jaeleslie

I am getting entirely preoccupied here with reading other people's journals and replying to my friends' stuff and wandering off to find fascinating book artists and pirates amongst the thousands. This morning in brisingamen's journal I found a bit of poetry by Walt Whitman, quite a lovely description of what we are about here. Building a city.

But I have been laboring on my neighborhood association's online discussion list this morning, which is argumentative and petty and always at the edge of flames, and I despair, turn my back and walk away. I'll be back. But here you are. Where else would you be? I speak not only of you, personally, but of the network of friends (whether or not Live Journal-designate Friends) that makes its magical appearance in one guise or another on the screen of this box. But I quote another New York poet, Paul Goodman:

My world my only one, whom I must love
if I so hard persist and pursue
to become a happy man with you
just you, with only you, my obsession,
and I cannot imagine
another possibility than to make
such idle passes at my only world...
I am beforehand disappointed
and late at night I end up sobbing
on the shoulder of my only one my world
for here you are -- where else would you be?

I was thinking about what City is, when I was driving Tobes around, wondering what on earth he thought of our little burg, our provincial capital. We went through one of those vestpocket tax-shelter suburbs near the lake and he mistook that for the country, which indeed it resembled, the English countryside at least, so then I took him out to the real country and pointed out a couple of cornfields and cows. That's what it's like from here for many hundreds of miles in nearly any direction. We came to a T intersection and turned back, and quick enough were back in the sprawl that looks just like Naperville or Aurora or the suburbs anywhere in the hundred-mile sprawl zone around Chicago's Loop. We talk about Madison as a city, but it's just got a big university and a small assortment of world-class this and that, to keep the New Yorkers quiet when they have to spend entire semesters living here. When you're downtown near the power plant, if you drove around the block fifteen times you might get something of the feel of a real conurbation. And if you live in Madison your whole life, you actually run into people you know. If you've just moved here in the last thirty years, say, it's unlikely you'll see people you know at random. It is at least big enough for that, and all the new people make it bigger.

But people live in village-size groups, even if they're surrounded by concrete for miles. The village is not the physical place but the daily interactions. Tobes is part of my village, even though he came so far and will probably never see this place again. The internet has made interactions like those in the fanzine community much more daily than they ever were through the mail. A city includes lots of people you don't know, might never know, perhaps don't want to know, and is big enough to get lost in if you want to find a whole new village for yourself.