TORONTO MYTH. A collaboration, with pictures by Lee Ka-sing and texts by Gary Michael Dault
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The faucet marks the headwaters of the narrative idea, where water gushes from metal, runs for a while and ceases to run.  Pathetic waterfall, smoothly styled so that we might try to forget the small twilight runoff it offers in lieu of the great hard sun-pressure of promise.
  The faucet marks the headwaters of the narrative idea, where water gushes from metal, runs for a while and ceases to run.  Pathetic waterfall, smoothly styled so that we might try to forget the small twilight runoff it offers in lieu of the great hard sun-pressure of promise.
  In the city, a clock is out-of-its-depth in multi-leveled time.  Impaired by inaccuracy, it swings in despair with the alternating indecisiveness of a pendulum, taking its shadowy users for a non-representational ride.  Robert Louis Stevenson once noted that to live without a clock would be to live forever.  But everybody has a clock, and our lives are short
  In the city, nature appears as a mechanized artifact.  This fan is a bent flower, held in a wire-weary bubble of electric fragrance.
  Many-arched, many-eyed classicism, unfound in the city, plummets into architectural sarcasm. "A very vexed question," wrote Italian Futurist painter Carlo Carra, in 1918, "is that of art getting the uppermost of man."
  The cars and trucks that come to the city start healing over at the outskirts, listing more all the time as they head hard for the urban epicentre.  It is desire that undoes them, these thin, egg-like skins of metal, growing even more flimsy and diminutive as they are inexorably tied into the knot of immediacy. 
  The tree, using the everywhere ink-wind, brushes itself onto a knobby, towel-like page of city air.  
  The sun over the city is an insect sun, a burning centipede, oaring its way across the sea of firmament.  The solar insect's heart is a celestial fire opal, an admirable brooch for the lapel of day, were it not wriggling with legs a million miles long.
  The lightbulb is a circus tent.  The filament is a tightrope act.  The artist is a a small Greek column, crumbling in the heat of the expectations we hold for him.
  One side of this Manichean tree is an inference of spring, while the other side is still a tightly frozen claw. This is an inducement to keep reading from left to right, like any good whacked-out citizen of the western world.
  These are rusty fields of meaning.  They thrust up like powdery, flaking hydro towers; they stretch in neural nets made of streetcar cable, over our heads.  They offer a dreamy cognitive membrane that makes your hair stand on end by its very lassitude.
  Notice this upsetting verticality on the bias: a failed imperative leaning, like the Pisa Tower, into something weaker, inflected, something more momentary than the loud aspirations of its original thrust.  Say a prayer now for resolve.
  This is a slow, longlived graffitus, what French writer Francis Ponge calls "age-old brushery" or "high brushery"; this is the cosmic hair of drawing, of scratching, incised upon the stone-cold shoulders of a moist old building.
  Pylons burnt by blur at their tops, self-cauterized by their epic, over-reaching dreams.  On the other hand, the virtual pavilion left behind by their granular un-finish is sweet (see the German, Halla: a temple, a building open on all sides, see Albert Speer's giant flashlight-columns at the Nazi Nuremberg rally of 1934, see architect Rob Krier's open pavilions with tent-flap sides).

  I saw a fire on a balloon.  It streaked to the ground like a candle.  "We must talk about the truly disgusting and, for us, troublesome state of things and we must find a way of defending ourselves" (Theo van Doesburg to Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1929).
  This curvaceous book--a tablet with type, suitable for a circular library--swings under your eyes, whisks away its message before you can cry out.  It says, "Please come visit me in the madhouse sometime next year" (James Lee Byars to Josef Beuys, 1973)
  What is this biscuit doing out of its box?  You could buy these maple cookies once (maybe still can, I haven't bought a cookie in years), but they were generalized maple then, not provincialized.  Strange, if all the leaves that fell were stamped with the province they fell in.
  I've come to hate all smirking robot, with their tiny, glowing heads and their overwrought limbs.  "And so, dear Stefano, I will give you guns.  And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side.  You will release a lot of energy in your young years...." (Umberto Eco, "Letter to my Son" in Misreadings, Jonathan Cape, 1993, p.125).
  It's just an idyll thought: it's all about this cranium tree, low-browed and dense, black with boudoir lace sweeping down and under the bare thighs of space.
  The wings of the guitar flap in freedom. Its cheeks blow sideways in the wind-tunnel of its own tumult.
  The weary chessboard of the city; isn't it time to sand it all smooth again?  It's all breaking apart anyhow, heaving like your stomach after too much bad food.
  The Great Wall is a great zipper, gleaming coldly through black satin seas of political time, temporarily fastening together two edges of toothed landscape.  Romanian-born American writer Andrei Codrescu writes about "tugging at the big zipper of history, unzipping the Nylon curtain and the leather wall...."
  The animal and its porous rider bend under a subtropical high, leaning into the horse latitudes, out of which both horse and rider are forever suspended in an hot, steaming agony of separation.  These are Strange Days for horses and for riders.
  Torches burn bright as flares of unquenchable breath.  A torch is a Deleuzian organ without a body, a superego organ that cries out with a more obedient mouth.
  The crane is a slippery slope, the bird in the machine, the upward lift of downward man, who is always trying to climb above the sands of infinite judgement. 

  Because flight is the opposite of falling, downward flight is a contradiction in terms.  Images of annunciation are exceptions, but a helicopter (I will show you fear in a handful of steel) is unlikely to be bearing grace.
  Spirals begin with a brief summer, after which  they strike out towards their widening claim to autumnal wholeness and wintry self-mastery.  This is how a thinning spiral survives its own disappearance.
  An engine is a mechanical aphorism, chunky, self-referential, reflexive, processing familiarity in order to arrive at the unknown.
  Clocks are supposed to run, the same way planes are supposed to fly.  A stopped clock, wound down, broken, incinerated, wounds time so profoundly, your continuing heartbeat sounds arrogant.
  An electron dance in grey wind rolls down the street, spinning like a taxi.  The filament princess throws up wiry arms and prays for circumlocution.
  A staircase leads you to a landscape like the one it left behind.  The very air resents this eternal return, and conspires to blow like sand into the eyes of the ascendant.

  The body against ice, the body against snow, shutters out its tentacled arms and legs, searching wildly for tripod stability. We are lunar landers, still on earth
  Once it was possible to know everything.  My envy of Leonardo is so profound it comes out as hatred.
  Every time I see a Bonsai tree, I want to give it is freedom.  Looking at a Bonsai'd tree is to feel you are looking at a real tree located at a great distance from you.  Bonsai is about longing, not fulfillment.  Every Bonsai beckons, but you can never go where it points.
  I think that I shall never see--with apologies to Joyce Kilmer and his poem "Trees" from 1914--a thing as windy as a tree.  Trees are rooted to the spot ("A tree whose hungry mouth is prest," Kilmer continues, rather oddly, "Against the earth's sweet flowing breast") where we are doomed to endless perambulation.  And they merely bend (like airplane wings), where we break.

  The sunset blows back against the city until its heavy beauty curls like a bookpage in the rain.  Everything doubles in the thickening light.  The porous city is only weakly illuminated by the Lamp of Memory.
  A building block turns to sand, and you think to yourself, where are my chalets of crystal, my "prismlike habitats" (Proust), where is my "diamond Babel" (Theodore de Banville)?  I cannot build with morphological dust.

  Like abandoned children, we live as perpetual newcomers to order.  A list is a closed circle, a barricaded museum where everything in the world is rumoured to exist, but where nothing can be found. I think I'm coming down with Dr. Derrida's Archive Fever.
  The city makes tracks.  They suture up rents in the wilderness, transforming the lifegiving tears and gashes of the past into the soft, easy chord you hear out the train window as the needle-drawn hydro lines lift and fall through the glassy sampler landscape.
  There is late water in the city, water too weak to cleanse.  It has a short, firework life in fountains, and then rests stoically in pools and ponds until moths and butterflies ladle it all away in the sun.  They say the human body is 98% water.  It's so easy to drown in yourself.
  The air is like wool.  It rests on the tabletop city like a stack of felt on a grand piano.  Shadows like shark fins carve the buildings into parings of grey light. My hands on the keyboard are so grimy it looks as if I'm wearing gloves.
  Matches grow like mushrooms in the damp patches of the city.  Excused from sunlight, they develop swelling, sulphurous heads that, when struck, will light their way to the iron strictures of full illumination (James Cowan, in his A Mapmaker's Dream, 1996, tells of a certain people, enemies of Genghis Khan, who lived underground because they could not bear the noise of the sun's rising). 
  My camera takes pictures by itself.  It is taller than any of its subjects (like a king) and steadfastly gazes down upon them.  When I step up on tiptoe to turn its film-advancing crank, it releases a grind of music.
  This paperclip-trombone blows a rasping, focusless music into the sandpaper ballroom where my wife and I stand in a cocktail, pondering the mysteries of extension.  A scintillating tautology from Henri Bergson shoulders its way manfully into my mind: "Living forms," wrote Bergson in Creative Evolution (1911), "are, by their very definition, forms that are able to live."
  The teacup goes flying like a coffin, lifting through rusty valleys of air, buoyed up by a stack of tender farewells as thick as taxes.  Why do we care where it goes as long as it gets there? (for Gerald Ferguson).
  Here's a balm of flower, solitary in the city, face-up in the soapy, lavender light.  Its petals are like buttocks, its throat a swallow  of tears (its leaves were swinging doors, but we're past them now).
  I bought a slick wedge of new car, and the first month it shrank to half its former size.  During the second month, it shrank by ten times that amount.  At the end of the third month, I drove it through the eye of a needle and left it there.
  Citizens in a queue, nothing (King Lear) will come of nothing--in cypherous procession. We are all vowels. Consonants have to be specially ordered.
  The grassy coordinates of the city, grids and sighs. "A sinking pilot will fling out all things," says Carlyle. But one grasps at straws.
  Two wan leaves--O the Sweethearts!!--enchanting one another with their capillary-fed narcissisms, touching, sharing a single straw.
  A woman meets her crystal paramour in a shelterless, conical room, carefully pumped with moonless air.
  A large fissure of sound has opened over the city.  It is the butcher to the city's meat, a sharpened, syntactic trombone to the rasp of which the citizens dance their donations.
  Here are the liver spots of culture, pustules of old time.  These are the holes in the black, toxic cheese that ol' Bull Burroughs used to think of as nourishment.  Sure, they're still around.
  Before the city took me, I thought of wisdom as a state, a laborious attainment.  Now, I see it as a rhythm.

  "Is anything the matter?"  "Well, just that our freedoms have come too suddenly: from leg-trap to train-track to phone cord to the smirking, reptilian coilings of circuitry."
  A skidding infinity (benumbing round), a broken and leaky endlessness.  Why do we ask of life more than our minds can give us?  "Once more I slip my chains" (Matthew Arnold).
  Digital reptiles on city streets--erectile, boneless--piped up from baskets of nothing, trying to find the sky in your eyes.
  And always at my back I hear the city's vortex rushing near.  Now I begin my ascent into the maelstrom.
  Curtains calm us down. A curtain falls like sunset. It offers tenderness and mourning. "I must forget myself to have access to the other" (Emmanuel Levinas).
  This morning a dragonfly landed on a page of my open book, white-hot in the sun. I looked at it for so long it took the place of my own name, this translucent beating thing with its bleached humming in the air, this dragonfly-shaped space in the world.
  Ah, the graduating ceremony of the individual into the universal! It takes place one shard at a time, in slivers of porous space. It has to happen, and you have to let it.
  My dear Fulvia: As you are already well aware, I live entirely by the produce of my brains, and for a long time to come all idea of writing is out of the question. I hope you do not mind.
  There was a trip to Ottawa ["A fly bothers me, I kill it; you kill what bothers you." (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 117)] and all I remember of it is a swarm of bees buzzing the Peace Tower.
  You take the cup of the lake to your lips and drain it to its silence. After which draught, you can float back to the city on your small measure of water.
  The eye is a tunnel, a jelly of perpetual possibility through which you gaze as if into a crystal ball. I look, blankly like a lizard, but where do my duties begin?
  I try to dream up birds as balm, as salve against the grit of the moment. I get as far as their beaks, at which time they are scoured away by the wiry wind.
  Countdown city hours take care of themselves. It's the wanton, elusive minutes that turn and prick like needles. Every clock is a first a protest and then a defeat.
  This is the unshelf of the servant city, the sifting wheel of civic organization, which is made up of speed-blurred octaves spinning roughly against a larger, sandpaper language. These are the weary rings of urban karma
  I dropped my glasses in the city. They spent an eternity looking up. What once I was, no longer I'm. Nor will a second chance come (Pushkin/Nabokov).
  Zipper, causeway, viaduct, with arches like baby-teeth, like fish-teeth. This is the look of a voice out of the blue, leaving behind its chronological waste, this axis of evacuation.
  Fluttering flags are an extrapolation of the heart's leaping up in pride and gladness. Flags that drape or lie still are swimmers drowning.
  Our buildings, mute as dentures. Our desire was for ladders to paradise, but the rungs and braces, piers and strappings, have grown spongy. If you climb, you fall.

  "...But the play of light and shadow, which is all a superior mind can see in the incoherence of the universe, is nonetheless, for me, the only spectacle in which a civilized man can interest himself without shame." Ling to A.D. in Andre Malraux, The Temptation of the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p, 20.
  Cities slip sideways in the disapproval of winds, beneath the hauteur of clouds. Buildings are falling all the time into their own coarse-grained streets--most often during unremarkable applications of twilight

  Company names are pillars of salt. Logos, which were once galvanizing words, rise up in the street, like begging dogs.
  The Insect of the Annunciation, slanting to earth, bearing the gift of aporia.
  A figure from an ancient frieze fell against the city. It stuck to a sheet of particle board, sensing a relationship between its own pixilation and the molecular swarm of its host wall
  This is the only known photograph of the angle that infoms the city. It is made of shaved and blackened bone, and is held twelve meters above the ground in a cradle of compacted soot.
  City trees touch in the granular air high above the streets. Up there, away from the rumble, the old arboreal courtesies prevail.
  Viewed from a certain angle, lace is carbonized into ghetto grasses, Embroidery supports human life. Dappling turns heroic--as in jungles.
  Big breather. As the city gulps air and dust, its airplanes fill up with inhalation and take city-breathing with them
  All cities are ruins. I saw the Eiffel Tower catch fire, in a dream, and burn down, like a tree, from the top.
  A storm tree burns to be a bolt of lightning, its thin, gleeful sap seathing up like full syrup, oil-black, boiling. The tree breathes heavily, like a leopard, its bark grown as rough as a tablespoon of molecules.
  A hurricane in the city is a hurricane on film (you watch Key Largo).  Buildings lean like icicles, then right themselves as if, bruised and furious, you had moved away from the wall and lit a dusty cigarette
  Friends in Newfoundland (the phones are fine) are waiting for a hurricane.  The man has gone fishing.  The woman hopes her roses will not be blown apart by the strafing storm.  An eye opens in the sea.
  This is the origin-plate. This faceted, irrepressible disc, lodged at the city's heart, falls twice as fast as it rises.
  The city's countdown vapours condense into wing-hard numbers--which have keening angles; they can take your eye out (they fly off like shingles) when their father-clock strikes.
  The city is the eye of mechanism. We snap on chromium smiles for each new day (the goldfoil air rustles in passing).
  Until then, I hang around the port of shadows (breathing in ma vie a belles dents), standing on the sand, watching paper ideas soaking back into the sea
  I listen every day for what Blaise Cendrars has called "the sturdy gong of contemplation." When I hear it, the streets will fill with lions. There will be eels rolling in the sky over the city
  I collect punctuated variables, trying to build a universal series of porous connections, always working (in rainy taxicabs) towards the next firmament
  We follow one another, famished as clouds, nourished by the distances we observe. Each of us keeps one eye open (trucks rumbling). The city is a pencil.
  We try to follow one another, like spiders feeling along slips of web. Do letters dream of envelopes?
  The key to the city has to be pulled, like Excaliber, from rock. You end up holding a gray bouquet of noisy little freedoms.
  breathing in the winds that turn the city, buffeting its mechanical birds.
  You sit at the coded city the way you'd sit at a piano, your fingertips grey with dust,
  Every City is nocturnal, even in sunlight, a chording of steps over steps, wheels running like closed eyes.