A friend pointed me towards David Byrne’s October 17th Journal Entry where he wonders why we think natural things are beautiful before we think human-made things are.
Is it more interesting to look at a river than a highway? (A highway with cars passing on it, I mean.) Is a colorful paint spill on a sidewalk as beautiful as a sunset? … Is it a cultural prejudice? Over the millennium have we grown accustomed to gazing at rivers and viewing the works of man as impressive, but not as moving and beautiful as a river? Do we see the works of man as suspect, impure? Highways, in particular, are seen as practical devices to get us from one place to another in vehicles of one sort or another. And while some interchanges and triple-layered overpasses might be majestic and even aesthetically lovely, gazing at traffic going by an ordinary stretch is seen as the pastime of a psychopath.
I’ve often wondered why ideas of the “The Canadian North” or “The Majestic Rockies” are so much a part of our national identity. Maybe they were for Pierre Burton, but for me they’re all just lovely postcards — and it seems an accident, or lucky stroke, of history that, say, Banff falls within our borders, and it’s nice that I can fly there and go for hikes on lovely, awe inspiring trails, but how that is part of me-the-Canadian, I’m not sure. Perhaps that’s why Canadians have such trouble with our identity — we’re presented with something that has nothing to do with the actual lives we lead, other than on vacations and road trips.
The things people do just seem more interesting, and more directly related to my experience as a Canadian (which, for all of us, is largely an urban experience). I like our skyline, the sharp edges of manicured shorelines, and, secretely, sometimes, the gentle curve of the DVP as it passes between Don Mills road and the Bloor street exit. Sometimes we’ve walked through the thicket of trees in Riverdale park, down the slope from Broadview, with the DVP out of sight but not out of earshot. It sounds exactly like the ocean surf (heard from maybe 100 meters away — when the waves all blend in as one big sound).
Cars are still bad, generally, and we’d still like to bury the Gardiner, but these things are around us so it would be denying the obvious not to recognize the occasional bits of beauty in some of our villified structures, and perhaps make them easier to live with, and not make us pine away for some non-existent Canadian wilderness ideal. This too is the same David Byrne who made nerdy things so sexy back when he was with the Talking Heads. They even had a song, late in their career, that brought up these conflicting ideas called (Nothing But) Flowers:
There was a shopping mall
Now it’s all covered with flowers
you’ve got it, you’ve got itIf this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
you’ve got it, you’ve got itYears ago
I was an angry young man
I’d pretend
That I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway
This used to be real estate
Now it’s only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it’s nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we’d start over
But I guess I was wrong
