Drifting (part one)

I set out to wander the Woodstock neighborhood without conscious purpose, headed out into the built environment in order to see where it led me, and in order to be sure to be aimless I started my journey by going wherever the arrows pointed. I was in the parking lot of a strip mall, between Safeway and Bimart, and beneath my feet the white arrow pointed North. I walked toward the exit, and then turned to follow a forest green Volkswagen station wagon that was driving into the parking lot. When I reached the double doors of the Supermarket I stopped.

I was the red dot on a map. I was exactly there, a fixed point. I didn’t know where to go next.

The concept of confronting the built environment directly, of intervening in everyday life, has a multi-faceted history. The derive or drift may have originated in the middle of the twentieth century in Paris, but many others have played with the concept since then. In 1970 a woman artist named Adrian Piper took to the street after she saw how traditional art galleries and museums were faltering. She concluded that if the art world as she’d known it was crumbling this was because the capitalist structure on which these institutions relied was also giving way. Her response was to quit producing conceptual art installations and instead perpetrate what she called catalytic actions. She adorned a polo shirt laden with white paint, hung a “wet paint” sign around her neck, and set off to shop at Macy’s.

According to Wikipedia Adrian Piper is a philosopher as well as an artist. Her confrontational stunts at Macy’s apparently, in some small way, informing her development of a “Kantian conception of the self [that] accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility,” but while Macy’s may have been able to deliver Ms. Piper to a firm conception of her self, the Safeway parking lot was for me a difficulty.

I zigged and zagged between parked cars, and worried that I might spend my entire afternoon bouncing around the parking lot like a pinball. I followed another painted arrow to my left, then trailed behind a college student whose uniform of a purple Izod shirt and Khaki shorts somehow attracted me. He was talking on a smart phone and I followed him around the corner of the Safeway, and then stopped when I found him pacing in front of the dumpster. He just wanted a private corner where he could talk to his girlfriend or his boss or his mother.

I walked around him, squeezed between the dumpster and the brick wall of the Safeway, and then stopped one more time when I reached a high voltage junction box. I stood there and waited.

Psychogeography is meant to offer a violent emotive possession over the streets. Exotic and exciting treasures were to be found in the city by drifters able to conquer her. But standing by the junction box, watching the traffic slowly pass by, I could only muster a critical gaze.

“I’m tempted to, uh, knock on the door of this house with a wooden welcome sign. To take it literally. But that welcome sign actually means the exact opposite of what it says. The welcome sign means ‘Stay Away.’” – recorded note to myself during my drifting

In 1991 I worked for an environmental organization called OSPIRG. I was 20 years old then and they sent me out into these built environments in Portland as a part of a search for environmental types. My job was to wander residential streets, examine the ranch houses and bungalows, and find good liberals willing to hand over checks.

Wandering those same streets nearly twenty years later it is as if nothing has changed. By continuing to wander the urban forest of Portland, remaining with the Alders and Oaks, I am always caught in my memory. Or more precisely, I am always stuck in my same alienation. Walking along Ramona in 2010, stopping outside an orange Raised Ranch style house, staring at the dark red garage door that someone left slightly ajar, I sense a female presence inside. I flash on a memory of a memory. A woman in business attire, maybe a Pant Suit, a faceless woman whose ordered life was contained inside a Raised Ranch like this one. Or maybe I’m remembering a woman in a tweed jacket and a brown pencil skirt who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright style Prairie house in SW Portland. Or maybe she was wearing polyester pants and a purple plush robe and lived in a converted International House of Pancakes in Beaverton.

In any case there was a presence. I could feel it as I stood on the sidewalk not daring to look in. I stood on the street and strained to hear her voice inside. I tried to remember what relationship I might have had with her when I met her before. I must have met her when I was working for OSPIRG. Or maybe she was one of my friend’s mothers back in highschool.  Perhaps she was the woman who lived next door to my family when I was just a baby. The woman who told me about reincarnation and served me store bought chocolate chip cookies on a crystal plate. She told me that I’d had lived before, maybe. She told me that I might have been somebody else before I was me. This was back in 1976, in Colorado, in what was probably a converted farmhouse.

I stood outside this house, this orange Raised Ranch style house, and felt that some part of my history, some unknown and inaccessible part of my life, was in the garage. There was a woman from my past in the garage, or maybe in the kitchen.

This was my delusion, and it was a long standing one. I could almost remember a time when these American neighborhoods, these series of square yards and square houses with triangle roofs had been integral to real life. Some woman had, perhaps long ago, told me a secret and I’d just forgotten it over the years. And if I could remember what she said I’d be whole again.