Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Sixteen Postcards from Terra Incognita

124 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. Postcards from Terra Incognita 125 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...