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.