From NB, II

4.17.07, Santa Cruz, 9:36 am

I picked up a book to look through—maybe it will be a good reference or resource. A Moon Travel Guide: Northern California Handbook by Kim Weir. From 2000. With an introductory essay by Ursula K. LeGuin, reprinted from her book Dancing at the Edge of the World (which I will seek today at the library, when it opens at 1 and I go to use the internet, all that email huddling in my inbox now, waiting desperately for me to come, to open, to read, all these terribly important things that I cannot miss…) And this essay is it, is perfect, ends with this:

“…Only knowing that we must have a past to make a future with, I took what I could from the European-based culture of my own forefathers and mother. I learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world as best I could. But still there is a mystery. This place where I was born and grew up and loved beyond all other, my world, my California, still needs to be made. To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost…”

This place where I was born…it is not about historical novel or conventional or experimental or the anxieties I’ve let percolate and swish around. It’s not about memoir or family history or personal narrative—not to denigrate, or criticize, or say there’s nothing of that in this future—but it’s just. It just is—you know I like to define in the positive, rather than by what it’s not. It’s about making a new world from the old one.

“But what about making the world, this world, the old one?…Whether our ancestors came seeking gold, or freedom, or as slaves, we are the conquerors, we who live here now, in possession, in the New World. We are the inhabitants of a Lost World. It is utterly lost. Even the names are lost…”

This state is a myth, my family is a myth, my past, my ancestry, the sicknesses and successes, the murders and suicides, the patterns and children. You are all only myths. I can name or unname you, I can rename and rearrange. You are dolls and words on paper. You are an image I have of a man on a bed in a white room, a man on the floor in the backroom of a shop. A woman in a kitchen above a rumbling train, a child in a field breathing California. In California, even contradictions mean nothing. You can invent a family and a gender, you can heal in any way you choose. “California isn’t a place—it’s a need.” (Kevin Starr)