All the Little Live Things
I heard on the radio that spring began the other day. Sure enough, I heard birds when I got up this morning. I didn't have to go to work; though, because it is spring break. For two days beyond the normal miserly weekend my calling to be a library copy-cataloging clerk is suspended, and my barely present waning wisp shred of coiled mortality is free to do what it wants. My brother-in-law, Doug, once inquired why I don't - with a few days off - fly out to Alcapulco and snorkel about in the warm Pacific. Like his some of his line chefs do. These are people whose life savings are jingling in their pockets just shy the price of Snickers bar come pay-day. Despite the attraction of the life-style, what sounded good was to sleep in for a few days and read a book.
I picked up Wallace Stegner All the little Live things a book from 1967 that I bought last year. I don't know why Stegner appeals to me so much but he does. Maybe he isn't a relentlessly as 'Western' writer as he is framed to be. Maybe I'm not as attached to the atlantic coast as I have figured. I went through elementary school during a period when the central and western regions of the nation were a large and massively mytholigized part of gradeschool education. Amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty - that wasn't just a song - that was curriculm. I was an American it was all good and New England was just were I was starting out from. Looking back I notice that the west was framed in these lessons as a natural treasure. In the mental picture I still have (and thrill to), the west of my imagination. It is still possible to hurry and catch up with Lewis and Clark and the march up the length of some transendentaly beautiful alpine pass in the Rockies with them. I remember being surprised a few years ago reading about the aircraft factories around Los Angeles that made fighter planes during world war ii. The California of my imagination didn't have factories; only Hollywood, surfing beaches, and Red Ponies. My education may have been a bit dusty, possibly left over from the thirties.
A friend of mine who I always figured to be the east coast born person I knew mostly likely to move to the west coast (she wasn't actually born on the east coast, not of the U S at least but in Rio de Janerio) When she never did I once asked her why? She said she went out there (California) on a trip at one point and decided it was not what she thought it was going to be - very different. She lives in Brooklyn now, and seems quite content.
I have an idea that every decade, of a particular culture, contains all its previous decades, not just contains but lives in and with these concurrently by diminishing degree. Maybe its just an restating of what we mean by culture. The built environment; in every city a certain portion of the buildings were built in a particular year, largely as long as they exist they will represent their decade. People, associations, organizations, corporations; all these things have a center to their existence, a moment in time when they most fully realized their purpose, their genisis. They will all reflect this stonger then they reflect other moments. All institutions, formal and informal, all things crafted were in answer to a problem and are tied to point in time when that problem or issue was identified and solved by an act of creation. These things will keep a place in their moment.
I came up with that idea at a time when I lived with a bunch of guys in a group house and somebody gave one of the others (Dan to Gary if I recall) a t shirt that read What if you woke one day and it was the 1940's and it stayed the 1940's all day... I don't know, I have dreams like that - bad dreams, but hey if it works for them. I made the point to them that the 1940's is still out there in motion and receding but it is out there now. I stop here and consider the work of another writer I like Joe Mitchell and his New York City stories. The ones in At the Bottom of the Harbor...
Somehow my concept of the west and California never got updated, it's a strange mix of grade school Americana 50s P.R. boosterism and 60s TV frozen solid. Stegner puts people and lives into these settings without losing the uniqueness of the settings or the individuality of all the little live things that exist there, like my prickly little weed from last spring. Showing the good and evil of all this striving by turns.
12:35:26 AM  ;;
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