by Craig Reynolds
During the get-acquainted phase of the Co-Generate Project gathering, I was asked why Buffalo had developed such a rich literary heritage. My answer, long and detailed, started with a history of the arts in Buffalo since 1962, when UB went public (and all shades of artistic, musical, literary and political avant–gardists flooded into the city); the Buffalo Philharmonic hired Lukas Foss (who recast the BPO as the most radical orchestra in the country); and the Albright Museum added Knox to its name and hundreds of pieces of contemporary art to its collection. But more importantly, I wanted to forge a personal point-of-departure for the next day's discussion, which would be tape-recorded and later used to write articles, reports and other evaluations regarding the nature of support for alternative spaces, both entrenched and emerging, in the coming century.
The critical thing to understand about Buffalo, I said, is that everybody is always telling stories. And the reason why is that at all times we are forced to face a void that we must fill––with stories––or succumb to absence ourselves.
One of the other participants responded that old people tell stories always, and the conversation turned in a different direction, but what I had hoped to say was that there is a distinct connection between the fact that history has forgotten us and the tendency to want to write ourselves back into it, even if we only do so through pub discussions of missed fieldgoal kicks or goals that should never have been allowed. In Buffalo, we are bombarded with an all-consuming sense of absence––or, more concretely, we are constantly reminded of the absence of everything that once defined our continued existence ... from the lost Little Italy mowed down in order to clear space for waterfront housing projects to the painful loss of Frank Lloyd Wright’s only commercial structure, one of the central architectural masterpieces of the 20th century (which now exists only as memory). We are bombarded with the absence of money, of institutions with pockets wide and deep enough to support our endless creativity. We are bombarded even more significantly with the absence of justification . . . for our achievements, for our failures, for our existence . . . which is a difficulty inherent in being human enhanced by the specific economic, social and political conditions of our fading city. It’s difficult to place your faith in something when your history, our environment reveals that nothing lurks beyond the lucky distractions of stability and success.
In Buffalo, loss is not solely a disease faced by the old. We all must confront absence; and those with a less consuming will-to-be naturally flee to other cities where one's response to ensuing darkness may be delayed . . . possibly until one turns old, or sick or succumbs to some other unfortunate condition neatly tucked away on the flip-side of youthful American security; but in Buffalo, the dichotomy on which the young and the old keep to their own respective corners fades. Absence is our birthright, not our burden, and that means that we are that far ahead of the rest of the country. Even in our 27 old man years we have been granted wisdom, although the challenge of remaking existence is as heavy as God. One reason why Buffalo has fostered so many writers is that our environment has taught us to place our faith in human energy alone, in the creative manipulation of temporary materials, because those satisfactions that appear to promise forever are as empty as teenage dreams. Our rich literary heritage, consisting of tangled, explosive texts, is a first set of blueprints in reaction against industrial darwinism. It is mandatory reading for those imagining new realities in the halflight of the fading Modern World.