Today I learned about Fordite, also called “Detroit agate” or “Motorcity agate.”
I saw someone call it ugly. How do you look at this and call it ugly? There’s something so unusually beautiful about it. Its unexpectedness, maybe, because who thinks of cabochons, or anything beautiful, as a byproduct of industry? Its unpredictability, with no natural shapes, no documented, expected patterns, perhaps. Intricately colorful, both manmade and natural.
Detroit agate. This is like the epitome of urban magic. This is like an icon of my City. Symbolic of its foundations and of its goals. Colorful and interesting and complex and mixed, like Detroit’s people. Manmade, but somehow organic despite that, like the city itself, with improbable twists and turns and unforeseen patterns. Little maps of the past that will be cut and shaped into a brighter future.
That’s Detroit. Nothing Stops Detroit: it’s suffered from crime, from poverty, from misfortune and industrial fallout and damaged reputation and bankruptcy. Yet its people have a hopeful quality about them; its people are a people meant to do and create great things. Potential, bred in their bones. I’ve talked about this before.
I feel like, despite the increase in the number of urban magicians in recent years, there’s still a lingering sense that City is ugly, that the industrial is dirty, that the urban is banal. Why is that?
City is just as natural as the rest of the world; human peoples build houses and apartments, and ants build colonies, and bees build hives, and birds build nests. So City is a constructed reality, yes, but it’s real and it’s ours, and that’s a fact of overlooked importance.
On my way from the grocery, I watched a woman stop in the middle of traffic to hand a homeless man a ten dollar bill. Hundreds, thousands of people pass each other on the Wayne State campus in Midtown every day and never meet eyes. A couple thousand cars are speeding one way at eight in the morning and another way at five in the evening, all at once, and it clogs up traffic-riddled roads. The interaction, or just closeness, of tens of thousands of people on the daily–is that not beautiful?
And the sacred architecture of the city. The raw brick angles of the older buildings, refurbished and refurbished again: they’re old, but they’ll still serve. Or the busted windowpanes in half-burnt business buildings, never quite restored, sometimes covered in tarp or advertising banners. The jagged, swerving routes of the aforementioned construction-laden streets (Michigan is always under construction, don’t you know?) and the empty lots fenced off in perfectly regular iron bars. The sidewalk is dirty and harbors murky puddles from on the ground, the nicked cement making for a slightly uneven walk as you go to the drugstore at 4 AM, but from up here, on the eighth floor of this old apartment building, the petty ugliness of city gives way to the ecstatic beauty of City, the skyline, all lit up until the small hours of the morning, and the lights never quite going out, accompanied by the constant hum of the transformer down the road that you don’t notice until it catches fire one day and it’s suddenly gone. The way the wind sweeps in long lines down vacant streets, cutting straight through you on a bad day, and the sun warms the pavement in the summer, just enough, under the shade, to sleep on, lulled to sleep by angry car horns and the pounding of feet.
Detroit is in its archetypical springtime. There’s so little to know about it from the outside, as in from the small Bible Belt town I grew up in. Once you’re in, you learn what Detroit, the spirit–Anima Detroit–is. She’s archetypical rot and primordial chaos. She’s Persephone, sprung free from the earth.
Detroit is a sort of allegory for the Otherworld, in that way. They say people and companies and successes come here to die, but from the inside everyone knows there’s more to be had here than meets the eye. It’s like a treasure, buried in our underworld, hidden from prying eyes. They want to strip Detroit of its dignity and its pride, but no one can quite get to it.
Did you know that Detroit has its own patron spirit? The Nain Rouge, “red dwarf,” was originally a patron of the city, a protectorate. But in a more modern sense, it’s regarded as a harbinger of doom for the city, a demon even. They banish it each year, nowadays, over in Cass Corridor.
The Marche du Nain Rouge is an emblem of Detroit perseverance. Everyone there has a wholehearted belief that Detroit will improve, will have its second Renaissance, and that nothing can hold them back–no man, no spirit, no ghoul.
Anima Detroit aside, I’m of the (relatively unformed) opinion that the Nain is probably just an omen spirit. The idea that black cats are bad luck actually came from the idea that, if a black cat crossed your path and then ran away, bad luck was due to you. In short, black cats traditionally can sense bad luck, so if they run from you, it’s an early warning sign. Most spirits who somehow went from being protectors or allies in the folklore to being imps and enemies, I believe, have this sort of history to them.
And people work best with a common enemy. That’s not to be understated.
The Nain is a sort of symbol for Detroit herself. Ugly, maligned, potent, blamed for all of the city’s misfortunes and mistakes. But it means well. It’s misunderstood. It has a storied past and new traditions keep arising surrounding it, like the Marche. It’s a living myth.
The Nain is actually a permutation of the lutin, the goblins and sprites of Normandy, France. Spirits tend to follow their peoples, and the Nain appears to be no exception. If a house imp follows you to a new house, to a new land, and the land is passed on, then the imp may remain with its family on the new property. If the families with their house spirits colonize a whole city…?
The Detroit lutin are dead with their colonist families, and in their place grew the Nain Rouge–or is it Nains?–a creature of its own uniquely American heritage, a spirit all its own, a spirit of City life and industrialism and emerging unharmed from the underworld and bad reputations.
“Ugly” is such an ugly word for something as intricate as the City of Detroit. “Ugly,” perhaps, like human pores are ugly, or a large gut, or unclipped scraggly fingernails. Nothing in this city is ugly, not from the inside. From the outside, it’s discarded paint drips, stains, and charred remains. From the inside, swirling agate cabochons. It’s just a matter of perspective.
Nemeton Nigromanticos 