Day 2

grapevine
mlk
livermore

oneonta to el paso to 50th street to figueroa to the 110S to the 5N past Santa Clarita into the grapevine.

Last week, I went to an installation at LA's Center for Land Use Interpretation that outlined histories and points of interest along the grapevine, reclaiming transition as a space to be, not just a space to pass through. In the ribbon between the north and south bound 5, paintball. Here's where the ruin of the old and considerably more windy road intersects with the present highway. The white pipes for water bound for the desert of Los Angeles sliding up the flammable grass hills. There's a sense in the inherited myth of the American roadtrip that one is setting out alone and into another time. Into a past rootedness or a free future. But Coolidge proposes the grapevine is a designed space for passing through, like LAX. Another place, with a human history. Not a no-place...here is Grover...here is hills with dry grass the wind bends...here is solitude that I carry inside myself...

On this trip, I plan to listen to these books on tape: an autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., a series of lectures on the struggle over democracy in the 20th century, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Central question: what does the word nation mean to you, emily?

The grapevine empties out into a straight line pointing a hazy north. It moves me that King has an essential belief in the dignity of people, all people. The sense I get from his description of his work in organizing in Montgomery, in Selma, in Birmingham, in Memphis is that he has fallen deeply in love with the event of a community, a people, engaged in a remarkable act of self-discovery. He's directing, in a paraphrase of his words, an act of standing up - because no one can walk on your back unless your back is bent. He talks about standing in the church in Montgomery where the community decided on the bus boycott to protest segregated seating - and that the feeling in that room - the faces looking back at him, decided faces - that no historian or sociologist would ever be able to describe what it felt like to be in that room. Some living thing and King had fallen in love.

a sign for peaches, the hills on the right fall away, soon the smell of cow shit

King mentions more than once the image of faces in crowds. He has this one story where he's in this meeting with some intractable business men - where? I think Birmingham?- and they go out for a lunch break and standing outside the building are a sea of strong faces, backs straight, meeting their gaze. Undismissable. The business community come back from lunch ready to negotiate and one man says "Well, we ought to be able to work something out."

The shock I experience hearing this story makes me notice a readiness in my mind to paint people without political power into a strict position of victim-hood, as without agency. It has something to do with my understanding of individuality, (which is?) . King's work suggests another way of framing action and agency, a collective action, that I am interested in...

King says, "The kingdom of god is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis that reconciles the truths of both."I don't understand. What is the truth of collective enterprise? What is the kingdom of god? I don't really have a picture for this. Maybe not a place without problems. Maybe a space where god is.

in the black of coffee, night; Gandhi's hand full of salt

Where are you?

Livermore, CA. I visit my grandparents. We go out for sushi and I learn that they designed some of their own furniture - one is a coffee table mosaic of Mt. Fuji that they made by hand when they lived in Hiroshima. We watch the 1944 film To Have and To Have Not where an American loner learns to stand up for a cause (in an echo of America's decision to enter global politics in WW2) and the nation learns to love Lauren Bacall. I sleep sound in a couch full of mice.