Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

I live on a hill on the edge of a valley. I look out my window and watch cars creep by on the interstate that could take me a thousand miles to my birthplace if I so choose. I watch trains pass by, the freight trains, the commuter rail, the Amtrak. There’s a river down there you can sort of see if you look closely, at the right angle. I can see kids on the high school soccer field blocks away, and make out from far above the billboards that I often drive right by.

This slice of Los Angeles – the one I look out over every day – is odd to reconcile with the map that I see on my phone. It feels disconnected from the version I know on foot or by car, the one I experience when I’m down in the street. Adding this third experience of the space has upended everything I thought I’d made sense of in my mental map. So now, as I live in it, I try to find my own authentic knowledge of the earth I see and the earth I feel, some melding of technologies and body.

I call this my little valley, but really, that designation doesn’t even fit with how the city was made to function. The natural nearness is dissected by the infrastructure built to connect the city. I can see, out the window, a coffee shop that is half a mile away as the crow flies. Google tells me it’s a ten minute drive there, but an hour’s walk with the available roads. To drive, I would have to take the highway.

It’s an urban planning gripe, sure. And all you walkable city dwellers can tell me that, if I’m going to be making these kinds of complaints, maybe LA wasn’t the right choice. But I’m here to say that the world that is constructed is not the one we have to accept. The evidence is right in front of my eyes. The current state of this land is like a corset on the body. It has been constricted for a certain use. And in the meantime, I’m interested in just sitting, and breathing, and coming in and out of touch with my own body in relation to that other one, in and out of touch with the responsibilities of my own human being in a post-modern world. I feel lucky that I have this vantage point to remind me that I’m just a small part of this whole valley, and everything beyond it.

Today’s poem is its own observatory, a portal into new possibilities of seeing.

Telescope
by Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away 
when you forget where you are 
because you've been living, it seems, 
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. 

You've stopped being here in the world. 
You're in a different place, 
a place where human life has no meaning. 

You're not a creature in a body. 
You exist as the stars exist, 
participating in their stillness, their immensity. 

Then you're in the world again. 
At night, on a cold hill, 
taking the telescope apart. 

You realize afterward 
not that the image is false 
but the relation is false. 

You see again how far away 
each thing is from every other thing. 

“Telescope” from POEMS 1962-2012 by Louise Glück © 2024 Louise Glück. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.