Illustration by Wayne Hoecherl

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But we were leaving that weekend for a family holiday, so this time we rode to the midweek market at Thornton Park to pick up some fresh corn. It was a greenhouse-effect afternoon, hot and humid. There were two dozen people at the market stalls when we got off our bikes. The only people on the park grass were a man sleeping next to a shopping cart and a couple of unshaven, cheerfully drunk men trying to strike up a conversation with one of the market’s attractive young volunteers.

I love the food at these markets: Russian blue potatoes, ostrich bacon, heirloom tomatoes, homemade butter tarts. But this isn’t my only motive; the experience has other shadings. They are not quite as primal as the desire to crunch a lemon cucumber, but they’re there. While I’m giving money, for instance—and the verb fits, as there’s something of the donation box in paying $6 for organic eggs—I have the sense that I’m participating in the Grand Shift to a Better Society.

I don’t mean this only sarcastically. I can mock the sentiment, but I can’t escape it. It’s the opposite of liberal guilt. Not “this is the right thing to do,” but more irrational, more grandiose, closer to the old X-Files poster: “I want to believe.” It’s tempting when eating local—and/or growing your own food—to cozy up to the wool-capped Commer-cial Drive activist in all of us, whose ethical lifestyle has a rind of self-

spring/summer 2010 29

Thornton Park is the front lawn of Vancouver’s Pacific Central station, and about as long as a soccer pitch. If it were elsewhere in the city, it would be a picnic park with swing set and playground. It’s shaded by stately old trees: oaks, elms, chartreuse-leafed catalpas. They’ve been here a long time, probably since the park was landscaped with imported soil—good black growing dirt, hauled in from

Chilliwack by train on a special spur track—in the ’20s. But Thornton Park doesn’t see many picnic quilts. It’s the south

entry to the Downtown Eastside, strewn with the McDonald’s bags and cigarette packs of local dealers, and most of its users are single, low-income men, many of whom are drunk or high. You have to be intoxicated to relax here, because the park gives no sense of repose. Transected into pieces by a half-dozen curving concrete paths, it’s worn thin by people en route to somewhere else. It corners on the permanent traffic jam at Main and Terminal, and the rest of it is bordered by a Skytrain platform, a backpacker’s hostel, the #3 city bus stop, and the train tracks and Greyhounds of Pacific Central station. Surrounded by all this departure, there’s an unsettled feeling to the place, a metallic haste.

Usually my wife Michele and I attend the big Saturday farmer’s market at Trout Lake. We have a favourite grower there, a wind-burned Spaniard with tough, cracked fingers, who often has a plate of samples—chunks of lemon cucumber, wedges of Italian plums. He passes them out with a proud paternal smile. “Go on, go on, try! Fresh this morning. Delicious, delicious!” He’s hard to resist. When the Trout Lake market is really bustling around mid-morning, you’re surrounded by the same arts that have been around since towns were invented: gourd hefting, cheese sampling, tomato sniffing. Couples debating over grocery list items, while their toddlers balance wide-eyed in front of a clown or musician.

tYee BriDGeGETS PHILOSOPHICAL AT THE fArmEr’S mArkET

AfteR the lOnG And dISAStROuS

WeSteRn expeRIMent WIth

Self-InteReSt, AfteR CentuRIeS

Of InduStRIAl-AGe deSeCRAtIOn,

I’M lOOkInG fOR SIGnS.

SIGnS thAt An eRA IS endInG.

Growth Patterns

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30 spring/summer 2010

righteousness. As James MacKinnon pointed out in The Hundred Mile Diet, local food lends itself to smug, I-am-part-of-the-solution thoughts. This kind of thinking is, no doubt, extra and unnecessary. But I do think that, or want to. I’m pulled to do so by a personal psychic undertow: I want to believe that things are turning around.

After the long and disastrous Western experiment with self-interest, after centuries of industrial-age desecration, I’m looking for signs. Signs that an era is ending—that dawn is breaking at the horizon of the export-quality North American nightmare. My grandiosity goes even further, beyond the wane of corporate power and even late capitalism, and the rise of local economies. It includes the world, the cosmos, the root soul of humanity. In some inner grove I’m still a child who wants to believe in something grand, mythic in scope: that a Dark Age is receding.

That Wednesday at Thornton Park, 15 market stalls on the sidewalk divided the park grass from the entrance to Pacific Station, and this agrarian strip inserted a gentler quality—garden, harvest, home—into the area. At one end a woman sold loaves of spelt bread and ginger squares; at the other, another woman hawked saucer-sized cut sunflowers, a bunch in each hand, trying, a bit desperately

this late in the day, to sell them off cheap. In between were rafts of bouncy raspberries sold by Sikh and Vietnamese families, jars of garlic pickles, fresh eggs, honeycombs, and a bike stand offering free tune-ups.

Michele picked out two dozen ears of peaches-and-cream corn. I didn’t understand the name until we peeled back the husk and cornsilk: white kernels nubbed the yellow ears like pearls. It wasn’t until I waited under the catalpa shade with our bikes—no fenced-in bike lock-up like at Trout Lake, because at the last market, a volunteer told us, someone stole one of the bikes out of it—that I began to see where we were. Scattered garbage, vomit by a tree, two McDonald’s bags whiffing across the grass in the light wind. Only a block from the Cobalt Hotel, with its blackened Girls Girls Girlssign woven out of old bedspring wire. At the moment this didn’t register as meaningful, but now I wonder if these were the signs I was looking for, if at Thornton Park we were standing on evidence of the Grand Shift—or, as deep-ecology activist Joanna Macy calls it, The Great Turning.

“Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition,” says a character in one of William Gibson’s novels (called, yes, Pattern Recognition). “Both a gift and a trap.” Apophenia is the technical term for this talent gone awry. It means seeing patterns that aren’t there. The term was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in the late ’50s. As one study of psychosis in children defined apophenia: “Hallucinatory revelations with new connections in meaning and significance… the perception of meaningful-ness and connections in random phenomena.”

Humans look for patterns. We can’t avoid connecting dots, even if we’re being selective for our own reasons, or are actually only seeing spots. Trying to know where the current is taking you, to get a hindsight view while seated in the forward-only river kayak of time, is sketchy stuff.

It’s the same urge that puts the latest prophecies of Nostradamus on the front page of grocery checkout tabloids. But—unless they have trained themselves out of it, like certain celebrated God-is-dead authors—human adults and children connect the dots anyway, hoping for the best.

If you look for signs of desecration and disaster in the world, there are more than enough to confirm that we are teetering on the apocalyptic cliff. There have been plenty of such signs throughout history, and if they were wrong about The End of Everything, they were right to shriek about The End of This Particular Thing—the losses of species and habitat and cultures that, due to what fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls “shifting baseline syndrome,” we’ve forgotten we ever had.

But these days there are other, smaller signs that look good. Hybrid cars, the end of official global-warming denial, Barack Obama. Even the rise of recycling. All of these things are tainted, and you could say of any one of them—as people have said about recycling—that they don’t add up to much on the ground. Taken singly, each one is a drop out of the apocalyptic bucket. But the value of recycling, as a for instance, has never been about reusing cans and bottles. Its real value is that it changes the way people think. Eating local does eliminate carbon emissions, but more importantly it changes the way we see food, and this is huge. Or it could be. Seen together in the global landscape, these current events—including farmer’s markets—are like watching fireweed and salal crack the parking lot of modern culture.

Placing a farmer’s market in the midst of urban squalor may be common in older cities like Toronto and New York, but this was the first time I’d seen the boutique world of local/gour-met/organic food pop up in the Downtown Eastside. I appreciated it; and I was uncom-fortable, unsure how to navigate. When I head into the DTES I’m on guard, in an eyes-forward posture meant to deflect engagement with the

wretched, for whom I feel less compassion than I would like. Maybe it’s the experience of growing up around cousins and grandparents with ad-dictions and violent lives. I’m timid, afraid of getting my cage rattled, afraid of how I might react—that my disgust or fear will be nakedly apparent. It’s the opposite of how I am at the farmer’s market: drinking my organic tea, shaking the callused hands of the growers, with my people—all of us hap-pily paying high prices for eggs and eggplants.

This must be amusing for Thornton Park regulars, to see market-goers like me get a bit jumpy as they enter the park, this temporary rift zone where the crappy reality of urban poverty snugs up against the emergent dream of slow-food utopia. And jumpy is the right word: I was sitting with our bikes while Michele shopped because, after we’d left them locked together next to a tree, the man with the shopping cart had leaned idly against them in a way that asserted ownership. The market volunteer, who at Trout Lake would have chatted amiably with the two men—because they would have been two different men—did her best to ignore them. They were not market customers but, at first glance, spare-change boozers from outside the part-of-the-solution bounds.

At Thornton the notion of darkness is not abstract. Unlike in the global-oil economy, here the wages of addiction are writ small. Blue plastic sterile-water empties and faces burned by exposure—not from hauling compost at a Fraser Valley farm, but from park-grass days and sleeping-bag-alley nights. The park also stands for the center of human pain and trouble in other ways: it is home to The Marker of Change, a monument to the women murdered in Montreal’s École Polytechnique massacre in 1989. It occupies the east-central lawn of the park, 14 coffin-shaped tablets of pink granite in a circle. For all these reasons, because

In SOMe InneR GROve I’M StIll

A ChIld WhO WAntS tO BelIeve In

SOMethInG GRAnd, MythIC In SCOpe:

thAt A dARk AGe IS ReCedInG.

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spring/summer 2010 31

on Wednesday afternoons two realities stutter against each other like tectonic plates, this patch of worn urban lawn offers hope.

Hope means you’ve connected the dots (whether intelligently or foolishly) between what is and what might be. Hope flirts with apophenia, a diagnosis of which means you’re delusional. When the faithful see an oil-rainbow Virgin Mary in the metallic windows of a Florida bank, or the schizophrenic pulls a secret code from the ingredients of a box of Ritz crackers, they’re suffering from apophenia (assuming they’re wrong, which is hard to establish).

The concept of apophenia has been used to rebut Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity. In a case of synchronicity, events that are not relat-ed—“acausal”—appear, or feel, related. As if a message is trying to get through, or something important is being confirmed. You’re in Hamburg talking about Egyptian rituals, and a scarab beetle flies through the win-dow. Or one day you keep seeing ladders: in a dream, then outside your apartment, later on the glazier’s truck in front of you. I experienced a mild synchronicity recently when I drove to a ranch in the BC interior to spend two weeks working on a project about apocalypse myths. When I went to open the driveway gate, wedged in between the wooden fence and the latch was a colour flyer from the local chapter of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It read—above an illustration of smiling citizens walking beneath lightning-forked storm clouds—“How can you survive the end of the world?”

A psychiatrist like Klaus Conrad might call a sense of synchronicity, of seeing meaning or message in it, a special form of apophenia. A pleas-ing fancy, but no more, indicative of neurosis if taken too seriously.

The author Robert Moss has, like Jung, a more liberal idea of pattern recognition. Moss wrote for The Economist for a decade before writing several books on dreams, coincidence and imagination (after, he claims, he began to dream in an archaic Mohawk language he hadn’t previously known). He points out that Conrad’s Greek was sloppy, and that the word “apophenia” is a bad neologism—albums by The Who notwithstanding, there is no “phenia” suffix. It does make sense with the letter “r”— “apo” meaning distant, “phrenia” meaning mind.

Synchronicity, writes Moss, can be imagined with a parable. Picture a dust-mote-sized person, who is traveling much more slowly in time. It takes a moment to visualize. There he is, our little Mr. Mote, in the Thornton Park grass, which to him is high-canopied jungle. Time moves so slowly that a second is several years long, the grass as still as the stars. Above him, far out of sight, two children at a picnic table toss pick-up sticks into the air. Each stick that falls at intervals around Mr. Mote is observed by him as a unique event—a yellow stick falls this week, a red one next month, a green one three years later. Seen over and over for years, he calls the falling sticks coincidence. But really it’s all one event: a bunch of sticks being dropped at once by someone in a larger dimension. “He does not know,” writes Moss, “what the game player (a giant invis-ible to him) knows: events that manifest at discrete points in space and time, as experienced by the miniscule observer, are the result of a single movement on another plane.”

The resurgence of local food and farmers markets is synchronous with many other acausal events these days—the collapse of the stock market, the destruction of the World Trade Center, cap-and-trade

legislation that might reverse 200 years of increasing carbon emissions. Certainly they are related in terms of our economic period, and to the material basis of Western culture, namely crude oil. To say that these things are the falling sticks of some greater, larger event, that they are related elements of a tectonic shift towards a new culture, might be just an apopheniac case of seeing Jesus in a tortilla. But it might not.

Jung’s Greek was more accurate than Conrad’s, if not quite so suited to a rock album. Jung invented and adopted many words, among them enantiodromia (coined by the philosopher Heraclitus). It’s an unfortunate word—it sounds like a prehistoric genus of armadillo—but roughly, the term means the tendency for something that has reached an extreme state to be troubled, eroded, and eventually broken down by its opposite. Some crippling weakness develops in the billionaire corporate raider, or barbar-ians topple the society run by legalistic patricians. Or, in the classic case, happy-go-lucky patriarch Job is reduced by his Maker to a boil-ridden wretch in a pile of ashes—only later to be resurrected to a state of grace, complete with a 14,000-head organic sheep ranch. As Jung wrote in a study of fairy tales: “The grand plan… is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil.” Things that reach an extreme state tend to flip. The term was meant to apply to individual psychology, but it might apply to an entire culture, even—or especially—to a ravaging global corporatocracy like ours.

Acouple of weeks after our day at the market, I revisited Thornton Park at rush hour and walked around. The farmers were gone, and scattered in the grass were the usual bus tickets, styrofoam cups and disintegrating fast-food bags. Over the back of a wooden bench, a dealer in a black tracksuit passed some packets to a couple pushing a stroller. Real and alive to those who spend their

days there, scoring and lounging, but to the sentimental outsider, the park felt bereft, like an abandoned warehouse. Yell and you’d hear an echo, but nobody would look up.

In fairy tales and myth, the turning point is the meeting of opposites. Meeting, literally: a relationship, ideal or not, and usually uncomfortable. The warty old gnome gives directions to the flower-girl lost in the woods; Sir Gawain is asked to wed the hideous Dame Ragnell. The following week, here—where seagulls pick away at a discarded hamburger wrapper and where a man wanders drunk through the granite coffins of murdered women—there will be a beekeeper. Someone who knows how to keep bees will be selling unpasteurized blackberry honey, and candles made from beeswax. There will be sunflowers and dewy utopian raspberries. This is good news, for the plain fact that the more jumpy, well-meaning people who come down to the DTES to buy their honey, the better. But still, for me, it’s more than that: not simply progressive urban planning at work, but a sign.

Joanna Macy calls our current age The Great Turning because she sees it as a collective veer from the dead-end track that Western culture has been on since cities were established 5,000 years ago. It’s grandiose, but that’s the point: a new-world myth to counter the end-times myth. I want to believe it. I want to think a massive pick-up stick event is hap-pening all over the planet, at all levels, inside out. Though I know culture has always endured catastrophic changes, I’m tempted to believe that our era is special—that we live at the pivot of history, an epochal shift, where the opposites are coming together. And I can’t seem to let it go. A dozen eggs, please.

tO SAy thAt theSe thInGS ARe the

fAllInG StICkS Of SOMe GReAteR,

lARGeR event, thAt they ARe RelAted

eleMentS Of A teCtOnIC ShIft

tOWARdS A neW CultuRe, MIGht

Be juSt An ApOphenIAC CASe

Of SeeInG jeSuS In A tORtIllA.

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