violin, treetop, abandon
When I first moved to Portland I lived off the park blocks, the south park blocks, where the university was, and, to the best of my knowledge, still is. It’s different now; just as the observer taints the observation so does the observer too far away to see but as yet still longing taints the lack of observation.
To say the park blocks are rife with homeless might be a bit of a misnomer; I never followed anyone to the lack of a home. The unwashed, the drunk, the mentally unstable, sure, and often not all three, sometimes the mentally unstable wore cardigans and cargo shorts. My fashion sense suggests that alone should be diagnosable.
I had a lot on my mind those first few years, a child coming, falling in love with the land and the city and how they embraced one another, and, absently, stealing an education. Sometimes I would sit in the park blocks and play the flute. Occasionally people would give me money and run off before I could tell them not to. Sometimes people would want to sit and talk or ask me why I was playing the flute in the park blocks. If my broad gesture of ‘look around’ wasn’t enough I’d say ‘Because I suck at the violin’ and go back to playing.
One morning after a particularly long spell of rain I took my flute down to the bench I liked, the one farthest removed from foot traffic, the one under which all the treetops tented inwards, and was --- frightened? Compelled? Intrigued? I don’t know. I stood and stared. There was a shirt, arms slung over the back of the bench, torso hanging down, hem touching the top of a pair of pants laid along the seat, knees bent at the edge of the seat and hanging to the ground. It was if a person were lounging on the bench and just rusted through his clothes.
Except for the dampness I might have thought someone was drying their fresh laundry. The image has stuck with me. An unfair criticism of where I am now is that you will never see that here. Why? I’m not exactly sure, but you won’t. Why is it an unfair criticism? Because there are a lot of places you’d never see that, that simple almost silly arrangement of clothes. Some places are too fastidious, some too frugal, some too prosaic, some embarrassed to show their laundry dirty or otherwise.
I thought of it as urban sculpture. I thought of that one PK Dick novel where when he gets up to the ice cream stand it is gone and in its place a 3x5 card that reads Ice Cream Stand. Years later when I wrote a serial novel I used a scene wherein a man rusts through his clothes and blows away on the hot desert wind. I had to contrast the cool rain forest, I don’t know why, afraid, perhaps that the clothes were left for me and I wanted to protect their real identity.
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