note: this column contains a major misattribution; it is corrected in the next column.
"It’s hard not to get hung up on history there, because everything in Little Rock is so transitional, incomplete both in its progress and in its decline. Nothing entirely succeeds, but nothing entirely fails either." -Charles Portis
"Historically, these interior states were less a destination than a corridor, one that funneled travelers from the East into the vast expanse of the frontier." -Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Dispatch from Flyover Country"
I help tend a narrow strip of ground between 6th Street and a church parking lot. In March I spent some time raking and bagging up mulch to get the ground ready for fresh compost. Last summer the bank of zinnias along this strip attracted more butterflies than I've ever seen in one place. I walked by several times a day to watch them, and we were well into fall before they headed south. Creatures, created beings, perfect in themselves. No need to ask them to bear our metaphors of transience.
Bagging mulch is good exercise, and good exercise is the only sure medicine for the tell-tale complaints of our time, depression and anxiety. I don't suffer much from either, and I think that in all but extreme cases, depression and anxiety are perfectly reasonable responses to the environment we've built since World War II, an environment of novelty, transience, and speed. When I stand up from the mulch to stretch my back, the sight of our modernist skyscrapers against the blue sky does cause a momentary depression, an emptiness. What are they pointed toward? What are they for?
We know what old church spires are pointed toward. We know what they mean. And Charles Thompson's wonderful Moorish synagogue that was demolished to make way for the First Commercial skyscraper? We know what it was for. We know what it meant. Yet we tore it down.
Some real prophets have come from Arkansas. Donald Harington. Charles Portis. But we do them no honor when we sing their praises without talking about what they actually said, without asking what they meant. The remark from Portis above is funny, but it's also really rude. I may chuckle because I think I do know what he meant when he called my hometown "transitional," and I think what he said somehow relates to my skyscraper-induced empty feeling, but I don't think that any of us here should just accept it and then move along to the next banquet given to "honor" him.
So what is Charles Portis talking about? Is Little Rock "incomplete in both its progress and its decline"? What place is complete in its progress? Bentonville? Of course not. Progress is never complete, which is one reason that conservatives must be cautious against the very idea.
And what place is ever complete in its decline? There's life in Pine Bluff yet. Right now it may contain some budding genius who will make an art of its rot and decay. The Pines Hotel may live and breathe again. Even in its state of near ruin, the Pines lives and breathes more than any modernist skyscraper with windows for walls and an express elevator.
I'd like to ask the Scottish, naturalized American stone cutter Robert Brownlee what he thinks of Portis's description of Little Rock as "transitional, incomplete both in its progress and its decline." He lived here from 1837 to 1849, and last week in this column I quoted his approval of the changes he remembered seeing in Little Rock's character in 1838 alone, as his fellow craftsmen moved to town and either drove out the rowdies or forced them to behave.
Brownlee's living here fewer than 12 years would seem to support Portis's claim about our "transitional" culture, as well as Meghan O'Gieblyn's claim that interior states were "less a destination than a corridor."
O'Gieblyn comes from our sister state of Michigan. (Arkansas and Michigan were admitted to the Union in 1836 under the Missouri Compromise, invented by Henry Clay to keep an even balance between slave and free states.) Like Portis, O'Gieblyn is a great writer. I suspect that her ability to think for herself, freely and well, is a result of her Evangelical upbringing and her being steeped in the Bible. But I'm not willing to accept her "corridor" claim about interior states any more than I'm willing to accept Portis's "transitional" one about Little Rock, because I want to believe that Arkansas is a place, not a pass-through.
I want to believe that Arkansas is a place, and more than anything I want to preserve our sense of place, even if none of us can quite define what that is. I know this much: sense of place comes from a sense of time. It's palpable, it's felt. When you approach a building that Robert Brownlee worked on, be it grand (the Old State House) or modest (the three-roomed brick Georgian house he helped build for his brother), you gain more than his relatively brief time here. You're not just jumping from 2023 to 1847, in the same way that you take off from one (generic) airport and land at another.
You gain everything in between, not just Brownlee's efforts at laying the brick, but the beef and potato stews (very Scottish) made by Tabby, who was enslaved. You gain the "sulks" (depression, anxiety, modern alienation?) of Robert's sister-in-law Isabelle Brownlee, who was not too fond of the new country. You gain the early 20th-century efforts of Louise Loughborough, who never heard the term "girl power" in her life and didn't need to; I doubt she thought about her power, just used it to protect and restore the best of old Little Rock. You gain the (dreadfully modern) imaginings of Max Mayer, and the sustained interest of Peg Newton Smith. You gain Mary Worthen's cultivation of the herb garden.
Little Rock does not have to be transitional. It does not have to be a pass-through, a corridor. Nor does any other place. We do not have to accept speed (airports, interstate highways) nor do we have to accept generic, soulless architecture. We can insist on stillness, slowness. We can insist on places to which time adheres.