beneath viaducts and bridges. But we live together on the banks of the river and the lake. We’re fought each other, and we’ll fight each other again. But not just now.

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Down to This (2004: 83).

Week 426 September 2007


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“The City of Toronto defines homelessness as a condition of people who live outside, stay in emergency shelters, spend most of their income on rent, or live in overcrowded, substandard conditions and are therefore at serious risk of becoming homeless.”

City of Toronto, 2003. Toronto Report Card on Housing and Homelessness

“Within this closeness that is dwelling in the polis I encounter, more and more frequently, those which do not dwell. I find that the homeless “jut” into my environment, without belonging to it. [...] On the same pavement where I walk they scuttle out of where they do not belong to another location where they do not belong, and every gesture of their mortal bodies reveals their resignation to not belonging.

Koukal, 1996. Discrete Environments: Those Which Do Not Dwell. International Studies in Philosophy, 28(2): 63-73.



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“Those of us which dwell swirl in eddies about the homeless, not indifferent, not concerned, not solicitous, but disturbed. We respond either with something like negation or something like charity, but in either case these confrontations disrupt our environment because we have encountered something out of place, something-we-do-not-know-what-to-do-with.

Koukal, 2006: 69.



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“I learned not to stare at the haunted men and women who would rummage through public garbage receptacles that had already been picked through half a dozen times before, in search of food or some discarded treasure. And I wouldn’t stand open-mouthed, staring at those who, like pigeons swooping down on crumbs of bread, grabbed up cigarette butts from gutters and sidewalks, straightening up long ones and immediately lighting them, the shorter ones going into torn pockets for later.”

Pat Capponi, Last Stop Sunnyside (2006: 56).



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week 6 10 february 2010 geog 4280 | imagining toronto copyright © amy lavender harris 1 week 6...

Documents

maggie helwig

long street

underside of toronto

long cold nights

possibilities of dwellinggeog

citys selfimage

street nurses

dereks soul