The Paddock Review

ODE TO COLLAPSE

 

When I was a child, I often visited my grandparents on a property they’d acquired late in life, a trailer lot carved out of a former tobacco plantation. They wedged a blue doublewide roadside and ringed it with a moat of shimmering white quartz. It was cheap and provisional in the way that most trailer homes are cheap and provisional—thin walls, uneven flooring, a kitchen probed by mice—but it was also the most magical place I’d ever been, a place that hovered between now and then, a place redolent of both collapse and dogged persistence. It was there that I first understood myself as particulate and finite, a tiny speck in an orchestral schema. The rural South has a special way of driving home lessons of mortality, while also dazzling us with the stubborn spectacle of life.

            If you’ve seen the sequential photography of the late William Christenberry, you know what I mean. His series, for example, that begins with the building by the roadside and its false brick siding, the force of obsolescence loosening the structure’s grip on firm geometry. When the artist visits the same building a decade later, it has been overwhelmed by a thick drift of green. It’s still a building, but it’s also a lack, a void. It’s the kudzu monster haunting the pages of gothic literature, the vine-eaten South. Finally, ten years later, Christenberry documents the building’s disappearance. It’s still there, we know, but it’s also, irrevocably gone. It’s a trace, an idea. Remember, it says, and its absence blooms.

            At my grandparents’ trailer house, the signs of modern rural life were all around us. Three-wheelers rutting in the hills, every third yard featuring a doe strung up for skinning, stop signs serving as free and easy material for homemade basketball hoops. All around us too were the signs of the rural Southern past. Flags, monuments, displays of massed cannonballs. The most obvious, of course, was the plantation house standing atop a sculpted bluff. It boasted a modest grandeur, black shutters buffeting a generous distribution of windows and a wash so white it was visible and gleaming in the dusk. It was no longer the master’s house; instead, it was a clubhouse for golfers. In other words, it both was and it wasn’t what it once was.

            Another kind of child may have marveled at the doors made wide for the passage of hooped skirts, or the giant furnace of the cooking stove, and imagined the churning economy of the plantation back into life. What does it mean that this way of living happened here? What does it mean that it stands here now? These are questions well worth asking in such places, but I’m afraid they were beyond me at the time. I was enamored instead with the many structures in the area that had been retaken by the land: a church destroyed by fire, outbuildings tilled down to rubble, the fecund rot of wood and the orange tang of rust in the woods. These places were gone, destroyed, and yet they still managed to assert themselves.

            Take, for example, the fence line around the murky collapse of a cottage on the outer limits of the plantation tract. No one could ever tell me who had once occupied this place. There was no bronze plaque glossing the family’s history, no ghost story still hanging around in the foothills, and my grandparents did not much speculate. But my grandmother knew that every Spring a perfectly measured, yellow square would appear in the bramble: dozens upon dozens of daffodils lining a defense from the wilds that was no longer there. And she’d take me to that place, risking ticks and torn tee-shirts to show me the lack. “Someone who lived here a long time ago must have loved these flowers,” she’d say. And we’d think upon that person, upon ourselves, and experience a marvelous contraction of the distance between then and now.    

            Is this my origin story as a writer? I don’t know, but my fascination with failure makes my chosen vocation a fitting one. Almost every visitation to the page is at once a defeat and a mark of stubborn persistence. I suppose what I am saying is that there is a distinct and powerful beauty in collapse. We do well to observe it, for, in doing so, we may catch a fleeting glimpse of ourselves before we, too, are gone. I suppose what I am saying is goodbye.

 

…..

This essay previously appeared as an audio component of the Speed Art Museum’s special exhibit, Southern Accent, in 2017, and is from the book Ode to Collapse: Essays on the Writing Life by Sarah Anne Strickley (Finishing Line Press): https://finishinglinepress.com/product/ode-to-collapse-essays-on-the-writing-life-by-sarah-anne-strickley/