For thousands of years, the land (Troy) was the ancestral territory of the Anishinaabe peoples (Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi). Following The Treaty of Detroit (1807) the land was forcibly ceded to the United States. Thereafter, primarily farm land for wheat, corn, fruits, etc.
The particular farm of Henry Blount with its tree cover and natural wildlife habitats becomes Sylvan Glen Golf course in 1922. Sylvan from the Latin silva (woods) and Glen a Scottish term for a hollow.
Then in 1970 construction began on the Sylvan Glen subdivision with 5475 Winchester (Subdivision Plan 2) built in 1976. Like Sylvan and Glen, Winchester evokes an image—Anglo-inspired and upper class, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Wessex and England itself under King Alfred the Great. Venta from the Celtic mening meeting place and (ceaster) coming from the Latin castrum, meaning a “fortified Roman camp.”
Lewis Mumford in The City In History writes of the American Suburb, In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.
Is it day or is it night? Considering René Magritte The Empire Of Light (there are actually many The Empire Of Light, empires of lights really), it’s not clear where the root and branches are or lead—Ottawa, US, forest, farm, golf course, identical streets with identical houses, a 2,129-square-foot Colonial-style brick home concerning 5475 Winchester where a sixteen year-old turns to Camus and Pink Floyd for a little help in knowing exactly where the hell he is.
Which, of course, is the beauty of not-knowing.
“It’s important to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do,” writes Donald Barthelme at the beginning of his joyous post-modern manifesto “Not-Knowing (1987).”
For a moment, set aside Aristotle’s syllogisms, Euclid’s geometrical proofs, set aside any laws of thought and formal reasoning, set aside deriving “all of mathematics from logic, and, to be sure, without contradictions,” as Douglas Hofstadter writes in GEB.
Barthelme continues, “The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”
Think of John Keats’ negative capability, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This from a letter he writes to his brothers on December 22, 1818.
Even though I do know in terms of a standard biography what happens to John Robert Harvey after beginning to read Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1980, or was it 1979, when I sit down to write the boy and his possible connection to the fellow who’s writing now . . . well I just don’t know, I don’t know what will happen as the words spill out, sentences attempt to follow grammatical rules because nothing that did or did not happen roots itself deep in stone—thinking backwards and forwards I don’t know what will happen within and without all these jottings . . . my story in the moment of writing has so many infinite loops and labyrinths that I just don’t know. Consider a view of René Magritte’s The Treachery Of Images (1929).
