Preface to Book 3
This book, the final installment of the Strange Waters trilogy, focuses on the upper portion of the Los Angeles River, and attempts to bring the project home through an experiment with poetry. “Home” traditionally means the place where one dwells, or the place where one belongs, or the place where one is from. As I have readily admitted in the earlier books, I am not from L.A. Having only dwelled there while conducting research for this project, I have little reason to feel that I belong there. Nevertheless, a number of poems about the city have led me to see the river in a new light, to catch a glimpse of revised meanings of “home,” to imagine the L.A. River as a place of possible connections.The river begins in the west Valley. The headwaters are behind the stadium of Canoga Park High School, where Arroyo Calabasas and Bell Creek converge. —Joe Linton
Home is a place where we can balance our lives with the imbalance imposed by the outside world. —John S. Allen
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated … —T.S. Eliot
Poetry is most deeply a way of doing philosophy—not as a mere juggling of abstractions, but as lived and felt experience. —David Hinton
The watershed is the first and last nation, whose boundaries, though subtly shifting, are unarguable. Races of birds, subspecies of trees, and types of hats or rain gear go by the watershed. The watershed gives us a home, and a place to go upstream, downstream, or across in. —Gary Snyder
In the beginning
unutterable
hot
no space
no time ...
—Susan Suntree
To explore the possibility of connection, however, I sense the need to consider disconnection, the condition of estrangement that affects more and more people. Another meaning of home is “the place from which we are estranged,” the place where we no longer belong, whether through exile or emigration or alienation. When we think of the city as separate from “nature,” for example, we accept a certain kind of alienation as part of a particular version of human history. In that story, we were part of nature a long, long time ago; we belonged there, it was once our home. But as we became more “civilized,” we increasingly moved away from nature and threw our lot in with “culture.” The strange qualities of the Los Angeles River—a river that is also not a river, that was once a prominent feature of the landscape until it was engineered into flood control channel—presents an opportunity for reexamining the relationship between “nature” and “culture.” And poetry about such a river might help imagine a way home.
The literary quest to understand the Los Angeles River concludes by turning to the beginning of the river, the place on Earth where it now originates, and to questions that emanate from such origins. Can we be or feel at home with an engineered river or will such a river just make us homesick? If we could learn to be at home with the L.A. River as it is, would we still need to “restore” it to something like it was? My hypothesis for this part of the experiment is that by connecting notions of language and place more generally, connecting the upper portion of the river with poetic attempts to articulate the river’s nature more specifically, and connecting “nature” with “culture,” we might be able to reconceive the very meaning of “home.”