Suburbs

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water

This bit from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land might set the mood for my feelings on the suburbs. You might have guessed I have no love for them. Yet I work in them sometimes. And every sojourn is a boring adventure in itself. Every time I come back, I am thankful for living where I live; the occassional power failures and the frequent raccoon raids on our garbage are small disadvantages compared to actually having something to do if the power goes out. (Music, conversation, other human beings we know and love, &c.)

A few days ago I got sunburned under the suburban sky: completely blue, spotless, bright. I have never in my life seen it as anything other than that. It's fitting: spotless sky for spotless houses, for manicured lawns, for wide spotless streets, for rationally planned angular parks with their angular swings, their authoritarian merry-go-rounds, the piles of spotless cars, the glistening auto body shops, pharmacies, shoe stores, boxes of wwarehouses, warehouses filled with boxes. (I want to point out here that the optics of the atmosphere resemble those of a fish bowl.) (And note than I've gotten way beyond what I intended to say.) Anyway, I cowered behind the facade of a fine house which I believe had the privilege of being the last line of civilization out here. Past it were hundreds of meters of crushed rock and earth-moving machinery. (They had made an enormous pile which was now beginning to resemble a hill. The conveyor belt pumped on more and more dirt from the forest at the edge of sight.)

I have no answer for the highways, those rivers of cars, oddly beautiful in the nights. No answer for identical street grids named after similar trees, no answer for those other grids that attempt to break the monotony by making the houses slightly different or making the roads impossible to navigate (as a break from the street grid monotony). All I can say is these places would not be good locations for temples: some sort of deity has died here, and the stench of its corpse can be felt in the cloud of valium streaming off the impossibly rare passer-by. A warning to all the Salvation Armies and Jewish Cogresses and World Youth Day 2002s: your fine masonry would sink into the mud here; it would gobble up believers and turn them into car-insuirance payment, mortgage-managing drones; somehow, your fancy temples with their well-known religious symbols splashed out onto them would end up looking exactly like all the other houses. (I know I'm not making sense. I blame it on sunstroke from maintaining their impossibly high standard of living.)

Consider: "Q: How many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb? A: There are two answers. 1) Two: one to change it and one not to change it. 2) Three: one to change it, one not to change it and one to both change it and not change it."