{"id":9747,"date":"2010-03-05T13:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T18:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=9747"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:55:28","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:55:28","slug":"islands-in-the-stream-of-consciousness-the-people-we-never-meet-in-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/03\/05\/islands-in-the-stream-of-consciousness-the-people-we-never-meet-in-toronto\/","title":{"rendered":"Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography<\/a> column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we\u2019re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington<\/em><\/a>, walking down the street like we own it. That\u2019s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it\u2019s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.<\/p>\n

Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It\u2019s a web that doesn\u2019t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.<\/p>\n

Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It\u2019s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don\u2019t watch out, you\u2019ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding \u2014 we can see all these people, but it\u2019s hard to know where they fit into \u201cthe city we know.\u201d It\u2019s too much.
\n
\nFacebook helps make sense of people by organizing our networks, but do a bit of stalking of strangers \u2014 especially ones that seem to live in the same general part of town as you do \u2014 and it\u2019s remarkable how many people you can find that have ridiculously high \u201cfriend\u201d numbers \u2014 into the hundreds or even over a thousand \u2014 who you don\u2019t have any friends in common with. That there is no overlap of these vast networks is as dramatic a sign of Toronto\u2019s human depth as the 401 is.<\/p>\n

We spend a remarkable amount of our Toronto lives in metaphorical tunnels and islands. We\u2019ve got our social groups \u2014 the people we know \u2014 and well-worn routes between them that lead to an impression of knowing the \u201cedges\u201d of Toronto, but it\u2019s an illusionary and parochial view. Toronto\u2019s deeper than any of us can imagine, but the depth is in places we don\u2019t pass by everyday: at Church basement meetings we don\u2019t hear about, in North York strip-mall nightclubs not listed in this newspaper and at concerts that aren\u2019t considered cool. Queen West hipsterland may as well be another country when viewed from Clubland. Toronto activist circles may never bump into Bay Street money folk, they just read about each other in the news. Yet it\u2019s all Toronto.<\/p>\n

We limit our Toronto experiences for good reason: we\u2019d not be able to cope with knowing everything. Yet we (and I) often say \u201cwe\u201d when describing the city and our fellow Torontonians in it. \u201cWe are despondent about the Leafs.\u201d \u201cWe got through SARS together.\u201d But what does that \u201cwe\u201d mean if we have no idea or direct connection to all those people? This becomes especially apparent in an election year, when candidates try to talk directly to you, but also to 2.5 million other people. This city of small towns suddenly seems full of disparate strangers.<\/p>\n

Princeton professor Danielle Allen<\/strong>, author of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship<\/em>since Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a> , has called the relationship between complete strangers the \u201cpolitical friendship,\u201d and in a 2008 talk she described it as more than just a feeling of being a \u201cwe\u201d but a way of acting towards each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne doesn\u2019t even have to like one\u2019s fellow citizens in order to act toward them as a political friend,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is a very easy way of transforming one\u2019s relations to strangers. We might simply ask about all our encounters with others in our polity, \u2018Would I treat a friend this way?\u2019 When we can answer \u2018yes,\u2019 we are on the way to developing a citizenship that is neither domination nor acquiescence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Toronto, we\u2019re relatively good at treating other people humanly. It\u2019s a civil and gentle place as big cities go, but in this election year, when heretofore benign differences between people will be played upon as if somebody\u2019s job depended on it, we can do better. Allen suggests the best way to improve our political friendships with each other \u2014 to strengthen Toronto\u2019s \u201cwe\u201d \u2014 is to improve our public conversations and talk to other people we might not otherwise talk to.<\/p>\n

There are all kinds of ways to break out of our social tunnels and get off our islands. Twitter is over-hyped and there isn\u2019t enough diversity on it (most people, contrary to \u201csocial media experts,\u201d still don\u2019t care to tweet) but it\u2019s a fantastic way of listening to other people<\/a>. But it takes some effort. The 600-plus people I follow (perhaps 2\/3 of which are here in Toronto) can start to represent Toronto so often I\u2019ll do a \u201cnearby\u201d search for geotagged posts (tweets people attach location data to) to see a completely different slice of Toronto with dozens and hundreds of parallel voices that until now I hadn\u2019t heard.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve started following people who are into golf, who go to monster truck rallies at SkyDome and who aren\u2019t completely appalled by Stephen Harper<\/strong>. They\u2019re into things I couldn\u2019t imagine being into, but the medium is so intimate that I hear about worries about their sick kids and about other loves of their life and they become less oppositional and more Torontonian.<\/p>\n

We should also approach our social life like we do restaurants, trying different things from time to time. It\u2019s tricky: you don\u2019t want to invade somebody else\u2019s territory, but if you do it respectfully (and aren\u2019t ironic about it) people are open to visitors. I\u2019ve had some fine and wonderful conversations sitting at bars on Scarborough arterials and there\u2019s a lot to listen to in the food courts of some of Toronto\u2019s malls, especially smaller ones like Albion Centre up in Rexdale.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, two friends and I went to a Russian sauna underneath the shopping plaza at Sheppard and Bathurst. It\u2019s been there since the 1960s, has clocks that tell Toronto, Moscow and Tel Aviv time, and was filled with naked Russian men. We three were conspicuous at first, though we tried to fit in quietly, drinking our BYOB tallboy beers like the other men in between sweats and cold-plunges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t get many Canadians in here,\u201d one guy eventually said to us. Then we talked and then we laughed about things. Then they showed us how to beat ourselves with oak leaves properly by laying us on the benches and initiating us. Now, that huge Russian population that lives in Toronto that I had heard about has a few more faces and voices associated with it. It was not world-changing or a civic-epiphany, but one of many tiny steps in figuring out what \u201cwe\u201d really means in Toronto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku. Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we\u2019re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington,Continue reading “Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21758,4,21759,20],"tags":[14512,2554,379,28,14514,14508,14509,14513,423,4657,876,7958,370,14515,2829,1154,14510,41,316,89,569,14511,2092,13375,19,10185,14507,496],"class_list":["post-9747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-culture","category-features","category-urban-design","tag-al-waxman","tag-albion-centre","tag-author","tag-behaviour","tag-board-of-education","tag-canadian-national-exhibition-arch","tag-church-basement","tag-danielle-allen","tag-eye-weekly","tag-facebook","tag-flash","tag-food-courts","tag-king","tag-king-of-kensington","tag-moscow","tag-north-america","tag-princeton-professor","tag-psychogeography","tag-queen","tag-scarborough","tag-skydome","tag-social-media-experts","tag-stephen-harper","tag-tel-aviv","tag-toronto","tag-twitter","tag-union-station-basement","tag-york"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIslands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/03\/05\/islands-in-the-stream-of-consciousness-the-people-we-never-meet-in-toronto\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. 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