In an essay called “The Ideal Palace” John Berger tells about a creation by Ferdinand Cheval, a “peasant” country postman who, in his spare time, spent 33 years and some 93,000 hours building a massive monument from stones. Berger raises questions of meaning and motivation, noting that it is rare for someone of the peasant class to leave behind something enduring that speaks of his experience. While North Americans a generation later would never use the term “peasant”, Berger’s point stands. Durable cultural artifacts rarely happen except as a consequence of privilege. Their creators have surplus time at their disposal, or the means to purchase that time. To create anything substantial, those without time and money must give up things, like the prospect of a family and social connection.
When I read about the postman’s palace, it reminded me of something I stumbled upon while wandering through the Don Valley, the broad flood plain that cuts through the middle of Toronto. On the Lower Don Trail, an unofficial trail veers into the trees at the first trail marker south of the Bloor Viaduct. It leads through the trees to the river’s edge, then south through dense brush until, further along, it rejoins the official trail. Sometimes, you can find tents hidden amongst the trees, homeless men living rough even in the wintertime.
Along that trail, someone has built five cairns using rocks dragged from the river. On one side stands a grouping of three cairns, each taller than me. I call them the Three Marlenas after the song by The Wallflowers. On the other side of the path is another large cairn accompanied by a smaller cairn—a baby. I call them Mother & Child, or The Pieta if I’m feeling in a dark mood. Further upstream, north of Pottery Road, there is an old millrace tucked in the trees alongside the Lower Don Trail. At the end of the millrace where, presumably, a mill once stood, I discovered another cairn, a solitary figure watching over the site.
These cairns are more ephemeral than the postman’s palace. Since I first discovered them more than two years ago, someone has toppled the Three Marlenas and, with the passage of time, they will crumble further. They are more emblematic of twenty-first century life in Toronto where construction projects, whether large or small, are more like disposable commodities than enduring monuments. Even so, they remain evocative for precisely the same reason Berger was drawn to the postman’s palace: they raise questions of motivation and meaning.
I have no idea who built these cairns. Maybe the builder was one of the homeless men who live rough in the woods there. Or maybe it was someone daily descending into the valley from the apartments on Broadview Avenue. Nor do I know why the builder made these cairns. I suspect that, at the very least, it was a kind of ontological declaration: I passed this way! I existed! Stripped of all its finery, isn’t that what all human endeavor does? The Venus de Milo? Angkor Wat? The Voyager Probes? And beneath all this, the anxiety that there may be no one to receive these declarations. Or worse, that they may receive them with active hostility, like crumpled letters tossed into the garbage can.
It occurs to me that Cheval’s Palace closely resembles my blog. While I have created no physical space, my slowly burgeoning mesh of posts is becoming an imaginative edifice of sorts, a mad obsessive labour that has no commercial value but, one day, may give people pause and a place where they can sit for a time and reflect. Look at me! I passed this way! I existed!
Note: “The Ideal Palace” in Selected Essays: John Berger. Geoff Dyer, ed. (New York: Vintage, 2001) pp. 516-21.