YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started explaining why he'd first considered moving out of central Seattle; first to Rainier Beach and then to Kenmore. Today, more of this.)
AT THIS SAME TIME, rents were on the ascent at an ear-popping rate. Downtown had begun its conversion to the mold-formed Large American City it has since become, sidewalks cleared of humanity's unsightly flotsom and jetsom by city hall so that the important people--the shoppers--could feel completely comfortable bringing their wads of freshly minted greenbacks down Pine and Pike, hurling their dollars into franchise clothing and home accessory boutiques by the armload, clogging the arteries of their bodies with another overpriced dinner out and the arteries of the city with yet another overpriced rolling status flag.
The heart of a city, its true essence, cannot, I believe, be found in its polarities. When we look at our environment through the skewing lenses of rage or lust, righteousness or nihilism, that environment becomes no more than a reflection of us. This sort of solopsism is both pathetic and dangerous.
And for me, it was easily remedied: We simply moved.
If I could no longer take a measure of my city's soulfulness because I could no longer see its subtleties, clearly the thing to do was to get another vantage. This we did.
It worked. South Seattle wasn't even on maps of town. Finding our way to the furthest reaches of upper Rainier Beach for the first time was thoroughly discombobulating; and for a week after the move I felt a sense of displacement that bordered on the existential.
It was much more of an ordeal to, say, walk to the store than I had experienced for perhaps fifteen years. And I became much more reliant on my automobile than I had ever hoped to be, a reliance I still admit to with great shame.
To be unhappy where you are in the world, geographically or otherwise, often results in a gradual abstraction, a reduction of that world to the very polarities by which it can no longer be truly lived in; the unhappy reality is consumed by a fantasy of other, better, more fulfilling, and satisfying worlds. By contrast, to be comfortable and at peace with the area in which you live, physically or otherwise, is to have made some distinction between the real and the illusory.
In a sense, to have moved outside of that dense urban area to the peripheral neighborhoods and eventually to an even more suburban address, I quickly gained a sincere appreciation for the amenities of both. A simple change of environment, and not only did the new place look good, the old place looked pretty good, as well.
I was born in Seattle, and, while I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, I have lived in this city since my late adolescence. I've always thought that people tended by degrees to live principally in the future or the past, mentally speaking, with a rare few who could be legitimately said to live in the present, in the moment. I myself definitely have my mind on what lies ahead, perhaps sometimes to the point of escapism.
It is perhaps for this reason that I only rarely have any wistfulness for Seattle as I have known it. I find that sort of nostalgia more haunting than comforting. Many of my friends, fellow artists, have left here in the hope that they might find something approaching fame or fortune.
I like to think that what they really got was a bigger world. Although my family and I will not always live in the suburbs, not always live in America even, it seems to me that a suburb can widen the world as well as any other dream.
MONDAY: Why old fake architecture's better than new fake architecture.
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