Downpression
To say “I am cold” needn’t mean “I am suffering,” I told myself ten years ago while pushing a double-seated stroller along unplowed sidewalks and over barricades of ice and slush thrown up by the plow. I was on the way to school and daycare before turning the opposite direction and walking a few more kilometres to work. The wind, it seemed, was always in my face in those days, except when it rushed in from the North like a wild thing carrying a storm. However, to say that I knew which way the wind was blowing, didn’t mean that I knew anything at all about the wind. For, as I learned once I started being cold without suffering, the winter wind is an especially mischievous, exuberant, and amoral being. The winter wind loves to play. He revels in being himself.
That was the year I befriended the winter. I started listening to the wind and talking back to him as well. When the cold bit especially hard into my skin, I learned to laugh and say silly things like “wowee, zowee!” and, in my silliness, and playfulness, and fantasies of an enchanted world (so much better than our shared fantasy of a disenchanted one!), I found a way of being me that delighted me more than the me who hated the cold, who grumbled and cursed on his way to work, and all over again on his way home.
That seems like a long time ago. Long before my loved ones were dying en masse outside in the winter. It’s neither the winter’s fault, that some friends of mine have to sleep standing up in their tents so that they don’t freeze to the ground and turn, like the river beside them, into ice. But, still, a time of beauty—not without its edge—can become a time with all kinds of mixed feelings when it is also a time of entirely preventable amputations and death To say, “my friend froze to death,” or “my friend lost all her fingers and half her foot to frostbite,” needn’t mean “the cold is to blame.” This would be akin to blaming gravity for killing someone who is pushed off of a cliff by somebody else.
Because my loved ones who are dying outside this winter (and the winter before, and the winter before, and the winter before…) have all been pushed. Pushed out of housing. Pushed out of jobs. Pushed out of shelters. Pushed out of social assistance offices. Pushed out of corporately owned shared spaces (like malls) and publicly managed shared spaces (like parks). And when the raised their heads up and spoke up for themselves they were pushed down. Out and down. Out and down.
Who is to blame for my friends’ deaths? The rich who “join house to house, field to field, until there is no more room, and they dwell alone in the land” (woe to them). The rich “who are full now, who laugh now, who are spoken well of now, who are comforted and comfortable now” (woe to them). The downpressors who will have nowhere to run to and no one to take bribes from them when their day finally comes (woe to them). The landlords and real estate developers (woe to them). The venture capitalists, asset managers, banks, and trust funds (woe to them). The Farhis and Tricars, and Siftons, and Drewlos, and Yorks (woe to them). The London Development Institute (woe to them). All the municipal bureaucrats who sell the poor to the rich (woe to them). And all the security guards, property managers, police officers, and social workers who enforce death-dealing laws, policies, and procedures (woe to them). We are ruled by the greedy, cruel, and smug. God help us, for there is no hope of salvation for people such as these. If salvation is to come for us, it must first come for them with fire and with sword.
To Be Justified According to the Law of Sin and of Death
We are ruled, in other words, by those who are justified by the works to the Law. What does this mean? To be justified according to the Law is to be able to say, look, everything I have done to you, all the harm I have inflicted upon you, everything I have taken from you and hoarded from others, everything I have contaminated, everything I have destroyed, everything I have dreamed and accomplished, the full devastation of the earth so that nobody is spared, I have done legally.
The bylaw enforcement officer who takes a homeless man’s tent, sleeping bag, change of clothing, and bike wagon and tosses them into the garbage truck and who refuses to return those items to the homeless man because the homeless man cannot produce a receipt (and so the items are classified as “abandoned trash” instead of as “valuables”) is working according to the Law. And so, he is justified.
The security guard who kicks a different homeless man out of the public library because the man was sleeping (the homeless are not permitted to sleep in libraries) despite the man’s tears and the man begging to stay because he has nowhere else to go (he walked all night so as not to die in the cold after bylaw enforcement officers also threw out his tent). “You were given three warnings—three strikes and now you’re out.” Despite one worker pleading with the Head of Security, the man was still tossed weeping and pleading into the cold. But this security guard was working according to the Law. And so, he is justified.
The more the Rule of Law has spread—both globally along major arteries and locally along ever-smaller capillaries—the more death-dealing violence and dispossession have been justified. The more the law inserts itself into our lives and claims the right to rule over what we do, where we go, where we can sleep, who is allowed to take what from whom, and, ultimately, who counts as human capital and who counts as human waste, the more we are subjected to the authority of Death over Life. What else can one call this but the law of sin and of death?
Winter Spirits
I take a lot of breaks walking home along the river. I lie on my back in the snow. I talk to sparrows in a bush who change their minds about flying away and who take turns popping out to look at me. I put a stone in my mouth and hold it beneath my tongue. The sun sets quickly and in my imagination the lights that reflect on the black water are actually arising from below as naiads, fairies, and water sprites gather to celebrate nightfall. It’s harder and harder to get back up and to just keep walking. Look around. Smell the air. There are fifteen cardinals in one tree and the earth and the dead are calling me. They are singing love songs. If you use your imagination, you can probably hear them, too.
One day, the river is extra talkative. Creaking, scraping, groaning, as ice floes pile against each other, break off, push beneath each other, and come to a standstill. Where the ice is thicker, it almost looks as if the river is breathing. And then there is a roar and a section of ice turns over and it looks exactly like the back of a dragon with a long tail turning and diving and disappearing and I understood why the Indigenous folks have stories that are only told during the winter. Some spirits only appear during the winter. Spirits of ice and snow and cold and dark and a dragon in the river. I swear it.
What spirits have died due to all the ways in which we have altered the land? When this river stops freezing, what will happen to the ice dragon? How many spirits have died? How many others have been newly born?
Death and Life
They never told us the name of the homeless woman who died beside Citiplaza at the entrance by CBC Radio. It was just before Christmas and they usually pause death announcements from then until the New Year but I think they want us all to just forget her. We don’t know her name or how she died—if she froze or if she had an infection and was discharged from the hospital or if she received the wrong medication or the wrong dosage of the right medication or if she suicided or was murdered or what. We only know about her death at all because passersby saw the police and the coroner and the body bag and stopped to take some pictures and post them online.
We know even less about the homeless person who died on the other side of Citiplaza after falling four stories from the parkade (did they jump? did they slip? were they pushed? accidentally? on purpose?). What we do know is that they were sleeping in that parkade, perhaps self-medicating there, that security guards told them to leave, that they begged not to go, that the security guards escalated, that the homeless person became upset and then [what we don’t know] and the homeless person shattered on the frozen sidewalk after falling four stories and now the workers at Libro, who saw them fall from office windows across the road are receiving trauma counseling and the security guards are on a stress leave and also receiving therapy.
After I heard the news I thought about the homeless folks I know who sometimes sleep in that parkade (this winter the city failed to produce a Winter Response Plan, the city failed to open additional places for people to be during the day and during the night, and, at the same time, we have more people than every before sleeping outside) and I did a quick tally of those who I had seen and those I hadn’t seen since the fall (or push?) of this person. And then, on my walk home, I bent double and barfed from grief. And then I went to the riverbank and lied in the snow until it melted beneath me and the cold crept into my bones I remembered “I am cold” instead of “I am suffering” and I got up and walked home. My partner and my kids were so excited to see me. And I was so excited to see them.
Rejoice.
Barf.
Rejoice.
