LETTERS TO TORONTO: Places know when they are loved.
By Iza Bryniarska
Places know when they’re loved - just the same as people. I’ve seen houses whose hearts were actually broken. – Lucy Maud Montgomery
This wine seeps into the mouth as if through the wood of the barrel in which it started.
Outside, the eclipse lends the moon’s expression of perpetual melancholy reaction a living hue. In the evening’s stunning cold the changed ancient face has the illusion of flushed skin. It has been transformed from the habitual; intimate in its commentary, verging on words.
The wine on the tongue produces a detailed image of wood.
This is a strange neighbourhood: the view from the concrete sixth-floor balcony is Dickensian to the left – the frozen lake, the deafening highway its every vein taut with traffic, factories exhaling smog. Metal, billboards, and condos popping up with weeds’ frequency and sameness, chimneys and crevices exhaling steam. To the right the more coherent high-risedness of the downtown core, and in the middle the CN Tower. This is a “great view” on a grand scale. This view is only achievable when you’re far enough and high enough away from the centre.
I’m inside the wood’s veins, tracing this wine’s twenty-two year coursing.
It’s the invisible centre that draws. In the streets and alleyways people breathe quickly, exhale graffiti, pounce on each other in an array of intimacy – violence, lust, politics, religion. Bells, machinery, the plucking of guitar strings, the riot of sidewalk messiahs hawking pens, salvation, or a kick in the ass for a dollar. Figures lurking in the shadows, by the side of Regent Park buildings or between century-old houses or wherever they can wedge themselves call out to women "tsk-tsk," or, more precisely..."tsss-tsss.” You walk down a murky street, cold starting to bite, look over at the suggestion of a form and hear "tsss-tsss," like the question version of coins rubbing together, of cheap polyester chafing 'cuz of sweat on it. You wish you could somehow find out the secret code that would lead to The Next Step. To see how that all goes down. Impossible - so, you board the streetcar and they remain - waiting, coin-tongued.
The eclipse is nearly over, the returning sliver of light at the base of the moon mimicking a cut throat. Blinded, blinding, the moon assumes its familiar inaccessible expression: a "distressed goddess", a scar in the memory.
Inhabiting a place produces a kind of religious conviction – though you cannot see inside right now, you know that tonight like every other night there are countless souls inside the low, peeling buildings off Queen, Bloor, Ossington, Danforth, Parliament who, under-sleeping in over-priced apartments and over-working in under-ventilated spaces, pound the city's shifting image onto canvases, render it in stone or wood, force it out of musical instruments, stain the page with it. At ground level in many of the neighbourhoods not visible from the balcony there's no big idea. The organism is an intricate network of inter-connected expressions.