Round About, and Where We Live
Beth had some appraisal pictures to take, and this is the ride in my mind. I carry Beth’s insight as I look and see.
Target was Dracut. Dracut sits just north of Lowell, thru which we passed. Lowell has grim and grime but also an endearing way of fascinating. It is a community with all the rupture that that really entails. A community welcomes and embraces, however rudely, even your loud effing parties. It includes the sad and wasted because there they are. The fancy loveless spots find borders to worship. The living world learns to cope. Let us consider the creative escapade.
The city of Lowell asserts the aplomb of diversity. Diversity is grandly more than the collegiate catchphrase that students here and elsewhere must bear. Diversity is how we space ourselves in a crowded world. Because Lowell was born a working machine, it can grasp the need for poor and striving, or poor and striving nevermore, as the case may be. There’s nothing more diverse than economic plight.
By whatever luck or impetus—call it Jack Kerouac, I suppose—Lowell has been granted more than a pep talk from the patricians of success. Maybe the name is magic. After all, there’s the local joke: The Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God. The city of Lawrence, just north and east of Lowell on the same Merrimack River, seems not to have received more than the bracing platitudes of economic growth. So it goes. And goes.
So passing thru Lowell, you see a world of people, specifically—because people finally become rather specific—people who are going about their day. Innovation resides in this very act. Lowell was built of mills and bosses. The bosses remain, in avid concern, but the mills are only boxes now holding the next generation of ideas, commerce or housing. The textile museum is closing for lack of funds.
The people and their languages remain. More Cambodians live in Lowell than anywhere outside Phnom Penh. A roster of nationalities joins them. We all seem to be intrigued by food, restaurants fast or slow appear everywhere, declaring the patent of cooking what you can. You are what you eat, or hope to eat.
The building life of architecture shines in Lowell, albeit in a grimy way. It’s not slovenliness that makes the disrepair, it is life in the face of life. A scurrilous numbering system insists that large is largest and anything smaller is left to decay. This is not a natural law, in fact quite the opposite.
The creative impulse resides in the compassion we can bring to our vision. That’s high-falutin’ talk, I know, but clearly the pretense that the destitute are invisible is woefully inadequate. Music and spices declare the sensory evidence, if you need to think that way. Faces of human people should satisfy the most truculent viewer of Donald Trump mastications. I’m being definitive because it’s real.
So I mentioned Dracut, a northern addendum to Lowell. It is a town. I will guess there is but one Dracut on this continent. It is a cramped and bustling place, almost tense to be a home for someone. Beth needed pix of some several condos, in the curious habit of appraisals. These habitations seemed telling. Off main roads, these ventures of building and commerce swerve into wetlands. The icily-planned housing fits into the plot. By some godly elegance, the wetlands remain at the edge of the human quarter. Birds, mammals, insects, and green life abound in the places that found no human usage. Even if you do not notice, too intent on firing up the grill, it remains. It is the world waiting.
And it waits.
The energy is palpable, up and down. Climb up or fall down, the rigid secular demands of economy remain. I’m not smarter than you to know economy derives from the Greek for manage household. It is a bullshit Elysium that swears by the gravitation of wealth to the too few. It is a mindless motoring on, like sanctifying the television show that Donald Trump plays Donald Trump on. The people with their households, of whatever sort, are still there, just sad, maybe, or lock and loaded angry. I’m not talking some occluded sense of bathroom privacy, I mean life or death.
But really, I just mean that we site ourselves in places the best that we can. We aren’t perfect creatures, even if our stock portfolio says we are. Anger is a tool for understanding why we are sad. Mindfulness of that fact will direct us. To and from Dracut or Lowell, or wherever we may be.