“Global Potemkin Village”

which was a struggle to finish

I remember hearing in some connection about an argument Gerald Burns had with Robert Trammell (two at-that-time Dallas poets) concerning how small is too small a small town to put in a poem. Of course it wasn’t really about that. Leaving aside the Olsonian angle (which i take to mean that local history & local poetry are by definition coterminous) it might turn the conventional practice of choosing topics (topoi, topographies) to write about, around, & by fiat decide that these things around me that i see are important because i am writing about them. That this language does not have to be the imperial idiom to be worth writing in. That i do not have to be the sort of person that you are accustomed to read for what i have written to be worth reading.

A truism, surely—until it isn’t anymore. For all that it might have been about Waxahatchie or Grand Prairie, it could just as well have been Dallas (for it was a just post-Nixonian year, or so). A scant few years later, DeLillo’s Libra (1988) & the series Dallas (1978-1991) had substantially supplied this want of mythology (till then, you might say “Neiman Marcus” or “Dealey Plaza” & be thought to have exhausted the subject). Today i picked up a free book on Venice, a place i have been to briefly but read about, far more. The blurb mentions other famous cities that have become synonymous with their best poetic exponents (as i, in the brashness of youth--& not entirely in jest--, once swore that D. would oneday be known for nothing except that yours truly had, by an inscutable fate, happened in this place to write)…

Venice itself has seen not only a plethora of reflections in art & literature, but even casts a long shadow in Scifi/Fantasy--almost more than New York City or London, as a place where weird things can happen (e.g. Tanith Lee’s Secret Books of Venus series). Curiously, when such a connoisseur of local color as John Berendt went to actually live there & talk to people, he produced an interesting sociological study (in the genre of places-that-only-have-a-single-industry) with the sadness that accrues to all depleted traditions, but tapped very little of the roots of its mythology. The weird had all evaporated.

Maybe it’s because no poet can afford the rent. Myth-building days, when the liminal is everywhere to be found & not yet a product for export, all have a family resemblance. But there has to be a critical mass of creators & above all of audiences (even if local & ingrown). This doesn’t happen just anywhere. It takes—dare we use the word?—Megalopolisomancy. And in the shadow of Turbo-Capitalism, where exploitative development is seen as the inevitable step to “the next level of success” by all & sundry, there isn’t enough time for this to happen…

And that place-which-is-not-a-place, the internet, gathers all others to its bosom, like a black hole of meaning. Telling us how to navigate (including each other), & what to do with our desires. This endless stream of nudges, whether one is standing on a limitless plain or a crowded city street, these are the nudges that matter. Strangely, though, they build their fantasyland & fantasy characters out of precisely those elements that linger in the public mind: things that used to have magic. There is a pathos to such utter derivativeness. As if we first killed off all the animals, then made up cartoon replicas to ease our solitude.

And yet it is those falsifications, the mediated realities of fifty years ago—70s music, movies, even TV shows—that seem like the last solid things we have that we can cling to, now.

"The boundary whereon I break to mist" --The Ring and the Book