Dear Chicago
The Japanese Garden and the view from the John Hancock Tower. Sorrel with Geoffrey Hill and your responses to the Cold Moon.
I normally explore the weird and wonderful in the English landscape and write about it every couple of weeks. At the moment I’m confined to discovering the delight in my immediate surroundings. If this sounds like something that would interest you, why not subscribe? Or, if you’re already subscribed, consider recommending to a friend to whom it might also bring joy?
The country of memory is a strange thing. Stuck inside, I find myself wandering more the landscape of the mind. When I was a baby we lived in America. I was too young to remember anything really, of course. And I can’t tell if the memories I do have are simply pure imagination — though research has shown the same mental faculties are used in both memory and imagination, so how can you really tell?
The title of this email is sort of a joke: there’s a Ryan Adams song, ‘Dear Chicago’:
It’s clear the subject of the title is primarily a lover, rather than the city; but I like to think of it as a metonym, just the same.
I remember being inside a photograph I have seen of myself. It is hard to say what came first, the photograph or the memory. I am a toddler. I am standing on a gravel path in the Japanese Garden, in the Chicago Botanic Garden. Above me is the midwestern sky, an impossible blue. Behind me, there is a blazing red maple tree and the path stretches away to an ornamental bridge over the lake. In front of me, on the ground, is my stuffed leopard toy: I have already chewed his plastic whiskers into squiggles. (He still sits atop my bedroom chest of drawers). I am smiling, in the purple-and-green fleece zip-up suit I handed down to all my brothers after me. In my head, in the picture, I am alone, but that can’t be right, surely? My father must be holding me, crouched on the ground alongside, making sure I don’t run away.
I wrote this before I found the photographs. It turns out I have melded together in my mind quite a few of them.
There is another one of me, in the John Hancock Tower. It was the tallest building in Chicago until the Sears Tower, which they subsequently liked to boast was the tallest ‘in the Western hemisphere’, at least until One World Trade Center was built. There is a Sufjan Stevens song about ‘the Seer’s Tower’, an apocalyptic vision that imagines the building as the Tower of Babel.
Any case, there is a picture of me at the top, in the viewing gallery. I am a baby, I can just walk, I am lurching towards the railing beneath the giant panoramic windows. The lake stretches away until it meets the hazy fringe of sky in that rarified aqua blue, dotted with the thin quiltwork of the city. Still now that is my mental image of light, of space: the earth fading off into the distance.
I was struck this week by this Geoffrey Hill poem, Sorrel:
Very common and widely distributed… It is called Sorrow… in some parts of Worcestershire.
Memory worsening — let it go as rain
streams on half-visible clatter of the wind
lapsing and rising,
that clouds the pond’s green mistletoe of spawn,
seeps among nettledbeds and rust-brown sorrel,
perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light,
makes carved shapes crumble: the ill-weathering stone
salvation’s troth-plight, plumed, of the elect.
Reader contributions
I was blown away by your responses to last week’s post. People sent me some of their own thoughts on gazing at the moon, which was lovely. I want to highlight two contributions in particular:
This Frank O’Hara poem, shared with me by my brother Will Maclean:
Then this absolutely stunning photo of the Cold Moon, seen here at the bridge over the River Wye in Builth Wells. Excellent photo by my very own mother in law (!) Lynne Jones:
Thank you both!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s random musings and can excuse them in lieu of a normal adventure. Please get in touch with me to let me know what you thought.
Is there something else you’d like to see that might give a lift during lockdown? You can comment directly on this post, or reach me on Twitter or Instagram: I’d love to hear from you.
If you enjoyed reading, please consider subscribing, or sharing this newsletter with a friend.
Sincerely,
Ruth