Not just your human neighbors but these other critters and plants that are companions in
your life and are part of the fabric of your place. Now, as for nomads, people often raise
this question–what about nomads? Well, nomads always lived within a territory. They had a
place; their place might have been the southwestern corner of the Kalahari Desert. But it
was the southwestern corner; it wasn’t the northeastern corner. Nomads move in a known
annual circuit where they are circulating between certain water holes, plant species,
seasonal cycles and so forth. There are no nomads that just promiscuously go off across
the landscape forever.
PC: Only actors.
GS: And there are gypsies whose second language is French; there are
gypsies whose second language is Romanian. That should tell you something about gypsies.
PC: Gary, I’m reminded of this game we played once around the campfire:
try to describe the place where you lived without referring to manmade or man-named
geographical signposts.
GS: Yeah, great exercise.
PC: Try to describe where you live in terms of drainages, coasts, creeks,
ravines, basins.…
AUDIENCE: This is for both Gary and Peter, could you talk about hope and
optimism and how it changes over the years?
PC: Well, my sense of optimism has had the shit kicked out of it. But
it’s still kicking. I call it radical optimism because it exists without regard to the
facts. Being culturally Jewish, I have a propensity to go right off the deep end of doom
and gloom. I do have a passport and a hundred dollars cash under my bed. But, I actually
believe that from this formless void that began to intrigue me thirty years ago any form
can be produced and that this particular world imagining is not the last stop on the train
line. And if there can be dark ages, there can be golden ages. And much as I–you probably
don’t know that I do run the world everyday listening to National Public Radio; I tell
them what to do, but they don’t listen. But if there can be a dark age, there can be a
golden age. And so, in spite of the facts, I try to retain a sense of optimism, if only so
that I just don’t depress the hell out of my sweetheart and my children. That’s how I deal
with it.
GS: Very much the same. I think that, yeah, we’ve had some shit kicked
out of utopian visions that we thought were about to become manifest. But on the other
hand, the actually existing world isn’t bad. It goes through some hard times, to be sure,
but we do it in good spirit I hope. Another way of looking at it is, like in environmental
terms, ecological terms, the truth is that nature doesn’t need us to save it. Mother earth
is extraordinary resilient, and she has millions of years to solve whatever problems we
happen to create temporarily. So we do these environmental things not to save the earth
but for the sake of our own characters and for the art and craft of this small human
exercise, that’s all it is.
PC: And no matter how we screw up, every spring these flowers come back
to greet us.
AUDIENCE: What can we do about urban sprawl, [and plans such as a] parking
lot under Golden Gate Park; how can we protect a "potentially utopian" place?
GS: You’ve got several choices; one choice is make them put the parking
lots outside of San Francisco. That’s what it comes to. If you get the forest service to
stop logging on one parcel, they’ll go and sell another parcel some place else. So the
same number of trees get logged every year regardless. We all have to put our heads
together on how to slow down this runaway train of economic growth and population growth,
and we might start with the global economy and with population as two key spots to start
working on. It’s good news to hear in the media that finally the mainstream American
public is beginning to get fed up with urban sprawl. There are answers to suburban sprawl
in some degree. One of them is the Portland, Oregon answer, which is a kind of zoning that
requires land owners to build within the available lots inside the city before spreading
into the suburban areas around the city and to concentrate the denseness within the city
limits. That has gone a long way to save farmlands in the margins, in the outlying areas,
and to make the city more like a city. Our cities need to be more like cities; our country
needs to be more like the countryside. To make our cities more like cities, I’m sorry to
say, you may have to build some huge underground parking lots or build some five-story
parking lots. Or, ride bicycles everywhere and have more public transportation; that’s
what we really need. That’s my practical answer.
PC: One thing I’d like to just say, looking backwards thirty years. When
Gary talks about doing this kind of work, and getting together, and people stand up and
they say, "How do we save this place?" I think if I were to critique myself for
the way that I behaved in the sixties, the level at which I would hold myself the most at
fault was having clear and fixed ideas of what had to be, what had to change, and what had
to happen and not listening as carefully to other people who were different from me. And
one of the things that I always want to urge people to consider is that you can’t pour a
quart into a pint pitcher. You can’t really make the world less than it is, and it’s made
up of lots of different kinds of people. And sometimes a small development, or a small
mini-mall, or something like that which may offend your particular sensibilities may [turn
out to] be something which is going to guarantee local employment. And it’s really
necessary to sit and think and listen and come up with some kind of system that’s going to
permit all the different kinds of people in a place, and all the contrary images of a
place, to create a design that is harmonious and works. And if we just try to make it the
way we see it, if we try to make the city like the wilderness, it’s not going to work, and
we’re actually going to work backwards. That’s my little two cents. I would like to thank
everybody very much for coming and for asking such provocative questions.
from Poetry Flash 283 (November-December 1999). Online Source