about desire lines

A late-night Google of the work of one of my favorite artist-friends, Taurus Burns (www.paintdetroit.com), yielded a hidden treasure so fantastic I’m embarassed I didn’t already know about it: the Heidelberg Project.

The Heidelburg Project (www.heidelberg.org) is a blighted Detroit neighborhood turned alternate fantasy universe—complete with brilliantly painted houses, poetry murals, and junkyard sculpture gardens. There was almost no remaining infrastructure here: only stray homes, humans, and imagination.

One part of me was enraptured. Another wondered how such colossal neglect could be possible in modern-day America. I mean, I’ve lived in Brooklyn, Richmond, DC—I’ve seen lots of urban decay (and I’m not talking about that “Roach” lipstick I wore back in ’94). But this was unlike anything I’d seen, perhaps outside my travels in West Africa.

Generating a satellite/map composite of the city revealed vast spaces of vacant land. More Googling led to further information about these “urban prairies” spreading through other cities: Buffalo, Flint, Cleveland, Chicago. These are areas in which groceries, schools, public transportation and other resources are so limited that one real-life Detroit urban legend, Glemie Dean Beasley, makes his living trapping coons and squirrels to sell for food (2).

Long after that Google-thon ended, the urban prairies still haunted me. I saw new possibilities in this emptiness. In these wastelands, residents were mapping out little gardens of Eden out of nothing. They were growing vegetables, reclaiming and reinventing condemned buildings, hunting wild animals to survive. I also saw the frailty of my own urban neighborhood, tenuous and marginal as it already is. We tend to think of cities as fixed, unperturbable. Yet, fed by the economic agendas of human beings, they are far more fragile than the nature which so easily overtakes it.

One of the most striking visual elements in these aerial scans were the “desire lines” formed when entire lots or city blocks were leveled and human foot travel ceased being determined by the angular conventions of city planning. Often these paths were winding, impractical, logic-defying. They were created out of something other than necesssity or even intention: they were formed from imagination, habit, desire.

One of the most iconic streets in New York City (whose name immediately evokes fame, creativity and neon lights) was paved faithfully around a desire trail of the Lenape people after they sold Manhattan to the Dutch for sixty guilders. It is the single longest street in Manhattan and one of its few that is not straight.

Language, too, is a desire trail. It is both subconscious and elective, a patina of common sense navigating paths of meaning and experience. It is idiosyncratic, apocryphal (ask five people the etymology of “fuck” and you’ll get five different responses)—at times, downright ridiculous (how did a random 80′s hiccup like “awesome” ever get canonized into grown-up use?). It defies all attempts at conscious artifice (Esperanto, anyone?) and has its own momentum and life-force. Like possessions of the missing that psychic investigators fondle for clues, words contain vibrations, history, maybe even sentience.

Poetry is not the city of culture to me, but the tendrils creeping into its windows, restoring language to the rightful chaos of nature. Good poetry can give voice to the the unspoken and know, as well, when to end the transmission. It is as much to me about silence as it is about words.

Enjoy. Thank you for crossing my path.

- Sarah

Sources:

(1) http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/06/shrinking-of-detroit.html — fascinating site.

(2) Detroit News, 4/09: http://detnews.com/article/20090402/METRO08/904020395/To-urban-hunter–next-meal-is-scampering-by#ixzz0h5P8pO2I) (How do do you know it’s really racoon? Look for the paw. “The paw is old school… it lets the customers know it’s not a cat or dog.”