The Sun Tower

Prologue

They say a change in perspective is worth some IQ points, if you believe in IQ points and that kind of thing. What I have found that an actual change in perspective i.e looking at a familiar physical entity from a different point of view/angle has a profound effect of cognitive dissonance. At times when it happens, it feels like some variant of deja vu. It is a feeling I can only describe as meeting an old friend after a very long time and to see how they've aged and changed. You try and reconcile the abstract memory and the abject reality. But then you look at the eyes that frame the face, and it anchors you in the moment. The eyes that connect the past with the future and make human life seem a continuum of experiences and not a discrete number of years, or seconds. The eyes never change.

I follow some photographers on Instagram. A lot of them take photographs of the city where I live. Occasionally they will take a picture of some frequently photographed landmark but from a very different and sometimes inspired perspective. And for an instant the moribund, monotonous world seems very interesting. Like a surprise gift from a long term partner or a different punchline of an oft-told joke. For an instant, you find novelty in the everyday and commonplace. And then you look at the eyes. The spell is complete. Like post-coital bliss that outlasts an orgasm. I hope I'm making myself clear.

This is, perhaps, an essay about perspective. Perhaps it is about history and tradition. Maybe it is about loss and sorrow. Perhaps architecture. Maybe it is about finding ones purpose in life. Or a way to live it.

A tale of two views

I live on the 12th floor of an apartment building. It is a one bedroom apartment of the modern 'beige box' school of architecture. That is not my term. It's funny how the words people have said to you become part of your vocabulary long after they cease to be a part of your life. Some kind of immortality, I guess. Anyway, my apartment looks onto the Burrard Inlet. Everyday I watch cargo ships from China and Copenhagen come and go. I watch seagulls and seaplanes penetrate the membrane of the slick ocean surface. I see helijets tear across cloudy skies. I watch the seabus continue its Sisyphean journey unto eternity.

That is of course, when the cranes that unload the cargo ships aren't completely in the way. They're there most of the day doing their own sisyphean job, but like the golden hour, they punch out at quitting time leaving the ocean and its activities in complete view. While the view of the ocean is blocked, something else arrests the attention of the wandering eye.

My apartment is surrounded by shrines to glass. It overlooks hundreds of ones like it. Great towers in the sky. Each a lego beige box of human proportions, occasionally the site of some human drama or another. There's the odd couple making love, a guy who watches TV all day and night, an elderly woman who, I suspect, is a hoarder. And based on the kind of cleaning he's doing, one guy recovering from a breakup or a divorce. All in our tiny prison cells going through each of our own commonplace Sisyphean existence.

It is all quite mundane, do you see? It is as if the windows were running some sort of film on a loop, a scene I'm all too familiar with. It feels like purgatory somehow. On certain days it is only too much I can do to fling myself off the balcony and nestle in the warm embrace of the concrete below. Were it not for the Sun Tower, that is.

Prisoners of the Sun

The Sun Tower is an old building built in 1912, which once housed the Vancouver Sun. Hence the name.

To be honest, the exact details of the building's past do not interest me terribly. I'd make a bad historian. But I do like old buildings. As a matter of fact, I seem to gravitate towards old things in general. Vintage posters, Victorian literature, vintage tins etc. In all the continual change that being mired in the present engenders, taking note of history either through written texts or in my case apprehending them through artefacts of the past, provides a zoomed out view of human enterprise. That something from the past survived into our present gives me hope in the midst of all this change we seem to be undergoing. That something within me will survive into my own future. That we are perhaps not all undergoing minor revolutions of the Self. Perhaps within all this fragmentation, there is a unifying principle.

And this is what I feel when the cranes block the view of the ocean and the mountain and the seagulls and the seaplanes. When Mr. and Mrs from #1309 across start getting down to business and Mr. Clean dons his marigold gloves. I look at the Sun Tower. This 100 year old building whose mere existence frames our daily mundane tasks. It is a stratified capsule of 100 years of human existence. It's its slightly anachronistic architecture and design standing proud amongst these anonymous monstrosities of glass that lends interest to the skyline.

Make no mistake, I am not against modernism or technological progress. While I have a predilection for the past, I do not necessarily want to recreate it, and our own mistakes in the process. I am throughly against monotony and this is the point I am addressing above. I've mostly lived in old cities, including Delhi which is supposed to be as old as 6th century BC. Older cities tend to have a bit of chaotic planning about them since they expand outward from the core of the founding demarcations. What is interesting about this, is that it sort of reflects the humanity of the people within. It is as if the city is formed in the image of the people living within it, because the city expands based on the needs of the people.

Streets are crooked twisty little passages, They are not based around grids or sectors or other non-natural constructs. While not efficient, I find them more relatable. Stores exist at the point of maximum utility and profitability. Neighbourhoods form and sequester like-minded people.

This is sort of a bottom-up approach to city planning, where the city evolves over centuries and centuries to become the most optimal version of itself. There are occasional fires/disasters which give an opportunity for a fresh start. In my opinion younger cities are at a disadvantage of not having the evolution, construction, destruction iterations that older cities have gone through. Older cities, however, tend to be overpopulated, vastly stretching their infrastructure resources, which is why they seldom top liveable cities lists.

Too weird to live, too rare to die

I mentioned how, chaotic urban planning and things from the past while appealing to certain senses of aesthetic, culture and tradition also suffer from being mired in their time. This is of course what lends them their anachronistic appeal, but it also disadvantages them since they occur before certain pre scientific advances. For example, I'm not certain, but I'm sure the Sun Tower wasn't built with seismic integrity in mind. Even if it had, I'm sure it wouldn't hold a candle to the modern glass towers that surround it. Therefore, this is not a call to arms to get back to the days of the past and reject modern advances in science, culture and technology.

The reason I'm attracted to the Sun Tower and bean bag chairs and graffiti and grown men on razor scooters and novelty tea cosies and the writings of Lord Dunsany and Edward Lear is because they are inherently and effortlessly weird. They are strange and impractical. They stand defiant in the face of all possible reason. In the people I have found association and lasting friendships with, I have found a pronounced streak of weird.

I find in myself a growing sense of anxiety if I'm kept from being weird for too long. I overdress sometimes but only to stand out from other people in technology who are notorious for dressing casual. Couple that with the fact that this city is populated with gym shorts and yoga pants wearing folk and you'll find me put on a tie before you can finish the word floccinaucinihilipilification.

This is why I used to fit in very well in the video games industry, where everyone had some peculiarity or another. One co-worker, for instance, lived off the grid in the mountains of New Hampshire, kept 10 cats and was an ardent metal detectorist. Hi Steve.

Medical researchers have identified a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 which is responsible for novelty seeking behaviour. It is, supposedly, of evolutionary and survival benefit. And I guess, the definition of the weirdness I speak of can be stretched to include the novel. The out of the ordinary, the non mundane. But just like negative space in art and design, for something to be novel, or interesting or weird, it must be surrounded by the mundane and the ordinary. Just like the Sun Tower has to be surrounded by the boring glass towers for it to be interesting. And one must rarely come across vintage music boxes and art nouveau posters for them to be charming.

My life, therefore, is to mine for weirdness and novelty in a moribund pit of uniformity till I reach a Buddha-like enlightenment that frees me from this cyclic prison of conformity and novelty seeking. And, then, all days will be a constant state of calm equilibrium. Until then, I'll sit and watch the lights go on in the Sun Tower as it gets darker now.

There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. Hunter S. Thompson, The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat