1993 would be my final year of collaboration with the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. But what an eventful and fruitful year it would turn out to be!
The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum, described in my previous post, whetted the appetite in my community for approaching the city archetypally. So later that year I began exploring opportunities to expand both the audience and the scope of the discussion. I was able to find allies at a local Catholic women's college (St. Catherine's) and the neighboring community of radical nuns (St. Joseph's of Carondelet). The idea we settled on was for them to host a conference modeled after annual events sponsored by the Dallas Institute. The Dallas conferences were called "What Makes a City?" and each year explored a different archetypal topic. For our conference we chose the topic "What Makes a City?: Myth and Maps". Myth was to be understood as a deeply true story that provides hints as to the personality of the city; maps, we suggested, could serve as mandalic companions to the myth of the city, revealing a kind of sacred geometry that also expressed that personality.
For the headliner at the conference, we imported the Director of the Dallas Institute, Gail Thomas, who had done some pathbreaking work on the myth of Dallas. She agreed to be a co-keynote speaker with Elizabeth VanderSchaaf, my wife, who had been exploring the idea of maps as mandalas. We were also able to put together a panel of respondents consisting of local urban experts, moderated by Eric Utne, co-founder and chair of the renowned "Utne Reader." Our panel consisted of an urban studies professor at the University of Minnesota, a local housing developer (and Jungian), and the former Dallas planning director. We held the conference in October of 1993; several hundred enthusiastic attendees participated, including the mayors of both Saint Paul and Minneapolis (who sent us a note encouraging us to hold more such events).
The conference keynote speeches proved be very fruitful in initiating a chain of events in the Twin Cities with positive repercussions directly into the 21st century. Gail's talk focused on the story of how Dallas discovered a remarkable synchronicity - namely that the neon sign on the city's historic skyscraper proved to be a fruitful symbol for the city and its personality, and a guide for Dallas' future development. The symbol was at one level purely commercial - the flying horse that was the brand of the Mobil Oil Company that once occupied the building. But at a deeper level, it embodied the myth of Pegasus, a symbol of high-flying aspiration that needs to be brought down to earth for the waters of imagination to spring forth. One of Gail's important accomplishments was bringing this symbol into civic discourse in Dallas, where it began to shape the imagination of the community. Today one can visit Pegasus Plaza, next to the Magnolia Building which still retains its flying horse neon sign. Pegasus Plaza literally taps into an underground spring of water, which feed fountains representing the muses. Gail and the Dallas Institute proposed the plaza and helped raise funds to bring it into being. It continues to inspire the community both to temper its inclinations toward ego inflation, and to energize it in the aftermath of whatever tragedies may befall it.
While Gail Thomas challenged Twin Citians to seek the myth of our city, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf's talk suggested what form that might take. Her topic was entitled "Reading the 'Deep Map' of a City" and highlighted correlations between geographical patterns and the personality of place. She particularly noted the paradox that the Twin Cities were both born on the Mississippi River but both turned away from the river, as if in shame, when industrial pollution turned it into an open sewer in the late 19th and early 20th century. But she also highlighted how the physical form of Saint Paul in particular would make it challenging for that city to return to the river. The land that is now Saint Paul has always been riddled with an abnormal number of caves - including a large cave with an underground lake that was a traditional sacred site for indigenous peoples. Caves are places of withdrawal and escape. Synchronistically, as noted in 1991 by Robert Sardello, Saint Paul residents are unusually inclined to withdraw into their families and neighborhoods, and not cultivate the ego/spirit that a city needs to complement its soul. Even the great public buildings of Saint Paul are cave-like: the state capitol and the nearly identical cathedral that faces it.
So by the end of 1993 our community was furnished with insights and questions that it hadn't addressed before: What is the myth of our city? (And could it be that the historic skyscraper in town contains a clue?) How can we return to the river in a way that draws on our myth and our "deep map" but moves us toward a stronger civic ego to complement our natural inwardness? Early in 1994 some answers to these questions began to appear - as I will discuss in my next post.
