Charles Brown crooned a jazz classic on the radio in my studio. I sipped coffee purchased from a convenience store after the conclusion of my morning walk.
During the walk, I made three separate observations of homeless people and traversed my neighborhood homeless encampment where nothing stirred. The only difference from my previous visit 24 hours earlier was 20 or so cans of white house paint stacked in a pyramid near the entrance to a tent. Some nearby homeowner had given it away on the sidewalk and here it was as mindless accumulation that would probably end up in the creek that flowed behind the encampment.
In the studio I was writing a piece about the New American Diaspora, specifically about a curiosity I'd recently discovered in the encampment: a piece of plywood the size of a living room window painted black and adorned with hundreds of words written in a peculiar manner with sky blue ink. The display leaned against the front of a tarped tent camper decorated with branches, barbecues, mannequins, potted plants, Santa Clauses, mismatched dining room chairs, table lamps, tree moss, bicycle tires. cannibalized lawnmowers and about a thousand other items.
On my initial inspection, I could barely read the writing, but took a photograph of the display for a later and closer examination on my laptop screen.
I looked at the writing enlarged on the screen. In visual appearance, it didn't appear as poetry. It looked more like a flood map of a small Oregon coastal watershed. It was writing with eddies, back washes and places where overflowing water jumped the main channel. It was something I had never seen in handwritten or printed writing. I couldn't tell if it was a male or female's handwriting and wasn't sure if that even mattered.
Ultimately, I couldn't read most of it. A few lines, however, did crystallize into coherency:
I was broken from you.
Golden eyes
Heaven on earth
To help remember my prepared lecture on why I have to leave.
My feeling of love when hurt
My infinity star
I was hoping for purple
I only understand love
For eternity and beyond.
I kept staring at the lines, zooming in to pixels, and I wondered about the writer:
Who was this person?
What was the point of this display?
Who broke this person's heart and why?
Was this a cosmic confession?
Was it shit?
Was it genius that I couldn't grasp?
Did I have a pilled-up REM's Murmur or a malt liquored Gertrude Stein or a meth fueled Rod McKuen in front of me? (FYI: Rod McKuen was once homeless for many years and later wrote a series of poems called the “The Art of Catching Trains” that appeared as a prologue in his collection of poems, Lonesome Cities.)
What the hell should I do with it? Type it up, print it out, scissor the lines apart, toss them into the air and let them fall into order and meaning when they settled on the floor? That's what a stoned William Burroughs did in a Tangiers hotel room with clippings from newspapers. “Cut ups,” he called the random method. Why not?
I looked out the window and saw a squirrel racing across the neighbor's roof. That looked like fun.
And...
...then...
...I...
...stopped.
It was over, my interest in this piece of writing, perhaps even the whole subject of the homeless.
I was done. The writing on the display meant nothing. It was someone's addled and mad scribbling. Meth had probably been the inspiration and the editor. The writer was deranged. There was no secret genius for me to discover and promote.
Time to move on, perhaps a teaching novel set in the mid 1990s before the Internet invaded, then assimilated us like the Borg, and ruined all our lives.
Or writing about Oregon degenerates I met camping along Fish Creek 30 years ago.
Or the beavers that parachuted into wrecked Montana watersheds in the 1930s with the idea of restoring them to full ecology once they started beavering on the ground.
Or Audrey.
Anything was preferable than writing about incoherent writing.
So I stopped...
...and quit wondering about the writer...
...until a few weeks later...
...when I found out who she was...
You provoke me to think so these are my thoughts.
You know as long as they are "the Homeless" we can pigeon hole them into some corner of our mind, and link all them to all the all the problems we perceive of homelessness, the drug addiction, the mental illness, the physical illness, the deplorable living situations, the damage to the environment, the unpleasant appearance we see on the street, and all that fear those ideas generate, but when "the homeless" become an "individual" we know, or think we want to know, or should care about all that pigeon holing becomes pointless. We want to believe it's a problem with "homelessness" in our society, but it's really a problem with how we deal with each individual. So based on what I just said I don't see a "group solution", no political magic. The problem, if I see one, resides with you and me and the homeless guy, and just like you and me the homeless guy has his beliefs, his ailments, his stories, and his way getting around in the "world he perceives", and it is probably a very different world he sees than the one you and I may agree upon, but it's his world, the world of an "individual "and it cries out for respect even if it pains us, even if it disgusts us, even if we want to help, but don't know what do. Is the problem I want to solve for him really his or an idea in my mind. My good intentions want to "help", but help must be accepted, acceptance comes through trust and trust happens between individuals. I must respect the person I want to help in order to gain his trust and then ask him "how can I help you? "
Everybody has to be vulnerable you and me and the homeless guy. Sounds improbable? Takes courage? I admire your courage to visit camps and talk to homeless folk. I appreciate your writings they tug at my heart and make me laugh.