The Most Authentic Detroiter Ever (Part 3 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 27 January 2015.


"'Journey to the Center of the Earth' by Édouard Riou 38" by Édouard Riou - http://jv.gilead.org.il/rpaul/Voyage%20au%20centre%20de%20la%20terre/. 
Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I have this picture of my grandma, grandpa, and uncle Val standing outside some kind of brick home in Detroit. Their jet black hair and backdrop of brick bespeaks a level of "authenticity" that I will never approach.

But it's interesting to unpack this candid moment, when they are smiling, languishing, effortlessly radiating their unalloyed Italian-ness.

How is it that these Italian-Americans--people who have "cashed out" their Italian identity by becoming Americans, Michiganders, and Detroiters--seem to brim with authenticity, entirely self-identical? In the case of the people in that photo, existence is identical with essence. But the people in that photo, as well as the existences their smiling, posturing, youthful bodies denote, died the moment the camera closed its eye on their image.

The shocking realization of my Romantic journey to Italy was finding little that corresponded with that ideal. My Italian relatives were, in their so-called essence, less like me than any of my English-speaking relatives, less like me than my friends of mixed European, African, and/or Asian descent. Whatever similarities there were, I came home utterly disillusioned. Italians were lazy, immoral, and duplicitous. They had no rock 'n' roll sensibilities, playing insipid knock-offs of American music.

This may be part of what I express at the end of "Hey Rome": that identity is not a monolithic reality, that it's a cobbled hodgepodge of everything and always has been--like every other thing. And that I hold the key only when I acknowledge the angst of not being able to find inherent value and meaning in anything, even in a city with more claim to inherent value and meaning than any other, excluding maybe Jerusalem.

Detroit has a similar narrative of authenticity, maybe more so than any other city in America.

This is especially painful because of the sickeningly precipitous drop-off between that narrative and reality. Were there any such authentic figure who could claim Detroit's primordial essence as his own, would we even recognize him? I am sure this individual would have had some involvement with the lodestone, since it is "the true power behind the American Dream."

In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock and Axel come out in Italy after descending into the volcano in Iceland. Could we make the case that a similar subterranean waterway exists between Iceland and Detroit? Is the American Dream a dream of objective purity, of inherent value and meaning, of self-identity? Is it the lodestone that still resonates at the center of our collapsing metropolis, calling-yet-spurning the anguished multitudes, singing its siren song:

Are you a thing of substance? Are you a thing?
Are you substantive? Are you an object? Are you real? 

Is the lodestone some kind of hyper-condensed, collapsed star that now lies at Detroit's center, lulling passing matter onto its event horizon, offering a dream of self-identity, essence, condensed unity, authenticity, purity? And to the extent that this dream thrives, so too does the city decay, collapsing further and further in on itself.

Is this what Richard Wilbur meant in his poem "Beasts"? Are these the "suitors of excellence"

Making such dreams for men
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters.

And what is the fate of one who has sought an "inner essence" and comes back with a lodestone of supposed authenticity?