Rhyme Paysage

I have been try­ing, and fail­ing, for the past few years to write about this ques­tion: what is it like to live nowhere in par­tic­u­lar? To live in a place that is only weak­ly a place, that does not seem worth not­ing in of itself? I am con­vinced that to feel that way is not and could not be only a mat­ter of per­son­al per­cep­tion; it has sol­id roots in a shared real­i­ty. But to fix on where that judg­ment comes from feels like pick­ing up mer­cury with your fingers. 

There are a few fac­tors that seem plain enough. You do not see enough peo­ple in parks, park­ing lots, side­walks. The out­side is sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed at most points, at most times of day. Every­one is allo­cat­ed too much space over­all. You can’t get a sense of an area as a whole because you can’t sam­ple the peo­ple present in it; they are all filed away inside in bed­rooms and store­rooms and wait­ing rooms. If peo­ple are not strict­ly need­ed to make a place, they eas­i­ly com­plete it, as Ten­nessee jars; they tell a sto­ry of what an area is and who it is for.

Then, that most of the area is strict­ly zoned. A place made of wide unbro­ken blocks of res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial, indus­tri­al cuts down on con­flicts, noise com­plaints and nui­sance fumes. But it makes it hard to have a lived expe­ri­ence of how var­i­ous the city is, in fact; the threads of expe­ri­ence hang off the frame with­out pulling into fab­ric. Your day-to-day rou­tine sorts out work and home, with a fif­teen-minute noth­ing of dri­ving put between them. Once, when I was in the com­mu­ni­ty gar­den in my neigh­bor­hood, a man who worked at the lit­tle plas­tics fac­to­ry next door came by and intro­duced him­self as Squir­rel. This is both absolute­ly true and ter­rif­i­cal­ly mis­lead­ing as to the usu­al lived expe­ri­ence of being here, a place that has already been ter­rif­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful at pre-sort­ing the peo­ple who have to coex­ist in it.

A third is only flat­ness. Changes in lev­el intro­duce changes in expe­ri­ence and per­spec­tive that auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate mean­ing in the mind. As you walk through, ten­sion and release get over­laid onto what are oth­er­wise sim­ple sequences of one thing after anoth­er. Points in the city show or hide them­selves, feel seclud­ed or super-con­nect­ed, depend­ing on where they fall in the con­tours. And nat­u­ral­ly, you will see the same place from dif­fer­ent angles. If, in the first two, the pres­ence of peo­ple ide­al­ly would give you a sense of what the sto­ry of the place is, in the third your var­ied expe­ri­ence gives you the abil­i­ty to tell an inter­est­ing sto­ry your­self. Not so if each loca­tion is one node on a flat orthog­o­nal line; you will encounter it in much the same way every time. 

But those three can’t account for all of the judg­ment of the place­less­ness. I have lived in oth­er flat places, oth­er zoned places, oth­er places where pedes­tri­ans were scarce. I know that it is not all about prej­u­dice – and places have jumped out at me where I didn’t expect them, or failed to arise where they should have been. I know that I am not the only one who feels this way about Colum­bus, from the sheer vol­ume of pieces and posts out there with the same ques­tion: why do we have no iden­ti­ty? The judg­ment seems to have some­thing to do with Susanne Langer’s intu­ition of sem­blances, where we can read human life into a work of art; but a city is not art. It also seems to have some­thing to do with sto­chas­tics, that a com­plex sit­u­a­tion can be fair­ly judged from a large enough mass of infor­ma­tion; but where do we get the expec­ta­tion of a place to begin with?

I have tried to diag­nose lack of place, to quick­ly fix lack of place; or to bemoan lack of place, or satir­i­cal­ly turkey-shoot lack of place; and I don’t believe in any of that any more. What is left instead? I could write that lack of place is not the excep­tion but the unsaid and unsayable default, that the deep placi­ness of cer­tain areas big and small has to be read against the vast reserves of nowhere in par­tic­u­lar. And that would have its val­ue for all the peo­ple between places, or try­ing to cob­ble place together. 

For those peo­ple, I could write about the sen­sa­tion of being nowhere in par­tic­u­lar. But that feel­ing is not a sim­ple one. Being nowhere in par­tic­u­lar has its own com­plex of qui­et charms – to not be involved, to not be arrest­ed or imposed upon, to not care in advance. As that sug­gests, they are charms of absence, of free­dom-from and not free­dom-to; they are about being eva­sive. Most of my sub­jects sug­gest them­selves to me, jump into my arms; this one is always gen­tly step­ping back around a corner.