The Landscape is Changing

I don’t care if you’re going nowhere, just take good care of the world.

The air in Toronto was thick and wet upon my return and in it I finally learned how to love the city wading through the cool crystal-clear shallow waters of ephemerality.

I write you from my parent’s dining room table in suburban Detroit after a nearly 2-month stay in that city, the first city I ever chose, the city I thought rejected me, and the city where I learned to become an adult. What I mean: I learned to really take care of myself, meet my needs, and find my path. Back in Toronto for a short time, I paid closer attention to those around me — like the marble-feathered pigeon who roosted motionless and alone in the nook of my stoop three consecutive nights in late June and to whom I’d bring assorted seeds until he ceased — where each interaction took on a fleeting importance.

One of things I love most about Toronto that I used to really hate is how possible it is to be alone in the middle of the city. Alone and in the vastestness of a landscape not quite urban and not quite wild feels so precious to me as the need to be connected and endlessly productive and always tapepd-in tightens from collar to noose. It’s in the city’s forests, ravines, and beaches where I feel most connnected, productive, and tapped-in. Those I share these places with, and who share them with me, are important.

Since I last wrote you, I’ve been chest-deep in a research gig on the history of railroads in North America with a specific focus on the social and political nature of the railroad as well as the environmental and safety concerns that continue to revolve around its infrastructure. I never thought I would learn so much about railroads, but the more I learned the more fascinated I became in their story. Is this not true of all things?

Leafing through dozens of books at U. Toronto libraries, I was drawn to the early photography used to document life in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, where the rails weren’t the main character but the literal stage itself for modernity. Photography and railroads are about speed, and speed is about being modern even to today. I became obsessed with the faces looking back at the camera, surely not as inconspicuous as the cameraphones we have today. With their big boxy bodies and deep lenses and air of novelty, these cameras caught the eyes of some curious subjects. Looking at them looking back at me from beyond the page — a landscape is interrupted. A person with complex desires, longings, and basic needs just like mine interrupts it.

Also filling my cup this July was a three-part workshop I faciliated called “a landscape hosts something” that played with the idea of landscaping as a creative practice. I organized each session around a pair of gerund verbs involved in the re-making and re-presenting of landscape: collecting & describing; imaging & imagining; mapping & abstracting. Participants showed up each week ready to play with the mini and maxi challenges I prepared for them, and they made some incredible work exploring our venue, Bickford Park, and its surroundings.

One of my favorite parts of the workshop was returning to the park each week and animating it with curious investigations. Our home base was a soft cotton sheet I dyed forest green, lilac, and periwinkle and populated with printed matter related to the workshop. This was honestly one of the easiest and most intellectually stimulating workshops I’ve facilitated and I can’t wait to keep offering more opportunities to think, play, and connect.

Ada Smailbegovic in Descriptions of Invisible Objects : “She appears almost entirely outside of narrative, as if standing outside of the river she enters it only transiently making a slight invisible movement inside of it. A landscape hosts something. She does not see through the geometrical optics of reflection. Brittlestars don't have eyes; they are eyes, she thinks. What if your whole body were able to see.”

One of my complaints about Toronto when I moved there was its lack of lookouts or vantage points — high elevations can let you create a sense of collectivity and interdependence, rather than ownership, if you let it. From up in th CN tower (named after the railroad whose former yard the strcuture erected itself), I was reminded of this. I remembered le Parc de Belleville and the Williamsburg Bridge and the Griffith and something seemed to click.

I’m going back to Mildred’s Lane for the Queer Ecologies Research Collective this Augsut. To prepare, I’m reading Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature. He writes through his experience living and gardening on the windswept Dungeness coast at the southeastern extremity of England. He was slowly dying (as we all are, but he was a gay artist with an HIV infection in 1989 so it was different) and presents the text as a daily journal, as if each day might be his last. I went to see what Derek was up to in on July 27th 1989 and found nothing. I try to imagine how he might have been between beachcombing and surveying the wounded landscape.

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Survival by Sharing — I’ve had the pleasure of reading Paul’s meditations on entanglement, time, memory, imaging, and (un)making public in their new substack. Check it out :^)

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