Category Archives: aesthetic

/versation, 2024, aesthetic, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, the no-scape

no escape [on the Ohio River Valley Gothic]

2 February 2024 / 0010 hrs

No matter what I’ve told myself over the years, I’ve always been steeped in this kind of Gothic. A childhood in the rust belt around folding farms and closing steel Mills, all just a few degrees separated from day-to-day existence… but close enough that I had a front seat to the sort of geographic necrophilia that happens in the country.

I can never quite meditate it out of my bones.

The Gothic that makes for good television is a more urbane kind a Gothic that lacks that determinism. It’s a Gothic without determinism. It languishes and chokes like the endless summers and New Orleans. Undying, but never quite replenished. Strangled.

This Gothic that infects me, this Ohio River Valley Gothic, is imbued with that determinism. It means you know where you are and hang the fuck on, no matter what. Grit your God damn teeth, spit and keep moving. There’s no escape from pain. What escape exists is only temporary and comes with a hefty price. Better to grit and hang on.

The Southern Gothic languishes in the past. the Midwest Gothic is all hard and deterministic, ike the high desert winters. But the Ohio River Valley Gothic waxes in wanes. It ebbs and flows. It both languishes and is bone and sinew built with determinism. This is what the river brings, deposits like high water mud and driftwoodbone and garbage from up river. It rides in on cross currents.

—

no escaping the massive corn fields
etched into the imagination. 

we take turns playing scarecrow
as the water rises, biding time

in the company of grackles.
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2023, aesthetic, incomplete memoir, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

brief homily on aesthetic

Time and the river have washed away all of my lyricism. What remains is a poetry of growls and mud.

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aesthetic, Archives, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, Uncategorized

Kintsukuroi: Or, Being Humpty Dumpty

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. ~ Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

When I broke the bowl I was pissed. Maybe more pissed than the situation merited, but that probably isn’t for me to decide.
Keep in mind, I’m not one to lose my temper and I’m not inordinately attached to stuff… as a concept. Certain things among the stuff I have has intrinsic meaning, though. And while the bowl hasn\’t been mine long, it quickly gained the status of useful artifact.

The bowl, along with a sturdy little cup, was a gift from my wife. And if that wasn’t enough, both were made by my friend Beth — one of my oldest friends and one of the few remaining people from the ether of my undergraduate college years who I still talk to.
People trapped in an avoidance culture full of disposable everything dismiss the importance of artifacts. But I\’ve long maintained the importance of certain things of the various stuff I\’ve had over the years. At one point in my life, when all of my earthly possessions could fit in one smallish suitcase and one milk crate (for books… what else) I still had this red coffee mug from Bybee Pottery… a mug I still have and still use.
I don\’t know if the bowl can be repaired, but I hope it can. Amanda reminded me of Kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing bowls and cups with silver or gold.
In other words, as my wife succinctly pointed out:
If you can\’t hide it, paint it red.
At the core of her statement is an idea that runs counter to the avoidance culture we live in. We\’re not supposed to look like we\’ve been through anything. Entire industries have grown that encourage us to hide everything from our age to our relative poverty (thanks to the usury perpetrated by credit card companies and the stupid amount of importance people put on their FICO Score). Every truly human thing we experience, ranging from absolute happiness to the darkest of grief, is supposed to be tempered, homogenized, and run through a cultural meat grinder that either reduces it something just one person feels or — maybe worse — dilutes it into something that needs to be healed by the latest version of New Age hokum.

Living in the midst of an avoidance culture means every experience we have should be neither too happy, too hard, too sad, or too disastrous as to leave a mark. And when it does leave a mark, we should feel shame and hide them accordingly.
Well… to hell with all that.
The Hemingway quote I used is a pretty popular one. You see it in a lot of inspirational memes that are supposed to make people feel better about going through the meat grinder. But it’s also cherry-picked… which is the curse of all great writing and proof that there is some truth buried in it that people want to overlook. Here’s the rest of the quote:

But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave
impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

The truth here, as I see it, is that we really have two options. We live and suffer breakage — which means, at some point, we have to find a way to repair the broken spots — or we die. Finding a way to fix the broken spots doesn’t mean we need to cover it up to make other people feel better, though. On the contrary. It is the things that have broken us that we have worked to repair that make us beautiful. It is these things that make us human. And moreover, it is these things that bring out the divinity buried in every person. Our broken points bring us closer to oneness with God.

The beauty of artifacts and of people… especially the broken ones… is that they bear the mark of our having lived through the moment when the break happened.
It means we survived.

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