Detroit, What Was and Will Be

I am a Detroiter. I have lived there for a measly six months of my whole life, every other month previously spent in the countryside seven to eight hours away depending on the route. I’m not even in Detroit now, but my old home, the place where I was so entangled with the land for so many years that I feared leaving it at all. But now I think it had to be.

I’ve talked about the nature of the human spirit a little bit, and just what that means, and how it doesn’t really, from my perspective, mean anything. A long long while ago, my spirit (unintentionally) subsumed the local land spirit, and the land and I were connected. A lot of this, I think, has to do with where I live, and who I am–a lot of coincidences for that sort of thing to happen–how I, when I was a child, was apparently ripe for that sort of weird growth, like an untrimmed hedge tilting out of balance beyond what “human spirit” is supposed to grow, especially at such a young age; the unique nature of the local spirit of the land, all skeletal coal mines artificially made into lakes and long rambling roads that kick up gravel that occasionally get immersed in semicorrective tar, and rolling tamed hills like wolves bred into slightly slower, slightly stupider dogs brought to heel; the legal, physical situation, where my parents purchased the land and expanded and built on it and lived here their whole adult lives, our human habits sinking into the earth like osmosis as it seeped up into us, just a little, and perhaps me most of all because my parents were already fully grown when they came here, and my younger brother was born just so recently enough that he, in the words of grandmotherly disapproval, “never got out and got the natural sunshine.” It’s in him, of course, but not to the degree, I think, that he can feel it in his bones. But I digress.

Much as the dirt and coal and tar is a part of me, part of my natural makeup and spiritual foundation, I needed to shed it. “Wanted” is not the right word–I don’t truly want to leave the dirt, like no one really wishes they were a different person. I needed to shed it, to be my own person. “Human spirit” is complicated. There is no hosing off a soul and sending it on its way, only the slow flaking away of an identity.

And so we come to Detroit.

Six months or less and I am a Detroiter. I wouldn’t say as much to most people, because nine times out of ten, it seems silly, if not outright ridiculous. I call myself a Detroiter, yet I’m born and raised in the midwest countryside? I call myself a Detroiter, yet I’ve barely lived there? I call myself a Detroiter, yet I haven’t seen all the sights, walked all the streets, barely know how to get around the downtown area (curse the one ways)?

Yes, I do, because I want to, and because I can, and because I have fallen in love, passionate sudden zealous love, with this city.

I am in love with everything about it. I love its history, and not just the history itself but the unique texture of its history, the industry, the progression, the riots, the fall. I am in love with its physical skeleton, the streets and architecture, the constant horrid construction on Woodward and the clusterfuck turns and not-quite-roundabouts and flashing traffic lights of the riverside after sunset, the tall buildings scraping the horizon line, the people mover (aboveground almost-subway) making its ridiculous little circles and the trains, the character of the trainyard, so different from the trains here in the countryside, rattling and rolling over highways, the sides covered in graffiti, and the abandoned corpses of old buildings decorated in gorgeous spray-painted murals and out-of-place diary entries and the occasional squatter, and rooms in abandoned factories, surrounded by shattered glass from fifth-story windows and higher, full of just shoes, piled high, for no reason we can identify.

Place magic is something special. It’s like the archetypical fairy tales of the druids with their circles and Stonehenge and crazy rituals (which aren’t historically real, but everyone’s seen that story and everyone knows the kind of thing I’m talking about). Out here, in the countryside, with the dirt creeping up my ankles, it’s so easy. Here, I can make it rain by shaking a bell jar of water and souvenir seashells. Here, I can summon up wind with some fancy breathing and broad hand motions. It’s nothing special, not really, something like maybe twenty acres I can “feel,” and the power doesn’t extend beyond that because it’s local magic, place magic. And this place also is close enough to the allegorical druid circle that I can draw parallels for metaphor and consciousness’ sake to make things work. Dance around a tree for prosperity, or drop coins in the coal river. Not difficult.

The city is entirely different. Where the power of the countryside is low chords, rolling terrain, sprawling roots, slowness, the city is a punch to the gut. I enter the city and feel myself taken up with inspiration, “divine inspiration” if you’re feeling poetic, and my whole body lifts starting from the bottom of my ribcage and I am sprawling, but quick, fluid, punching pulsing blood through arteries as opposed to the bubbling liquid seeping of countryside veins. It’s a difficult thing to explain if you haven’t felt local magic, but at the same time, anyone who’s lived in a city and has a healthy grip on metaphor probably understands.

In the city, my seasonal affective disorder was… not gone–that’s a physical, chemical ailment, an illness that is a literal physical property of my body, and probably won’t ever go away. But it was an entirely different experience. Not like it usually is–like a really old car on its last legs, rattling and stuttering to a halt until, in the spring, some poor sap replaces a belt or something and it wheeze back to life and its granted a couple more miles. In the city, it felt more even, far more manageable, the energy never quite completely sputtering out, only decreasing. I never forgot to eat, I never gave up entirely on classes, and I slept as normal. Bizarrely amazing.

Compare and contrast to what happened immediately upon coming home to countryside for the holiday. Seasonal magic gets frequently dismissed by occultists and eclectic/reconstructionist/etc. pagans nowadays, I think, because everything Wicca touches gets the side-eye. Cyclical life, the slumbering of gods? Pfah! I don’t know about the gods, but when I came home and went to sleep, I slept for fourteen straight hours. This was not an anomaly–it’s how it’s been the entire time I’ve been here. I had to start setting alarms for 2 PM so that I could get anything done at all. It’s not like that in the city, where the seasons don’t have nearly as much impact on daily life, snow and slush gets pushed off the streets so that commutes can take place as normal, and at the very most things are only delayed, not cancelled. Meanwhile, during a good snow in the countryside, I can’t get my car up the driveway. Sometimes a lot of snow makes our internet connection fizzle. Sometimes we can’t even go to work or class because the roads out here get no attention. That’s the difference.

So. Let’s talk about Detroit specifically.

I’ve been to a few cities–not many, being from a family that doesn’t really travel. I’ve been to Chicago–that’s the big one that most people will recognize, I think. Chicago is a great hulking monster of a spirit, wheezing smoke and groaning machinery, like purple-gray smog. Not in a bad way, not at all–when I first visited that city and had the opportunity to “stretch out,” so to speak, and feel out the spirit, I was blown away by how big and powerful and rushing it was. We went through the grimy downtown areas, the kinds that aren’t meant to be tourist traps, with the smokestacks, and walking there was the best way to meet the spirit. If Chicago were a sound, to me it’d be jazz, and if Chicago were art, to me it’d be a crinkled Impressionist painting in both acrylic in watercolor.

Alternatively, some other, lesser known cities I’ve spent time in. Indianapolis, for example. Indianapolis felt like nothing to me, and I think that’s because, having lived in Indiana my whole life, I can’t taste it. It’s like tasting the inside of your mouth (you don’t). Very bustling though, an interesting sort of energy vibrating through the crosswalks, and something about parking garages and white buildings. I’ve also been to Orlando, like every middle class asshole out there, and Orlando is a different kind of beast, less a city than a county all its own, with Disney World and Universal Studios and Sea World and whatever else is hiding out there, and feels less like the archetype City than it does an assortment of buildings that don’t quite fit together coherently like a city rightfully should. I imagine that the many other cities I’ve never visited but desperately want to, including but not limited to New Orleans, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, and San Diego, feel more like Chicago and Detroit than anything like Orlando, despite its size.

The point I’m vaguely, sort of getting at is that to meet a city’s soul, to really get in there and taste it, you have to immerse yourself in the city, if only barely. I like the phrase “tourist trap” because it’s a useful way to describe that particular phenomenon of being in a city, but not really in it. You’re seeing only what they want you to see, only barely skidding across the surface let alone scratching it. To meet Chicago, I had to drive through the less polished downtown areas past smokestacks. I couldn’t find a cohesive Orlando because it’s almost entirely tourist traps, and what isn’t wasn’t meant for me to drive through. Thus, I call myself a Detroiter–why? To immerse myself in the city, to put myself under its power and get my hands dirty in its spirit. Walk in its shoes. It has a function, just like most labels have functions beyond ease of description. “LGBT” (and GRSM) is not just an adjective, but an identity, a badge you can wear. Same goes for “Detroiter,” or “artist,” or “student,” or “proud pet owner,” or “puggle breeder,” or “psychonaut” or “occultist.”

Detroiter. “No pussies in Detroit.” “Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.” “The people in Detroit are very – they’re like a lot of cities, but they’re very proud to be from there and they really want to see change and they really want to see good things happen.” “Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.” “Detroit is a place where we’ve had it pretty tough. But there is a generosity here and a well of kindness that goes deep.” “When you are already in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to get there.” “Nowhere on earth has more soul than Detroit.”

Detroit: People across America believe it’s a corpse, a gravestone warning off the dangers of industrialism and capitalism and “the American dream,” and yet its people are more proud than anyone from a city I’ve ever met. You get people from New York who say, yeah, New York’s okay, lots of problems though. People from Los Angeles saying, yeah I’ve lived in LA, it’s alright, good food there. I love asking people where they’re from since I never go anywhere, and I love seeing what people say about their hometowns. I’m not a great proponent of my own hometown, sadly; I love the land, but not the town, or the city everyone works in nearby. I probably take it for granted. And that’s common. People from London like, yeah I’ve been there, went to school there for the first ten years of my life, sure, shrugging it off. People from Ottawa talking about how different it is here from Canada, namely the temperature, how hot our summers are, but nothing really beyond that. And so on.

Detroiters, though, largely don’t take their city for granted, and I think that’s part of what makes the city so appealing to me, so soulful. Detroit has seen a good deal of hardship–reputations don’t come from nothing. It’s seen bankruptcy, race riots, and political corruption. It’s common knowledge there that the police are ineffectual. I told my theory professor that driving in Detroit was scary because I was afraid I’d go down a one way street backwards, and she said not to worry, that what are the police going to do, arrest you?–followed by a laugh; they have better things to do. My first day on campus, we were told that if we needed 911 to call campus security first, and then the campus security of the other college, and then the Detroit metro police, because you can get a pizza faster. (In their defense, the police receive little funding and even less incentive to stay on the force–it’s a stressful, understaffed, underpaid, dangerous job.) The water was shut off to select neighborhoods once. I watched a “we can’t breathe” protest beneath my apartment window the other night. There are thousands of houses in various states of disrepair, some in my own neighborhood or ten minutes’ walk away, completely abandoned, or become desiccated shells for graffiti artists (and some beautiful graffiti I’ve seen).

Yet, everyone has hope. On college social networks, students say, “We’re the generation that will bring glory back to Detroit.” The art scene here is wildly deep and vast and wide, Midtown and Downtown especially gaining momentum because of cheap old housing and work space, and the colleges and graffiti here, and the culture, a whole mishmash of culture in varying shapes and sizes, from the quasitown of Hamtramck to authentic Chinese restaurants with the best dim sum.

I love Detroit also because I feel like it’s a kindred spirit. Something good and grand, twisted and deformed by adversity, growing past its restraints anyway one inch at a time, like a tree that grows past a rope tying it to a stake in the ground. When it bleeds, it scabs over and ignores that shit. It has a tough skin.

So. City magic.

In the countryside, a lot of my day-to-day divination isn’t tarot, or scrying, or bone-tossing, though I love those methods, but rather simple omen watching, like augury. I know that vultures on collapsed barnhouses means that something big is about to throw down, and I know that red-winged blackbirds on wires instead of in the ditches means that someone’s got it out for me, and I know that when said ditches are full of cattails to the point where you can’t see the water, it’s going to be a good summer.

In the countryside, simple magic–I’m talking the casual things, the things that come naturally to practicing magicians–can come from anywhere. Rain, as I said before, is ditch water and souvenirs shaken in a badly-sealed bell jar, getting water all over my hands. On the way to my car, I stop and pluck dandelions and make wishes and blow. I pluck locust shells off of the locust trees, and crush them to make protective grounds like red brick dust. Cattails purify, coal dust makes everything, including enemies, dirty, and low-pressure well water from the shower head washes it all away.

In the countryside, the spirits, the “meager,” “petty” spirits, who most people don’t give second glances, are everywhere. There are land spirits, like me, doing their best to protect and guide their own. There are also all sorts of animal spirits–not totems, not power animals, not spirit guides, not soul animals, I loathe all of those names and terms heartily and so I’m left with nothing to describe them but “allegorical animals,” capital-a Animals. The unimpressable brother Fox, spindly Rabbit, overly elegant grandfather Stag, temperamental sister Blackbird. They are not mine and they are no man’s and it irritates me when people think they can tame them or summon them as if humans have the right-of-way. Elemental spirits, for lack of a better word for them, hidden in trees and lakes, but each with their own taste–regionally, our water spirits, nixes if you must call them that, are black and filthy and toothy because of the coal, and our air spirits are incredibly varied, thanks to the clean country air contrasting with the smokestacks in town that you can almost see from the top of the hills.

Now, the city. I don’t know the city’s language yet. I want to know it. I want to drown in it. Detroit has that allure, that draw, that pull. It almost seems dangerous, how intoxicating the will to be immersed in its soul is to me.

Divination in the city. I don’t know how to do it. Tarot, bones, scrying still works, but those are different paths than the one I want to walk. I want to be able to look out the window and see if I’m going to have a shit day, or what traffic is going to be like. Divination can be found in patterns that break, natural things that have little quirks of function, like the different direction birds fly in. I rarely see pigeons, but with practice I might be able to see omens in their flight patterns. Sometimes I think that rush hour traffic might have that quality too, enough life all congregated in one place so that the traffic as a whole spits out little sparks of magic, but I don’t know how to read that either. Sometimes omens fly in my face, like when plastic bags… well, literally fly in my face. But it’s harder to learn to get them when you want them.

Magic in the city. This is something that I can easily wrap my head around, because a) even a couple months immersed in city life can let you figure out its fundamental energy flows and whatnot, and b) form begets function: whistles call dogs and spirits, gas takes you to work and to the Otherworld, blankets keep you warm and safe. Similarly, locks inhibit flow, streets are nothing but flow, and garbage can be an unpleasant curse. Detergent washes out stains and bad luck. Keys are weapons against nighttime attackers and nasty spirits. Hoodies and loose jeans make you invisible. Traffic is a kind of magic all in itself that I’ve known about even just commuting to the city for work for years: hand me a stop sign and I’ll get you a banishing. (Speed limit signs are useless, though. Also, in Detroit, I highly suspect one-way signs are equally futile.)

Spirits in the city. I tried, when I lived here in the countryside and only commuted, I really did, but the spirits in my home city just didn’t want anything to do with me. I reached out just enough to hear my name in the sighs of car exhaust and machinery. I offered a small blacker-than-black coffee to a spirit in an alleyway behind a favorite deli once. The “megasigil” I used to establish my power there was a Monster energy drink can filled with screws, paint thinner, and broken bits of cell phone. Also, every time a spirit tapped me on the shoulder I’d hear a noise like I was getting a text. Once I thought I heard my phone so clearly that I picked it up and answered it, and was bothered the whole day after. For assorted reasons I frequented the local government building, and the spirits there, that I could tell, were stiff and irritable. The best offering I could get any spirit in the city hands-down was a McDonald’s cheeseburger, plastic wrapping unfolded. (I don’t know how to describe this, but in the process, the taste and texture of the pickles and onions became ingrained in my senses, and that is just bizarre.) Also, the spirit behind the deli asked me for hard-boiled eggs, which I never got around to.

I have a hard time hearing city spirits because of all of the noise–not literal noise, just spiritual static kind of “noise,” whatever you want to call it–but, for Detroit, I try. Something I have learned is the potency of mascots. School mascots, corporate logos. There’s a college in Indiana called Purdue University. They’re called the Purdue Boilermakers, their mascot a train, which thematically is just awful, but that’s not my business. Talking to a Purdue student, I can almost imagine the train whistle, the rumble. The Wayne State mascot–not my mascot, mind–is the Warrior. Those are spirits, and they can be summoned or pleaded with. I’ve considered getting a mascot emblem for my desk to help me work and give me inspiration.

And other spirits. Spirits are formed of ideas too and Detroit is a city of ideas. Artistic spirits, I’m sure, are in no short supply. Spirits of roads and streets? Why not. I have a feeling there’s a spirit of Woodward. I know that there are industrial spirits, smokestack spirits, probably (definitely) the spirit of Ford and maybe, if I had to guess, the spirit of the American auto industry.

I wonder at the nature of city elementals. An incredibly useful, vastly undervalued tool in modern magic, I think, is fiction, outright urban fantasy and science fiction kinds of fiction, and it gets thrown under the bus for giving pagans a bad fantasy-wizard LARPer reputation. But books like Zoo City (by Lauren Beukes) turned me on to the idea of spirits in cell towers and email servers, and similarly, the game Off (by Mortis Ghost) explores surrealist elements that click, in a way, in an industrial setting. (These elements are Smoke, Metal, Plastic, Meat, and Sugar, by the way. Tell me that doesn’t click, on some level.) I want to meet elemental spirits, I want to learn their unique takes on the physical world, and I want to see how the cityscape changes them. What is the river spirit like, what is the trainyard?

I want to live life from the eyes of Detroit’s soul, want to feel the pulses of the hearts of its people. (This is probably how I got so damn lost in the land last time.)

That’s why I call myself a Detroiter. Because I want to suck down its soul and be absorbed into it like another city spirit. That’s why, when asked, I immediately come to the defense of that city, and I don’t find “haven’t been shot yet?” jokes funny unless it’s a Detroit resident making them, and I’m not willing to throw Detroit under the bus for the sake of posterity and appearances–“oh, I’m only there for the experience,” “for the education.” I love the collective vision everyone in the city has for Detroit, a vision of a sprawling light-ridden urban center of art and culture and industry after a long process of revitalization and renaissance. Detroit has a soul more hopeful than anything I’ve ever met and I believe in the vision because, immersed in traffic construction sound restructuring factory industry, having handed a five to a homeless man and being told I’d be prayed for, seeing so-called careless, reckless young adults believe so strongly in their city, I can’t not. I wonder if I was guided here, if my gods led me here as they’ve led me to other places, or if I completely independently chose to move into it, knowing intuitively that I’d fall in love there.

In one day, I go back home to Detroit. It’s a relief. I need to see more, stretch farther, walk further, drown myself in it.