The ancient Greek could use his or her eyes to see the complexities of life. The temples, markets, playing fields, meeting places, walls, public statuary, and paintings of the ancient city represented the culture's values in religion, politics, and family life. It would be difficult to know where in particular to go in modern London or New York to experience, say, remorse. Or were modern architects asked to design spaces that better promote democracy, they would lay down their pens; there is no modern design equivalent to the ancient assembly. Nor is it easy to conceive of places that teach the moral dimensions of sexual desire, as the Greeks learned in their gymnasiums--modern places, that is, filled with other people, a crowd of other people, rather than the near silence of the bedroom or the solitude of the psychiatrist's couch. As materials for culture, the stones of the modern city seem badly laid by planners and architects, in that the shopping mall, the parking lot, the apartment house elevator do not suggest in their form the complexities of how people might live. What once were the experiences of places appear now as floating mental operations.

The spaces full of people in the modern city are either spaces limited to and carefully orchestrating consumption, like the shopping mall, or spaces limited to and carefully orchestrating the experience of tourism. This reduction and trivializing of the city as a stage of life is no accident. Beyond all the economic and demographic reasons for the neutralized city there exists a profound, indeed, "spiritual" reason why people are willing to tolerate such a bland scene for their lives. The way cities look reflects a great, unreckoned fear of exposure. "Exposure" more connotes the likelihood of being hurt than of being stimulated. The fear of exposure is in one way a militarized conception of everyday experience, as though attack-and-defense is as apt a model of subjective life as it is of warfare. What is characteristic of our city-building is to wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating. What we make in the urban realm are therefore bland, neutralizing spaces, spaces which remove the threat of social contact: street walls faced in sheets of plate glass, highways that cut off poor neighborhoods from the rest of the city, dormitory housing developments.

-Richard Sennet, The Conscience of the Eye (xi, xii)

...Adam Smith imagined the free market of labor and goods operating much like freely circulating blood within the body and with similar life-giving consequences. Smith, in observing the frantic business behavior of his contemporaries, recognized a design. Circulation of goods and money proved more profitable than fixed and stable possession. Ownership served as the prelude to exchange, at least for those who improved their lot in life. Yet for people to benefit from the virtues of a circulating economy, Smith knew, they would be obliged to cut themselves free from old allegiances. This mobile economic actor would moreover have to learn specialized, individualized tasks, in order to have something distinctive to offer. Cut loose, specialized Homo economicus could move around in society, exploit possessions and skills as the market offered, but all at a price.
Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places. Any strong visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie the individual down. This was the premonition expressed at the end of The Merchant of Venice: to move freely, you can't feel too much. Today, as the desire to move freely has triumphed over the sensory claims of the space through which the body moves, the modern mobile individual has suffered a kind of tactile crisis: motion has helped desensitize the body.

- Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone

Beginning of November

The light is winter light.
You’ve already felt it
before you can open your eyes,
and now it’s too late
to prepare yourself
for this gray originless
sorrow that’s filling the room. It’s not winter. The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you’re alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you’re holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it’s suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

Franz Wright, Ill Lit

Soft Wood
(For Harriet Winslow)

Sometimes I have supposed seals
must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy
Even in their barred pond at the zoo they are happy,
and no sunflower turns
more delicately to the sun
without a wincing of the will.

Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.
After two years away, one must get used
to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,
to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,
as it blows through curtain and screen
touched with salt and evergreen.

The green juniper berry spills crystal clear gin,
and even the hot water in the bathtub
is more than water,
and rich with the scouring effervescence
of something healing,
the illimitable salt.

Things last, but sometimes for days here
only children seem fit to handle children,
and there is no utility or inspiration
in the wind smashing without direction.
The fresh paint
on the captains' houses hides softer wood.

Their square-riggers used to whiten
the four corners of the globe,
but it's no consolation to know
the possessors seldom outlast the possessions,
once warped and mothered by their touch.
Shed skin will never fit another wearer.

Yet the seal pack will bark past my window
summer after summer.
This is the season
when our friends may and will die daily.
Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.

Harriet Winslow, who owned this house,
was more to me than my mother.
I think of you far off in Washington,
breathing in the heat wave
and air-conditioning, knowing
each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.

Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

It takes about six hours to get to the Spiral Jetty and back again if you’re coming from South Salt Lake City. It really isn’t all that far, but the dirt roads start at the Golden Spike National Historic Site and it’s unavoidably slow going from there. There’s no way even a high-clearance 4WD can negotiate sizable rocks at anywhere near 20 mph, especially on sub-class D roads. One is advised to take it easy. The lack of speed wouldn’t be such a annoyance if the ride wasn’t so bumpy, especially when the CD player goes epileptic and vertebrae stiffen and sore from the never ending jostle. When another car approaches in the opposite direction, they usually pull over on the side to let you pass.

A little metal sign says “Spiral Jetty 16 miles,” after you pass the first cattle guard. There are actually five cattle guards in total, and the last one is still about 2 miles from the final destination. These guards are basically gates with grates; pits with long cylinders across spaced just far enough apart. The cattle get their hooves stuck inside or they don’t even try – I’m not sure how smart they are. Anyway, as you weave closer to Rozel Point, the road becomes a trail and the rocks appear to multiply. A print out guide from the group that manages the Jetty says that the big ones could high center a vehicle or blow out its tires, and that the brush is so rough, it could scratch up a paint job.

Robert Smithson built the Spiral Jetty in 1970 and a study found it to be the most popular work of twentieth century art in all art history textbooks. The whole thing was underwater for a while, but now the water level is even lower than the base of the Jetty. The sand is caked with salt. From the hill it looks indistinguishable from milky water, slightly choppy and smelly. The actual water, which meets the Jetty only at its outermost curve, is more of a pastel grey. It features a kind of slight surface eczema that could possibly result from moving underwater sediment.

Though most drivers are polite when passing by on the trail, they take no issue with parking as close as they can to the Jetty. Their inevitably garish high-clearance vehicles completely ruin the hillside view and stain the landward one as well. Stopping at Rozel Point, by contrast, allows the visitor to amble steadily toward the sculpture, gasping raw, salty air at the virginal glimpse. By choosing to walk, what could have been fragmentary snapshots through a windshield become dignified, continuous panoramas. A sense of pilgrimage is made possible, and the only rocks that need negotiating are those out in the water.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty