night reading

Oh Detroit, you complicated old man, nearly dead, with your shoulders arched over the river, polluted and gray, the threads of your shirt worn down with disease and car exhaust. You have grown fat and thin with industry, car factories, Motown music, riots, raids, transportation nightmares. You have eaten Coney dogs with relish and onion. You have built magnificent buildings only to burn them. Your children’s children have squandered their dowry. They piss on the streets. They throw trash in the trees and hang their laundry on ropes fit for hanging.

Oh Detroit, what have you done to the black man, his wife and kids, his cousins, his music, his hairstyles, his shoes with white tips, his pleated pants, his elbow slung out the car window, his basketball courts, his officers downtown, his nightclub, his shirtsleeves tucked over a pack of Pall Malls, his imagination, his industry, his sense of humor, his home?

Oh Detroit, what have you done to city hall, the public trains, the workers’ union, the Eastern Market, Boblo Island, the Ambassador Bridge? Where have you put your riches, where have you hid your treasure? Your concrete over-passes, your avenues as wide as rivers, your suburbs bloated with brick homes and strip malls and discount liquor stores and resale shops. Where have you hid our grandmother’s ukulele, the swimming pool out back, the lawn chairs, the car seats wrapped in plastic? Where are the rain shakers and the basketball nets? Where are the full court presses, the sneakers tied to phone lines, the windows broken in, the crazy old man on his porch yelling profanities, the old woman with the African statues in the stairwell, the kids with bikes with flat tires, the stray cats and guard dogs and prophylactics thrown in alleyways.

Oh Detroit, when you are dead and gone, who will care for you children’s children. They have run wild with the bastard boys around the streets, reckless car rides downtown, rigorous dancing, drug taking, knife-stabbing, pillow-stuffing, tail wagging restlessness. They have been drunk with this for years. They have been out of their minds. They have been left with nothing.

-Sufjan Stevens, from a series of brief essays on his Michigan album

place

i am severely disinterested in politics and literal interpretations of classical thought, and believe that an assertion of absolute truth is a shot in the dark just as much as it is the fabric of our culture. i think that the privilege of living happily is mostly overshadowed by a need to answer questions that we're unqualified to be asking. the missing sense of how enormous our world really is might help us understand how absurd it is to be sad or angry or afraid or convinced of anything.