Adieu to Friendly Ghosts
The days before I leave a place are always quiet ones, even if I'm roaming about town, taking last looks at people and places. My final few weeks in London were a bombardment of social activity, an attempt to fit in as many friends and neighborhoods and exhibitions as possible. At the same time, though, I read constantly, trying to fix my memory with books as much as experiences, and in the process forming the idea for this blog. I suppose the time of changing locations is my personal equivalent of those holidays that call for reflection and resolution.
Yesterday, despite the return of a wintry disposition to Philadelphia, I spent a good three or four hours walking around Center City, looking with that 'tourist's view' that I'd set out to explore with four months ago. What I discovered: that kind of distance is impossible for me; a context is always present. Instead of seeing the steely, indifferent high rises around City Hall; the upscale furniture stores nestled into my favorite brick row houses on Pine Street; the garish, leering grin of the sex shops on South Street, as some sort of sociological markers indicating a particular atmosphere (cosmpolitan; gritty; angry; friendly), I found myself on some kind of childhood ghost tour. Each sandwich shop and corner park called up a host of people I've lost touch with, as well as my own awkwardness standing at the fringe of their circles. I was walking, pacing the city as I used to, seemingly in the same gray light. For an hour or two it seemed possible that in fact I am the same self-conscious teenager I was when I left five years ago. I took myself to the movies at one of the Ritz cinemas, curled up on the plush seats and relished my manufactured loneliness as I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman ace the role of the selfish and troubled Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood. Nothing like the 'tortured artist' cliche to help a writer lick her wounds.
It was all terribly self-indulgent, in short, but probably a necessary part of my preparations to board yet another plane in several days and whisk myself off to a life I've planned vaguely, at best. I suppose that's what I crave, the indeterminate: that's the difference between what I used to know, and am learning to know again here in my hometown, and what I can imagine poorly and invent as I find it. At lunch today with a friend (at a place I'd never been before, incidentally, a falafel shop on 20th), I felt the temptation to 'make it new', find new ways to connect with my old self. But all this context, this history -- it makes me awkward, and uncertain. I'd rather be the sure center of a changing landscape, not just another bundled ghost-chaser wandering the brick walkways around Independence Mall.
Yesterday, despite the return of a wintry disposition to Philadelphia, I spent a good three or four hours walking around Center City, looking with that 'tourist's view' that I'd set out to explore with four months ago. What I discovered: that kind of distance is impossible for me; a context is always present. Instead of seeing the steely, indifferent high rises around City Hall; the upscale furniture stores nestled into my favorite brick row houses on Pine Street; the garish, leering grin of the sex shops on South Street, as some sort of sociological markers indicating a particular atmosphere (cosmpolitan; gritty; angry; friendly), I found myself on some kind of childhood ghost tour. Each sandwich shop and corner park called up a host of people I've lost touch with, as well as my own awkwardness standing at the fringe of their circles. I was walking, pacing the city as I used to, seemingly in the same gray light. For an hour or two it seemed possible that in fact I am the same self-conscious teenager I was when I left five years ago. I took myself to the movies at one of the Ritz cinemas, curled up on the plush seats and relished my manufactured loneliness as I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman ace the role of the selfish and troubled Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood. Nothing like the 'tortured artist' cliche to help a writer lick her wounds.
It was all terribly self-indulgent, in short, but probably a necessary part of my preparations to board yet another plane in several days and whisk myself off to a life I've planned vaguely, at best. I suppose that's what I crave, the indeterminate: that's the difference between what I used to know, and am learning to know again here in my hometown, and what I can imagine poorly and invent as I find it. At lunch today with a friend (at a place I'd never been before, incidentally, a falafel shop on 20th), I felt the temptation to 'make it new', find new ways to connect with my old self. But all this context, this history -- it makes me awkward, and uncertain. I'd rather be the sure center of a changing landscape, not just another bundled ghost-chaser wandering the brick walkways around Independence Mall.
posted by HB at 11:22 AM
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