BUZZon - Another World

Toronto again, rain again. I am in the city for the ordination of my elder daughter Maggie as a deacon of the Anglican church; she has been working toward this concretely for the last several years, emotionally and spiritually for a good deal longer. Today, carrying my umbrella, I am wandering through the streets of the downtown, some streets I’ve known since childhood, some I’ve discovered in later years.

A big city presents a new world on every corner. I drop in at the AGO, and on the main floor turn toward a gallery of works donated by Ken Thomson, who inherited and ran Thomson newspapers and was accounted Canada’s richest man. His collection of Canadian art is hanging one floor up, but in this dimly lit gallery I observe his collection of European art, most of it work in miniature.

The glass showcases are filled with ivory carvings, often a hinged diptych about the size of a paperback book, and the imagery is for the most part religious, the Virgin and child on one side, Christ and the Last Judgment on the other, all of this articulated in tiny figures carved with slow infinite care. I notice one that one of the panels presents an image of age and youth, the torso of a female nude, smooth and sensual, observed from behind, in front of her an old man with almost female breasts, withered and drooping. The gallery exhibit dozens, perhaps hundreds of these miniscule creations, most in ivory, some in wood or metal.

It’s a puzzle that a man whose wealth and power were vast should be obsessed with such tiny works, carvings the size of a nutshell.

At lunch I met up with Maggie, and I spent the next hours helping out with a weekly dinner for indigent men and women that is cooked and served by volunteers at St Thomas’s church on Huron Street. For some of the guests it is a regular social occasion, and they arrive early. One plays the piano. Maggie has been working on this project for ten years, and a few of those who are present plan to attend her ordination. The guests are a little community of souls, all dealing with poverty, some living on the streets. One of the men has a striking and familiar face; I’d seen him at these meals before, a tall man with long grey hair and handsomely formed features, his skin darkened by living outdoors. Schizophrenic, and sometimes, Maggie has told me, his voices will not allow him to eat, famished as he may be. Today he cleans up a couple of plates of food. His name, he says, is Elizabeth.

After the clean-up we go on to a concert of mediaeval music performed in the church by a group of five musicians, called Sine Nomine. The concert is called “O viriditas! The greenness of life’s rising,” and it presents music for spring and music expressing the mystic meaning of spring’s greenness in the writers like Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart. The clear exotic lines of the singers’ voices evoke some other time, some other space. Another world of souls.

Late in the evening we catch a streetcar south to Queen Street. As we walk through the streets toward Maggie’s house, there is a constant stream of young people coming and going from the bars. Walking in front of us are three tall young women in tiny miniskirts, black stockings, inviting bare white thighs, their hooker get-up for a Friday night on the raz, Collisions of worlds: it sticks in my mind how after the dinner I came out the door of the church hall and saw Elizabeth, his possessions all packed up in bags, drawing mysterious shapes in the air between the church and the street, his fingers describing the forms the voices demanded before allowing him to make his way from one world to another.

Creative Change ←		Art House Residency →

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig