Cleveland, Ohio, (post-modernized to be “NEO”) is where I’m at. It’s a region slogging through its post-industrial dark night: post-industrial, ambivalent, self-deprecating, unfashionable, fragmented, and liminal. It’s neither old or new age, nor is it progressive or regressive. NEOland is poor at its heart and wealthy at its extremities. Creative energy moves fitfully through its sclerotic arteries. It’s feudal too; . . . a delapidated city-state, who’s guardians go unguarded. Its crisis is a crisis of arousal.
What’s fascinating is how the short ‘half-life’ of so much in CleveNEO, political celebrity, sports teams, its various articifaces: hall of fame, office parks and malls; industries, night spots and almost every ‘initiative,’ hides a grubby tenacity.
Cleveland is a city of hospitals and universities and housing. It’s a city of small kindnesses and local rituals. It’s tribal and tribulated, and its triangulated between modernisms and alterities and frayed habits. Cleveland is a city that seemingly cannot see itself. (See Douglas E. Harding, Headless Way for this ref.)
It comes as a surprise that it is also: liveable. You live here long enough, or, move here and sense this immediately. What hasn’t radiated away are verities longtime residents take for granted, truths easily taken for granted. Carl Jung understood that everything unwanted is the Shadow, and, there is much golden if tarnished in all the features hidden in the rutted grooves of this most geomantic of cities. Its grid is full of far flung crossroads, the pressure points of its body and embodiment and bodi nature.
NEO is literally riven, derived, riveted, and rivered. It is a city of lost archives: parks, and libraries, and neighborhoods; constitutive of the etched arkos of its soulful peoples.
Neo-Cleveland is a city in Diogenic search mode; looking to get to the end of its no’s to the yes already there…doing so doggedly, “The long night: made even longer by a barking dog.” Santoka
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