MAY1997
Matt Briggs
Who Killed Yesler?
Who Killed Yesler?
by Matt Briggs
Is Ballard Stockholm?
In Sherwood Anderson's short story, "Certain Things Last", he writes, "... I began thinking of myself as being at that moment in a city in Italy. Americans like myself who have not traveled are doing that. I suppose the people of another nation would not understand how doing it is almost a necessity in our lives but any American will understand. The American, particularly a middle American, sits as I was doing at that moment, dreaming you understand, and suddenly he is in Itlay or in a Spanish town where a dark-looking man is riding a bony horse along a street, or is being driven all over the Russian steppes in a sled by man who face is all covered with whiskers. It is an idea the Russians got from looking at cartoons in newspapers but it answers the purpose. In the distance a pack of wolves are following the sled. A fellow I once knew told me that Americans are always up to such tricks because all of our old stories and dreams have come to us from over the sea and because we have no old stories and dreams of our own."
But Seattle
at the end of the 20th century isn't full of immigrants from Europe, but
immigrants from the rest of America, from California and Back East, just
as it has been since the very beginning, here. Even the people arriving
from overseas already know America, because we have the great post-modern
junk masher of tv and radio and all of the other media buzz to neatly churn
out plotted suburbs full of lower income cell blocks and upwardly mobile
three car garage pads and this is America.
Fifth generation
or immediate generations, it doesn't matter because almost everyone is an
immigrant in the geological history of the place. The native people had
a culture and a way of life perfectly suited to an environment that dissolved
like sugar in the decade of the first wave of immigration. Seattle has always
been a city of temporary housing using the cheapest and most material available.
In the great fire, most of the city was burnt to the ground. And even though
they replaced that city with brick, these buildings are being destroyed
because they are obsolete.
However,
climbing into Belltown from the new convention center, walking across the
Regrade and through its old brick buildings I realize that even this place
where many of the buildings from the 1950s and even the 1930s still stand
is as artificial as any other in Seattle. The entire hill has been sloughed
off into the Sound. My idea of Seattle is abstract. Just being in the same
latitude with the jet stream over head and the smell of oily sea water and
the white noise of I-5 is enough.
I think
Seattle like all older American cities, exists more as an idea than as a
physical place or collection of buildings. New York was New York in the
1870s when its skyline was just ship masts and water towers. Writing about
a similar abstraction of a city, Nabokov writes:
Passing as it were through Gogol's temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century, losing it when it ceased to be the capital of an empire. [...] It's real strangeness, however, were probed and displayed when such a man as Gogol walked down Nevasky Avenue. The story bearing that title stressed the strangeness in such a vivid and unforgettable manner that Blok's poem and Bely's novel Petersburg -- which belong to the dawn of this century seem rather to develop Gogol's town than to create new images of its mystery. St. Petersburg was not quite real -- but then Gogol, Gogol the ghoul, Gogol the ventriloquist, was not quiet real either.
page 11, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, New Direction Publishing, New York, 1959.
And Seattle
(or anything in the West) isn't really real anyway. The places are temporary
constructions and provisions, myths and dreams, metaphors, tricks of the
eye. Seattle exists more as an extended series of references to taverns
and old riots and scandals and failed labor movements and now washed out
commercial punk music and various levels of successful or failed megalomaniacs
from Pantages to Boeing to Sub Pop to Microsoft.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997