GEOFF GOODSON
<Contributor>
Law school starts in three days. There are prostitutes around me– I give them some cigarettes and ask if I can sit in their corner, which is strewn with clothing, garbage and discarded needles. They fidget and banter, fidget and banter. I hug my knees drunkenly against the barrier, watching them crush up crack and inject it into their feet. I don’t know why I stopped here. One turns to me, spreads her legs and says that I should pay her for the free show. I laugh. In front there is a man who is “tweaking,” yelling at her, past her muddled attention, right through her, about how her vagina smells and why he fell in love with her anyway; how romantic and how kind he must feel. He turns to me now and is telling his story of unrequited lust: of their lives together, drugs he gave her and how he asked for nothing in return (except for sex, most likely). I try to look away. He paces back and forth, crouching as he yells and is now screaming that I am an undercover cop. The whole street seems to turn their gaze on me. I suddenly realize that I am lost among the lost, frozen in my fetal crouch– alcohol syndrome. Law school starts in three days.
Toronto can be a lonely place. The unknown people come at you in such waves of conspicuous anonymity that one seeks out those who are most like themselves. So often have I wandered the streets of Regent Park, Sherbourne and Dundas, looking for those who are quintessentially as “messed up” as I; to talk to, to relate to and with hope, to reach out to as one who also feels hopelessness and resides with the powerless among us. As such, this message is to those out there who suffer through each law semester, through addiction, through poverty and through other problems big or small: you are not alone. And moreover, you inhabit a privileged liminal space.
Many more than would freely admit are such “double agents” of Osgoode Hall. But, inherent in that agency is an ability to take on dual perspectives and through that, to the world, confides a common humanity between classes and experience. For instance, yes, I must admit that I smelled when I entered the homeless shelter (from which I am now completing my final term). But, now I sit here in this classroom of elite higher learning and no one knows the difference. My terrible smell was not merely the abject smell of poverty, in fact, but the very natural smell of a human being; a human being with dignity. You too have dignity in your problems (whatever they may be), be it your stress, your lack of confidence, or your fear of the future. For, this vulnerability is what binds us together and enables the legal profession to ground the law in human experience and in empathy.
It often feels to some as if Osgoode members, students, faculty and professors, stand on the shoulders of the masses: I, we, have received great privileges in various lives. As such, I cannot but recognize the mistakes that have brought me to where I am today. My personal difficulties are no more meaningful than others’ and my responsibility is no less unyielding and demanding. My issues have no defence except for the contexts in which they were chosen. But, in that light, I can only hope that we can all live up to the expectations that our shared personal struggles do demand in a larger sense. If one can agree that the women whom I described above deserve the same sense of value as ourselves, surprisingly, it is the gift of our own struggles that actually endow us with an inherent sense of legal professionalism; an ability to consider the toil behind legal facts, the common toil that unites us all, even in an adversarial system and which ultimately, if respected, demands that we take our place within the circle of giving and receiving in our communities.
As our lives and memories erode, when we become vulnerable and as we experience fear and hurt, one becomes aware of the true wonder of our strange existence and meaning in our labour becomes paramount. Without a greater intelligence of unattainable inter-subjectivity, without God or legal certainty, it might seem that all we have left are problematic conceptions about others, about ourselves and the ever-pressing struggles of existence. However, it is within this very difficulty that there is some recourse: the flawed journey towards unattainable transcendence through our work, the effort to still sympathize and appreciate the experience of others, especially when we accept the inevitable limitations of ourselves and the power of our profession, for me, is what life and what law is all about.