Books and literature – a sibilant intake of breath

Love and a city’s possibilities

‘What does love have to do with it?’ asked the late Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in his 2007 book, Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. He was Toronto’s second poet laureate, from 2004 to 2009, and the book is his legacy project from that time. Di Cocco had a passionate, sometimes combustible-seeming connection to Toronto. A practicing Catholic priest, he wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks, smoked cigarettes, and spoke with a fantastic gravelly voice. A cool priest even, cooler than I ever knew from thirteen years of Catholic school. ‘A town that is not in love with itself is irresponsible, and civilly apt for mistakes,’ he wrote. ‘A citizenry is incited to action by the eros of mutual care, by having a common object of love — their city. A town that is not in love with itself will cut corners; lose sight of the common good.’

Love is also something you would be hard-pressed to find in official city statutes, but ask yourself if you love Toronto or whichever city you live in. Often the answer is no: cities are frustrating, but how can we care about something we don’t also love? In a section of Municipal Mind called ‘Restoring the Soul to the City,’ Di Cocco tried to conjure a Toronto that could be — something we could aspire to. ‘Developers are generally not known for their philosophical bent, but for their market enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘But it was a developer who told me the truest thing about cities: Speaking of Florence, a place that revitalized a civilization by a standard of civic care and design excellence, my friend remarked, “You know, Florence was already there, before a building ever went up.”

Toronto is certainly not Florence, and those with little imagination will dismiss the poetry about a city as useless, but Di Cocco was encouraging us to dream up an ideal Toronto that could be something to strive for as this place continues to grow and change. It could be about the architecture, but it also could be the sidewalks, more equitable and affordable housing, lusher parks, or ample public washrooms. Is Toronto living up to the city we dream of? From Di Cocco’s point of view, these collective ideals and visions are what make Toronto beautiful, rather than the stuff already built. It’s possible to dream of a better Toronto even while loving the current one. Perhaps it’s the only way to dream.

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 15

Contrast with: This uncivil city

Forward to Stroll

A new, cool style of engaging and enjoying metropolitan realities has recently emerged in Toronto among certain young writers, artists, architects, and persons without portfolio. These people can be recognized by their careful gaze at things most others ignore: places off the tourist map of Toronto’s notable sights, the clutter of sidewalk signage and graffiti, the grain inscribed on the urban surface by the drift of populations and the cuts of fashion.

Their typical tactic is the stroll. The typical product of strolling is knowledge that cannot be acquired merely by studying maps, guidebooks, and statistics. Rather, it is a matter of the body, knowing the city by pacing off its streets and neighbourhoods, recovering the deep, enduring traces of our inhabitation by encountering directly the fabric of buildings and the legends we have built here during the last two centuries. Some of these strollers, including Shawn Micallef, have joined forces to make Spacing magazine. But Shawn has done more than that. He has recorded his strolls in EYE WEEKLY, and these meditations, in turn, have provided the raw material for the present book. The result you have in your hands is a new introduction to Toronto as it reveals itself to the patient walker, and an invitation to walk abroad on our own errands of discovery, uncovering the memories, codes, and messages hidden in the text that is our city.

Forward from first edition, Toronto, 2010

John Bentley Mays, 1941–2016

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 7

Hopeful messages from McKibben

I have long considered the opening chapter of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass to be a masterful lesson in worldbuilding in speculative fiction. He does a magnificent job of introducing a subtly different alternative world, without ever relying on crude exposition or just telling the reader that some things are different and what they are. The biggest obvious difference with our world — that the people in hers have daemons — is revealed unobtrusively and naturally from the perspective of characters who consider it normal. We learn everything crucial about Lyra’s bond with Pantalaimon just from the character of their conversation in this short timespan.

Yesterday, during a discussion with ChatGPT about Lyra Bellaqua and Sherlock Holmes, I had the assisted realization that what the chapter also achieves, even more importantly, is to establish Lyra’s character through the same method of compelling and unobtrusive narrative storytelling. When we meet her, she is conniving to sneak in to the exclusive Retiring Room for Jordan College scholars, which is forbidden to her, driven by her consuming curiosity about what happens there. Right away, we see that she is inquisitive and bold, willing to defy the rules to learn, and unwilling to defer to stuffy authority. Then, when she observes the Master’s attempt to poison Lord Asriel’s wine, her choice is to intervene: revealing the fundamental moral framework that drives her. Even at a risk to herself, she will make a substantial effort to save someone else, as later revealed at a much grander scale with her Bolvangar rescue.

It is said that all speculative fiction is really a commentary on the present, and Pullman’s is sharp and relevant. The Golden Compass reveals the monstrosities that emerge from the unchecked power of the heartless, and presents selfless individual moral courage as a response. Comfortable and exclusionary systems of power which are free from outside oversight drift into seeing right and wrong in terms of their self-interest, if they even persist with thinking about morality at all. Lyra reminds us that, while it is never safe, we always have the choice to resist and to assert a standard of morality based on respect for the individual and repugnance at their exploitation and sacrifice for outside agendas. The arc of that demonstration all begins with the insight into her mind provided by that opening chapter, and that’s why it stands out as some of the strongest worldbuilding in fiction.

The environmental movement and young people’s rage

During my childhood, I remember a book circulating around the house called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth.

It included activities like putting a milk carton underneath a dripping tap to measure the rate at which it was dripping, and leaving elastic bands stretched and exposed outside to supposedly measure air pollution.

Much later, I realized how fucked up the implications of the book and its genre are.

The buried premise is that the Earth needs “saving” — which is horrifying and terrifying. The book takes it for granted that the one life-sustaining planet known in the universe is imperiled by human activity. If something needs saving and doesn’t get it, that means it dies or gets destroyed. The book comes right out and takes for granted that all known life is at risk unless humanity changes its conduct and attitudes and that this won’t happen through the existing political, economic, and legal systems.

The next implication is that the appropriate resolution to this, at least in part, depends on kids. It’s up to kids to save the Earth. Furthermore, they need to do it through some sort of resistance to or reform of the political and economic systems which embody and sustain the ecological crisis.

So not only does the book imply that it is the responsibility of kids to save all the life in the universe, but it goes on to give them a series of trivialities as action items: find a way to avoid wasting a carton of water, check the pH of a local stream… It sets up a colossal threat, then gives some arts-and-crafts activities and low-impact personal lifestyle changes as the solutions available.

Of course, my bitterness about this arises from the decades of utter betrayal toward young people which have characterized my life. Given the choice between perks today and not wrecking the Earth, all our leaders choose the former with lip service to the latter. Young people have grown up in a world where they expect catastrophe, and understand that their leaders prefer that outcome to changing the self-serving status quo.

I was part of that youth movement at least from my experiences with LIFE in the mid-1990s until the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities after 2012, and saw how it was systematically patronized, treated in bad faith, and ignored by those who set policy. Adults told kids that it was up to them to save the world, then knowingly and purposefully undermined those efforts in order to protect their own interests, all while portraying themselves as sage decision-makers moderating the unreasonable requests of radical activists. This process is ongoing.

This dynamic has produced a great deal of apathy and political disengagement, but I think there is also an underlying rage arising from young people understanding that they have been put in lifelong peril by a society which systematically disregards their interests — to say nothing about how the prospects for their potential children have been ravaged. It is hard to guess how that rage will manifest, but it seems very implausible that it will be through the sort of long-sighted planetwide cooperation which provides the only path to curtailing the climate crisis.

Nice thoughts are not an obligation

You don’t have to think nice.

Instead of teaching you to think EI [emotionally immature] parents teach you to judge your thoughts. EI parents always turn thinking into a moral issue. They will attack their child’s open, honest thoughts if they feel threatened. By acting wounded, insulted, or appalled, EI parents make it clear that you are only good when your thoughts are nice.

It’s crucial to realize that you don’t have to think nice. There are no thought police, thank goodness, and you have the absolute right to think anything that occurs to you. Your original thoughts are a big part of your individuality and are necessary to solve problems with creative thinking.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 8: “Making Room for Your Own Mind”

Interior, not interpersonal

Thought is an interior experience, not an interpersonal event. Thoughts innocently arise from our instincts for survival, security, and pleasure and are involuntary. They are the personal raw materials of the mind and, as such, are neither good nor bad. However, emotionally immature people judge your thinking to make sure you stay aligned with their beliefs.

…

It’s hard to be clear on your own position if you know your opinion could lead to your being reviled. Because EI parents need to feel like they are right about everything, they make you feel rejected if your thinking doesn’t match theirs. As an adult it’s self-defeating to accept others’ opinions instead of consulting your own mind. But EI parents teach you to do just that: they act like you’re being rebellious or selfish if you don’t consider them first in every step of your thought process. EI parents see free thought as disloyal. For EI parents everything is about how important, respected, and in control they feel. So, what happens if you have your own thoughts and opinions? They see you as disloyal. To the ‘all or nothing’ EIP’s mind, your differing opinion means you couldn’t possibly love or respect them, therefore you may have learned to hide your most honest thoughts from your thin-skinned EI parents.

The uncertainty principle and limits of knowledge

[Heisenberg and Bohr] left the park and plunged into the city streets while they discussed the consequences of Heisenberg’s discovery, which Bohr saw as the cornerstone upon which a truly new physics could be founded. In philosophical terms, he told him as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. These hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.

Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World. New York Review of Books, 2020. p. 161–2

No anger! No sadness!

You minimize your feelings and shut yourself down. Emotionally immature parents often react as though your emotions are too extreme: as though there were something wrong with you for having a heartfelt reaction. They thus teach you to downplay your feelings because they are uncomfortable with these strong emotions. They convince you that many of your emotions are unwarranted or excessive.

…

Their overall message to her was: don’t feel. Whatever Maya experienced, she always got the message that it was too much. Mild emotional arousal was all her parents considered acceptable. To avoid embarrassment, Maya learned to disconnect from her strongest emotions, whether positive or negative. This resulted in chronic depression as an adult. “I think they wanted me to be happy,” Maya told me, “but in a very shallow ‘let’s not get too deep’ kind of way.” Maya recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Maya hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Maya began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom: her right to feel whatever she felt.

Boundary-rejecting parents

They don’t respect your boundaries or individuality. Emotionally immature parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries. They think boundaries imply rejection, meaning you don’t care enough about them to give them free access to your life. This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy. They feel loved only when you let them interrupt you any time. EI parents seek dominant and privileged roles in which they don’t have to respect others’ boundaries. EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and therefore belong to them. Even when you’re grown they expect you to remain their compliant child or, if you insist on your own life, at least always follow their advice.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 2.

Category: Books and literature