About the Piece

This is what the Goddess of my city really looks like. Especially now, that she is living in Diaspora. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me back up and tell the story.

There is a statue of Portlandia, leaning down from a pedestal outside the Portland building, back in my home town. (That’s right, Portlandia is much older than the television show. Which, for the record, I love, even though a difficult woman who used to be a friend of mine was right when she said, “But it’s making fun of the wrong things to the wrong audience.” Yeh, she’s got a point… but for those of us who lived it and have a sense of humor, it’s still pretty spot on.)

I remember there being a lot of controversy, when I was a kid, about this statue. People objected to the use of public funds to commission it, they objected to the aesthetics, and they had already been losing their minds over the postmodern architecture of the building whose facade she stood guard in front of. (Culture wars were once a lot more fun than they are now.) Although she’s obviously riffing on the Statue of Liberty, artist Raymond Kaskey claims she is a portrait of…”Lady Commerce.”

I grew up in her city, and none of the bullshit over the money, the controversy, or especially not “lady Commerce” ever had anything to do with me. Instead, I considered her to be the personification of the city, a goddess who took care of the glorious misfits who wandered in her streets.

I left Portland more than ten years ago, in the economic shit storm that has all the cities in the country ceding space, resources, and “livability” to corporate raiders and callous developers instead of to the people who made them. I left in a great wave of us, who moved out both before and after me – a wave that we have come to regard as The Great Portland Diaspora.

We have exported our organic gardens, our lefty political leanings, our silliness and our art to all the corners of the earth now. But we still all make regular pilgrimages back to the home world, often to stand next to each other in solidarity outside the Justice Center jail while the nazi cops shit pepper spray from their buttholes, just like the old days.

We joke about life in the Portland Diaspora sometimes. There are a lot of things about the outside world that Cascadia doesn’t prepare one for – apathy, political doofiness, people fighting over free food at food not bombs, dudes who still take up mind space by catcalling women, cars that don’t stop for pedestrians, cans not getting recycled, people buying living beings instead of adopting them at shelters… even the garbage is messier out here. (That was one of the first things I noticed when I left the city. I went dumpster diving in Ohio with a friend from the Diaspora, and…ew, people just threw all the usable things into the same bin with their coffee grounds and their cat litter! When I noted this in astonishment, my friend laughed and mockingly intoned, “Ewww, your garbage is so DIRTY here!” Heh. Yes, we did live a rarified existence back in Portland, didn’t we.)

But we took our Mason jars of sprouted beans and our battle scars and our variants of the Holy Herb with us and went out into the world, and this is how I picture the city Goddess now. She is tucked away like roots in the ground, still balancing her lofty ideals precariously over her scantily covered addiction issues, still casting everything into stories that will one day be a better world, still blowing smoke rings while waiting for the rain to clear. She’s way down underground, with the ancient forests that used to cover Cascadia; all of them and all of us just waiting for the right moment to burst up from the earth again and be reborn.