INTRODUCTION

   But the stars had shifted, and as I watched them
   and waited for either sleep or dawn, I couldn't
   help but think about the stories.
                           -R.M. Pyle, Where Bigfoot Walks.

 

 

SITE:

In Portland, Oregon, a city established the year Henry David Thoreau built his cabin by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, grows the largest urban forested park—more forest than park—in the country. Near the end of the 19th Century, when the tract was being logged for building materials and fuel, a Unitarian minister named Thomas Lamb Eliot had a vision that preserving this land was important to the future of Portland. Through his prompting, in 1899 the newly-formed Municipal Park Commission invited John Charles Olmstead of Brookline, Massachusetts to study the area for possible preservation. In their 1903 report, he, and his brother, Frederick Law, concluded that unless something was done to save these woods they would "become as rare about Portland as they now are about Boston." (Portland was named with the flip of a coin on whose other side was "Boston.") Forty-eight years later, the first forty-two hundred acres (there are now over 5,000 acres, with 40 miles of trails) were formally dedicated as Forest Park.

AESTHETICS:

Drawing its spirit from Forest Park, this journal encompasses the city that surrounds the park, an environment presently enduring rapid population growth, along with raucous, though usually well-planned, development, where I work at living deliberately the last quarter of my life. Recently, a Brazilian friend wrote me that she doesn't like growing old. I replied that I feel like I'm never old enough. Then I thought, "Old enough for what?" Throughout this journal I will be seeking what Hermann Broch calls "the style of old age," as eldering is not about suffering the slings and arrows of chronological time, but tracking psychological and mythological exegesis into complexity and depth.

This project also continues my development of metalogues: monologues that extend beyond the singular voice. However, unlike many past texts, here there is no paratext to contain citations and additional information; rather, embedded links open text boxes. Walter Benjamin pointed out that interruption is the origin of quotation. Thus, as usual, into the smooth texts I invaginate other voices, fragments, of which Gilles Deleuze says, "there is no other part which corresponds to (them), no totality into which (they) can enter, no unity from which (they have) been wrested and to which (they) can be returned." (Proust et les signes.)

OPENING:

Some years ago, psychologist James Hillman was a guest lecturer at the University of New Mexico. After pacing in front of the class, he turned and said, "Philosophy is about keeping the conversation going." To which Portuguese author, Fernando Pessoa, would write, "I have no philosophy, I have senses." Japanese Zen Master, Soen Nakagawa, would offer this poem:

   Touching one another
   each becomes
   a pebble of the world

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© Joel Weishaus 2005-6