The Grid

Lakewood, CA

D. J. Waldie's Holy Land is at once memoir and map. Waldie repeatedly references both the concepts of map and grid throughout the text, and in the suburban world he describes, these are nearly interchangable.

One of James Howard Kunstler's major complaints about suburbia is among Waldie's most prized features: the map as grid, drawn before the existence of the terrain it describes. To Kunstler, it is a lie, a hubristic defiance of topography. Waldie instead ascribes a peculiar holiness to the grid, or at least an opportunity for holiness. Many people, including his father, felt its ordering rigidity would create a space allowing, and even enforcing, some habits that other places could not—habits that are not shameful, but family-oriented, and in his case, Catholic.

Waldie's literary map is neither a plan for construction nor a complete description of the town's layout. It is not the map that planners drew up in 1949. It is instead a means of navigation for those unfamiliar with this holy land. His map was constructed according to a grid of rectangles, each of its 316 parts fitting as double-spaced text on a single sheet of paper. This grid defines the space in which he describes another space defined by another grid.

Waldie's grid does not directly correspond to the grid that defines his suburb, but it is a grid by which one can interpret, measure, and attempt to understand its relationships. Waldie allots equal space to each historical passage, vignette, and life story, but not all of these fill up their alloted spaces.

Any useful map has a grid, overlaid regularly (that is, with no regard to topography) across the landscape it describes. Lakewood, though imperfect, is the map realized, an alteration of landscape to conform to a grid, to create a map on the land itself, as exists across America in plots, state lines, and cities, all aligned to the cardinal points of the compass. Sometimes America can appear to be a map of itself.

We divide time up this way, too. Our days are regular over the course of a year, even though sunlight is not. Each day is divided into the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds. Months and years are similarly dependable. Our temporal obligations are to this grid, not to daylight or season or harvest. For example, among our obligations for this course, we are expected to be in 527 715 Broadway from 2:00 to 3:15. These numbers refer to grids which we use to understand our world and our obligations to it.

The spacial and temporal architecture of the holy land is one of regularity and repetition, a shift away from the cycles and spaces that arise out of utility in agriculture and plodding, unplanned urban development. The people that live there have religions, families, jobs, and homes. They have schedules.

Knowing precisely how one is restricted can be liberating. Waldie explored thoughtfully within his grid of 8.5 by 11 inch sheets. Working Americans clamored to Lakewood's grid of 50 by 100 foot lots. These people knew what they were buying, and they knew it would affect them. They knew it operated by different (and maybe more) rules than the places they were coming from. They hoped it would improve their lives, and for some, Waldie suggests, it did. For others, it didn't. The singular grid of the suburb does not define a single possible life, though it may appear to; it instead defines a range of possibilities, conditions for failure and conditions for success. This is reflected in Holy Land by the small personal stories that fit into the grid, and by the historical view of chaotic happenstance, opportunism, idealism, and profiteering that surrounds it.

The architecture of Holy Land shapes its content, as the architecture of the land it describes shapes the lives of those who inhabit it. We may run the risk of Waldie's grid replacing in our minds the physical grid it describes, as we may only be familiar with that grid as mediated by his. As Americans, however, many of us are familiar enough with the type of neighborhood Waldie describes, and so we may better understand our own grids through his; his grid may be not just a map of his own holy land, but of ours. Holy Land is often and easily compared to scripture. Of religious texts I've encountered, Waldie's elliptical and concise writing most closely resembles the Tao Te Ching. Much of that text's popularity is said to lie in the possibilities for interpretation its short yet cryptic sections provide.

The 88th section of Holy Land was for me the most illuminating. It reads, in full:

"Every map is a fiction. Every map offers choices.It's even possible to choose something beautiful."

A possible arrangement of John Cage's Fontana Mix: A musical composition created by overlaying transparent sheets of a line and a grid onto random forms