landscape, language, and poetic self-fashioning (part I)

Riverside Towers, Minneapolis, December 2007

I am a migrant.

I've chosen my migrancy: I didn't flee civil war, or lose my home to natural disaster. For £400 and a ten-hour flight, I could go back and see the street I grew up on, intact. But I don't need to. Twenty years in the same place formed me so that I could identify a house from my city by just a few details: dark wood trim in white rooms, arched doorways from living room to dining room, built-in cabinets. Here are the words that mean Minneapolis, the city I was born in and where I lived, in the same house, from the age of four until I was 25: windowsill, prairie square, lake , parkway, mill.

Kitchen on 4th St., Minneapolis, 2003

I count seventeen lakes inside the city. Eight other bodies of water (ponds and wetlands). The Mississippi River, useful tool for teaching US geography and English letter-names to French highschoolers, runs through it, fed by Minnehaha Creek. The lakes are called Hiawatha, Nokomis, Calhoun, Harriet, -of-the-Isles, Diamond, Cedar, Loring, Powderhorn, Birch, Wirth, Ryan, Brownie, Spring, Mother, Taft, and Grass.

My students' concept of midwestern geography (Dole, France, 2007)

The city is on a grid, and the grid runs to the edges, where it meanders into the cul-de-sacs and loopy drives of suburban space. But in places the grid runs itself right off the map, becoming rural routes and county highways. The beginning edges of what's left of the Big Woods on one side, the Great Plains on the other. The grid means any street you walk down could go on forever. You could walk to the Pacific. Or squint to see the wheatfields, a pale yellow glow in the distance, covering western Minnesota and South Dakota.

Red Wing, Minnesota, July, 2006

A city grid was a formal, material representation of Progress: Onwards! was the slogan, which didn't look to see who, what, or where it trampled, caught in its wheels, and lost. It was a way of taming the landscape, rendering it. Ordering it (and the streets run east/west, and the avenues run north/south; they count up from downtown; run in whimsical alphabets; name Presidents, seasons). Claiming it: the application of a language 'we' could call 'ours' meant the land we named was ours, too. And, tacitly, not yours. Not theirs. Ours not always (not, in history's terms, often) the inclusive second-person plural.

But to me, the grid means possibility. It means expansiveness. Opening. Before I could take the city apart to see its existential injustice (Minneapolis sits on land used for centuries by the Dakota people), I knew the straight roads led out of the city to everywhere. And I cannot lose this connotation: the grid connected me to the rest of the world.

Mayfly hatch, Minnesota, July 2006

If the grid represented what could be to me, what was outside the city both continued and arrested that feeling. It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been in the middle of a prairie what that experience is. The sense that the world goes on, limitlessly as far as you can tell, in every direction--360° and the whole hemisphere of sky--feels like flying. Feels like being in a cage, too. In that much space, how far could I ever really go?

Who I am, I made and was made in this space, which both contained me and freed me. The contradiction of a wide-open space is that from it I could go anywhere, but leaving it--by sheer geography, by miles and dollars, by gasoline, bus tickets, and interstate signs--is a lot longer thing than just my say-so. At one point in time, I would have had to walk out of this place, or sit on boards at the back of a wagon, and a day's journey might not get me across state lines. When I left, I flew to Chicago and then to London, and for the first flight I could see the grid of the city get smaller, and then the country grid, another scale entirely. The little pill-shaped window by my seat contained the places I had come from.

Because I come from a place where space seems as endless, as expendable, as other things we take for (ruthless) granted, like water or electricity, my relationship to space itself is a particular one. Living in England I sometimes feel confined, knowing that in ten hours I would have hit the furthest edge of the country (from where I live, by train). Knowing everywhere here there is water nearby, or hills, or peaks, or cities--something to obstruct the eye in ways a prairie doesn't. I imagined the landscape everywhere could be as big as my midwestern, North American one, which stretched and was full of the sound of crickets and cicadas.

Minehead, England, May 2008

I am learning a new vocabulary in this place, words that mean England to me, like 'allotment' (now I know, Jane, it's a little garden anyone can have, and they are beautiful), and 'close,' which is the word here for what we'd call a cul-de-sac, and 'commons,' land which is privately held, but open to certain public uses. Words that have to do with ownership, right to land, interiority, belonging. All the land here fits on this island that is smaller than my state (about 80,000 square miles, compared to Minnesota's 87,000). But at the edge of land there is the ocean (people here tend to call it the sea). Which both contains the island and points away, showing where else I could go.

Dunes at St Andrews, Scotland, March 2008

magpies

(They are everywhere here. My new favorite birds. The rhyme goes 'one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy' when you see them. I'm working on updating the site, which hasn't been done since 2006 [!] in some cases. I've put all my links in one place, for instance [see sidebar], and now all the pages should look fairly uniform as well. New links on the actual links page, and I'm hoping to get some work up in the work section, too. We'll see.)

(I always find two for joy.)

I want to refuse, as much as I can, a lifestyle that compels me to feel stress about doing the things I love.

I wake up, I lie in bed and watch the light come in through the window. I can see my books and things around me. They are pleasing to see. In a while, I go and eat something I like. I do a few chores. I pack my bag and bike or walk to the university, where I am surrounded by buildings, landscaping, and a park that are made to be calm and beautiful. I work in a room with my peers, who also love thinking and learning, who are kind and intelligent. I read books and articles. I spend time wondering about things. I write. I eat my lunch.

Later I go home, or I go to the cinema. One day a week I go and make prints in a printshop in another city. I have adventures. I cook with a group of economists. I have tea with friends. All this is lucky. Important to remember that when things seem overwhelming. I'm doing what I chose. I'm doing what I love. It'll happen. I'm good at that.

psychogeography (2)

The last time I was in that church I was probably ten...it must have been Christmastime.

For me, everything in this place was new. I was a tourist. My methodology was feeling: romantic and Romantic. I had false starts, a map printed from a search I did online. Found the tourism office, showed two women paper us. Took their maps, cut and folded them to fit my notebook. Wondered whether they'd recognise your paper self. It took me two hours to walk through the town (red door of the Corn Exchange), finally stumbling over St Andrew's Church, little overgrown path to the back of the Castle.

Which I captured, ink on postcard. And sent to you.

love and luck

About a year ago I walked down the basement stairs in my parents' house and watched my mom have a stroke, and everything I understood about the world, and my place in it, changed.

Memory, for me, is completist. This is why I make a poor storyteller: I can't leave things out. I tell lists (long ones), not stories. So I could tell you about the seventeen minutes we waited for the ambulance, name the nurses in the ER, trace the shape of the monitors listing emergency surgery patients in the air. And that would be the beginning, in facts, of the change.

I have always felt lucky. Even in France, where everything that could go wrong did, I was surprised to hear my colleagues describe me as 'unlucky.' I had a beautiful childhood, full of books, stories, music, possibility, adventure, imagination, and love. High school and college taught me so much about what education meant to me. And the thought of how much I learned in my Master's and in the year I spent in France is humbling--the luck, there is no other word, of it.

Actually, if I'm being truthful, things began to change for me when I was in France, an outsider. Foreign, alone. There is nothing like it for developing a sense of compassion, empathy, and humility.

And then to come home--and when my family most needed it there were meals left on the porch (months' worth), and cards, and letters, and the support of people we didn't even know (bloggy people who contributed to the auction, generous strangers who made bids). I didn't know how much we were loved.

Sometimes the only response was to cry, but I'm not so good at that. I'm better at working, going out and fixing something or getting the laundry in, or heating something up. Making cake as declaration of love. I learned this from watching all these strangers love my family.

I arrived in England on a clear day in September with three suitcases and a memorized recipe for plain cake. And within two weeks I was making cake almost every day. Oh, girls from Flat 6, oh, economists, oh Matt and fellow theorists: I was so lucky to be found by you.

Every day since June 4th of last year I have been aware that I can choose to be open and to love (or to be closed and bitter). And more and more I find I'm able to choose to love and to be kind, be really with the people I love. I have made this luck and they have made it for me, with me.

This feeling of being beloved. This luck.

imaginaries

Thursdays in the printshop, I'm working on a series of imaginaries. A friend of mine here noted that I am often as attached to the imagination of a place as to the place itself, which I think is a fair analysis. It's a deeply personal and private way of relating to space. The prints I'm making are etchings with chine collée.

This is the Beeston imaginary: foxes, daffodils, beehives, cranes, and girls in toggle coats.