Masses of Humanity, Layers of Civilization
Trump's Attack of the Cities I Love in a Short Write.
Welcome to the full moon post, once again I am drawing you into my proprioceptive writing practice, gathering my thoughts in 25 minutes, current-event style, and following up with some light editing.
I write this from my sister’s home, adjacent to Washington Park, in the city of Portland. This is not my city, I am just a visitor here, but it could be the sister to mine. I have come to love this place, it’s tall trees and its rain, walking the rose garden, getting lost in Powell’s, shopping on 23rd street, and swimming in the community center with its jolly women of a certain age (of which I am also). I have not been to the ICE facility, the single square block where the police chief says the protestors have taken to the streets, of which, he assured everyone, Portland’s own would have no difficulty caring for themselves. We have stayed mostly to the westside, save for one delicious foray to the vibrant neighborhoods of the east last night for gelato at Pinolo (h/t Jamuna). I have seen the people on the corners sometimes, with signs asking for help or curled up in a sleeping bag, and sometimes they are lost in a world of stimuli that I cannot perceive. But here also live so many others, people like me, who smile a hello, and continue about their city business.
I love both the city scape where I live and the one where I am visiting now. To someone unschooled in city life, it could seem that nature is hard to find in them, but we have learned to cultivate wildness. It turns out, that nature lives here in abundance, even without the quiet of country life. Other humans, for example, and the things that they create together. Art and community, the built landscape, layers on top of layers on top of layers. The people in cities rush like wild, leaving behind them their artifacts as they bring their kids to schools and to sports, and make dinner. They sing and dance and make music, whether they are in poverty or in wealth. They are both the workers and the employers, they are the visitors who come to experience the things that you can’t anywhere else. It’s what you do in a city, negotiate the nearness of those who may be opposite of you. This song comes to mind with its line “Everyone knows that cities were built to be destroyed.” (In editing and linking that line, I found this Temptations song from 1970, yet another perspective on the city and perhaps where that phrase originated.)
History of cities makes me think of old Jaffa, the ancient city, rises to the south of TelAviv’s mediterranean coastline. One of the world’s oldest port cities is on a mound (or “tel”) that was created by the layers of civilizations that have come and gone before. From the plaza at the top, where carts sell jewelry to the tourists, is a view of the sea. Jaffa is where Saint Peter, one of Jesus’ apostles, performed his miracles, and also got his shwarmas, as it was a mixed Jewish and Arab section of trade, and in the cities, since the beginning of time, you can find lots of good food and drink.
A few years ago, before Grandma and Mom died, we were at the farm visiting the North Mankato area rellies. They kindly came by for a Memorial Day potluck picnic because my mom was so wanting to connect with those she had grown up with. They were rural conservatives and we were big city liberals sitting together in a circle of lawn chairs. And when someone asked where I lived, I explained my South Minneapolis neighborhood of Linden Hills. Then my first-cousin-once-removed sitting next to me explains in her realtor voice, “That neighborhood has been improving over the past few years.” I felt the distaste rise in the back of my throat. I had moved to this part of the city more than 20 years before and even back then it felt too she-she for the likes of me. Her comment separated me from the city inhabitants that I chose to live next to, her comment assumed I wanted the dressing up of class and decorum, and it set my blood to boiling.
I assumed she said it to be nice, her words meant to temper the others’ judgement of me as an inhabitant of the “hellscape” (to use the president’s descriptor) where I lived. But my neighborhood has always been on the idyllic side (if you can call racial covenants idyllic--click on Timelapse to see how our city excluded people from creating generational wealth of through equity and capital appreciation since the 1800s). Originally called “cottage city,” it was where the working people of flour milling by Saint Anthony Falls would streetcar out to their lake-side cabins for holiday. Eventually it was subsumed by the growing city. We used to have a nicely mixed housing stock for all sorts of property purchasers. Those recent years of “improvement” that she referred to, meant more and more quaint cottages being torn down and replaced by large new builds.
Her understanding of my city was a numbers game, based on property values and crime rates, school rankings, cost of living and job market. By living in Linden Hills, she said, I wasn’t one of those usual city heathens. Her attempt to separate me from the “crazy people” pushed me in closer. My identity remains city heathen. By trying to mitigate the worst of it, she offended me.
Here I was in the place of my birth, where the spraying of the ditches had killed the bittersweet vines and the wild asparagus, the biodiversity remains in my land of choice.
**25 MINUTE TIMER GOES OFF**
What was heard but not written? It was more felt than heard. I’m not sure I captured the empty feeling of being misunderstood so completely. Why are rural conservatives so willing to believe that people in the city are depraved? When I turn towards the feeling, I find anger and offense, mistrust and judgement. Which so often they feel belongs only to them. Beneath it is sadness of feeling hated and attacked.
How do I feel now? Relief. Actually examining the feeling beneath my defense alleviates it bit. All I needed to do was recognize it was there and then I could see the space it had been taking up. I hadn’t realized how constricted I had been around the feeling and suddenly I was freer. It doesn’t change the other side’s perception of me, but it makes it so I am not beholden to it.
What themes came up? Just now a memory of returning to the city after family camp, my kids in the back seat as interstate 35W rolls us through downtown. I lament out loud that we are leaving behind the solitude of nature and entering the frenetic pace of the city and my kids tell me that that their feeling of homecoming is the opposite. They felt the warm embrace of the masses of humanity, submerging back into a buzz of acceptance and the grace for all different kinds of folks. There is a freshness to their response and I feel gratitude and a little more woke.
What would I like to take forward into future writes? Futile battles against nature. Wabi Sabi of city life.