Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Sixteen Postcards from Terra Incognita

Numbered in the way they were written, not the way they were delivered

One of Sixteen: Wish You Were Here

The poignancy of postcards stems from that expressed or, at least, implied desire: Wish you were here! Penned when "here" is so not "there" yet addressed to a "you" important enough to make the "you" who writes the postcard forgetful of the "here" where that "you" writes. To write a postcard is actually (in the midst of not being there but being here) to transport yourself to the "there" of the addressee. The genre of the postcard embeds an address in its text like the ghazal insists upon the encoding of the poet's name into the verse. To write a postcard is to caption its caption, to continually locate and place yourself in a place all the time imagining another place, the "there," of the recipient.

Two of Sixteen: Thinking of You

The postcard is place inscribed, dramatized, and animated. It is a place that moves. A piece of place that has broken off and… I like to break the proscribed boxed boundary of the space "This Space for Message" message. I write on the photo, verso. I arrow in on the window, the third floor, third from the left. I affix the legend: I am here. There are other windows on the card. Think: the stamp is the postcard's postcard. Thinking of you! Indeed. Thinking of you, there, thinking of me, here, wishing you were here with me, me there with you. The postcard is a koan of place, our having to be somewhere, and our relationship to place and to each other. It is a place, a place in and of itself. Thinking of you! Wish you were here!

Five of Sixteen: Why Fort Wayne

It is hard to imagine now but for a while this plot of ground was to die for. Three American forts were built here. Four French. Three British. The Miami and the Shawnee each had fortified villages. There were massacres, ambushes, running battles, forced marches, insurgences, sieges, conflagrations, surrenders. Torture. Spy Run Creek, it is said, ran red with blood. This place was, for a while, geopolitically present. And place always contains its component of time. A strip of ten miles of land, a continental divide actually, that separates the Great Lakes Basin from the Mississippi Valley, was strategic if one moved around by water. But we, long ago, no longer moved around by water. And this contested portage, overnight, became, quite literally, just another backwater, no longer bothered to defend. Attention shifts and drifts through time. It lights on and lights up a place for an instant. Now you see it. Now you don't.

Three of Sixteen: There Is No Here Here

I love the map pieced together from the montage satellite photos (like postcards) representing the United States at night. There are great globs of light, dentritic phosphorescent tendrils netting up metropolises, the pearlescent bacterial glowing culture. And then there is the negative space, the absence of light, the empty negated vastness. I imagine that in the black blankness the grid of place is waiting to be sparked, that it is a story or a poem that provides the juice, switch it on. How does a place become a place? Donald Barthelme in "The End of the Mechanical Age" imagines God as a meter reader and tells us that grace is not like electricity, it is electricity. Let there be light. Write "light" and there is light.

Four of Sixteen: Look Out There

Once flying at night from coast to coast I happened to look out the window and spotted the burning blots spotting, their shimmering splatter radiating on the ground below. There, suddenly, was Fort Wayne, all its distinguishing features in place (the quirky cant of its downtown street grid askew, looking like itself, itself assembling itself before my eyes into a here down there).

Six of Sixteen: The Necropolis Leads the Metropolis

City planners once imagined that cities, civilization itself, sprang from our ancestors' decision to simply settle down. Time was right to build a town. But I like the new theory promoted by the trade that cities were a consequence of something other than a conscious shift away from hunting and gathering, slashing and burning. No, humans changed their practice of burial. They began to bury the dead and tending the graves stopped the migration. Bury the dead and this precipitates the living out of the flow. They hole up. To tend the dead. Tending the dead necessitated construction of shelter, the spur for agriculture, the undertaking of specialized individual tasks. The Necropolis leads the Metropolis, you see, not the other way around. Oh it is the chicken or egg thing, I realize. But I like the notion of tending the dead. Tending the dead, the job description of the writer attuned to the steady erosion, the evaporation of the details of time and place, of everything and everyone's re-placement. Stories can be thought of as vast cemeteries of the past place, affixed now in neat rows of print. How does a place become a place? Perhaps through accumulation of stories. A plot defined by plots.

Seven of Sixteen: The Blue Light Special

Boxing Day, 1965. On the spur of the moment, Earl Bartell, the manager at the Fort Wayne Kmart, taped a flashing blue lantern he got from sporting goods to some scrap two-by-four lumber, creating the first Blue Light Special. The flashing light marked the spot of some holiday paper he was looking to unload. The sale had been advertised. Announcements had been made. But the customers were having difficulty finding the location of the reduced stock. People had become lost in the store. The blue light was a navigating beacon, strobing orientation. The customers navigated the cramped, crowded aisles toward the discounted breast of-if not the new world-then, at least, the next year's promised presents. The place I write about is the place where the Blue Light Special was created. I, like Gatsby, another midwesterner, believe in the ecstatic future. I believe in the blue light. It is both illuminating and illustrative.

Eight of Sixteen: The Indiana Sky

There is this shorthand for place employed in prose. The adjectival sky. "He walked out under the Indiana [the Iowa, the Illinois, the Idaho] sky." An efficient way to indicate a place in a story, setting, naming it. But, really, would we know an Indiana sky if we saw it? Or, if in a story we read "the Indiana sky," what would we see, what would be conjured up in our imagination? That is to say, place can certainly be named, but, in merely naming it, can it be known?

Ten of Sixteen: Sky Writing

Look up. Wait! Start again. Look up "Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne." It is said that he was the first to successfully complete a complete outside loop, the loop to loop. He died in a crash, an airplane crash, in an Indiana cornfield. Art Smith, it is said, was first to write in the sky, the Indiana sky above the Indiana cornfields, marking the severely clear azure blue with a cloudy cursive script. What did it say? That goes unrecorded. And besides, it is too far away to read, and the letters, the words, are already smearing, streaking. The ascender on what appears to be a B is evaporating, the apex of an A is now merely a dull smudge. The sky arrives above our heads-transparent, generic, unremarkable. It is sky. By definition, over everywhere, everything. It must be branded, a proprietary geography of invisible air.

Nine of Sixteen: The Dumbest City in America

From Fort Wayne my mother calls me in Alabama to tell me that Fort Wayne has been designated by Men's Health magazine as "The Dumbest City in America." It seems to have been done scientifically, with graphs and categories and surveys. The number of Nobel recipients, library books circulating, SAT scores. "What," she asks "are you going to write about this?" It seems one thing I have written is this, to use the occasion of Fort Wayne's designation as "The Dumbest City in America" as an anecdote in a paper to be delivered at the AWP conference that meditates on the elusiveness of place. I don't know. I don't know. By definition my response can't be very, um, smart. I am influenced by the influence of place, a son of dumb. How does the brain think about itself? "Stupid is as stupid does," Forrest Gump's mother says. In Alabama, when it comes to lists, Alabamans say "Thank God for Mississippi." I want, at this juncture, to pun on dumb, to say something about how Alabama gives voice to the notion of place. That that place has placeness. A silence inhabits whole regions of the world, Fort Wayne, Indiana, for instance. That kind of dumb. In the silence in which some places are steeped, someone will articulate the vacuum. Struck dumb by dumb luck.

Eleven of Sixteen: City of Blue Trucks

Fort Wayne is the world headquarters of North American Van Lines, whose distinctive sky blue rigs wander lonely as clouds continually through the city, waiting for a berth. You see them orbiting on the bypass, idling in the far reaches of parking lots, a herd of them huddled together. Air brakes sneeze; running lights run. They've come to hub, to shift and sort and reload loads, to pool then peel away again, pulmonary pods, heaping beasts. Growing up, I liked thinking of the drifting blue trucks, counted them instead of sheep, each of them, I imagined, tared with another living room or parlor, each trailer transporting a suspended domestic setting, dreaming itself. Animated places crept by, a place parade, a parade of place, places looking for places to go and then going. The whole country, in individual dots and dashes, circulating through my city, the furnishings of its atriums entering the chambered city, this contracting, this expanding heart. And then, in another blue beat or two, beat it out of town.

Twelve of Sixteen: The Happiest City in America

In 1948, LOOK magazine designated Fort Wayne as "The Happiest City in America." I ask my mother, who is pictured on the cover with a group of high-school girls huddled laughing at a soda fountain: What is the source of all the happiness? In the water? In the air? Where did it go, she asks her picture, the photos of the photo spread? The photographer had no need to ask anyone to smile.

Fifteen of Sixteen: On the Planet of the Apes

"Where are you from?" Dr. Zaius, the suspicious ape in the movie Planet of the Apes, asks Charlton Heston, the marooned confused astronaut, who warily responds: "Fort Wayne." And the theater goes bananas where we watched (in Fort Wayne), howling, raucous primate applause. I believe we all wanted the film to stop and start over again and return to the place again where a made-up character uttered his made-up hometown that happened to coincide with our real hometown. I have heard people on vacation visit fictional places, send postcards from such places. Greetings from Green Gables, say, Sunnybrook Farm, say, Field of Dreams. Places that have become (through fiction) real. This real place (Fort Wayne) is authenticated by a bit of fiction, a bit of fiction within a fiction.

"Where are you from?" the ape asks.

"Fort Wayne!" Moses answers. The Promised Land.

"Me too!" we all respond, "Me too!"

Thirteen of Sixteen: A Sense of Place

We often speak of a sense of place, that a piece of writing can, at best, approximate a place, suggest the sensation of the surroundings, suggest a sense of sensing. The story simulates, at best, and perhaps needs only to stimulate a vague peripheral nimbus of locale and that is enough to satisfy. A sense of place suggests our alienation from place. It puts us in our place about place. We approach the world on a tack, askance, nuanced, alien and alienated, receding, just out of reach.

Sixteen of Sixteen: A Bottle in a Message

Once I got a coconut from Hawaii. Its hull hulled with stamps. My address and the stamp the only message. From the Smoky Mountains, I sent a little souvenir-a toy black bear crated in a tiny balsa wood box. Often postcards are not about the words alone-not the message in the bottle at all. The bottle itself the message. The medium and the means of transportation, transporting the places temporarily inhabited. Once the postal service would deliver almost anything from anywhere to anywhere if it had enough postage. I always wanted to send a door, unhinged and varnished with stamps, a souvenir of a place I once entered or left. Instead, in hotel rooms now, I strip the door of its framed legal notice encrypted with information that a safe will be provided-that the traveler cannot knowingly defraud the innkeeper-and use it as my souvenir postcard, an accurate indicator of where I'm at, where I've been. This explains everything, I write, an illustration of explanation. I write: Wish you were here.

Fourteen of Sixteen: The City of Conductors

Fort Wayne was division point for all the railroads that once ran through it. The Pennsy, the Wabash, the Big Four, the Nickel Plate, the New York Central, the Monon, and the streets of the downtown were clotted by conductors-passenger train conductors in their dark serge uniforms and freight conductors in stiff bib denim. They moved in time, on schedule with the trains, consulting their railroad pocket watches, carrying their tool bags and flares, ticket punches and key rings. Next door to everyone who was not a conductor, a conductor lived who worked strange hours on long drags to Chicago or Lima or bid highballing varnish to Indianapolis or Cleveland. Next door to us was a conductor, Mr. Kelker, who had lost both hands cleanly cut in an accident. He'd tell us stories. How the city was once a city of conductors, how it felt once to hold time in his hands, and how it felt to live, there, in what was once a destination and how it felt once to feel and how it felt now to feel the phantom feel of fleeting feeling, the subtle texture of absence, the heft of loss, the substantial mass of all that nothing in your hands.