We arrived at Arcosanti at almost midnight, and perhaps this is the best way to enter and explore renowned and (in)famous structures: in the dark, with no guide, and dim headlamps drowned out behind flickering mosquitoes and odd shapes forming in the almost-dark before entering the building. The key to our room was inside, down two flights of unlit twisting stairs, in the dark dining hall, next to the cash register. A man on the phone told me this four days earlier with a practiced and hurried voice that assumed I was as familiar with the daytime workings of the grounds as he was then looking at them. I was not. I had never been to Arcosanti. I only knew the place by daylight photos on my computer screen that hold the viewer at a suspicious and elusive distance—either too close to distinguish a working purpose or narrative of the photo, or so far that the enticing arcs and sloping rooftops inspire reverie and allure, the ploy that aesthetically designed structures promote forward thinking, or at least promise to confuse the layman to assuming an inherent genius.
That night we slept in a square room with a cement floor with small, tilt-open windows for ventilation, under old wool blankets and stiff cotton sheets, but only after we shooed away a few lethargic flies unrested by our arrival.
***
The essayist has an obligation to (T)ruth, albeit a subjective truth. For the novelist and short story writer there is a constructed fictional world that produces elements of truth, attributes of truth, to which the reader might align familiarity and awareness, a set of rules built into the fabula of the fictional world created by the writer. There is truth there, but the obvious manipulation of the world, the claim to un-truth, is what makes it fiction. But the essayist’s proximity of truth is through a different claim. Richard Kostelanetz writes: “essays tend to document what the author knows before he begins to write, rather than what he discovers in the course of creation, they proceed not from interior understanding but from exterior knowledge.” But the gimmick, the façade, is that the essayist is figuring it all out as she goes. This is the first false claim to (T)ruth the essay holds. The reader navigates the structure of the essay by lamplight in the dark, only knowing by memory what is behind her, and foregrounded by promises of tradition, the form of the essay, implying that the story is not simply a long, empty corridor leading to a dead end.
***
Arcosanti is advertised as an urban laboratory “focused on innovative design, community, and environmental accountability.” Positioned in the middle of the Arizona desert 3,735 feet above sea level and 7,500 feet above an underground aquifer, from which, through a 10,000-foot-deep well, the community draws all of its clean water. There are rainwater catches, a black water pump (the sewage facilities (currently not up to code yet frequently overlooked by the local government)), a forthcoming greenhouse, a swimming pool, and, as far as I can tell, only nine or ten solar panels—the community is “on the grid” a resident reluctantly tells me.
The community began construction in 1970, after Italian-American architect, Paolo Solari’s design. His vision was to create a utopia that would combine the craft and art of architecture with an environmentally ethical ecology, thus developing an (Architecture+ecology=) Arcology. The existing structures on the land are impressive—two wide, forty-foot arcs of, currently, questionable purpose (there is a temporary basketball hoop there now), a massive apse that shades workers at the facility in the summer months as they craft Siltcast Windbells in large plots of above-ground earth, and there is a visitor’s center, the hub of Arcosanti, where guests and residents are fed buffet-style meals three times a day, vegan and vegetarian options available. This is what Arcosanti is now. There are residences and a small amphitheater, the only structures under renovation and construction. And, as a visitor, at first it is difficult to distinguish between guest and resident, but I learn quickly that residents are loud, and yell across courtyards, making outward and public their happiness and adoration while they fix a determined gate toward some clay-clad responsibility. They’re off, presumably, to make bells, though even in the wind I cant hear their dull, clanking-clay chime. I have to focus—and the breeze grows to gale—to hear the sound of the fiscal lifeblood of the aging experimental town.
***
John D’Agata tells us that for Cicero, there was much at stake. While he was waiting, expecting is maybe better, on a day in 43 B.C. for his murderers to arrive at his home, perhaps he was drafting another speech, another essay, “literally trying to save the very world as he knew it.” For Cicero, for Montaigne, for Plutarch, to write an essay is to explore an ideology, to elucidate one’s perspective in search for better understanding. This requires clarity, focus, and premises developed into conclusions. The structure is made whole as the essay is drafted. The responsibility of deducing or inducing, of reasoning and verifying claims, is placed on the reader. So the reader must rely on logic, informed or inherent, to find meaning in the essay. If there is no argument, there is no meaning, and thus there is only disappointment to be had when the reader reaches the end of the corridor of the essay. This is the foundation of the American Essay: ideology fashioned into an established form.
***
We take breakfast, my partner and I, on the east cement patio of the Café At Arcosanti. We each have generic brand Frosted Flakes, an orange, half a bagel, a hard-boiled egg, cheap coffee. The chef asks us if we’re staying for lunch, tells us about the forthcoming pork butt and potatoes. We say we’ll be around. He tells us about the hordes of people, 10,000+, that once lined the hillside for the bluegrass festival, “But that was a long time ago,” he says with a huff. Now, our view overlooks the hillside he speaks of, across from the square, spartan dorms we stayed in last night, and there is a shade structure, a bent pole with triangle sheet, an instillation donated by an artist that looks desperate and overtaken by the sun as it barely darkens enough ground for a couple to sit under.
We pay for the tour upstairs, two flights above the Café, a floor above a couple residents, where there is a gallery of dangling bells made of copper and earth. They range from $30 to hundreds, some larger pieces over $1,000. A woman with a partially shorn and dreadlocked scalp rings us up for ten bucks-a-piece and then tells us the suggested donation is $10 a person, $5 for students. We pay the twenty and are directed toward the corner where an 11-minute video explaining Soleri’s vision begins.
Time-lapsed footage of vehicles racing on motorways, plumes of exhaust, smoke, and steam pillar into the sky, overviews of suburban sprawl, and cities choked by concrete and bustle reveal the maladies of the modern city. The fifteen or so guests in the tour group tisk or slightly gasp at appropriate moments of environmental disregard. Everyone is a bit appalled by the ecologically catastrophic state the world is in, as they should be. I imagine everyone has heard a bit of Soleri and his vision, the rumor of his brilliance and his eccentricity. They’ve all traveled out here into the heart of the desert looking for direct solutions to very complex problems. We want to see the organism of the repaired city out here—its smooth functions and hidden symmetry revealed like an open hatch that we might see the miniature wonders of cosmic balance for ten bucks a head.
After the video our corpulent tour guide escorts us past more bells, to an opposite corner where a scale model of a few taupe buildings loomed over by massive, foot-tall, white half domes resides. A man asks what it is and our guide tells us the darker buildings are the existing structures here at Arcosanti, and everything else is what they’re working for. He huffs, “Good luck.”
***
Richard Kostelanetz is an eccentric literary figure, a rabble-rouser of the written word, a “passionate defender of the avant-garde.” He is the author of dozens, perhaps hundreds (I don’t want to count), of books of criticism, anthologies, reviews, proposals, stories, films, and numerous other artistic assemblages. There is an exhaustive list on his homepage where he claims, “Pleased I am that you’ve just opened my website.” He is a voracious reader with an impressive cognitive access to citable material. He is lucid and direct, and his ability to historicize the avent-garde is top notch. He’s also a literary conspiracy theorist that, at times, appears desperate and takes umbrage at publishers, critics, established writers, aspiring writers, and the evolution of virtually every genre. His Wikipedia page section “Partial list of works/media” matches the lengths of subjects with which he has grievances.
He’s smart, and I admire his intellectual capacities and wide breadth of interest. I find most appealing his tenacity, or anyone’s, for literary art and his impressive prolific output. But when I read his texts I underline and annotate meaningful reflections, hilarious rants, and a regard for minorities that, for a person so attuned to the future of writing, lacks foresight and compassion. Everything goes in. The only wasted thought is the thought not written down.
Kostelanetz in 1973:
“In spite of Ralph Ellison’s pre-eminence and example, the most currently emergent black writers in America have not yet produced sufficient literary works that are superlative enough to win sustained critical respect.”
“[Women] are also able to exploit an accumulating reservoir of establishment guilt over past prejudice; they have another advantage in the potentially largest literate audience of their own kind.”
“In the future, however, homosexuality will be presented as a respectable minority affiliation and then articulated as a sensibility of ‘universal’ relevance.”
***
Two of my friends are in the market for buying houses. They tag me along in visiting these vacant structures that I might lend some advice, some amateur expertise on home improvements given my years of construction work. They ask me about exposed piping, good/faulty wiring, sturdiness of walls, possibilities of remodeling immediately after purchasing. How is this any different than workshopping an essay? A group examines an established form (scaffolding), hunts down faulty logic (plumbing, ventilation), gratuitous exposition (paint, cabinets), possible scene expansion (probable additions), in the hopes to modernize the structure, to make it more comfortable (accessible) while appealing to artistic sensibilities (modern style).
A professor of mine recently held a reading at his newly renovated row house in the downtown Barrio of Tucson, showcasing months of work and an overt display of attention to detail and design. The home is massive: eight of these row houses modified to accommodate two people, with numerous lounge spaces, offices, bathrooms, a kitchen, and a separate but attached apartment intended to be rented out. It is without a doubt stunning and undeniably off-putting. It is grandiose and magniloquent, sleek and modern with pristine Scandinavian furniture and cool, dangling lamps, distressed tables, and retrofit modern appliances. This might be compared to a contemporary reconstruction of a traditional essayistic form—modernizing the old. But in all of its matter-of-factness, the home reads more like an all-too-clever tale of Nabokov’s youth as he performs “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life,” his “true purpose of autobiography,” while he recounts a floundering swan, “making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat.” A memory that would casually, as the timeline of the memoir goes, spring into mind a couple of years later for the author when he learns of his Mademoiselle’s death. It’s all too neat, too calculated and assured by history to be good. Nabokov’s memoir—and my professor’s home—is deliberate and beautiful, but rote and borderline annoying in its undeniability.
There is what the essay could be, and what the essay should be. One is as infinite as the other seems infinitesimal. One abides by the history of the essay in order to disrupt expectation, the other uses history as a scaffolding. As Kostelanetz remarks: “essays must relate to verifiable experience; their frame of reference is exterior rather than interior.” This is true for both the could and the should. What happens during inception, for the essayist, what interiorizes the essay is the form the language takes as it’s produced. An experience is told, in remembrances, again and again, and each time the tale takes new shape, emerges differently, an architecture with a new façade. For fiction and poetry, if the representation of the author’s imagination is reformed and redrafted, the imagined experience is altogether new, based on a previous design, but nevertheless new. The essay, if it must (and it mustn’t) abide by its Greek origins, should still abide by the attempt of objective (T)ruth.
***
Our tour group leaves the room of bells, the only outside commerce Arcosanti practices, and heads for an open-air workshop under a massive apse crowned by an broad, angular cross, without its y-axis counterpart. Our guide, and anyone else I ask, doesn’t know what it means or why it adorns the huge structure. In the shade there are two artisans each holding a hand in an un-fired Siltbells like a puppet, carving circular designs on the bells’ exteriors, a popular design found on throughout the grounds. The designs are ornament. Like the gothic half-cross, there’s no significance to their design. I keep looking closer for meaning, but the swirly meandering designs appear to be an unspoken code between the residents—as though when they arrived and took up the clay in their hands, the circles came out. The workers don’t make eye contact with the crowd and they are serious about their work, devoted and intent. Between us and them are numerous, large cement boxes full of silt where forms of bells have been impressed and filled with the liquid material that will lose moisture to the earth, harden an edge, and leave behind the shape of the bell to be design-carved and then fired, hung on a wire and sold as the majority of income Arcosanti takes in.
This technique of casting the bells in silt is the same original technique used to form the cement walls of the apse and the numerous original structures around the property. Tilt-up concrete panels are cast in the silt found in the surrounding area, sometimes dirt from up north, in Sedona, where the silt is deep crimson, was trucked in and those walls still take on a pink hue. This method is part of the Soleri vision, to merge the earth and human construction as one, to form a singular ideological organism between humans, our necessary structures, and the natural environment. Eventually, as the human brain evolves, it will align with the creation process of the earth, of other ecological matter, forming a singular harmony.
Soleri on Arcology:
“Society must become a true organism that will perform adequately. This will be made possible through the power of miniaturization. The physical miniaturization of its container, the city, is a necessary.”
“Miniaturization is the process that minimizes the prime handicap of the physical world; the time-space straight jacket.”
“The superanimal constituting society has not undergone the miniaturizing metamorphosis, and it is by its very nature totally unprepared for the performance of its designated task.”
“Society is still an awkward animal suffering from a kind of ‘flat gigantism’ that nails it to the surface of the earth.”
After the bells we take another flight of stairs up to two 40-foot arcs that the residents call the Faults. There is a whiteboard with plans for the day’s tasks and activities, a couple boxes of things, and at the other end of the blank, unused space, there is a temporary basketball hoop. An old woman who appears flustered and confused spreads her arms and asks, “What goes on in all this space?
***
The essay is as much an event as it is a space. There must exist a moment when the essay is born into truth, when it transcends fiction. There may be an inherent truth, an innate truth in the world of the story for the teller, but the truth of the story emerges only as the facts presented align accordingly with, objectively, what happened. There is a bent thread, a meandering line that delineates the actions and events of the story. Fiction happens when the narrative knowingly (for the author) moves away from that path. This is the hard and fixed line of event truths in the essay. This is undeniable information, calculable and standardized data, the lattices and scaffolding of unmovable walls.
While fiction is meandering through well-lit labyrinths, truths of the essay, of nonfiction, are secured in rough material bound to the framework. But there are other truths, as sound as the structures of incontrovertible experience. The essay must, as equally necessary as truth, be felt.
He punched up the fire
and returned with an armload of wood
and the child,
and put the dead child onto the fire.
She said, “Oh John, don’t!”
He did not reply
but turned to her and smiled.
I wonder where the truth is in Reznikoff’s Testimony but in every word. Bonded to the frame of lived and recounted (factual) experience is the reconstruction of a narrative originally presented in court. The content is the content redesigned, repurposed, with the intent of the narrative to be felt. Anaphora, enjambment, and off-rhyme—poetic techniques that do not serve to falter the facts of the story, but to recondition the status of one essay, a court document, into another. Is this a stanza from a poem? Does omitting proper nouns and exact locations drive the content into the realm of fiction? Who verified these facts? Can they be facts, and thus truths? More importantly, what power does the possibility of these alleged facts have to make me fear John? Why am I haunted by his smile? How did that grin become so sinister?
***
Kostelanetz’ work depends heavily on personal ideologies; for him, there is the way an essay should be—prescriptive, identifiable, knowable. The essay, even in all of its experimental forms, “[tries] to distill and communicate perceptions of the world.” And who could argue with this, in terms of the essay, the novel, poetry, any writing that begins, in fact, with a blank page. The essay is changing and evolving, and so the prescription of what an essay is is changing and evolving. In addressing the established critics of what that is looks like, Kostelanetz writes of the formally experimental essays in the anthology Essaying Essays: “Nearly all of them are so different in appearance that, if submitted to any academic course in America, they would < flunk > on sight.” He acknowledges that charts are essays, as are maps, lists, codes and codices, briefs, missives, legal and financial documents, and so on. If the possible forms of the essay are innumerable, then everything of form is essay. If every form is essay, when does an essay fail to be an essay?
***
The tour is losing its appeal for most of the group. This might be because it’s hot under the noonday sun. It might be because we each had expectations of the structures that aren’t being lived up to. For the residents that live here, for the cook I talked to earlier in the day and for the tour guide, for the elderly gentleman leading a group of potential investors into the private living quarters, for those in the living quarters and those peeking in, there is hope that this place and its potential is an answer to something. For them, the completion of Acrosanti is romantic and heavy with purpose. And when I look around the grounds, at the foot-tall weeds that grow around the cracking rubber of the tires on the crane that hasn’t been moved in a few seasons, I wonder when that answer will be presented. Even if the massive housing structures are finished, eight times the height of the existing café, what is the last brick set into place that signifies that answer?
I want to pull one of the residents aside, maybe next to the pin-ups of professional blueprints for a retaining wall somewhere along the two-mile dirt road approach Arcosanti (overtly posted along the tour route), and ask them to be real with me for a second. I want a private admonition of the intentions of Arcosanti, but I don’t know how to suggest to someone that a building, a structure, has failed. How can I point up to the massive arcs, the pretentious and massive apse, the uninhabited dormitories, the newly-formed steps of the amphitheater and say, These impressive parabolas are wrong?!
These structures are, by definition, working. The walls hold up roofs, and ceilings provide shade and shelter. The studios shape workspaces for bell-making, small dorms secure privacy and house humans, kitchens for cooking, the gallery of dangling little catenary bells produces income. The structures, as they are, function properly. But there is such a dreary longing for a future unrealized. Soleri’s ideologies haunt the stony corridors of this place and drive an implicit zealotry usually only found in rural, pop-up churches. They are pariahs here, gathered under numerous roofs, insistent in the way that, for the outsider, equally inspires compassion and sorrow in the presence of crumbling hope.
And there is nobody to blame for this misguidance. The people live here by choice, or pay to come, to work, to learn an art as a trade. They eat together and have community. They have a belief structure that they hope to translate into edifice. There is Soleri’s vision—his dogma—the organic confluence of human/earth/city. And from afar I want to cheer for this practice, I want to apply and be easily accepted and then pay to build bells in the desert. I want to look up and someday see some 50-story bisected-artichoke backlit by the universe and converse with congruent galaxies. But to roam the halls of Arcosanti is to feel that something has failed. I’m not lulled by the valved voice of Soleri’s drawings or the jagged, magnificent miniature models. Somewhere, the content does not beget the form, and the form is perpetually indifferent.
***
For Kostelanetz’s, the differentiating feature of the essay is that it’s deeply personal. W.H Auden’s charts of “Paradise” are only as he could have rendered them, and this is without a doubt true. The inherent subjectivity of existence already suggests this. But I don’t know if he is married to this idea, and this is why I respect his take on the essay: it’s evolving. In 1973 (when the section of quotes above were made), he was willing to ostracize much of the literary and publishing community with The End of Intelligent Writing: “Perhaps the manuscript was more ‘threatening’ than even I envisioned it to be, since its own history with publishers was illustrating one of my thesis.” No one wanted to publish the book, and that only reaffirmed his claim to America’s lack of literary intelligence. But just two years later, after numerous imagined but nevertheless recorded projects (his website lists 79 Proposals including 1001 Stories, and Six-Hour VHS Video Restrospective), his previously mentioned anthology calmly and deftly explains his position of the avant-garde essay: “Innovative essays are those that confront not just dimensions of extrinsic reality but also the intrinsic, literary problem of how else essays might be written.” So there is a progression and advancement of form, but there is an associated ideology—something the essay should be.
I don’t altogether agree with Kostelanetz’s vision of what an essay is. I would agree that the possibilities of its form are limitless, as are personal perceptions of experience, of “the world.” But this isn’t to say an essay, like an edifice, can’t fail. Millions of pages are lost into the ether of out-of-print, crowded corridors of the internet, shelves of second-hand stores and dark archives of libraries. And buildings are demolished, refurbished, changed so drastically as to become altogether something new. Though it is never the form of the structure that fails, only the ideology assigned to it. I walk through Arcosanti and I imagine a rehab facility given its remote location, a summer camp for children to learn practical applications of art and science. In short, the intention of the structures must be made new. The design of the buildings must be reimagined and applied to a constantly changing world. As must the essay.
Soleri, in all of his prolific madness—his publications, his intergalactic drawings, his quixotic ideologies—had a design for what structures and cities should mean, what the shape of those designs should look like. But in all of his drawings, as hypothetical structures morph depending on global location, the form is arbitrary. In the preface of his book, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, he writes: “The written content of this book is really an endogenous affair for and with myself…There is no one to my knowledge who has an awareness of the environmental consequences of the thesis here presented, much less made a serious effort at the deployment of any proposal.” In other words, Arcologies, such as the nascent utopian society at Arcosanti, where Soleri spent two decades guiding young, enthusiastic artisans and architects, should, perhaps, not physically exist and never have been built. But Soleri pushed forward with his ideology, inspired, now, two generations of people who vie for grants and permits and attempt to actualize a dead man’s visions under the constraints of an established social order. He sought the construction of his ideology knowing its form was wrong, knowing the edifice would fail.
As the writer and critic aims to define and redefine what the essay should be, as those walls are constructed, limitations are set into place, thus so are inherent failures. Like a structure, the un-failing essay demonstrates the present not as a static moment, but as a trace at the trice of death and renewal, obsolescence and innovation, expiration and inception. The form of the essay must stand up to linear time, while disrupting the expectations of what should come next. The essay will always be, and everything will always be the essay.
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