Middle America

I'm on the bus on Interstate 80, traversing the route between Des Moines and Iowa City. I tick off the little towns I haven't thought about in years. Mitchellville: where our car broke down. Colfax: the old 19th Century spa town once famous for the curative properties of its mineral springs. Side notes for Guernsey, for Brooklyn, for South Amana, for What Cheer.

After Seattle and before going back to Asia, I'm bouncing around the odd corners of the rural Middle West that shaped my childhood. In my hometown, one thing has stayed the same, another has changed. I'd forgotten how many details I could remember. A grain elevator or the detail on a church window reminds me that it exists.

Beyond the specific details, I'd forgotten so much about what the Middle West is. Fallow fields and black earth, gravel alleyways, the width of residential streets and front lawns and languid, muddy rivers. In Seattle, everything goes up and down, the streets crowded with houses, whaleback hills rising from the sea. And in the Midwest, all existence seems to spill out like milk across a table.

This is ultimately the place that molded me. All places are ultimately existing in reference to what I learned here. Whether I have chosen to embrace or reject them, the aesthetics and the ecology of Middle America are my oldest and deepest benchmarks for how I construct my vision of the world.

When I went to the art museum in Des Moines, every piece seemed to encompass some learning experience. The architecture of the building, the individual paintings occupy my earliest memories of the concept of art. In these cold, graceful hallways designed by I.M. Pei and Richard Meier, I learned about color and light and technique, representation and abstraction, concept and application. It was here that I sat as a 12 year old beneath a twisted ladder and ballet slippers affixed to an Anselm Kiefer mixed-media painting, and realized I was looking at a degree of sadness and horror I'd never experienced.



My visits back here are rare. The last time I spent more than a couple weeks in the town I grew up in, I was a teenager. Walking down the streets, that old feeling of being 17 and preparing to leave home nags me. As I drive down 13th Street, I feel like I've just finished up a day of mowing lawns and am going to drive into the sunset with a Camel tucked behind my ear, Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes playing way past the distortion point.

I leave soon. Flying over Iowa, you look down on the neatly intersecting roads corresponding with the grid pattern imposed by the Northwest Ordinance. From the air, I will look upon on a constellation of memories, cleanly parsed out by section and township lines. I'll order a whiskey and soda, and watch them slowly recede into the distance.

Goodbye Letter

I've been sorting through stacks of paper over the past couple of days: oddities collected over the years, scribbled short stories, tourist maps, postcards, letters, sheets of blank paper with coffee stains. My life seems to be composed of pieces of paper, and I'm trying, by sorting and cleaning, to get these pieces of my life in order before I fly away.

In a few days I will say my final goodbye to the city I called home for nearly three years. When you're about to move away from someplace, daily actions take on a ritual quality. I'm spending my last week wandering, stopping in at a favorite bakery for a last croissant, a favorite dive bar for a last beer. I go to the Frye Museum to take one last look at a portrait by Franz von Stuck that unfailingly gets under my skin.

You try to compress all these favorite indulgences-- these plates of sushi, these trips to the corner coffee shop-- into a shorter timespan. The normal processes of my day to day life, the long nights spent staying in with a book, the eight hours at the office, the numbing bus and train rides home, dissipate, and I'm delighted to find myself on vacation in my own city.

But all of those indulgences are only bright spots. One's real affection for place comes from the background noise, the momentary twists and vague impressions of ordinary life. I'll certainly miss the coffee at Trabant and the whiskey cocktails at Liberty. But I'll also miss the unnameable and the ineffable: the sudden loveliness of seeing multicolored lights on the far side of the the lake as I sit at my dining room table after midnight; the time when my bus home was rerouted and I had to take a long detour walk through Interlaken Park on a winter afternoon; and above all else, the cold, watery light that pierces the clouds and turns gray, dirty backyards into storybook English gardens.

When I walk through the streets of Capitol Hill and Eastlake and the Central District now, I am traversing the labyrinths of my own memory. When you live somewhere for as long as this, and spend a lot of time walking around to boot, the streets are filled with specific images and memories. Every corner has the story of an acquaintance you waved at in a restaurant window, of a curb you tripped over at 2 AM on your 22nd birthday, of a long kiss goodbye. Were I to live in Seattle for the rest of my life, I would continue to discover an infinite number of new labyrinths, of houses behind other houses, of immaculate gardens behind high fences, of alleys that have mysteriously remain unpaved, of hidden stairs running down hillsides.

But memories unfailingly supersede other memories. As landscape changes, it erases the reference points, the signposts in the remembered city.

Having lived here for a few years, my memories are now at a saturation point. Knowing I'm about to leave, I can't help but be overcome with nostalgia as I walk home late at night. The cherry trees are in full blossom, and the days are getting longer and warmer. On that long walk down the north face of Capitol Hill late at night, I listen to the same song over and over again.

Now that I finally found the one thing I denied, it's now I know do I stay or do I go, and it is finally I decide that I'll be leaving in the fairest of the seasons.

--Nico, 1967

Map Reference: United States of America

I am in the map room on the top floor of the Seattle Public Library, staring down at a map of the United States. It can be any map, old or new, emphasizing physical details or political details, in color or in black and white.

Staring down at the tangle of rivers and railroads, I try to make sense of what I see. I try to correspond these neatly typed place names and these geometric symbols-- each represents a cleanly categorized type of real entity-- to my own perceptions of where these things lie in relation to one another. To my own memories of these places, to the photos and drawings I've seen, to the stories and descriptions people have told me. When we look at a map, we try to take all of these representations and all this subjective stuff and compress it into the structuralist confines laid down by Rand McNally.

In Asia and Europe, so many names correspond to the histories and myths of a landscape, the names etched out through millennia of recorded history. Village names refer to battles, to the patron saints of local parishes and the miracles these saints performed, to forking rivers, to fields of rice and turmeric, to long-gone castles. This is a landscape of what Marx called the regime of primitive accumulation, those Medieval approaches to the distribution and control of land and wealth.

But in the United States, place names are generated not by the edicts of a count or a priest, nor are they slowly made standard over the centuries by the habitus of local people. They are, by and large, a product of the state and of the commercial institutions. We have countless names cribbed from the Old World. The East Coast is full of towns named for the birthplaces of the colonists. Further west, so many of them seem to have been culled at random-- a Madrid, a Lisbon, a Persia, and a Pekin named by entrepreneurs who likely never set foot there. And between the imported names, we have the names of the heroic figures of the capitalist era: the pioneers and postmasters, generals of the Revolutionary and Civil and Mexican-American Wars, railroad men and their daughters who would marry their fathers' junior executives.

And there are the names inherited from slaughtered Indians, the names of great chiefs, the names that describe the myths of the wendigo and the Happy Hunting Ground. Their meanings are transcribed by local historians and sealed in dusty histories that moulder in county courthouses and small town libraries. So many of the languages that encode these meanings are forgotten by all but a few scholarly linguists and a few ancient Indians on remote reservations. Those elderly last few speakers of Pawnee and Osage have no one left to speak to, and the languages that carried the chants of the Sun Dance and the potlatches are forgotten. Their names for rivers and mountains remain, but they are little more than novelties for history buffs and students.

I live in a city named for a chief who famously told Governor Stevens and his men in Olympia that his people had no concept of land ownership. Governor Stevens looked back at him, shame-faced, and promptly removed Chief Seattle and his men to a patch of land on the other side of the Sound. They named a city for the man and a river now lined with Superfund sites for his tribe, still federally unrecognized. His daughter, Princess Angeline, died a pauper selling Indian baskets to tourists, watching a city grow along the peninsulas she was born in. The city fathers, feeling nostalgic, named a side street for her that cuts jaggedly through the South End.

As America dialectically unfolds into a new information age, the names of our streets have ceased referring to robber-barons and Babbittian developers. They refer to abstract concepts, readily marketable to a consumer society. Vast tracts of suburbia are given pastoral names straight out of Wordsworth. Within the nameless and shapeless swirl of houses, schools and parks are built, likewise named for abstractions. In places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, schools are named Cactus and Bonanza and Liberty, vague images inhabiting an imagined reality without reference points.

Eventually, human memory will dissolve all the input of nomenclature. All these place names will be overwritten with human experience. Kuala Lumpur, a city of gleaming mosques and ornate row houses, means "muddy estuary" in Malay. And the lovely names of Shiloh and the Marne are associated with nothing but war and death. Meaning is not a product of intrinsic nature, it is a product of history and struggle and collapse and redemption played out in space and time. Walking through the tracts of suburbia, I hope, vaguely that some day, the venal world we erect will someday seem as saintly as Chartres.

The Dream-City

For years I have been haunted by a city that appears in my dreams. This isn't a recurring dream, but rather a motif that appears in countless dreams. I can't remember when I first began to dream of this city, but somewhere in my adolescence, I became aware enough to recognize this city as such.

Perhaps I am dreaming of one place, perhaps of many. I don't think that distinction applies here. As far as I can tell, it is a boundless urban space, extending as far as I can see, lacking clear divisions or boundaries, infinitely entangled and complex. Yet I can pull out distinct landmarks in this city: an antique rooftop water tower, a warehouse filled with cardboard boxes, a sludge-choked canal, a hotel with long verandas and bougainvilleas wrapped around high trellises. I can't remember how many times I've seen them. All I know is that I have encountered them, and they have permanently embedded themselves within my dream-city. Our waking world shows a remarkable similarity. We may have a memory of a specific house without knowing where it is or the conditions under which we saw it. All we know is that we saw it somewhere.

If we experience our dreams as the conscious mind sorting out all the empirical stuff that we process in our lives, then it stands to reason that this dream-city is composed of elements of the places I've visited and of my visual and auditory memories of those places. Certainly, individual buildings and patterns are borrowed from my everyday life. From an early memory of Kansas City, I recognize a looming pair of candy-striped smokestacks. From Seattle, there is a darkened bar with red candles at every table and a waitress with a tattoo of three black geometric symbols gracing a pale wrist. This city agglomerates my memories, my anxieties, my flawed perceptions, and my logical deductions, recombining them into a seamless nowhere and everywhere.

The dream-city is filled with names and places that correspond to real names and places in the real world. They seemingly lack meaning; they are places I have been, places I've never been, places I've seen in photos, places I've read about, imaginary places in novels and fairy tales, places I only know of as reference points on maps. These names correspond to an entirely mental geography. This city is Nairobi, Oregon, located in the heart of Germany, anchored by the bristling minarets of the Bosphorus and girded by the Danube which empties into the Indian Ocean, which is just outside the city-- you arrive from that seashore via the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, disembarking at the Finland Station.

A high percentage of the qualities and images seem to derive from early childhood. I grew up in a locale going through its growing pains, too small to be considered a city-- an overgrown prairie town, just big enough to have a tiny shopping mall. As the mall attracted business, the old Main Street had languished. What was left were antique stores, biker bars, shoe stores that had whole sections for diabetic footwear. Above the shops, the second floors of the old brick frontages had apartments, offices, and small, secondary retail outlets. As my parents shopped, I would run around the stores and behind the stores, looking at the patterns in floors covered in little hexagonal tiles and ceilings gridded with identical pressed-tin panels. Behind, in the dusty brick alleys, were steaming grates, crushed wooden pallets, and bags of hair from the barbershops and beauty parlors. These forgotten labyrinths still come back to me in daydreams, and in my sleep, they seem to overtake all other reality.

My happiest dreams and my nightmares seem to be embedded within this maze of reconstituted memory. This infinite space is a reservoir of dramas of a magnitude I have never experienced. I've fallen in love with utter strangers, I've thrown myself off a narrow bridge. It is almost like this is a laboratory of experiences and emotions, and I am the white rat, unsure of its purpose.

As I awake, the shape of the city remains for a second, appearing almost as a weakly tinted transparency held between my eyes and the world around me. Its light and its shadows linger around the edges of my eyelids. But I am finally in the unequivocal here and now. The city is sliding from view. By the time I step in the shower, it is a few images and a remnant of whatever emotions I was feeling. By the time I'm on the bus to work, it is a fainter version of that perception. And by the time I'm pouring my second cup of coffee, mid-morning, I can only remember concrete narratives and images that I have chosen to remember, that I have repeated to myself, that I have written down. It is at this point where the conscious mind has seemingly conquered the unconscious, and enforced logical and real patterns onto a remembered unreality. I have a snapshot: an empty hallway, a radio antenna. It is all I have, and I won't have it for long.

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.