Thursday, October 2, 2008

ostranenie, I

(written september 26, 2005, queen's park east.)

The fog is thick, really thick, and it reminds me of London (though the weather was beautiful when I was there, warm for September and not at all what I'd come to expect from all the Dickens novels and Sherlock Holmes serials I'd read). The displaced fog is laced with what I assume is acid rain, and it floats by the base and the summit of the C.N. Tower like spent gunsmoke from a John Wayne western: all dry ice and blank caps. It leaves only the revolving restaurant ball visible halfway up the
structure, like a bead halfway down an abacus.

I imagine there isn't much to see looking down from there today, though I can't say with certainty,
because in the twenty-odd years I've lived on and off in this city I've never been up what the
brochures call the tallest free-standing building in the world. Now, most of my information (and
maybe theirs as well) comes from half-remembered public school lessons; like Neptune being farthest from the sun, the height ratio is probably out of date. The thing that's tallest is only
tallest until something else gets taller. And that seems to be a big deal with people: tallest,
longest, fastest, smartest, strongest - it's all relative and it's all transitory.

The longer I spend downtown the better I get to know the area: south-east around Queen's Park
from Museum Station, right on Hoskin and past Trinity College (which is under construction -
workers' lattices climbing the sides of a characteristically classical building like matchstick
constructs). I look at the aloe-green towers (not nearly as tall or free-standing as the Canadian
National) through the gridwork of ugly and impressively fragile-looking rusted steel lattices, and I presume the green-and-brown combination that is mirrored on the Parliament buildings farther down the way must
be some kind of British thing, though I don't remember seeing much of that in London despite the
good weather.

My feet move me farther down the sidewalk and past the old wrought-iron fences and distinctly
churchy university buildings. There's this underlying but extremely prominent religious feel to
the entire layout of this area; a feeling of the sanctity of education, the richness of history and the hand of god on young minds that you don't get at newer
schools like York or Laurier. This school pays mostly lip service to the superstructures of glass
and plastic and electronics and concrete that you find in the new universities; save for a few
modern structures like Sid Smith Hall, the majority of classes are nestled within buildings made
of old wood and thick uninsulated glass and heavy iron knockers. It's like the school itself is vying
against the passage of time, like it prefers candlelight to the illumination of a PC screen, like it's
desperately holding onto a time when its vitality was still measured in feet instead of meters and
pounds as opposed to a composite-alloy dollar. It's vying against the natural order of things;
clinging to the trappings and importances of an earlier age while still trying to stay tallest, longest,
fastest, smartest, strongest.

I know that time renders everything obsolete and that relates directly to the transience of
superiority, but if something outstanding remains frozen in time; if something devalues the
importance of the passage of time in favour of its own superiority within the framework of that
time, if this school at the borders of its grand old constructs maintains the form and shape of that time in this place; do I enter that structure and immerse in that superiority while I stand here? Or is it all of
this, here in this time, in this place, just an old memory that refuses to die; a planet that will not return to its original orbit,
the gold medalist who refuses to observe his broken record? But in all of what I see: the fog and
the religious streets and a tower that I still believe is tallest, all of what I might be, standing here
and breathing in acid rain and dry ice and old time, I suppose that I and everything must be relative
and transitory.

No comments: