Thanks for being here.
This is our first stop for today and this is the MOCA Tucson.
This building was built in 1960,
designed by the husband, wife, architectural team of William
and Sylvia Wilde, who are
known for their modernist and brutalist architecture.
Before it was, the MOCA was a fire station.
And before that, what sat here was the Tucson Light Factory.
The Tucson Light Factory produced all of the light
enjoyed in Tucson and the surrounding area from 1905
to 1932, at which point the factory was shuttered
and the local light industry was privatized.
My name's Mathias Svalina and I'm a poet
and I run a dream delivery service.
I take subscribers and every day for a month.
I write dreams to them
and I deliver the dreams by bike to their doors before dawn.
And the dream history tour
that I'm doing right now is an extension of that in
which I'm trying to embed the dream logic
inside of cities and sort of unearth
a surrealist interpretation of a city's present and past.
This building here was the site of two rival universities.
one university was the University of Synonyms,
and the other university was the University of Cinnamon.
Everything that could be learned at the University of Synonyms
could be learned at the University of Cinnamon.
Everything taught in every class with the same.
And yet, when one student was a student of synonyms,
every word of every lecture consisted of consisted
of parallel meanings.
And when one was a student at the University of Cinnamon.
everything taught in the lectures was a flavor, a spice.
And if you lean in now, you can still smell
a bit of cinnamon.
Yeah, I was. Working in marketing in D.C.
for a company that provided
personal security for CEOs.
And like, I had four suits from the men's warehouse
that I wore on Monday through Thursday, and
ultimately I realized my only skill sets were teaching,
writing and writing weird --- for people. At a certain point.
Put those as the primary
things in my life
and let everything else fall into place as it would.
And you know, the trade offs are pretty obvious.
Frequently have been told about
John Dillinger being captured at the Hotel Congress,
but you might not know that before he was caught there.
He went for a little walk and he ended up here in this spot,
and he stood here for a long time as the sun
dipped behind the mountains.
The sky exploded pink
and orange, and Dillinger closed his eyes tight
so tight, the flashes of light filled the darkness,
and as he stood with his eyes closed,
he considered for a moment, never opening them again,
never returning to the world.
He felt he left behind,
which was such a factory of broken things.
Such a chain of brief thrills.
Rather than having a reading at the poetry center
or something that could be easily archived,
I wanted to have something that happens out around town.
And for the most part, disappears.
A piece of land exists like a symphony.
It exists only that it exists in the experience of it
in this way right now.
And then, now and then, right now and again.
And it's like Heraclitus said about stepping in the river
but it's also like a puppy curled up
asleep and warm on your feet.
Not growing up in this
environment, not growing up in this landscape,
there's such a surreal visual experience
of the desert in the saguaros. The daily transcendence
of light out here is like a weird kink.
So I brought you here
to tell you about this beautiful building,
the Hampton Inn over here.
We all know the Tucson's one of the longest
continuously occupied spots in North America.
You might not know that
this area has been populated by ghosts for much, much longer
And during the construction of the Hampton Inn,
when the workers dug out the foundation,
there are no signs of ghost habitation
that date back to before humans had a word for time
or a word for ghosts, or word for words
before words even had to mean anything.
Like every city, you know,
the history gets transformed and whitewashed and
manipulated in order to tell a convenient story
or tell and brand new, convenient story.
Tucson consists of the Tucson we can see and smell and hear,
and birds flitting between trees and dust blown wind.
And the geometries that light carves out of angles
and also consists of the Tucson that cannot be seen,
cannot be sensed, cannot be lived in.
All of the images and all
of the stuff and all the matter of experience.
That gets warped and twisted and reiterated
and remixed inside of a dream
feels like that happens inside of a city's history of itself.
So there's something that is very analogous
of the dream logic and the history logic for me.
I brought you here
because I wanted to tell you about March 22nd, 1983,
when Nina Simone
the morning after performing in Tucson sat right here
crying and a hummingbird flew up to her face
and the hummingbird buzzed once, twice around her head.
On that day, at this moment, this spot became
Tucson's fontanelle.
The soft spot where a baby's skull is not yet fuzed.
Beneath the fontanelle lies in the city's brain,
a mingling of infrastructure
and history and dirt and bedrock and atrocity and love,
and all the unseen truths upon which a city relies.
Nina Simone crying here.
Split the city open as you have so many times
when so much passion
and horror and terror and love gathered around you.
Like a gown made of vines, vined of strained
patience and exalt vined incidence and thorn.
And with all the terror and beauty, the city opens
at your feet like a galloping horse bursting into light.