What Sowell Bay Knows
On Cameron, an octopus, and the room to become an acting being
Paul Tan
Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures is streaming on Netflix, which means a great many people who never quite got around to reading the book are now able to spend a Tuesday evening with Tova and Cameron and an octopus, and will turn off their tv feeling something they may not have a word for. We had the book on our shelf, but ended up listening to the audiobook on the drive home from visiting our son in the Bay Area, which turned out to be appropriate because the route Cameron travels in the novel is mostly the route we were driving. If you have not yet met any of these characters, the rest of this essay is friendlier if you spend the next two hours watching them first.
Let’s explore the journey of one person and the relationships that evolve. Cameron Cassmore is, when we first meet him, a hungover thirty-year-old in the Central Valley of California, sleeping on his friend Brad’s couch, fired from another job, carrying nothing very valuable except a long-shot theory about a wealthy stranger in Puget Sound who might be his father. He is, in practical terms, homeless. The novel does not use that word for him often, because it is set in a town where the word would not yet apply in its harshest sense. In any American city, Cameron would be one more young adult drifting through a service system that does not know what to do with him. I have spent thirty years in community work in Southeast Seattle. I have met a great many Camerons. The novel is, among other things, a story about what one of them might find if he found the right town.
Cameron is not who you think he is
I am not going to hesitate to speak openly anymore, because the public conversation about homelessness in our city tends to focus on the most visible and most acute cases — the tent encampments, the open drug use, the people in obvious psychiatric distress on downtown sidewalks. Those cases are real and the serious, well-funded clinical and chaplaincy responses that careful practitioners in this city have been building are what is appropriate. Sparrow Etter Carlson at Sacred Streets and the legacy of Reverend Craig Rennebohm’s Mental Health Chaplaincy have given Seattle a body of work, now extended in Rennebohm and Zahniser’s new academic text Whole Community Pathways to Mental Health, that is a thorough treatment of what it means to walk alongside people in the deepest distress. That work is essential. Nothing I am going to write here diminishes it.
But Cameron, in the novel, is not the deepest-distress case. He is not psychotic. He is not in active addiction crisis. He is not, when we meet him, the person on the corner with the sign. He is, in fact, the much larger and much less visible population — the working homeless, the couch-surfers, the lost young adults, the immigrant families doubled up four to a room, the recently fired warehouse worker living in his car, the woman bagging your groceries who you have begun to suspect is sleeping at her sister’s only sometimes. He is the vast middle of American homelessness, who do not need a clinical intervention so much as they need a town — a place that can hold them long enough for a life to take root again.
He is the vast middle of American homelessness, who do not need a clinical intervention so much as they need a town — a place that can hold them long enough for a life to take root again.
This middle is not where the public conversation usually goes, because the middle is harder to see. The middle does not appear in the tent-encampment photos. The middle does not generate the political pressure that drives the policy debate. The middle is, mostly, the people behind your local fast food counter, in the back of community college classrooms not quite making it, at the day labor pickup spots, picking through the dollar bins at the Goodwill. They are, for the most part, functional. They are also, frankly, without a station in any fabric of relations that holds them. Cameron is one of them, and the novel is the story of what happens when one such person finds a town that has room for him.
The octopus who sees what us humans cannot
Before I get to Cameron’s town, I want to spend a moment with Marcellus, because the novel does something with him that turned out to be the structural premise of the whole book. Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus in a tank of the Sowell Bay Aquarium. He narrates a quarter of the book. He has been mapping the human inhabitants of his aquarium for four years from inside his glass tank, watching them assume he is not watching, accumulating the kind of patient cross-referenced knowledge of human behavior that only a being who cannot leave the room ever fully develops.
He is a literary trick. The trick works because Van Pelt makes him, genuinely persuasive, and the audio version gives him an endearing British accent. His intelligence is distributed across eight arms that each can do something different at the same time, which makes him a better metaphor for what a community’s awareness actually looks like than any single human mind. He sees who Cameron is before any of the human characters do. He sees who Tova is. He sees the connection between them long before they see it themselves, and he undertakes, through the only means available to a creature of his physiology, to bring it into the light.
The wisdom in Sowell Bay is not concentrated in any one head. It is distributed across many heads, and the octopus is the form in which the novel lets itself say so.
The wisdom in Sowell Bay is not concentrated in any one head. It is distributed across many heads, the knitting circle, Avery at the paddle shop, Ethan at the Shop-Way, the high school student at the aquarium, the realtor who is also a neighbor, and yes, the octopus who watches them. The story’s quiet claim is that this is what a functioning community actually consists of. Many people knowing many things about each other, holding the knowing across time, and acting on a small fraction of what they know that the next day asks them to act on. Marcellus is the figure of that attentive seeing. He is what the work looks like from the inside when it is operating. He is also, in a quiet way, the figure of mortality — he knows his time is short, and the work of bringing Cameron to Tova is part of how he chooses to spend it.
What Tova had been carrying
Tova has lost her son Erik, thirty years before the novel begins, to the water. He vanished one summer night at eighteen from a small boat, and what the town had quietly believed, and what Tova had been carrying alone for three decades, was that Erik had taken his own life. There had been only the empty boat, a fight with Tova earlier that evening, the rumors that follow a young man’s disappearance in a small town, and the long private suspicion of a mother that she had somehow missed what was coming.
Then, in a small scene the novel could easily have dropped — and the film briefly includes — Tova encounters Adam Wright. Adam was Erik’s classmate. They start talking on a park bench (outside a restaurant in the movie), and Adam mentions something he has carried in his own memory since high school. On the day Erik disappeared, he had asked Adam about borrowing a few of his mother’s beers. He had wanted to impress a girl. He had not, in Adam’s recollection, been a young man planning to take his own life. He had been a young man on his way somewhere, with a six-pack and an idea, who had then had a tragic accident on the water.
Tova is undone by this, in the gentlest possible way. The mystery is not solved — the cause of Erik’s death is still the water — but the worst version of the story has been disproved by a piece of information that had been sitting inside Adam Wright for thirty years and had finally found its way to her. Erik had not been planning to leave. Erik had been planning to flirt. The difference is the entire weight of Tova’s last three decades. Adam Wright was not a counselor. He was a classmate with a memory. He gave it to Tova because they had a chance meeting, and they had been part of the same town long enough that a conversation could surface a detail that no formal process would ever have surfaced. The town held the information until the right moment found the right bench.
What Cameron is carrying, and what he isn’t
Cameron arrives in Sowell Bay carrying very little. His aunt Jeanne, who raised him after his mother walked out, is several states away in the Welina trailer park. He has a half-formed engineering aptitude that no school ever helped him develop, a tendency to remember useless plant facts, and a story about his father that turns out to be wrong in the way it is right. He has the bag. He has very little in it.
What Cameron does not have is a place. A place not in the sense of a location, but in the older sense — a station in a fabric of relations, a spot on the loom where the threads of other people’s lives have made room for him to be a thread alongside them. He has bounced from job to job, from couch to couch, from delusion to delusion, because none of the places he has been in has had a station for him. Every story he has told about his life has been about who his father might have been, because in the absence of a place, you grasp at a person. The person is supposed to give you the place. The person almost never does.
In the absence of a place, you grasp at a person. The person is supposed to give you the place. The person almost never does.
This is what most of the middle of American homelessness actually looks like, once you sit with it long enough. Not primarily a clinical problem. Not primarily a housing problem, although housing is part of it. A place problem, in the older sense. A person without a station in any loom that has been kept open for them long enough to be received.
Why the service system cannot quite do what Sowell Bay does
Let’s think about this, because we need a language for what the service architecture in our cities does to people like Cameron, and the language is not yet common in the American conversation. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, in a book published earlier this year called Situation and Constellation, has made a careful argument that gives us what we need.
Rosa’s claim runs as follows. Late-modern societies have shifted, across most institutional domains, from a mode he calls acting to a mode he calls executing. Acting requires room for play within a complex, ambiguous, often unbounded human situation — room that demands the exercise of judgment, which in turn rests on experience and on relationship. Executing means carrying out rules, following directives, implementing decisions that have been made elsewhere. The shift is driven, Rosa argues, by a structural pressure to reduce complex situations to single-parameter constellations that can be processed by the systems we have built to scale up. This is necessary in many domains. It is also, in domains where human formation actually happens, structurally destructive. When you cannot act, you cannot grow. When the staff who serve you cannot act, they cannot help you grow either. Both parties — the worker and the served — become executors in a system that has no room for play.
This is what has happened, gradually but nearly universally, to the service architecture for the broader homeless population in American cities. The case worker does not have time, in the parametric structure of her caseload, to sit on a bench with a person. The intake assessment does not have a field for the slow accumulated knowledge of a particular human across years. The funder cannot count the friendships. The dashboard cannot register the hour Avery spent at the paddle shop talking with Cameron about a paddleboard he could not afford to buy. The system, optimized for throughput, is no longer set up to produce what Rosa calls a successful life — gelingendes Leben, the German has a single word for it — in the people who pass through it. It is set up to produce cases that have moved through the system in the correct sequence at the correct dosage. These are not the same outcome.
The system, optimized for throughput, is no longer set up to produce what Rosa calls a successful life. It is set up to produce cases that have moved through the system in the correct sequence at the correct dosage. These are not the same outcome.
I am not making a critique of social workers, or of the institutions that employ them. It is neither. Most of the workers I know in this city are thoughtful people doing the best they can with a structure that has gradually eaten the conditions of their own ability to do the work. They are also, clearly, the people Rosa is mostly describing: practitioners whose room to act has been progressively reduced by parametric optimization, who burn out at rates the field has documented for decades, who entered the work because they wanted to be present to other human beings and who find themselves, after a few years, mostly entering data. The burnout is not from low wages, but from low agency. The eating of the workers and the eating of the served are two sides of the same problem. The problem is not in either of them. The problem is in the regime they are both inside.
What Sowell Bay has that the service system cannot
Here is the thing that struck me about who saves Cameron in the novel. None of them is a case manager. None of them is a therapist. None of them is running a program. The aquarium hires him because they need someone to mop floors and Ethan vouches for him. Avery at the paddle shop talks with him because he wandered in, she gives him some lotion — just because. Tova, eventually, learns that she is his grandmother, and thirty years of unspent grandmothering offers her a different opportunity than the retirement facility. Adam Wright, in his small way, saved Tova first by giving her back her son’s last night, which is part of what made her able, three decades later, to receive a different young man.
Ethan Mack at the Shop-Way is a sturdy and important figure in Cameron’s recovery. Ethan came to Sowell Bay from somewhere else, years before Cameron, carrying his own version of a carrier bag. The town slowly made room for him. He is now the older man Cameron is going to become if Sowell Bay does for Cameron what it did for Ethan. The novel does not foreground this. It does the work in the background. One man stands behind the counter of a small-town store and lives a kind life. The younger man, eventually, sees that this is also a way to be.
None of these people is operating in the executing mode. None of them is following a protocol. None of them is producing measurable throughput. They are simply acting — in Rosa’s sense — with the small room for play they have, on the slow accumulated knowledge they carry about each other and about the place. The work that received Cameron is not a service. It is a fabric of small repeated acts of judgment by people who have stayed long enough to know what their judgment is for. This is what Rosa calls a successful life in action. This is the room to act (in German — Spielraum) that the executing machine has been gradually eliminating from American service work.
Why this matters for the population the city is not really seeing
The Companionship work that Sacred Streets and the Rennebohm-Zahniser framework offer is essential for the people in the deepest distress. It cannot, however, by its own design, reach the broader population I have been describing — the working homeless, the precariously housed, the young adults like Cameron whose collapse is gradual rather than acute. That population is largely outside the chaplaincy and deep-clinical frame because their distress has not yet crossed the threshold at which those frameworks are activated. They are inside the service system, executing the steps the system requires, performing the right inputs to receive the right outputs. They are not, in any meaningful sense, being formed. They are not, in Rosa’s language, becoming acting beings. They are, in many cases, more lonely and more lost after engagement with the service system than they were before, because the system has trained them to be the clients it knows how to process, rather than the persons they might become.
What this broader population needs is not better services and not deeper clinical intervention, although both of those, well done, remain necessary at the edges. What they need are “rooms in which they can act.” Rooms in which the executing mode is suspended, in which judgment is permitted, in which the slow accumulated knowing of one person by another is the actual currency. They need the equivalent of Sowell Bay’s aquarium, its Shop-Way counter, its paddle shop, its knitting circle on Tuesday afternoons. They need places where they can be received as persons rather than processed as cases.
They need places where they can be received as persons rather than processed as cases.
These rooms are being built, in small ways, in this city and others. The Slow Table I have been writing about. The Friday night drum circle. The Community Anchor for families with young children. The maker’s bench. The household with a young person in the spare room. None of these is a program in the technical sense. All of them are practices that produce, over time, what Rosa would call Anverwandlung — the transformative appropriation of a world, the slow way a person comes to belong to a place by acting within it. These rooms are not in competition with the Companionship work or with the service system. They are the substrate the other two are supposed to be operating on, and which has been in most American communities, mostly eaten by the executing machine.
What this means for the rest of us
If you live in any American city now, you are surrounded by Camerons. Not always visibly. Some are on the corner with a sign. Most are not. Most are bagging your groceries, serving your coffee, sitting at the back of community college classrooms, sleeping in their cars in arrangements that will collapse in a few weeks. They are not, mostly, in active crisis. They are in the slower crisis of being executors of their own lives without ever having been given room to act. They are not waiting for a service. They are waiting, mostly without knowing it, for a town.
You are also surrounded by Tovas. Older neighbors carrying things alone that nobody has thought to ask them about. Grief that has gone underground because nobody has been on the right park bench at the right Tuesday afternoon for thirty years. Adams who happen to remember a detail that could free somebody if the conversation ever got around to it. The whole landscape of American life, in any neighborhood where the fabric has thinned, is full of these unfinished exchanges — information that has not found its body, welcome that has not found its young person, an empty chair at a table that has not been set yet.
The public conversation about what to do for the people in deepest distress in our cities is dominated by the credentialed professions and by serious chaplaincy work like Sparrow’s. None of this is the conversation I want to have here. I want to have a different conversation, with the rest of us, the ones who are not in the helping professions and have mostly assumed that the work of being with the lost is somebody else’s job.
It is not somebody else’s job. The credentialed work at the acute end is being done as well as it can be done by the people doing it. The broad middle, the population I have been describing, is the responsibility of all of us — not because the professions are failing them, but because the professions, by their design and by the executing regime they have been forced inside, cannot reach them. The work for this population is the work of neighbors and friends and aunts and classmates on park benches and shop counter regulars and old women with thirty years of unspent grandmothering. It is the work of rooms in which acting is again possible. It is the work the rest of us could do, if we were willing.
The willingness is the hard part. It is hard because it requires being knowable and available (yes — vulnerable), and being patient with the slow accumulation of presence that the executing regime has trained us out of. The young person who is going to make it through is going to make it through because somebody let them in, kept letting them in, and was patient with the months or years it took for the letting-in to do its work. The somebody is not a program. The somebody is a person, or several people, who took the risk of letting their own life be visible to another life that was, at the start, a stranger’s. Adam Wright did a much smaller version of this when he sat down on the bench and started talking. That is how the work usually begins.
The picnic
The film, at the end, gives us something the novel did not quite. In the last pages, Cameron and Tova are playing Scrabble in her new condominium, just the two of them, the small sweet life they have chosen. It is a fine ending. The film closes differently. The film closes with a picnic by the sea — Tova and Cameron, yes, but also Avery and her son Marco, and Ethan from the Shop-Way, and several of the knitting circle. A long table set on the waterfront. The breathtaking Pacific Northwest bay behind it. Plates set, people playing. Tova calling everyone to come and eat.
The picnic is not what the story was about. The picnic is what the story was for. Cameron’s recovery was never going to be Cameron-and-Tova alone in a condo. It was going to be Cameron with a town. The town was the answer the whole time. Sowell Bay was Cameron’s housing program and his behavioral health program and his vocational training and his clinical intervention, although it was none of those things and would have failed if anyone had tried to organize it as them. It was a group of ordinary people who were still able to act — in the older sense — with each other, who carried each other’s not-yet-finished stories across decades, and who, when the time came, set a table on the waterfront with enough chairs for everyone.
The picnic is not what the story was about. The picnic is what the story was for … Sowell Bay was Cameron’s housing program and his behavioral health program and his vocational training and his clinical intervention.
Marcellus, near the end of the book, looking back over his four years among the humans of Sowell Bay, allows himself one summary judgment of our species. For the most part, he tells us, we are dull and blundering. But occasionally, he says, we can be remarkably bright creatures.
This is, I think, the register. We are mostly muddling. We are mostly executing. And occasionally, in particular rooms and benches and Tuesday afternoons and Friday evenings, in some small willingness to be known by another person across time, we again become acting beings. The brightness is what does the work. Marcellus sees it before the humans do. He spends his last attention trying to make the connection the humans cannot yet make for themselves. He is what the work looks like from the place where the work is fully visible: a creature who knows the time is short, who chooses to spend it on the connection that needs to be made, and who does what he can with what he has.
Most American cities no longer have the long table set by the sea. They could. They are not going to have it because a program built it, and they are not going to have it because the service system was funded more generously. They are going to have it, if they have it, because people who were not paid to do this work decided to do it anyway. People willing to suspend the executing mode for an evening. People willing to sit on the bench. People willing to be the next Adam, the next Ethan, the next Tova, when their own moment comes.
This is what I want to write about next, in the corner of Seattle where I work, where some of us have been quietly building rooms, and slow tables, in which acting is again possible. The rooms are not Sowell Bay’s. They are ours. The work is the same.