Notes From the Essay-Path

Last night I read the first part of a long history of Chicago's parks, particularly on the South Side, which I found extremely interesting and which has made me look at streets in a different way. Basically the idea is that the early magnates and city government of Chicago were privy to the fairly new arrangements of Haussmann in Paris, which served as an inspiration to the new streets; and that the same Frederick Law Olmsted who planned out Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn wanted to have boulevards as tree-beplanted 'tunnels' between parks. Since at that time the traffic was horsedrawn and pedestrian, the grandest boulevards seemed to consist of several different tracks; and it was only in the 1890s where asphalt and electric street lamps came into use. The question with the streets is how to arrange the drainage, prevent excessive strain on the surface, and stay aesthetically pleasing; for a while cedar wood paving was used on some roads and 'blast furnace slag' was one possibility for the gutters. The streets' forerunners were sometimes Native American trails, navigating through surer and less swampy soil, and one or two avenues which joined the park district later were pioneer plank streets. I liked the other trivia, too — that a gas lantern had 8 to 10 candlepower or something, whereas the electric lamp had 2000. Lastly, the park management on the West Side was clearly hugely corrupt, but at least in this report the management on the South Side looks highly respectable.

The whole point of the exercise is to have a contextual sense of urban development during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which may seem beside the point of my essay, but which isn't particularly as the socioeconomics which might bring forth religious groups are its focus. So I have read much more of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, for instance, but I don't think I will bring the Nation of Islam into the essay aside from mentioning that it is partially the legacy of the Moorish Science Temple's .

For the purposes of an essay it's self-defeating, but like during the last semester I keep on wondering what Truth is in relation to history. The basic question is, how can I write something which someone who is affected by the subject which I am writing about would recognize? I don't know all the time which facts are true and which are important. So I use instinct and I consult different sources from different perspectives in different disciplines. Obviously this takes longer, but I dislike feeling sloppy and mendacious.

Besides, I think that the principles and the historiographical ideas of the Moorish Science Temple are easily found enough, and that these are moreover fluid and open to interpretation by different followers and perhaps closed to interpretation by the skeptical outsider. The organization and its degrees of power don't interest me very much either, because they seem to me to be 'ersatz' for something else. So I want to take a very concrete approach, make something clear of the events like the Great Depression and the New Deal and the First World War, the formal and informal minutiae of segregation, and the evolution for instance of Chicago; perhaps something of the general religious foment if I manage to bring my investigation of the prominent branches of Christianity in the first half of the 20th century to a reasonable point; and still, I guess, in an authorial manner, capture some of the individual human drama.

In short, this is all overly ambitious, but it kind of sweeps one up in its breadth and historical momentum.

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Anyway, right now I am at the bookshop, and it has been a quiet morning thus far. I went to sleep after 5 a.m. last night and woke up before 9 a.m., so I feel a little hollow-eyed. But this is definitely preferable to my original notion of remaining awake the entire night.