It’s been somewhat difficult attempting to connect this idea of “contado” to the works of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Brautigan. I hope I’m not alone on this, and maybe I am just speaking for myself.
So, I’m going to start off simply.
According to Gray Brechin in Imperial San Francisco, the world (more specifically San Francisco) is “a duality made of the city and its contado—that is, the territory that the city could…dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its peoplereceived a marketplace and a degree of protection in return” (xxxi).
Contado offers a notion of connection within the periphery. And this is where I’ve made my connection (pun intended): just as the city was supplied by the contado, these writers are supplied by this contado, and use a periphery to draw upon and act as the foundation of their inspiration, whether it includes the hub of the city or not.
Not only were natural resources used in the making of a great city like San Francisco, but these resources were gathered in places considerably far from the city itself. The city uses its ccontado as a means of builiding itself, of production and development. The gold that was mined plays into the idea of contado by constituting as a major part of the wealth of San Francisco and its elite. But this mining for gold “had caused far more damage than it was worth” (Brechin 59). Lumbermen and farmers themselves were to “blame for muddy streams and flash floods” (51).
So just as the contado was drawn from for construction, the contado is also effected in its destruction. The actions of miners and loggers, farmers and lumbermen, all contributed to the destruction of the environment within the contado. Miners and lumbermen “effectively devastated the mountain range and rivers that drained them” (44). Although they believed the wealth they acquired justified their actions, “fortune could not undo extinction” (26). There was “no thought of the morrow, the destiny of one race meant the holocaust of another” (9).
The pollution caused by such development and large scale efforts had led to the destructrion of national monuments. Acid rain has begun to dissolve these statues and monuments, a doing of the “byproducts of industrtial expansion” (2). Pollution “lodges today in the sediment, fish, and wildlife” (62).
I believe it was Thoreau or Emerson (one of the two) that once said everything on this earth is connected in some way or another.
I was surfing the other morning and suggested that my friend try opening his eyes underwater, because it was clear and the morning light penetrated the water beautifully. His quick refusal was met by my overt outburst of questions: Why not? You won’t just try it once? Afterall, I told him, it was just salt water and our body (especially the fluid in our eyeballs) is composed mainly of salt water. (Why do you think our tears taste salty? I asked him). Another surfer overhead my talk of salt, and paddled over to us, where we sat waiting between sets. I must have talked to this man, a rather intelligent, whimsical older gentleman in his late fifties or so, for about 15 minutes while my friend just listened probably thought we were crazy. But this random stranger and I struck up a conversation about the connection of every living thing on this planet. We dissected our bodies down to the salt water, then to the atoms, to the quarks, everything. And we were all made up of the same elements, created from the same materials billions of years ago at the start of the Universe and our planets, Earth included, where “The Big Bang” theory plays in. (This is where I said it that someone’s point of view would decide the “bonds” of everything, in that depending on what kind of person you are, you either believe in God’s Creation, or The Big Bang. Or both. But even God molded us out of clay. He created us all the same and made us out of the same things). So this common building material of life was shared by every living thing on this planet, offering a relationship between everything, if not just a commonality. This is when I mentioned Thoreua’s saying (or maybe it’s Emerson) that everything is connected. Aren’t we all examples of walking contados?
San Francisco’s connection to the world around it, however big or small this “world” may be, is nonetheless profound. The city’s water supply comes from 160 miles away. This alone is part of the contado idea here, and San Francisco’s periphery extends all the way to Hetch Hetchy.
On a much larger scale, can’t San Francisco’s contado be considered a sort of microcosm of the larger world’s contado, in the sense that everything is connected?
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2 comments:
They say that a writer should write about what they know. I found your connection between the San Francisco contado and writers (Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and Brautigan) interesting. I definitely agree. The contado serves as the muse for these authors. San Francisco and the surrounding area is a diverse culture and microcosm. These writers are influenced by what they know and how they perceive the world around them.
Bri...I think you've got the idea down pretty well. As you're thinking, the contado idea - as we're using it in the class, anyway - can function in a lot of ways. If we start with Brechin as the "literal" version of the contado (talking about actually places and space...the SF contado being places like the Sierra Nevada, surrounding cities, water sources, etc.), we can extend the idea of periphery, as you say, with other places, groups, cultures, etc. "Connection" is definitely a useful way of thinking about contados; so when we establish a core-contando relationship, part of the work there is figuring out what the connection is like. Is it imperial? How does the contado contribute to the core? And what's the attitude of the core to the contado?
I like what you say about everyone being a contado, in some sense. Or the idea of SF as a contado in some larger arena. Possibilities are numerous with this idea!
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