Eckes, Myers, & Verdin
Every generation sets down its own blanket of experience within a place. Layering it on top of previous utility, and building upon centuries of lives lost and hopes dashed. Over time, we build over the sediment of these layers, often unaware of their prior function and the lives lived within them. This is the premise of Ryan Eckes’ short piece Passyunk Spur, which dissects a small area of Philadelphia and extracts a number of inter-generational sheets of varying ethical and social thickness, comparing them, and becoming fascinated by their shape underneath each other. Eckes describes plans to build transit lines out into the wild preserves at the edge of the city, dissecting the indigenous etymology of the area as ‘peaceful place’ but also rooting it in contrast within its Latin origin, predicated on a binding together, a pact between boundaries. A contrast which undoes his original interpretation and sets in linguistic opposition the etymologies of indigenous and immigrant. How the past exists as wild, untamed, drawing a through line from the back then to the here and now in the lyrics of popular songs which tug on our definitions of heart and home. Eckes knows there’s only a slight difference between inhibit and inhabit and how their common linguistic origins concern themselves with power.
Eckes uses this etymological framework to draw contrast between the different stages of Philadelphia’s development. How the outskirts of the city, increasingly gentrified, still hold areas of violence, both literal and administrative. How these limbic areas, neither urban nor suburban still hold the memory of burial sites under playgrounds. How children dance upon the graves of those before them. As Eckes describes “Every word is a spur, an outgrowth, a departure. Language, like the city, is wild, even while it inhibits our freedom, our ability to make peace.” And how with every new effort to grow, the city doesn’t just expand outwards, it also adds layers of sense-making to the existing layers which constitute its grounds. These are layers not just of concrete, but layers of language. Social and moral layers of administrative suppression and economic hardship. How for as much as things change, these layers often reinforce existing prejudice despite their common origin.
Monique Verdin’s Southward in the Vanishing Lands performs a similar etymological exercise but instead of Philadelphia’s urban reach into protected spaces, Verdin’s piece encloses the indigenous people of New Orleans in the limbic space between coastal erosion and the discrimination of forced migration. Of peoples moved around to serve the administrative convenience of those who seek power and control over place though simple colonial ceremony. Of the vulnerability between an eroding shoreline and the linguistic etymology of shrinking coastal communities. Over time these oral histories have been lost, as Verdin explains “forgotten when the native languages died, leaving it to imaginations to ponder blurred legacies and lore. Much remains a mystery, lost in translation and left out of historical texts.” If Eckes’ layers are built upon the strands of urban extension, Verdin’s are built upon the forgotten stories of those no longer here, and the personal attachment to the inter-generational violence and resettled removal of her ancestors. She concludes by bringing the histories of violence into the present day through the political segregation of levee construction, and as the rapid wetlands of Southern Louisiana erode at an alarming rate, how efforts to protect against future climate events still result in decisions of who is eligible for protection from the elements. Who, as Verdin ends, gets to make “a last stand on sinking sand”.
Both Eckes and Verdin draw comparisons between the erosion of agency in colonial removal of indigenous cultures and the modern day encroachment of construction under the guise of urban renewal and protection. For Verdin, it catches the peoples of New Orleans in a historical net between centuries of economic suppression and relocation with the climate-based erosion of the land itself. They exist in a shrinking limbic space between a receding shoreline and the space of political power unwilling to help. For Eckes the same dynamic concerns itself with encroachment into preserved spaces, and draws contrast between the violence of development and the peace of the wild. Both pieces also lean heavily upon the origins and etymology of the language they use, but while Eckes uses etymology to establish deviations between indigenous and European cultures, Verdin uses it to trap the language of economic inequality in the net of climate crisis. If Verdin’s wild spaces are eroded through the violence of climate, Eckes’ wild spaces are still sites of at least a temporary peace. Both frame these dynamics in the cloak of the inevitable. Despite being a man-made consequence, Verdin equates the inevitability of colonial expansion and claim with the inevitability and inability to arrest the erosion of the Louisiana wetlands. For Eckes it’s the resigned inevitability of having to go to the outskirts of the city to reclaim one’s towed car, and the temporality of the city’s outskirts in the face of increasing gentrification. If Verdin’s inevitability is one which sits upon layers of historical oppression and violence, both colonial and climate, Eckes’ is one which concedes that it will always be this way. Verdin’s inevitability still has fight in it. It’s still making “a last stand”. Eckes’ inevitability has already given up but continues to complain. It’s the inevitability where we feel like “fucking animals”.
In reflecting upon my own practice, which also uses visual components to provide context and clarity to constructed narratives, it draws awareness to how writing always sits upon the layers of an author’s previous work. How we borrow from the past to make sense of the present but also write ourselves into the future. That we are only ever sitting on top of the centuries of experience which came before us, both in place but also in cultural moment. And how the temporality of such moments might aspire to be captured and preserved in our writing, but are only ever a temporary stop on an inevitable path of progress. That whatever I’m writing now is but the latest in a history of things I’ve previously written, but also prologue to what’s written next. Verdin and Eckes remind us to situate our writing in time and space by drawing attention to when our writing exists. I’m writing this on a Saturday morning in my office in Denville, New Jersey. I can hear a train in the distance. It feels cold. I cannot recall the events of when I last wrote, although I know it was yesterday. I do not know what I will be feeling when I write, probably tomorrow. This attention-drawing brings us closer to a sense-making of not just how we’re writing, but also why we’re writing. The layers of meaning which come from an introspection which seeks to unravel the blankets of experience built up over time, but which always inform what happens next as we type.
