Scrawled in Wax

Courtesy of Flickr user Smaku

On a cloudy day in the summer of 2006, I sat on a bench at Harbourfront in Toronto. With me were two of my aunts and two of my cousins. My relations, who mostly live in northern India, were visiting the city for the first time and I, the ever-dutiful nephew, was showing them around.

Part of the reason I took them to the Lakeshore was the view you see above.  I couldn’t quite articulate why, but something about having them see the city’s skyline seemed important to me. But if I were honest with myself, it’s possible that I just wanted to see it myself too.

You see, I had just returned to Toronto after spending a year abroad. The most recent place I had lived was Conamara, a remote area of western Ireland that had more sheep in it than people. The closest town to where I stayed was an hour walk away, a fact I can attest to with some degree of accuracy, as it was the closest place one could get a pint of Guinness.

Returning to a large city after a stay in such a quiet, empty place wasn’t quite a shock, per se. After all, other than my time in Ireland, I have only ever lived in large cities; they’re all I know. But, with the fresh eyes of my family next to me, it was a chance to reconsider the city, to hopefully, almost, kind of see it for the first time.

As my cousin Shagun and I sat on a bench, sipping our Canadian java, it was hard not to look at the array of buildings before us and consider, in awe, that each window was filled with a person – and there were thousands upon thousands of windows before us. Somehow, as time had worn on, I had forgotten that this space I have marked out as my own – this geographical area called ‘a city’ – was a place I shared with millions of other people. Those windows were just the beginning, too – there were hundreds of thousands more out of view. Even after only three months in the Irish countryside, it was a lot to take in.

* * * * *

Skylines are a chance to take in what cannot, in actuality, be taken in. They are like globes of the world, or photos of Antarctica: graphical depictions of things that cannot be contained in representation. One cannot encapsulate and encompass the modern city. The sheer wealth of life, the incessant pulsing of human activity… in the aggregate, it’s too much to consider. Thought of in its entirety, it would bring one to one’s knees, forcing one’s mind to halt as it found itself suddenly overwhelmed.

* * * * *

I have a habit of wandering through my neighbourhood at odd times of the night. It’s one of the few times I feel alive. Sometimes, as I walk through the dark, quiet streets, it brings a smile to my face to think “I bet you some people nearby are making love right now”.

The city I call home is in the midst of a construction boom. Go any place high and you’ll see the cranes dotting the skyline and everywhere you look, skyscrapers are going up. Some are modest 30 storey buildings that will add a small sense of visual gravity to an area; others, at 60 or 70 floors, will aggressively force their way into the skyline that awaits us in the future. As I watch these buildings creep ever higher, all I can think is: yes; more.

“And when I got there… man! There were people and giant buildings everywhere! And you know, that’s when I thought to myself: this place right here? This is somewhere, man. This is where things happen. This is the centre of something big.”

The skyline is the modern sublime: the view in the face of which one can only acknowledge insurmountable and incomprehensible magnitude. And there’s something to that: to place yourself amidst an inconceivably massive web of human activity is to situate oneself amongst the contemporary, forever slipping into the future.

For years now, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of the public canvas. Perhaps because I’m a minority, I’ve always focused on what it means to see yourself in the public sphere, to be able to think of oneself as a ‘legitimate’ part of a society. I want to look up at the sky and imagine myself there.

The skyline – the grand, collected mess of the big city – is also the public canvas. It’s a visual measure of the scope of potential that lies before one, an aggregation of the human activity immediately available. It is the sign of the big city and its attendant wealth of culture. It is like peering into the mess and mass of a server farm at Google: it’s a symbolic gesture toward the things it produces, the lines of flight that scatter off in every direction.

Courtesy of Flickr user Appleswitch

The skyline is the sign of the new network.

The skyline is the exemplary metonym, and the outline of massive buildings against clouds and sun haunts my dreams.