SLPAD - 77 - big ugly pines?

[Michael Bailey]

Waking through the streetlit shadows of big ugly pines, listening to the
voices
               of girls, the purr of cars, wondering what the hell he was
doing here when he should
               be back at Roach, having a pretty good idea that when he got
back to Roach he would
               start wondering what the hell he was doing there, and that
maybe wherever he went
               from now on he would be wondering this. He had a momentary,
ludicrous vision of himself,
               Lardass Levine the Wandering Jew, debating on weekday
evenings in strange and nameless
               towns with other Wandering Jews the essential problems of
identity—not of the self
               so much as an identity of place and what right you really
had to be anyplace.


Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. Hard to imagine an ugly pine tree,
though they are probably not looking their best after the storm.

A page of stock photos found by searching “ugly pine tree”
https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/ugly-pine-tree.html


Now Nathan has another flash forward (the first, a few pages back, being an
auctorial passim interpolation of how he’d later remember this day of
impromptu removal service) but this time it’s an absurdist soliloquistic
extrapolation of wondering what he’s doing here, anticipating feeling the
same way back at “Roach”, then generalizing to the idea of wondering what
he’s doing any particular place, & linking up with the notion of the
Wandering Jew.

Wondering, wandering
https://youtu.be/-RNoyAALPn4


Walking through a shadow - that’s, like, a qualis. (Qualia reminiscent of
quail, flying by & neat to experience)


“debating in strange and nameless towns with other Wandering Jews”

- wandering far afield, but it made me think of IWW stalwart Sam Dolgoff.
The biography by his son Anatole describes how he would put in a long day
as a painter, and then travel at his own expense to speak at ill-attended
meetings (although he did meet his bride at one) - kind of a contrast with
LL, levels of motivation & commitment type of thing.

Keeping that little flame alive like Webb Traverse in Reef’s dream despite
the way the IWW fractured and largely petered out.


The philosophical ground for debate - “identity—not of the self so much as
an identity of place and what right you really had to be anyplace” -

At first blush, it looks like a running off the rails of philosophical
discourse, a reductio ad absurdum, a floccinaucinihilipilification similar
to his dismissal of excitement about his date (“sheer momentum”) or Rizzo’s
wondering if he’s having a philosophical crisis (“it’s probably just my
stomach”)

But isn’t there something in Hegel or Heidegger or somebody about the
“identity of place?”

No, not that I know of (Hegel’s the synthesis guy & Heidegger more “being
and time”, right?) but there’s this:

Place identity or place-based identity refers to a cluster of ideas about
place and identity in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban
design, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, ecocriticism and
urban sociology/ecological sociology. Wikipedia
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_identity>


Again wandering far afield, from the Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman, he got
married, had a big Jewish wedding & a job I think selling pharmaceuticals &
even a baby, but he got involved in social justice issues & that really
called to him, so he got divorced, had this whole other life instead.

Anyway, if Nathan was almost close to committing to someone (enough to even
try going back), presumably he’s got a family back in New York and may have
even been poised for a wedding and somehow that fell apart -

Unlike Abbie Hoffman, there wasn’t some burning commitment to a cause
dragging him away from hearth and home - in fact that Wandering Jew thing
makes me wonder if he felt that way to begin with - wondering what he was
doing & unable to come up with a satisfactory answer - & just joined the
Army to get away from a feeling of estrangement. And then wondered what he
was doing there, of course.