One of those dull afternoons where
you're stuck in a Wikipedia loop. Not out of interest, desire, or any
kind of pointed effort, but just as one of those places you arrive at
when a torrent of sheer information-- whether it's Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, whatever-- seems to be the only thing keeping
you going.
Itt was thus that I arrived at the
entry for “mobile home.” History of. Geography of. Inclement
weather and. And suddenly, I see a picture of my hometown.
It was one of those photos-- the kind
you see almost daily in the press in the Midwestern states-- of a
mobile home struck by disaster, in this case, a flood. I remember
this part of town, and even this vista quite well. The meandering
path of the Skunk River through riparian woods, a mobile home park,
where, in a sad attempt at a bucolic mode, the developer named the
streets after songbirds, kids in t-shirts with Stone Cold and Mankind
on them darting about on bikes, women in neon tank tops leaning into
screen doors with lit menthols.
But was that my memory? Or was that me
superimposing a stereotype onto my memory?
And so, perversely, I went to Google
Street View, to cycle through the part of town down along the
floodplain of the Skunk River, to wide streets and chain restaurants
with big plastic signs, tiny, rundown houses on flat lawns, an
enormous sky.
And I realized not only that this was
how ugly my town really was, but how people who don't grow up there
conceive of the image and shape and light of the American Midwest.
I noted every forgotten detail-- the
fan eternally spinning in an attic window, a gingerbread porch, the
steel oblong structure behind the power plant that I called “the
sarcophagus,” because that's what they called something that looked
similar at Chernobyl on TV.
And rather than a warm nostalgia, they
evoked a stark disgust, that these details, so associated with an ice
cream and a sweaty brow on a summer afternoon, with a drunk teenage
walk home through the snow, so often intimate and even cherished,
were in a setting this bleak and flat and wide.
Our memories of early life are of
course eternally veiled in golden gauze, even if they're sad. This is
not only because of the temporal and spatial distances we have
between ourselves and our childhoods, but because of the intrinsic
nature of childhood perception, which is intuitive, holistic,
immediate, impressionistic, and unsystematic, lack any of the
exterior reference points that we have acquired and cultivated in the
meantime.
And so when we see the images of our
childhood rendered in the stark relief of analytic adult perception,
especially through a computer screen, there is a disconnect. We can't
reconcile who we are with who we were, and for those of us who have
wandered a bit, where we choose and where we're from.
We try to justify the disconnect
through countless techniques: the aforementioned nostalgia, ironic
distance, lyricism, contempt. Some of us go into therapy. Some
politicians try to impose their nostalgia into an idiotic politics of
regression. Some musicians make shitty revival records.
Thomas Wolfe once assured a 16 year old
me that you can't go home again. I loved his elegant descriptions,
paired with the sense of loss and alienation of a North Carolina
mountain kid adrift in New York, frantically scribbling on top of his
fridge, unsure how to express his pining, and so going into radical
modernist stream of consciousness-- something I admired immensely as
an adolescent looking forward to clutching onto some modernist
alienation myself.
And it took Joan Didion a lifetime to
realize that California was a late-capitalist nightmare not only in
her middle years, but from its earliest inception.
We try to organize the narrative arc.
Reality eventually slashes it to bits.
And all the lies we tell ourselves
eventually come to a head, at times like this when you're staring at
your laptop, at a picture of an asphalt street with a willow tree on
it, 3000 miles away.
