Surrealism and the Homeless (Part 2)
What follows are declarative sentences I wrote about the occurrences that transpired on a dozen of our walks through the park between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning in the months of April-June 2024. I could have written hundreds of more sentences from previous winter walks, but I didn't want the exercise to become too unwieldy or time consuming. These incidents are not in chronological order.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
A softball field waits for players.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
Two skunks sniff around the entrance to the Presbyterian church.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
A writer walks his husky at 5:30 in the morning.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Someone left behind a plastic jar of Cheetos in a grocery cart.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
An old man cuts rhododendron flowers with a Bowie knife.
Songbirds sing.
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty's “Runnin' Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
Rain falls.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
A beaver glides in the creek.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A writer composes a haiku in his head.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn't moved in six months.
Freight trains squeak as they couple and uncouple.
No one has returned in three months to a tent pitched in the blackberries.
The husky takes a dump.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I printed the sentences and cut them out individually. I put all the sentences in an envelope, shook it up, then dumped them onto a piece of yellow construction paper. I began arranging the sentences with conscious intent on a table in my back yard to the sonic accompaniment of classical music (later identified as a fugue) and Elmer's gnawing on a bone. I attempted to construct a new reality, possibly a surrealist one, from whatever emerged from my construction.
Five minutes later I had composed this:
A man walking though the park carrying all his possessions listens to Tom Petty's “Runnin' Down a Dream” on his phone. He sings along to it.
A beaver glides in the creek.
A man sitting on a stool wears a box over his head and smokes fentanyl.
A blue heron hunts in the creek.
A man living in an Acura takes his black puppy for a walk in the park.
Canadian geese honk overhead.
A 1990s Oldsmobile SUV parked at the park hasn't moved in six months.
A creek flows down a watershed.
A woman rides a bicycle towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles.
Songbirds sing.
A man in the park draws a picture of a penis and scrotum in bark chips.
Ducks swim in a fly fishing casting pond built by the CCC during the Depression.
An abandoned notebook has two words written it: Royal Flesh.
Mt. Hood looks orange, red, purple and blue in the eastern sky.
An elderly man and woman live in a van and share a wheelchair.
Rain falls.
A man on meth shoots hoops alone.
A coyote appears, disappears, reappears.
I read it aloud twice and in doing so gradually recognized the reason for my particular arrangement. I wasn't conscious of my choices when I was moving the sentences around or discarding some altogether. They fell into order as if by mental legerdemain.
The exercise produced a poem, if you want to call it that, of one image of homelessness followed by an image of nature. This type of stark contrast occurs almost every morning on my walks with Elmer. Just this morning, I saw a fine telescope in a encampment consisting of a tiny 60-year-old trailer and three tarped tents not long after I observed a mother and father goose herd their new chicks down a grassy slope.
My poem did not meet the standard for surrealism. I wasn't disappointed. I seek understanding writing about the homeless and this exercise provided one on a strictly personal level. I don't hold it out as a truism for anyone else.
What I observe in the mornings unfolds all the time in Oregon, and elsewhere in the United States. If something happens all the time it cannot be described as surreal. Surrealism isn't commonplace or ongoing. What I see every morning with homelessness and nature in my neighborhood has become commonplace to me and obviously ongoing. Indeed, the former seems to worsen; the latter seems very much to prosper. My local watershed began recovering two decades ago after a century of ignorance and abuse.
After two decades of uniquely American abuse too varied and complex to delineate here, many people are homeless, many addled and insane and pulverized with no hope of reclamation or restoration.
Will I walk through the juxtaposition of early morning marvels of nature and the misery of homelessness for the foreseeable Oregon future, perhaps the rest of my life?
I think so. It's the most dispiriting sensation I've ever felt as an Oregonian.
At least Elmer will be with me.