Walk a Town, Write Things Down

Images, Emotions, Details and Ideas.

My old Subaru has been working, maybe 80 percent of the time? Maybe even 90 percent, speaking generously. To have any margin of uncertainty…makes depending on driving a gamble. Every time it starts, I’m relieved. In that moment I think, The car that brought you here still runs…

It’s become one of those mythical cars I’d heard about in other people’s stories—the problem inexplicably doesn’t show up once it’s made it to the garage. It doesn’t test as a problem on any diagnostics. It’s a bit haunted.

The lovely side of this concern is that driving a car that glitches now and again always brings along that line, The car that brought you here still runs…

It’s one sort of optimism.

That’s a line by Richard Hugo, in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” —a poem that has changed lives, changed minds, re-envisioned the particular ‘Triggering town,” built a world out of emotion—conceptual, visual and dramatic—marking a real and imagined space in which to feel attuned to something so human, witnessed in the world’s grainy details.

Do you know it?

*It seems the mobile version of this app might be breaking the lines of this poem in a way other than how they were intended by the author. It works on the desktop, but not on the mobile. Bummer.

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss

you had was years ago. You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage. Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall

Hugo has a short essay that some of you may know, “The Triggering Town.” In this piece, that was originally a lecture, he writes about finding a town you don’t know and riffing on it:

If you have no emotional investment in the town, though you have taken immediate emotional possession of it for the duration of the poem, it may be easier to invest the feeling in the words. Try this for an exercise: take someone you emo­tionally trust, a friend or a lover, to a town you like the looks of but know little about, and show your companion around the town in the poem. In the line of poetry above, notice the word “that.” You are on the scene and you are pointing. You know where you are and that is a source of stability. “The silo” would not tell you where you were or where the silo is. Also, you know you can trust the person you are talking to—he or she will indulge your flights—another source of stability and confidence. If you need more you can even imagine that an hour before the poem begins you received some very good news—you have just won a sweepstakes and will get $50,000 a year for the rest of your life—or some very bad, even shat­tering news—your mother was in charge of a Nazi concentra­tion camp. But do not mention this news in the poem. That will give you a body of emotion behind the poem and will probably cause you to select only certain details to show to your friend. A good friend doesn’t mind that you keep chorus girls in a silo. The more stable the base the freer you are to fly from it in the poem.

The essay is here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69402/the-triggering-town

Some of you have probably heard me say it—the longer I write, the more I think of it as an emotional tour, between the author and readers. Everything else is surface.

Today I’ll turn the key, see if the car starts. I’ll also do some writing, take a long walk, look at the world, make my plans.

Hope you’re doing well—I hope the car that brought you here still runs, that life is full of potential.

And big shoutout of thanks to those who have joined the Thursday night essay discussion! I adore you! Thank you for being there. I appreciate your ideas, your presence.

Cheers,

M

Hotel: That City is a Wall Sticker of the City That is Actually Outside.