Dallas Waits for Her Sage
Here in Dallas, we have critics, architects, and intellectuals; artists, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs; mavericks, escorts, and glitterati. All the instruments for the symphony are in place. But we lack the soloist.
At a recent symphony—Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3, to be exact—I experienced Jaap van Zweeden conducting for the first time. Each time I’d been to the DSO during the season, a guest conductor was leading. Some performances had been good, others so-so. But what a different sound Jaap’s was! Eureka, I thought, this is what a symphony is—sonic unison sending its orison skyward. Up there in the choral terrace, facing the orchestra with my back to the organ’s song, I felt seized between two competing yet conjoined musical epiphanies. In that explosive collision, Dallas’ own genius seemed to be one that collectively and consciously orchestrated itself as symphony.
To be sure, Dallas’ built environment already reflects this harmony. What has not already been said about the Arts District, the Calatrava bridge, Woodall Rodgers Park, and various and sundry other amuse-bouches that our city will soon offer us? In the face of a globally deadening, unleavened spirit, we are still bustling and growing, attentive to cultural and communal needs while greening ourselves. How often do you drive through another city and see cacti, hanging plants, and red yucca gracing parkways and highways while trees and flowering bushes bedizen overpasses? Babylon couldn’t have had it better.
Dallas has reached critical mass.
Yet if we look at other cities which have suddenly encountered giant transformation, writers bubble to the surface to immortalize their changes. Here in Dallas, we have critics, architects, and intellectuals; artists, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs; mavericks, escorts, and glitterati. All the instruments for the symphony are in place. But we lack the soloist. We don’t have the poet, the playwright, and the novelist. These are the helmsmen. These creators are here in Dallas, but so far the moment when their works converge hasn’t happened.
In mid-nineteenth century Paris, Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann bouleversed and boulevarded Paris from top to bottom, zapping away all the rickety, meandering alleyways and slums. Medieval neighborhoods vanished like ingrown hairs. To no avail, Baudelaire raged against the loss of these places. The down and dirty side wasn’t really gone—Zola and Toulouse-Lautrec still managed to paint a city sipping absinthe and dancing the cancan. Yet what Haussmann effected changed Paris’ logic for good and all. Weepy pens marked its change.
 Dublin: Old and New Photo: Joan Arbery |
Lately, Dublin’s apotheosis in the Celtic Tiger days has iconized contemporary cities undergoing rapid growth. Plenty of authors chart those changes. But early 20th Century literature really marks Dublin’s kaboom period. To give new technologies a trial run, London first pawned them off on Dublin. Thanks to these advantages, and despite its very rural surroundings, Dublin quickly modernized. At the same time, the Celtic Revival uplifted Dublin’s culture. On its tails, the Easter Rising transformed Dublin’s politics. Here were Synge and Yeats, Joyce and Beckett—not always the most constant of Dubliners, nor Dublin’s most kindly porte-paroles, but the city’s mythmakers nonetheless.
To say the least, these are mere glosses on the extant tomes about why Paris and Dublin birth such artistry. But glosses shape a general rubric: massive change opens up to cultural productivity.
A piece of iconic literature is not the same as retrofitting or rezoning a city. It is a spirit of an age. To paraphrase Joyce, it has to speak to “Dallas, Texas, America, The World, The Universe.”
If this town has arrived, if it’s becoming an iconic city at the start of the 21st century, we need a universal story. Dylan Thomas called his poetry his “craft and sullen art”—it grew in spite of himself. What grows in spite of us? Dublin and Paris coined ways of describing their outgrowths, of even honoring them after they’d been expunged. Any city that survives its metamorphosis develops a literary myth.
What Dallas’ story is, who will write it, whether we even have it in us—all unknowns. But for Dallas’ song to last, its composer must step forward.
As for the guns, it is unfortunate that the violence is so strongly associated not only with Dallas, but with all of Texas, because outside of the immediate area it is not considered a positive thing. 
The problem with waxing rhapsodic about Dallas’ growth and change is that Dallas has disposed of everything it could have grown from.
There is no backstory. No vibrant history. No foundation. Dallas has always been linked to four things - J.R. Ewing, football, money and JFK.
Pulling down slums is one thing. Ripping out the Eiffel Tower in the name of progress is another, and that is the analogy more aptly associated with Dallas. Dallas is a city with ADD. It lives in the present at the expense of its past, but a city with an identity worth having bases that identity in its past. The present is too changeable to base an identity on.
Dallas is not a destination - it is part of the journey for most people who live here. They move here, live here for a while and move on. I have always found it revealing that in my large workplace I am one of the few people from “around here” - and I’m from Fort Worth.
Dallas could have learned a lot from its neighbor to the west but it spent too long being disparaging about Fort Worth. Now Fort Worth has the environment and the identity and Dallas is nothing more than a chrome and glass backdrop.
I would rather live in Dallas than many other places, and I an very fond of the city overall, but in reality it is difficult to identify Dallas as too much more than a TV theme song sometimes.
13 May 2009 at 8:41 am