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Andrei Codrescu in his wonderful and poetic collection of essays about his adopted city, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City,says he fell in love with New Orleans, “At first sight, violently.” While reading New Orleans, Mon Amour, I saw a little of myself in his writing and his love for a city that captures his attention so vividly and serves so much like a muse. So, with this column, Last Evenings on Earth, Chicago will serve as my muse. She’s the city I know best and the city I can’t seem to put out of my mind.
Like New Orleans, Chicago was built at the hub of an ancient river system and on a swamp, at first thought a seemingly impossible Athenian task, but one accomplished through pure will of civilization. And when we say civilization in Chicago we’re talking about the Renaissance, the ideal, the light of the horizon. The impossible and the nearly-impossible effort to progress. Upward and onward. This is what Mark Twain knew when he wrote the following in his famous travelogueLife On The Mississippi: “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago – she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” Chicago is the ideal place to write from and write about. It has the Renaissance novelty of constant change (like nature, like the universe) and a multiplicity of people and events that few cities in the world can match. In this sense, Chicago is a place where almost anything is possible, catastrophic or breathtaking (sometimes both), a city built over metaphysical rivers. I can’t help but think of the gorgeous Palmer house, for example, which burned down in the Great Chicago Fire just thirteen days after its opening, and how Potter Palmer immediately set to work re-building after the fire. Or I can’t help but think of how Chicago played center-stage to the formation of jazz and blues, the only real universal music of the century, with its own historical force, captured in the roars and cyclones of Howlin’ Wolf and the sorrows and sense of Muddy Waters. And, of course, I can’t help but think of how all of this history unfolds in personal moments throughout my life. On a crowded and nerve-wracking bus ride in Ecuador to visit my grandfather in Guaranda, a friend of mine handed me a copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch to help keep me mind off what seemed like an impending avalanche, and I came across the following passage: “And now a cracked voice, making its way out of a worn-out record, suggesting unknowingly that old Renaissance invitation, that old Anacreontic sadness, a carpe diem from Chicago 1922.
Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,
Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,
I jus’ want some lovin’ be-fore you go your way.
Every so often the words of the dead fit the thoughts of the living…”
Suddenly, as if in a dreamscape, I was transplanted from the Andes to Chicago, and although I was obviously not alive in 1922, I knew that feeling, the feeling ofcarpe diem the City evokes, the feeling that ghosts hustle bygone street-corners and recite poetry to the living. Somewhere in Chicago, in 1922, my Jewish great-grandparents must have heard these lyrics. They might have even danced. Or another memory of the City: riding on the L one glacial January afternoon, I noticed how shadows on skyscrapers move at perfect angles, no doubt, a consequence of the art of architecture, but I had never thought of this before, the geometry of shadows or the shadows of a city without end. Now, it’s all I can think about. Or the way a Serbian driver in a white van told me I was an asshole because my car lights were out, “Assssss-hooooole,” smirking spectacularly, the way only a Chicagoan can smirk. Or a midnight drink in The Gingerman Tavern with a friend I haven’t seen in two years. Or seeking solace and comfort at 4AM at a diner on Western Avenue (that inexhaustible street) after a feral night out with friends, after a shift driving a delivery truck downtown, or after discovering an old student of mine was sentenced to twenty five years. And, of course, my father’s jewelry and casting shop, the center of the world when I was a child. All in all, it makes perfect sense that I fell in love with Chicago over a long period of time. Our city is a slow roast. You need time here. It’s a heartbreaking place in its savagery and, yet, it’s also a relentless savior to those who just need a place to show up. To be sure, I might not be here my whole life, and, in fact, I’ve left quite a few times, but it’s the only city that’ll take me back. And that’s why I come back. It’s the only city I could love like this. Over time, metaphysically. The way a young reader falls in love with an epic novel or the way an astronomer falls in love with the discovery of a new planet or a new sun, a swirling flambeau, the possibility of a parallel universe.
Photo by Flickr user Crowbert
Paul M Davis