I left a meeting yesterday with a conglomerate of talented and creative minds, all in their own way, dedicated to finding their voices or their imaginative paths and then using that centered uniqueness to further themselves within this town that we call Nashville. It was one part inspiring and one part made me want to crawl under the floor boards of the Earth and live alone forever. But I’ve always been the kid who didn’t want the cookie offered. I’ve always been the lamb that saw the cliff coming and jumped first.
And there is nothing wrong with living a life of creative intention or existing with an urge to “shape a city” or whatever. But intentions are such a hazy thing to define and easy to hide behind. And I step back and wonder, in a pathetically existential way, if these attempts to “create a culture” are often basic exercises in narcism. I wonder if the sound of our own conch across the water is more important to us than the water itself. Or better yet… When will we realize that the water doesn’t give a shit?
I guess that’s where my brain is going. It’s a hard thing to keep an identity in a city that is progressing and changing. It’s exciting to some and disheartening to others. It’s financially prosperous for property owners. It’s extremely gentrifying to thousands of people who have made this city run for years. It’s an article in a travel magazine. It’s a celebrity’s new place to buy a home. It’s Uber and rent a bikes. It’s more jobs for the jobless. It’s condos blocking the sunset. It’s a surge in the art community. It’s big corporate networks swooping in and creating television shows to make money by extorting its beauty. It’s finding new bars with less people. It’s parties you don’t know about. It’s having more options for restaurants. It’s Brooklyn burnouts. It’s pop up dinners. It’s always something new to be excited about. It’s always a stranger pulling away from you.
And in the end, there is nothing wrong or right about any of it. If that’s the conversation you want to have then you are just talking to the void.
Hundreds of years ago, this land was actually a hunting ground for Native Americans. It was a giant plain that deer would cross to reach a natural salt depository. And Nashville itself started in 1748 with a town square built on four acres of land before Tennessee was even a state. From there, time has stretched across an invisible horizon and buildings crawled out of the dirt like hungry spiders. Bridges grew across the Cumberland River like new born animals reaching for their mothers in their sleep. People have foraged and hunted and built and destroyed. Civil wars and tornadoes and floods have raked across this city’s surface. Children have been raised and lived full lives and fallen into old age and have died inside its boarders. Songs and poems and murders and kidnappings have come and gone and will come and go again.
And maybe this city we try to shape actually ends up shaping us. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the mission of “creating a culture” is as futile as commanding the night’s moon to rise. Either way it will rise and it will set… with or without us. The best thing to do is accept the strength of its pull on the tide to come. To close your eyes and let it illuminate your thoughts into wisps of electric wonder. To howl at its face and shout sonnets across the cold and milky surface above. To lay in the hushed light of its breath and allow yourself to change. And then to change again. And then to change again. And then to change again.
Will Morgan Holland Just Woke Up 