The only war.
Iterate swift, swiftly
deadline-driven, message aligned
cross functionality
The problem with nostalgia isn’t that it’s one problem, but an entire toy chest of them, for what is nostalgia but a childish yearning, a desire to return to a time as remembered, often to the exclusion of fact.
Nostalgia carries in its seeming sweetness the rejection of movements, people, and technology: witness an uptick in colonial aesthetics, or a president who can’t use a computer–never mind a longing to reclaim some hazily explained former greatness. It’s one thing to be less than proficient in accepting the present, it’s another far more dangerous undertaking to reject that our future lies in breaking from the past.
Early in the election, some friends jokingly posted lyrics for Tomorrow Belongs to Me, but it held in its ha-ha Weimar ringing a sharp pain of reality. I don’t make much of the fact that 78 years ago today Kristallnacht stained human history. Maybe I’m trying not to read anything into it, because the future is unwritten. But I’m an idiot if I don’t wonder that someone with a heart full of hate doesn’t remember the date with the same wistfulness implicit in the MAGA movement. We feel sideswiped because we imagined better angels, faith and all that, we put our racist relatives out of mind if we were lucky, as if will would work some magic. We don’t all believe in magic.
I read a lot of late 19th century Russian and early 20th century British literature. This is offset with late Habsburg history, empires in decline, ready to fall into the 20th century war machine. I read as a 21st century reader, chafing at racism and short-sightedness, wondering whether at the time people felt the slow action of history in their blood. In some part, I suppose I want to find in the echo of antiquity a solidarity. Humans learn by doing, reading, seeing, and the aim is to know what came before, but: there can be no return.
The election was won by people for whom longing takes up their entire beings. Or, if that is overdramatic, then they remember their fathers working, homes easily paid for, cars in the garage. Only, this is the memory of some, not all. It is a post-war idyll that settled nicely into myth, easily resold to generations, nurtured into a kind of zombie memory. And like the zombie, it infects and devours.
Nostalgia is this blind thing, a dumb facsimile that lacks the complexity of the present and hides in its hazy glory a segregated history. What feels/is a backwards glance has us falling back and imagining the hard work in trying to pull free.
I don’t know how to go on, but we woke up this morning. Let’s go on.
It had been years since my last visit. Once I made it past the waves of radiant heat and roaches gunning for my feet, I was hit with the incredible foreign beauty that went unnoticed when I grew up there: the shed sheaths of palms cluttering sidewalks, alien succulents, architectural pastiche, haze and distance plying their lying magic. It was like visiting a new city, albeit one I had been reading about for years.
To that end, it’s not often I admit to being born here, for the length of time I have spent away, the language being one I am unsure of. And yet, I know the map well enough not to get lost. If I say that I am from this place, I am of this place, and that says more about me than I would prefer to admit. The creation of personal legend is central to the point, and so is my own undoing.
The myth of Los Angeles is founded on myth, preserved in myth, and confounded by myth. But this is not a complaint, for what city worth visiting presents its honest face? Given the choice, we want the seduction of a good narrative. Dreams such as the ones worth having would go hungry and starve without the shared delusion, the dirty light, and the received idea.
But given the size of the cockroaches, there is enough feast to go around.
Points of Interest
He is both blessing and curse, the over-friendly passenger who tells you that for the last six months he has been working in Alaska to pay off his five credit cards, and as soon as he quit he ordered just as many gun magazines to begin the cycle again.
“Old dog, no new tricks yet!” he cackles.
You like it when people are friendly and open, only now he is pointing out with the rote mastery of a tour guide sites of value, the 118 Freeway to through Simi Valley, for example.
My own notes on the place went unheard, as I mention its part in the Rodney King verdict, and for having an unseemly goth population despite the desert-like heat. A little later, he points out the Reagan Library.
“See, see! The Ronald Reagan Library, you can visit it!”
Disappointing him with my lack of reaction, perhaps he takes me for another American freeloader. I don’t aim to please, so neglect to tell him that I did once make the pilgrimage, years ago, shortly after it was built.
A friend and I never made it past the parking lot, admiring the view, and after we determined it was the thing to do, my friend relieved himself on a corner of the building.
“Still, every American really ought to visit just once.”
The sound of someone trying to make you complicit with their racism begins with the squealed insistence that they aren’t racist and proceeds rapidly to their own assertive disproval, the crash after the rubber burn.
People were nice: well that’s novel, I thought, as cars slowed for me despite their right of way. We waged a short battle of waving one another on, until finally the light turned red and I walked.
I waved, smiled, as did the motorist. This happened several times. It didn’t seem right to press the point.
It couldn’t have lasted.
In retrospect, moving to a city because people seemed nice strikes me as a strange rationalization. Where is the urban nice index? Does the mayor’s office appoint a czar of niceness or is it an elected office? Wouldn’t one trade the grace of agreeability for reliable, if surly, public transportation? We live in cities because we care more about the dynamic, and are perhaps willing to make trades of space for convenience, nice for proximity.
Or so one assumes.
Lately, I’m the first to say hello when I pass neighbors on the street, trying to hold up my end of the nice bargain, or disprove the latest received ideas. But when I get to the end of the street, I wave my arms like a lunatic at the car that goes the wrong way round the traffic circle meant to slow progress between arterials. The driver presumably takes me for a clean, well-dressed lunatic, and I take them for someone who has become so accustomed to the narrow neighborhood lanes that they drive too fast and the wrong way.
I, a city-dweller, can say that they grew up on a farm. This, the only ammunition I have, is a weak acid. From my father’s stories of growing up on a farm, I used to wish I grew up on a farm.
And when I grew up, I would have moved to a city.
For our purposes we’re calling it a “stick,” it’s best if you don’t ask too many questions.
Forgive the absence, I was otherwise occupied in questionable pursuits.
Well, you tried.
Years ago, when the Society was founded in an apartment above a bar on Polk Street, leaving the city was not an option.
The city was everything, what was not contained there I didn’t need.
It was true, until it wasn’t, and everything I came to require was prone to rot and had a name I didn’t know. Where I needed Beaux-Arts cornices, now it is the wet smell of wood, mushrooms blooming fungal details no less architectural. I still defend cities against less loving neighbors who consider them dangerous and dirty, but my relationship with the city of Seattle compels me to leave it again and again.
What does this mean for reportage of the Tenderloin Geographic Society? The missives will perhaps be more sporadic. I have a few months to determine whether the site stays or goes, and in the meantime, I commit to memory the Latin names of wildflowers and work on spotting birds of prey by the complaints of crows.
That I knew I’d have to learn the language of place was never in doubt, but somehow I forgot the rule of acquiring a new tongue: nothing means what you think it will.
The manual labor is trumping that of the mental. Please excuse the absence.
Recalling the dinosaurs.
After nearly a week in San Francisco, there is much to consider. Strangely enough, I came across the last Urbane Studies column I wrote for SFist.com tonight, while getting together some old files.
I suppose I would have liked to have rewritten it, the beginning seeming to have come out breathlessly impatient to tell some truth. And so it is, the latter part of it speaks a truth that is as close as I probably ever came to what I wanted to say about how I felt about having loved and lived in that great city, only to learn that I needed to leave it.
Writing is dissimulation, and even when I said what I meant, I relied on the complicity of a wordy disguise. Few I worked with knew what I did, and still fewer know as time and distance multiply. After my own fashion, I don’t often re-read what I’ve done, but I want to know that it still means what I meant it to mean.
What else can you hope for, if you’re writing your way out of town?
This is, as ever, the Ouroboros: go to the end to find my beginning.
I’m honored to be a guest on BFF.fm’s Burrito Justice radio Tuesday, February 24, at noon.
Possible topics of conversation:
What happened, San Francisco?
Burrito bowls of Seattle.
Tunnel boring machines as sea monsters.
What life’s really like in the former Shingle Capital of the World.
It doesn’t rain all the time and you don’t have to go to Starbucks.
Please, feel free to suggest/or ask questions via twitter.
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