I walked through the ghost town that used to be my city during these dying days. I saw a holy man crying with mother Mary – all these dying days. x
“As difficult as I sometimes find to admit it, I’m a westerner and even, now, a Seattleite. I love being a resident of a remote state, where (we tell ourselves) we’re disconnected from everyone else and therefore forced to make everything up on our own, feverishly hoping that what we come up with will somehow, magically, prove to be indispensable to the rest of the world which, hemmed in by tradition, hasn’t thought of that yet.” (David Shields, ‘Enough About You’) x
I fell into an insight about belonging that I wasn’t anticipating when I started reading a book about Seattle’s cycles of boom and bust; I’d picked up the book because I was interested in one minor character in particular but ended up devouring the whole thing. This city is a strange place to be, isn’t it?
It’s not like I haven’t thought about Seattle and what it means to belong here before; heck, I’ve posted about it at least once a year. But it was only within the pages of this book that I realized I’d been thinking about belonging all wrong.
I’ve tended to think in terms of participation; of taking part and hence being a part of something or other. Belonging has tended to be a doing word, and so what I did and what I didn’t end up doing made that sense more relative, with peaks and valleys, booms and busts.
Maybe that’s why the pandemic has felt so alienating; so many things I used to do, I just don’t anymore, despite all the new things I’ve started doing since. I threw myself into participation within weeks of my arrival here, five years ago; I took part, so I was a part, until that fell apart, and I was no longer participating.
Did I stop belonging? By that definition, maybe. But as I finished the book last night, I realized that belonging is a feeling word first; the doing comes after.
And what did I feel? A sweet sort of heartbroken love for this place.
“Now I could see that light in Seattle is amorphous – not so much beamed from a single source as aglow all around. It looks like sourceless light – apparent everywhere, coming from nowhere. It so softens shadows that there is virtually no contrast between light and shade, leaving Northwesterners to move through a dreamily dim, carefully ill-defined world of rounded edges and comfortable contours.”
(Fred Moody, ‘Seattle and the Demons of Ambition’) x