North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay will be 45 years old this summer. Once a repair dock, its conversion to a public market was an immediate hit, an arcade without the arches. Like the Canadian federal government's early-1970s conversation of the south shore of False Creek's industrial waterfront (Granville Island Public Market), the Lonsdale Quay provided the freshest seafood and the crispest lettuce. Over the years the Quay, like the New Westminster Quay that followed in the 1980s, lost its lustre, which is not uncommon now that malls in general represent not the perfection of our culture, but its remainder bin.
The English Reformation of the 16th century marked the bloody transition of England from a Catholic state to its national brand -- Protestantism. Of course there is more to it than religious sectarianism. A related transition concerned an increasingly literate Christian population who preferred to read their Bible, not bow to priestly interpretations of it in the form of images and objects. This, more than anything, has come to define the English psyche, and a reason why the English have never countenanced ambiguity as anything more than an aesthetic effect, a recreational decoration and not a road to something other than what one knows for certain. America gave us Gertrude Stein, Ireland gave us Joyce and Beckett. Even T.S. Eliot came to see his "Waste Land" (1922) as little more than a few pages of hastily scribbled notes.
The picture atop this post -- found in the window of one of the Lonsdale Quay's upper concourse shops -- is of a framed piece of writing posing as a landscape, where the neighbourhoods are represented in their textual forms. The land, as defined by this landscape, is unceded, and is the ancestral home of the Coast Salish peoples, whose relationship to the land is not so easily divisible. As for the shop, its stock and trade is based largely in notions.
No comments:
Post a Comment