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Can you see me? I'm waiting for the right time
My poem "The Principle of the Thing" has been accepted by Weird Fiction Quarterly. It is the ghost poem I wrote last spring for Werner Heisenberg: 2025 finally called it out. 2026 hasn't yet rendered it démodé.
Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:
If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."
it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.
The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.
Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:
If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."
it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.
The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.
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Thank you!
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Thank you! There is! Their issues are themed and their submissions calls exist in a semi-open state where you need to be on their subscriber list to see them, but in 2024 when I was still on FB I accomplished this feat by joining their FB group? You absolutely should send them work.
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also your discussion of Boston Time reminds me of this gem of a artifact in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, titled just Michael Ambrosino's Show -- in 1970 one of WGBH's producers essentially just took a camera on his shoulders and started wandering around Boston neighborhoods talking to people, and the result is a really lovely snapshot of different bits of the city at a particular time.
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Thank you!
also your discussion of Boston Time reminds me of this gem of a artifact in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, titled just Michael Ambrosino's Show -- in 1970 one of WGBH's producers essentially just took a camera on his shoulders and started wandering around Boston neighborhoods talking to people, and the result is a really lovely snapshot of different bits of the city at a particular time.
That's wonderful. I had no idea it existed. LOOK IT'S THE OUT OF TOWN NEWS.
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Right? The author was born in Chicago and spent much of his life mapping Boston, so I'm not even sure I should believe it as applied to himself. But especially in a context of walking a place to learn its time, its phrasing still flashed me on Colpeper's question.
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My God, I don't want to think of my art as an obligation. I have enough obligations already.
(I agree with you: as a claim, it has a received sound.)
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The house I was born in has no interest for me. But the logging camps (and their equivalents), yes.
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If it were the same house occupied for generations by the same family, then it would be so woven into the family stories that I would want to know the house because I would want to know the stories: that part makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense to me is the assertion that attachment is attenuated the farther it moves out from the immediate family. That just isn't at all how I feel about the past. It would be very narrow-band if it were.
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*hugs*
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So sorry about the rest. *hugs* I am glad that there was also psychogeography, too, though.
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Thank you! The last couple of poems have been long waits for acceptances, which I like much better than the alternative.
So sorry about the rest. *hugs* I am glad that there was also psychogeography, too, though.
The psychogeography really made me happy.
*hugs*
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I was born in the same town as both my parents, which we left before I was a year old. I lived there for several months in my early twenties, and have been back numerous times. At no point have either of them ever pointed out the street(s) on which they lived when they were young, and I honestly have no interest in finding out, and I am otherwise very interested in my parents' lives. On the other hand, I was quite disappointed in not getting to go to the World Fantasy Con that was held in the Finger Lakes region, because I have a number of Dutch ancestors buried there. I'd also like to visit Boston some day, to see the harbor where my Swedish ancestors first set foot in this country, and then trace them back to where they left Sweden. Basically, the farther back I can go, the more interesting to me. Admittedly, I recognize that I am anomalous based on conversations with people throughout my life; most people seem to long to plant themselves in one place from an early age. I'm one of those people who has enjoyed the aspect of moving every 3-5 years that came with growing up in the military, then being married for a while to a military man. It's only been very recently that I've found myself wanting to grow roots and buy a house, and that has more to do with the fatigue of chronic illness and the stress of paying rent than that my wanderlust has subsided.
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Thank you! It is very much the bright spot in the trash at the moment!
Admittedly, I recognize that I am anomalous based on conversations with people throughout my life; most people seem to long to plant themselves in one place from an early age.
Nah: it is actively strange to me that I live in the metropolitan area of the city where I was born. Both sides of my family were migratory. I expected not to. I am in fact here partly because of chronic illness. It took me years to love the city for its own sake rather than feel trapped by its event horizon. (When you visit Boston, you should definitely meet its sea.)
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I hope everything else improves soon.
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Thank you!
I hope everything else improves soon.
Also thank you.
*hugs*
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I'm sorry to hear about the rest of your day. *hugs*
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I got them from the Minuteman Library Network! The first was published by the Joint Center for Urban Studies and the second just by the MIT Press. I found them fascinating.
I'm sorry to hear about the rest of your day.
*hugs*
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I'm reminded of my reaction to memes and articles titled things like, "If you can still remember these seven things, you have a better memory than some made-up percentage of your peers." And then brightly list your "childhood phone number and address." Which house? Which number? We moved! Not even as much as many people I know, but we did. So did my father's family. And my mother's.
P.
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Thank you!
I'm reminded of my reaction to memes and articles titled things like, "If you can still remember these seven things, you have a better memory than some made-up percentage of your peers."
Whenever those involve pop culture, I just don't bother.
Which house? Which number? We moved! Not even as much as many people I know, but we did. So did my father's family. And my mother's.
I used to fall asleep to my mother telling me the story of the immigrations and migrations of my family.
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*hugs tight*
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Thank you!
*hugs*
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Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline.
Have you seen speeded up footage of, for example, photos of a place that show it growing and changing over time--old buildings coming down, new ones going up? It's like watching breathing, in-out, in-out.
It's poignant when one goes to look for buildings or places that have had some significance, and they're gone. It's weird, to be a time traveler in one's own life. It hasn't happened so much to me, but a little, enough to know the feeling.
The line you quote at the end, what's that from? [ETA: Never mind--it must be from one of the two books, right?]
Hurray for the poem, and deepest curses on the causes of the landfill on fire.
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An entire rabbit hole about my city I had no idea about until the beginning of this week!
Have you seen speeded up footage of, for example, photos of a place that show it growing and changing over time--old buildings coming down, new ones going up? It's like watching breathing, in-out, in-out.
Yes! They make it incredibly clear how organic towns and cities are.
It's poignant when one goes to look for buildings or places that have had some significance, and they're gone. It's weird, to be a time traveler in one's own life. It hasn't happened so much to me, but a little, enough to know the feeling.
It's been happening a lot around here lately and I am coping with it as best I can. The entire block which contained the restaurant where
The line you quote at the end, what's that from?
"Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you?" It's from A Canterbury Tale (1944): it's part of Colpeper's hymn to connecting through time. He's just been asked what the old road has to do with the modern day, or why the soldiers currently stationed near it should care about the pilgrims who walked it six hundred years ago. So he begins by invoking the immediate, personal past in which he can feel confident of his audience taking an interest and then moves further back in time, common heritage instead of individual lineage, all part of the same continuity no matter who walked the road, climbed the hill, smelled the heather and watched the clouds so long as it all happened in the same place which holds all their echoes, links all of them through the land. It's not at all the same attitude as Lynch's. The language just reminded me.
Hurray for the poem, and deepest curses on the causes of the landfill on fire.
Thank you!
*hugs*