The Image of the Railroad

I'm riding the bus through the switchyards south of Downtown Seattle, in the industrial zone along the Duwamish River. On one side are the reedy woods on the west slope of Beacon Hill where homeless people camp and on the other is the looming concrete hulk of the Harbor Island Bridge.

Mostly these are intermodal yards. Brightly painted shipping containers stand in stacks, decorated with the names of Chinese and Swedish shipping firms. Where the port and the switchyards meet, the gantry cranes that hang over the harbor move the containers around like Legos.

Off to one side, I can see a few hopper cars sitting on a siding, seemingly stranded, surrounded by freeways and vast empty lots. I glance up from my book. Emblazoned on the sides are names I'd long since forgotten: Cotton Belt, Golden West Service, Wisconsin Central.

My earliest memories are populated by freight trains. Across the street from my childhood home, an old branch line ran towards somewhere north, I never knew where. Minnesota perhaps, maybe all the way to Canada. I imagined that the engine I saw in the morning would soon pass through great pine forests and slow down as it neared yawning open pit mines on the frozen tundra.

The sounds of the railroad were omnipresent: the horn of the engine, the bell at the street crossing, the grinding noise of metal on metal. Lying in bed, I would hear the dull rumble of an approaching train, and the light of the headlamp would cast across the wall of my room, briefly illuminating my books and my Kansas City Royals pennant.

As I got older, I read the history of the railroads. i jotted down the numbers of the battered diesel engines. I wrote down the faded names on the sides of boxcars, names that seemed to encode an old industrial America I would never see: Saint Maries River, Seattle & North Coast, Frisco Line. Buildings were renovated, cars were crushed and recycled. But these boxcars were purely utilitarian and therefore unmodified. They were fragments that seemed as lovely and mysterious as Inca pottery.

During my teenage years, this raw fascination began to turn into a more conscious fantasy. In my room I listened to Simon and Garfunkel and read On the Road. Late at night, I walked around town, down towards the old Chicago Northwestern depot. Standing on what had once been a bustling platform, I watched the cold lights of the chain stores flicker between freight cars. I was surrounded by the logos of contemporary Middle American life: Target, Long John Silver's, KFC, Joann Fabrics. But it seemed as if all I would have to have done was ran, jumped onto the ladder at either end of that boxcar, and I would have been on my way to the Mississippi Delta or the deserts of Chihuahua. The flashing red light at the tail of the train retreated into the night. I almost believed that if I chased it I would arrive in a land of wild mountain streams, of apple harvests in the British Columbian autumn, of illicit kisses with tragically beautiful waitresses whose breath tasted of Lucky Strikes, of visionary sunrises in the High Sierra.

This is all terribly adolescent. As you grow older, the romantic visions of your high school years, whatever those might be, inevitably fade or mature into more adult goals and plans. The world when you're 18 years old could not be more open, and as you age, you come to realize how many potential lives you could have lived that will never come to fruition.

And yet I doubt those teenage hopes will ever truly die. I find them catching up to me at dull moments when I'm walking around the city, chopping onions for soup, waiting in line at the post office.

I cross the Jackson Street Bridge. On the tracks below, the express is ready to disembark for Portland. I can't help but wish I was on board as it puffs creosote smoke into the icy early evening.

Memory, Mood, and Film

The other day I went to the movies. It's something I hardly ever do anymore-- a few times a year, maybe. But Lars Von Trier's Melancholia was playing at the Varsity, so I walked up to the University District, paid my eight dollars, and had a seat.



In the era of Netflix and torrents, we watch most of our movies at home, on television and computer screens. We put on a movie, and sit back on the couch with a box of Chinese takeout and a beer. When we go to the bathroom, we press the pause button. When I watch movies in my apartment, it's usually because I'm bored. I'm watching a movie, and it's usually a movie I've looked forward to seeing, and it's often a movie I wind up being thrilled by. But it is specifically a video experience, dominated by the norms of video viewing rather than theater viewing.

When we go to the theater now, it's a rejection of that mode of entertainment. You don't have the ability to pause, you can't run to the refrigerator and grab another beer. You are in a darkened space entirely devoted to the idea of film.

People wax on about the grand old movie palaces. However, they're not commenting on the quality of the theaters-- they're pining for the sheer beauty of their architecture, for their bannisters and balconies and scrolled columns. And they're pining for a community of film-goers, for a world in which going to the movies was the thing that people did. In Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, the small town theater only barely plays into the plot of the film. But when it closes, it signifies the end of an age of innocence.

And when critics describe the desire to see a movie in the theater, they rarely use logical lines of reasoning. Rather, their desires are driven by something else. For true cinephiles, it's as if cinema is a holistic thing encompassing the film, the theater, and something ineffable. All existence dissolves into projected light.

Perhaps because of this holistic experience, we don't remember how we saw the movie-- we don't remember the color of the seats or the people sitting next to us. And when we do remember these things, they're viewed as a distractions. We want to remember the movie itself. The darkened theater is imagined as a blank space.

Those memories I have associated with movies, apart from the movies themselves, occur in the afterglow: the collective murmur of the audience exiting the theater, the drive home, the way your faculties slowly readjust to your everyday reality.

As I walked home from the theater, everything seemed imbued with dread. The iron bridges over the Ship Canal creaked, waves lapped at rotting piers, a red sun slowly set over Queen Anne Hill. For hours afterwards, the outside world seemed full of omens, and all my life was imbued with cinematic memory.

Histoire de la Folie

When I write a nonfiction piece, I tend not to tell stories from my daily life. I'd like to think that I write about daily life. But when I say I'm writing about daily life, it's more likely a quietist meditation on reality and memory, informed by morose continental philosophers.

So I’d like to at least try to write about my world as it is now at this place, at this time. For the past few weeks, I've worked at an outpatient schizophrenia facility, which I regularly refer to as the Cuckoo’s Nest. The proprietors have tried to put the bad old days of the Victorian asylum behind them. They’ve filled the lobby with soft chairs and beige carpeting, and laid out a color scheme of warm oranges and browns. But in an era where every medical institution looks like a Starbucks, this makes the Cuckoo’s Nest look all the more antiseptic. Foucault famously pointed out that in the modern world, our schools look like our hospitals and our prisons and our sanatoria. These institutions were once painted sea-green and clinical white, and now they are done up in tasteful earth tones.

The walls are covered with motivational posters, pointing the path to sanity through antipsychotics and cognitive-behavioral therapy. The faces in these posters are serene, their eyes smiling. They don't have the blotchy skin and broken teeth of the real patients, the track marks and bruises and open wounds, the stained and ill-fitting clothes. They are the faces of an inner peace most of the patients will never attain.

In each encounter I have with a patient, there is a certain regret and pity. There is something so dismal about talking a man 30 years my senior, with a gray beard and a wrinkled forehead, as if he was a small child. I try to approach them with empathy; after all, the odds are stacked against them. They are variously schizophrenic or bipolar, possessed of borderline and histrionic personality disorders, addicted to crack and meth and Five Star vodka. Once they were working poor, now they are just poor.

The patients don't reside in hospitals. They live in grim '60s apartment blocks with faux-Hawaiian names on the fringes of the city. Unconfined, they wander down windswept highways and smoke cigarettes in front of low-slung brick corner stores. People in the neighborhood avoid their gaze, and they are as invisible as they would be in Bedlam.

The Cuckoo's Nest is located in an area developed during and immediately after World War II, when returning servicemen and blue collar workers streamed into the region. They came to build the ships and airplanes that would win the war, to cut timber for Weyerhaeuser, to forge I-beams for Seattle Steel. They built their American dream on the broad boulevards that cross the Southwest corner of the city, on Ambaum and Delridge and Roxbury and Pacific Highway.

Now the streets have rotted. The GI bungalows now moulder with peeling paint under the damp Seattle winter sky. Those streets, Ambaum and Delridge and Roxbury and Pacific Highway, are now lined with boarded up strip malls and cinder-block apartment buildings. This is one of the several unincorporated nowhere zones down in this part of the metropolis. This is where Seattle sticks its unwanted: migrant Hispanic laborers, refugees from the Somalian Civil War and the Laotian Secret War, Native Americans from the tiny reservations that dot the Puget Sound, Samoans and Filipinos whose grandparents experienced American colonization, the poor whites with gray skin whose ancestors came over from Norway to fell the great forests.

The sun sets early here in winter. On my bus ride home, I look out at the dusky streets and glowing gas stations, heading back towards the bohemian neighborhood in which I’ve happily ensconced myself. I go home, and will spend the next 16 hours in the land of the sane.

Domesticity

In the interstices of my daily life, I always look through my notebooks that I keep in my bag. These aren't the Moleskines that so many people who write keep. They're spiral-bound, college-ruled, completely throwaway, and are as filled with idle doodles and grocery lists as they are with intentional writing.

Looking back, I realize just how much I've been writing so much about the idea of home: what it has meant to me and what it means to the general populace. Is it an idea that can even be defined? Or is it one of those concepts, like love, that perpetually floats on the edge of definition. We can think of examples, we can use other definitions to touch on aspects of the idea, but we can't actually nail it down.

That concept, that word is so loaded. Some people know where their home is in the world. They were born somewhere and never left, or they arrived in some city and stayed and stayed. But I'm always searching for someplace that nurtures me, as if I'm a tropical plant that needs a specific soil pH and a specific mineral profile to thrive.

When I write, I like to think about the big questions of space, dialectic, the city, the meaning of Enlightenment. I don't write about the couch I'm sitting on, the weather, the coffee I'm drinking. I write my ideas down, and stare at the world around me. I am sitting in a planetarium, focused on the stars above me, not the seat where I am lying prone.

But this apartment, where I've lived for a year and a half-- longer than anywhere else I've lived since leaving my parents' house-- is the home base for all of these explorations. I sleep in this bed, I read the newspaper under this afghan.

It took a while for me to truly feel like I was living in this apartment instead of merely occupying it. My roommate had lived here far longer, and initially-- as all roommates and sublets feel-- I felt like a houseguest rather than a resident. This was her furniture, these were her books. I knew where the glasses were kept and I washed them after I was finished with them, but this was just what any good houseguest did.

But slowly I came to inhabit it. I acquired things. I got a rice steamer and a food processor and an expensive coffee maker, a desk, a floor lamp. I filled the cabinets with spices and the liquor cabinet with whiskey. Every day, I repeated banal actions, brushing my teeth and baking bread, filling trash cans with used Q-Tips and pencil shavings.

I became familiar with the walks around the neighborhood. Each contour became familiar, the precise gradient of each hill, the time it took to walk to the coffee shop or the grocery store. I waved to the neighbors when they were out smoking cigarettes on their patio, and waited for the bus with the same several people.

And I fell in love with the view over Lake Washington towards the Cascade Mountains. At sunset, I looked out at neighborhoods on distant hills. Somewhere, I imagined, on that hill, there was a girl at a cafe looking up from her book and staring back in my direction. Our gazes met each other and we never knew it.

When I leave this apartment, I will give up the things I own. I'll sell the nice things and give away the cheap things. My posters will come down off the bedroom wall, leaving rectangular outlines in the accumulated dust. My books on the shelves will disappear. The paper towels I bought will get used up, the hair I left in the drain unplugged and thrown out. My imprint on the apartment will get fainter and fainter until it becomes indiscernible. New people will move in, with their own lives and their own things and their own stories of what happened in this exact space.

Memory and Intent

A recent instance of déjà vu: I step out of the shower and into my cold livingroom. The ashen Northwest winter light comes in through dusty windows.

There is something in the tone and the granulation of the paint in my apartment. I am momentarily transported to someplace I think I remember, a house somewhere back in the neighborhood I grew up in. I can almost hear a Chicago Cubs game playing on a chipped, sea-green radio, almost feel my bare feet sinking into worn, scratchy carpeting, almost smell instant mashed potatoes and gravy and the stale coffee left over from that morning.

Déjà vu doesn't transport me to the places I've loved, or to any place that I've traveled. It takes me to early childhood, to quiet towns in the American grain belt. In my conscious memory I remember hiking on the Italian coast and summer evenings drinking beer on patios. In my unconscious memory, all I can see are switchyards and blacktop roads cutting through cornfields.

The one exception is musical memory. When I have a specific memory of a piece of music, it has nothing to do with a momentous event. It doesn't send me to anywhere important. In the age of the MP3, recorded music is what we use to fill in our lives, and it occupies our commutes, our long, lonely drives, the hours we spent cleaning our houses. When we find a piece of music evocative of a certain moment, we think of light, of color, of wind coming through an open window.

When we listen to a song and remember our associations with it, we are not remembering the actual associations. Every time we listen to that song, we overlay a new set of experiences onto the memories we want to hold on to, and we become more and more distant from our own memories. That memory-picture becomes blurred, filled in with white noise. It's when you can't remember the name of a song, when you think you'll never hear it again, that your memory will remain pure.

The nerves connecting the eardrum and the brain can send signals in both directions. Consequently, remembered music can be heard by the ear, as clearly as if it was coming from a speaker. The songs of my life nag me in bed late at night, and I feel as if I can hear the world spinning.

So many of the things we remember are very discrete and practical-- we need to remember what to buy at the grocery store, or the name of a co-worker's child. Maybe we remember some commonly held fact like the name of the Vice President of the United States.

What interests me far more is the memory that is unintentional, the moments when you are suddenly struck by something long-forgotten, when memories collide, when memories supersede your current reality. Déjà vu ends. I am standing in my livingroom, unmistakably here and now. A bit of sun shines on a far hill, and I can hear the cat meowing outside my window.

On Pike & Boren

Four pillars stand on the corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue, on the Western edge of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer, gutter punk kids hang out there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, busking for quarters.

Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built  They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.

The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.

Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.

In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.

At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.

So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.

This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.

I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.

Linguistic Reality

Maybe a year ago, I experienced a horror at what seemed to be a complete slippage between my language and my thoughts. I became convinced that my words for emotional states and abstract concepts were ultimately flawed. The way I used them seemed different than the way everyone else did. I felt, momentarily, that my voice had been stolen. When I rode the bus home every day, I floated, unsure of my own world, among strangers.

It's not like most of our words have a concrete, permanent meaning. There is at least some degree of arbitrariness in what we speak. It reminds me of that lovely quote by Wittgenstein:

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

For whatever reason, I've met a lot of linguists in the past couple years. And so many of them have this sort of autistic relationship to the world. It's as if linguistics is their own way of discovering human society. They take interpersonal communication-- something so subtle and difficult and loaded and impressionistic-- and change it into a precise scientific reduction. Everything is parsed into phonemes and morphemes, syntax and semantics. Positive science is the barrier they erect against the maelstrom of social reality.

When you're younger, language seems like a matter of precise terms. You're learning new words constantly, and they all have a meaning. In school, you learn the rules of grammar and spelling, synonyms and antonyms. But as you get older, that linguistic certainty is shaken. Suddenly, there is context, history, questionable definitions. There is the exhilaration and the terror of discovering one's own subjectivity.

I suppose I'm trying to determine my relationship to my words because I've been trying, over the past year or so, to make my living as a writer of some kind or another. And to a certain degree I've succeeded. I've had more or less steady writing work. But as my current contract draws to a close, I have to wonder "is everything going to turn out OK?"

For me, reading and writing is the nearest thing I've ever had to a religion. In school, the point of reading was, for the most part, a vital part of some quest for knowledge/truth/etc. But outside of a life as a student, I stopped reading books to learn more about the world. Instead it became, above all else, a form of therapy.

At the twilight of the Roman Empire, the fallen Senator Boethius sat in his jail cell, contemplating Aristotle and Cicero. The important thing wasn't the conveyed knowledge. It was that a great idea can ameliorate the boredom and the loneliness and the meaninglessness of day-to-day life.

My coffee is getting cold and it's starting to rain. But then, after five minutes in front of a Russian novel, I pass into a world mediated by someone else's language, and everything dissolves into light.