A Symposium on Neighborhoods
IN HARDY’S “The Self-Unseeing,” he visits the remains of his childhood home and recalls where the door was, how the floor felt, how his mother sat “staring into the fire” while her fiddler husband “bowed it higher and higher.” The last two bittersweet lines, “Everything glowed with a gleam / Yet we were looking away,” remind him they couldn’t possibly have been aware of the harmonious moment while living it. They were oblivious, happily so. The moment is what the poem tries to catch up on. We’re always late for consciousness, neuroscientists say. And there are durations and degrees of lateness. When conversations turn to the trials of keeping up with the accelerated present, I say I’m still trying to keep up with the past.
If you grow up in a concentrated, tribal, old-style working-class neighborhood, as I did, you’re in the dream and can’t see it, conceptualize it, or even short-term remember it, as you eventually will in time. It’s a mossy nutrient medium and you’re the bacterial culture growing in it. You don’t control much. I spent more or less the first twenty-one years of my life in an insular, redbrick, South Philadelphia neighborhood, a village really, unaware how the place, its physical and emotional climate, was saturating my consciousness. The surround (voices, odors, sounds: the givella-water man shouting his arrival, the fresh manure hot from his horse, the rocking tock-tock of his wagon—this was the 1950s) composed, and in my head continues to dilate, an entity greater than all of its pieces. But I was oblivious to what was forming me and modeling my mentality.
To outsiders, a neighborhood is mostly local color. Live there, though, and local color is your life, invisible to you. When I finally moved away, my neighborhood, where there were no gardens, became a subject in my garden of writing: something was always growing or dying there. I think of it as the Matter of South Philadelphia (as one speaks of the Matter of Britain): it can’t be my property because it doesn’t belong to me, it is me. To honor my own looking away, I act in good faith to the material by re-imagining it: the re-imagination of the place is a preservative and maybe, maybe, makes me a little less late for consciousness.
I’ve now lived in San Francisco, in the same apartment in the Upper Haight, for twenty-two years. The surround has been stitching itself to my being, I’m sure, though it’s not the First Place that South Philadelphia was. It’s more a set of clothes I wear, baggy or too tight, silky or itchy. The difference is the consciousness, the seeing—of the self, the ambience, the dynamic that’s engaged when I’m being witness to what I’m already a part of. I’m less late for consciousness but still prickly about local color. It calls attention to itself, it fondles too cozily the details of neighborhood life, it craves to be admired or adored. Local color doesn’t disclose value or inquire into value. It’s mostly a collection of icons. It estranges poets from their material and becomes the kind of irony that baffles revelation.
I spent several years in a neighborhood on the Peninsula south of San Francisco that I never felt to be my neighborhood. The “my” matters. Everyone around me referred to the place as the “neighborhood.”
Let me back up. I lived for three years in the historic center of Bologna, next to the old Jewish ghetto that was also once the red light district. It was a neighborhood, like any neighborhood worth the name, with sensual textures and definitions that became memorable even while I was inhabiting them. A neighborhood requires sidewalk velocities (which require pedestrians), daily noise (or streetside sound design) particular to the place, and people greeting others. I’m not looking away from Bologna. It’s also different from other places I’ve lived because of its historical strata, down through the Middle Ages and Dante to the Romans and Etruscans. My neighborhood was antiquity. You hear visitors speak of Bologna as elegant, friendly, sophisticated. My birthplace, on the other hand, is of a kind that people who. In its raw ways, it’s enchantingly for everybody except us. And yet in 1950s and 1960s South Philadelphia everybody owned a house and car: it was, still is, nudged along by the razor-fingered American Dream. Eventually it created in me a comic, contrary, perverse consciousness: in order to feel like I’m living in a real neighborhood now, I can’t own a house or car, have a driveway or a dishwasher. This, I admit, is creepy, autocratic, and precious.
