Call and Response - the Folkways of the Urban Bicycle Commuter

Before a man is going to push his boulder up the hill there are a few questions he must answer. So too did I have to answer some questions before I got going: first, "Am I strong enough?"; second, "Can I keep the bicycle in good working condition?"; third, "Can I be safe, pushing this boulder?"

I take this third more seriously now than I did when I was a bicycle messenger in D.C. one summer in college. I shudder to think of the things I did then: riding one way the wrong way down one-way streets in rush hour. Being willing to do almost anything to avoid stepping down of the bike - cutting across busy intersections at crazy angles, veering up onto the sidewalk heedless of (even rejoicing in) the stricken looks on the pedestrian faces.

I am a materially different person these days. Old and fat. A father. Winner of bread. It would not do to die or be maimed or suffer the dependent and deranged state of the traumatically brain injured. That of course could still happen, but meanwhile I will try to do my bit not to raise the odds. One of my goals, after all, is to get healthier.

That was not the only kind of safety to consider. The neighborhoods through which I would ride are the stuff of white-flight nightmares: abandoned row-houses, arrests on the street, poverty, suspicion, and violence. Or so I imagined. The fact is that the intra-urban interstate I commuted along in my car conveniently circumvented most of these neighborhoods, and I know of them mostly by rumor. So, to "do this safely" is coded language. Coded for me and for others who ask about my riding in the City: first they clearly think of how narrow and congested many of the City's street's are, and then they almost inevitably ask, "Wait, how do you ride home? What route do you take? What neighborhoods do you ride through?" So, I thought about that, too.

What I mostly thought was that this plan would not work if I were to ride, guarded and paranoid, can of mace or other milky defense mechanism clutched in one hand, down the hill and up. I did not want to spend an hour and a half a day afraid. So I took the opposite tack. I decided to say hello to folks as I went along: embrace the whole thing. The advantage of a bicycle is that you are going slowly enough (especially at first, and especially uphill on the way home) that you can call out and there is enough time for a response.

So that's what I did; what I do. On days when the weather is not too heinous (storming so I can't see, or blowing a tornado watch's worth of headwinds my way), I try to say hello to most folks I see. I try not to be obnoxious about it - if someone's not making eye contact, is on the phone or whatever, I leave them alone, but otherwise I throw a "Mornin", "Evenin", or "How you doin?" their way. Almost all of the people I interact with to and from work are African American. Probably two-thirds of them respond to the call, but here's the thing: not one of them has been rude or hostile or paranoid. Everyone who responds has been nice, and I get all kinds of responses back: "Hey", "Why hello, how are you?", "'Sup?", "Be safe", "What's goin on, big man?", "Mornin", "Evenin", "Hey, Brother", endless variations in the various accents telling of lifelong city residency, immigration from the Carolinas or other points south, or New York or Philly. I had a conversation with one guy in a car at the end of the summer about the importance of hydration - he had just come from working out and I was nodding my head to the music coming through his open windows. He told me to make sure I got enough water because it was hot and it was important for my health.

Occasionally the call comes from the pedestrians, and not from me - one young man was waiting for a bus, listing to headphones and nodding his head in time to the music. I was going slowly up the hill, not pushing too hard, so I also started nodding, which brought his exuberant call of "My nigga wid a bike!", to which I could only smile and keep pedaling. I had never been anyone's nigga wid a bike before. Pretty great, really. Another man called out "Hey I keep seeing you!" - pleased - and I gave my response.

Occasionally - usually at night - I might get a long stare, and once, from a kid who looked like he was about ten, a real eyefuck and chinthrust, and a call, "You police?" I just laughed. He asked once again on another night but I just shook my head and kept riding. His assumption has left me pondering, but I'll write about that later. Once a young man in a car waited till I was abreast of him and blew his horn - I jumped, and all the guys in his car laughed, but it was not malicious and I was willing to be the object of fun. Another guy rode his scooter by me going my way, honking tonically, laughing like a madman, but again he didn't bother me (and the sudden honk from the loud car horn is much more effective than the long blare of a slowly approaching scooter anyway).

Overall these interactions with the people along my route have been the most gratifying, most unlooked-for and wonderful part of my experience. That there is such a pleasant interaction between strangers of different backgrounds in this City just feels very good to me, better than the weight loss and sticking it to Big Oil. I do not fool myself that there is more to these interactions than there are. After all, folks are mostly just being polite. But the fact is that I don't think the white folks would be as polite to unknown black folks coming through their neighborhoods. If I ride through a white neighborhood and say "Hey" I often do not get any response. And so I am grateful for the people who are polite and warm to me, because it makes my life easier in a small but very important way.

My favorite call and response? I was leaving work, exhausted one evening and frazzled from the day. If I leave too late, the ride home is a little jangly and there is no flow, no rhythm to the ride. This was the worst so far - my rear view mirror that clips onto my glasses had worked itself loose a few blocks from where I work. I reached up with one hand to adjust it, but then I saw a car coming around the corner in front of me: no big deal but without thinking I grabbed the front brake, lost control of the bike and went down, landing painfully on my left thigh. I pulled my bike to the far side of the street to check out my pager, on which I had landed and my bike, and to finally get the mirror situated. Across the street and behind me there had been a group of kids - five or six of them, about eight or nine years old on average, probably. These kids live right there, in the projects, in lives that that tend to be steeped in drugs and violence. (These lives I know a little more about because of the toll of this kind of life on the mental health of the residents in the community. One young man told my colleague, who kept telling him to take his meds at dinnertime every day, "You keep telling me to take my meds at dinnertime, but I live in the ghetto, and I don't know what this 'dinnertime' is, we don't have dinner....") So, right after I went down, one girl started cackling at the top of her lungs: "He fell! Oh, my God, he fell! HAHAHAHAAHA, did you see that, heeee fffffeeeeeeelllllllll". I flushed with quick anger and humiliation, but the obvious glee that she was taking in my downfall was infectious, and after about a second and a half I found myself smiling ruefully. It was dusk so it was a little hard to see, and I wasn't interested in facing my mocker, so I just kept checking the bike. Then, the call came, from one of the older boys in the group: "Hey, are you OK?" And my response: "Yeah, thanks, I'm just embarrassed." And I got on my bike and rode off. That the boy would reach across the gulf and ask me, an old white guy from the suburbs, if I was OK, when he had nothing to gain but just because it was a common, decent thing to do, has been by far my favorite moment, born of my clumsiness and his willingness to ignore the class and race differences dividing us.

I have a couple of friends who have been punched while riding their bikes or scooters. I don't know whether that will happen to me, and if it does how my answer to the question of whether I can do this safely will change. For now the answer to the third question I asked myself before setting out to become a bicycle commuter - the question of safety - has been answered, at least for the moment, but in a way that is more nuanced than was the original question. How safe is it to depend on foreign oil? To get fat? To ignore the struggles of poor neighborhoods and remain fundamentally ignorant of the lives of those who surround us? I feel less afraid, less isolated, less weak than I did when I started, and I am grateful. For now that is more than enough.

This Roma Girl

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.

Romans in Sturdy Denim

Marketing is mostly bunkum. Politics is mostly marketing, at least during an election season. And if you are interested in the invisible substrate of our collective assumptions--many of which we individually doubt--then nearly everything is political. So how is it that even if we don't see the world the way that we are told Joe the Plumber sees it, we still feel limited in some way by what Joe will supposedly swallow? Fictitious weathervanes of public opinion. Was it ever thus? At any rate, advertising, mythologizing, self-narration, romancing, bullying, pep-talking, vogueing, bunkum--these are sister muses. Especially in an age as persuaded by the rhetoric of images as our own.

V recently commented on my feeling located vis a vis all this American stuff. And the troof of course is that I'm no more located than him. We have equal rights to America, and similar scruples about the ethics of authenticy, about the misappropriation of images by marketers. And maybe a similar body memory of the sting when we're reminded that we might be wearing plaid or whatever, we might be out in the same heat working for the same shit wage, but we're still college boys. I spent a summer in California heat moving scrap metal and used car batteries that had accumulated for years in the inferno of the narrow alley between two corrogated metal warehouses. Coming in overheated and with my clothes coming to pieces from the battery acid, and the old guys who worked there year around just laughed at me, never allowed me the honor of being one of them, even insofar as I was doing a job even they weren't willing to do because I had to have the money. And I suppose even so I wasn't one of them. But why, exactly?

Their suspicion is not without cause, of course. Think of the "Tea Party" "movement" with its familiar Reagan era rhetoric of an evangelical Christian national founding and a monolithic set of "American values". This is a fantasy of the American past. Americans have always been deeply divided; the Union was always tenuous; our present sea to shining sea thing would have been unthinkable to anyone at the Constitutional Convention. If you don't believe me, o Koch brothers, read the handsome two volume Library of America record of the proceedings. Interesting and scary stuff.

And the Tea Partiers are not alone in their more or less deliberate revisions of the past. Both sides do it. We all do it. "Revisionism", though,--and the quotation marks are buzzing like flies, here, as they always do around this fecund poop--is just one way of slinging it. How about "reinvention"? How about "self-interested reinvention"? How about "interested but historically responsible reinvention as one important mode of problem solving"? How about that?

Levi's and L.L. Bean have both recently taken an interest in their own past. And in the case of Levi's in particular, their past has real significance as an image of what is worth repeating in the American past. This despite a history of exploiting other peoples' ideas and labor and distorting their own history in various ways. Levi's hired an in-house historian, Lynn Downey, in 1989, and the brand has wheeled out variations on old designs, some of them very good, and made their archives available to the public. The fact remains that you can buy two pairs of sturdy denim jeans, which Levi's actually does make, and they will, with reasonable care, get you through several years of multi-purpose use. The popularity of such practical clothing, and the fact that in the West at any rate, you can wear them most places without being discourteous to your hosts, says something good--to my mind, anyway--about one aspect of our national values. It's a strange brand of populism that is so fearful about manipulations of the market by "socialism" but shows no interest in manipulations of the market by corporations. It is also perhaps a strange brand of populism that characterizes the poor as subject to a kind of hereditary illness, and seems--in its public rhetoric, anyway-- to have a hard time imagining that the poor could share the pleasures of work. Work clothes made of sturdy denim that show the line of the body, allow free movement and are reinforced at stress points with steel rivets? That's not a bad start for a populist platform.

Of course it's marketing for Levi's, and they have no particular scruples about where populism ends and bullshit begins. Their ads are beautiful lifestyle marketing, like so much marketing. But look at this recent ad--short film, really--and this one which uses what is probably a wax cylinder recording of Whitman deliberately reciting four lines of 'America', his voice holding you so close to the four-beat rhythms of the lines that you feel his hairy chest, the cross-tie scratchings of the cylinder clipping through camera frames like a train.

I hate business writing, so bold-face-emphatic and easy-to-summarize, but I recently heard this thing that might actually be true: "A leaders hire A people; B leaders hire C people." So who are you willing to invite into your self-interested reinventions with you? How much of their voice and vision will you let in? Do they get to speak, or will you merely take a couple names in vain? Is this Levis' ad marketing--speech--that dares to enter the room with something truly anarchic and physical? Something like American Eros? To me it is.

IKNOWYOUHATEMEBABYBUTDON'TBREAKTHENEEDLE

When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.

The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.

And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.

(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)

But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.

This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.

And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.

Io Sono L'Amore Orange Preoccupation Pumpkin Pie

Zest of one orange in the crust
2 cups squashed up roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of half & half
4 oblong chicken eggs
1/8 t each of allspice, nutmeg, clove & cayenne
(Nota bene: as you add the cayenne, briefly imagine one daughter saying that she just likes pumpkin pie regular, and another daughter asking why do things have to get different, and then put in)
1 t of ground ginger.
Then in the whipped cream: ground fresh ginger, crystalized ginger cut up real small, the zest of another orange, powdered shug, and a passing afterthought of vanilla. (Things are getting less precise by this point.)

Serve with Belgian ale or a squinch of whiskey or do what you think best.

Enemies and Friends, Updates

Enemies

Deer

The Internet

God

Former Enemies Now Listed as Friends

Tobacco

Romance Novels

My Penis

Io Sono L'Amore

I am confused and a little embarrassed by the responses to "Io Sono L'Amore". Even the people who praise this movie are embarrassed by it. The Manchester Guardian is careful to slobber on Tilda Swinton's Wellies before tut-tutting without eye contact through another 9 paragraphs. Even Manohla Dargis from the NY Times, whom one would think could get this sort of film because she's really hot, is careful to mention that she's familiar with the whole art-film-as-bodice-ripper thing, and that if she wept a bit it was just that damn gorgeous but literate molar twanging away. Ah, yes--the senses. We took a class in those at Fillintheblankfordbridge.

Even Anthony Lane, who seems almost unembarrassable, begins by separating himself from those who may have just wholeheartedly loved it. First line of his review: "The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn." Funny, sort of, but also through-away for someone like Lane, and mostly useful as a kind of Purell for sincerity.

Part of what all this makes me wonder is. Well, first of all it makes me wonder if I'm an emptyheaded goof. And it's partly the frequency with which that question comes up that leads to my other, also perennial, question: Is a certain sort of sensual knowingness actually an innoculation against the senses? Because in my experience if you open yourself to the senses they will fuck you up (that lovely mulled wine phrase). We all have our stories, and it's hard to tell them because they are specifically beyond words. They're about how we come to remember that something is beyond words, about how a single full sensory experience can mobilize years of thinking.

"Io Sono L'Amore" is about that. It's also about the growing and preparation and eating of food, about various shades of saturated orange, about the way that gorgeous interiors come to have the appearance of a real world and ensnare us, and about the difference between bodies when they are owned and bodies when they are royal. It gives itself to certain excesses. But I think what embarrasses people is that the camera lingers on the textures of things in the way that the senses actually linger. Before we drag them back to the task "at hand". So many tasks never so much as civilly greet the hand. (I love that cloth also has "hand".)

And but love. It is a pagan eye that ranges from the grasshopper on a tendril to the spires of the Duomo di Milano, and finds oranges and reds everywhere--Swinton's hair, upholstery fabric, flecks of light on skin and on clay, spices and fruits--everywhere shades of orange. And when Swinton makes her final appearance, or disappearance, pumpkin orange and a gold that seems to trap light spread from the saffron wool rug that marks her sudden absence to illuminate the memory of everything you've seen for the last two hours. Please see this.

Instructions for the Build-Your-America Kit (The final project for my Constructing America course)

You're going to assemble your own kit. Sources include everything ever done, said, written or made that seems to you in some meaningful sense American. You'll need a problem to work on, a collection of sources that offer possible solutions, and finally you'll propose a solution to your problem through a work of your own that draws on your sources and also includes your own best shot at an answer.

1. A persistent grudge or great hope to guide you. As you go through a day or leaf through a newspaper, what bothers you? What do you characteristically rant about or dream and plan about? Work on that.

2. Your own anthology of texts and test cases.

Once you begin to have a sense of what your area might be, begin to look around and see what has been tried before. If you're interested in American experiments in communal living, you might want to read about the Quakers, the Oneida Community, child-rearing customs among the Plains Indians, etc. If you're interested in vernacular architecture you might want to read about barn raisings, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House, or the connections between Navajo adobe dwellings and modern passive solar rammed-earth houses. If you're interested in American forms of feminism you might be interested in reading about Puritan female healers, Mormon female priests, and the Seneca Falls Declaration. If you're interested in American health care, I really have no idea, but the school and the city are full of people who know stuff.

So many more things have been attempted on this continent than one could be aware of. Before you conclude that American music is only rock and country, check out shape note singing, the hammer dulcimer, and Ogalala chant. Become an expert on things in your chosen area that no one has ever heard of. Begin to gather a shelf of books, clippings, web links, diagrams, artifacts, recordings--whatever seems helpful. Begin to keep notes about what possibilities they suggest. These are your working materials. We'll ask to see them so we can talk with you about them.

3. Now make something that seems like a sort of answer to your problem or question or hope. What we will want you to present will certainly need to include historically grounded writing of your own, but might also include other sorts of work if it seems demonstrably connected to your research. We will want an essay but we might also be sold on the need for making songs, a barn, a health care plan, etc.

You'll have lots of opportunities to try out parts of your thinking with people in the class. For now, just dig in and start gathering and thinking.

How I Survived Depression One Summer

One summer my friend Kirk came out to visit. We grew up together and had maintained our friendship despite living on opposite coasts. For years we had talked of taking a trip together, finally the opportunity came, and Kirk flew out west. The night that he arrived we took out maps, talked about sites to see in San Francisco, and read guide books about the California coast. As we talked he soon noticed I was distant and uninterested.

“What’s going on?” He asked.

“I don’t know. I'm bored. I’m tired. I actually don’t care what we do.” Kirk looked at me a moment then shrugged his shoulders, “Alright, no plan. Tomorrow we drive.” The next morning we loaded the car, “Let’s head north, back toward the Siskiyous,” Kirk said, referring to the mountains where we grew up. I had no opinion.

I drove as Kirk took out a CD, “Listen to this,” he instructed. He put in the Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan and the Band working with ancient American folk tunes. He rolled down the windows and turned up the music. “Listen to this stuff…murderers, lovers, hobos, moonshiners, drug addicts…they’re singing about America. The one we live in but don’t talk about.”

I listened as we drove across the dry farm fields of the Central Valley. The day was heating up, we rolled the windows down. “We need beer and tacos,” Kirk announced and then directed me to a stand he knew just outside of U.C. Davis. There were coyotes painted on the windows with students, homeless men, and suburban mom’s standing in line. “Go get some of that salsa,” he told me. “The orange stuff.” I did as I was told, found a table and sat down. Kirk returned with grilled shrimp, carnitas, and a plate of corn tortillas. “I’m going to get beer. You want one?”

“I’m driving.”

“So what, we’ll wait it out. This is medicine.”

Kirk returned and stuffed sliced limes down the golden bottle necks. “Try the habeneros. They’re hot as hell. You know that peppers release oxcitosin in your brain? It’s the same thing as runner’s high. Here get some more of this on you shrimp, but don’t touch it or you’ll burn your fingers.” He smiled and drank half his beer in one lift. I ate and drank mechanically, my mind empty, my mouth burning. We went out and dozed beside a patio table, our faces toward the sun, then headed north into the mountains.

Kirk lowered the window to breath the air steamed with pine sap, forest loam, and lake algea, “Listen to this music!” The vocals muffled, the microphone far from Dylan’s mouth. The drums heavy and slow. “You hear that tempo!” Kirk yelled to the trees, the passing cars, over the motor, over the radio and the air brakes, “That’s hump tempo, brother. Hump tempo!”

We saw signs to the Trinity wilderness, “Turn here.” Kirk pointed. We left the interstate and took the highway along the Salmon river. The mountains were steep and soon the sun was buried by the trees, leaving the sky propane blue. We wound along the river until a yellow bulb appeared, screwed to a wooden sign that read “Carl’s Fishing Cabin’s.” We woke the manager and paid for a night stay.

“Any place we can get some food?” I asked.

“Nope,” the manager said, half-turned toward bed. “I got a bag of pretzels.”

We paid two bucks for the pretzels, and Kirk found an orange in his back pack and quartered it. We set kitchen chairs in a clearing behind the cabins and looked up at the moonless night.

“I’m going to read something to you. Wait here. Kirk went indoors and came out with a night table. He rummaged inside then returned with a handful of candlesticks which he placed in a series of coffee cups and juice glasses. He lit the tilting candles, pulled a chair into their glow and opened a book. “This is Whitman. Now listen. Just feel the rhythm of this thing.”

We had no food for dinner, no plan for the next day, no television, or cell phone connection for distraction, so I sat outside and watched the stars spin and listened to Whitman mourn:

Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,

Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,

Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,

Loud human song, with the voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid and free and tender!

O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer,

I listened to Whitman’s song, felt his grief rhythms, breathed the warm night scent of the cedars and pines, pulled a blanket up to my neck, and quietly fell asleep.

The next morning we discovered the manager rented inflatable kayaks. We put on shorts and suntan lotion. We found two smashed peanut-butter granola bars in the trunk for breakfast. We filled water bottles, rented boats, life jackets, and paddles and had the manager shuttle us up river.

The day was bright and the river refreshingly cool and white. For the morning hours we stayed quiet, each of us navigating the rapids beneath the August sun, but towards the early afternoon the river skirt spread wide and heavy and eventually we found our kayaks spinning gently in an eddy shaded by young willow trees. Our skin burned red, our bodies tired from paddling, our stomachs empty, we each lay back in our kayaks and fell asleep. It was a half hour, maybe longer, before we rose and paddled the final half-mile to the fishing cabins while Kirk gave me his thoughts, "Buddhism is ancient psychology. They got a system to freedom. All we got is stories. Abraham trying to kill his son. Noah drunk and naked, sleeping with his daughters. That woman who puts a tent stake through a guys head. You see? We're just stories you and me. That's all we got." We pulled our kayaks up the river bank, returned them to the manager, and headed out on the highway mad with hunger.

As we drove out I remembered a restaurant my sister had once worked at. It was run by an Italian, a woman named Madelena from the island of Sardinia. The story was that Madelena was a celebrated five star chef in San Francisco. She married a wealthy, retired stockbroker and they built a vacation home up in Dunsmuir, a poor mountain town along the headwaters of the Sacramento River. After a couple of years, the marriage ended and Madelena kept the house in Dunsmuir, bought the abandoned train depot in town and turned it into a restaurant. From September through May she served dinner two nights a week, Friday and Saturday.

“That’s where we’re going.” Kirk announced. Once we got in cell range I called information and they put me through to Madelena’s. “We have one table at 9:00pm.”

“We’ll take it.” I told them.

We drove north, into the winding Siskiyous and came into Dunsmuir around 8 pm. We found the small depot and waited outside. The building was freshly painted--yellow marigold with blood red trim. Alongside the building was a large herb garden that smelled of marjoram and rosemary. We waited hungry and dehydrated. Finally our hour came and we took our seats. Madelena cooked in the middle of the room, surrounded by a wooden counter-top that came just below her shoulders. She wore a white summer dress with a white apron, her black hair pulled back with a bright red bandana. She was in her mid-50’s, and was startlingly beautiful, like a middle-aged Sofia Loren, dark hair, her eyes large and fierce, her skin browned by the sun. She worked confidently among the fry pans, and steaming pots, barking quick orders to her sue chef. She served the food on white plates then slammed her hand on the counter, causing the wait staff to leave their tasks to deliver the food fresh from the fire.

We were the last to be seated and as we perused the menu the restaurant began to empty out. The sight and smell of food made me delirious and I found myself breaking out in lust as I read descriptions of sliced tomatoes, avocadoes, salmon and swordfish. We made our selections, ordered a bottle of Chianti and waited. The appetizers arrived first. Two tender half moons of avocado filled with tiny squares of mozzarella, dressed in basil leaves, sliced cherry tomatoes, spring green chunks of avocado, all dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was exquisite. Soft and rich, the food melted in our mouths. I looked at Kirk and watched his eyes fill with tears. The waiter brought warm slices of pugliese, little plates of Sicilian olives covered in light green oil and sea salt. We dipped the warm crusted bread, ate the dark olives and drank our Chianti and began to laugh with a childlike pleasure at the taste of good food, the pleasure of hunger answered.

The salads arrived, crisp palms of endive covered in paper ribbons of parmesan cheese. Then plates of fresh green beans, crisp and sugary, pan-fired with toasted walnuts. Slowly, sacramentaly, we ate the green beans, now both of us silent, wiping tears from our faces. The smoky walnuts, the sweet green stems, it was like eating summer itself.

Then came the main course. Halibut grilled, covered in toasted fennel seeds. ribeye steak cooked in green peppercorns and olive oil. Warm summer vegetables, crook neck and zucchini. I remember my first taste of the fish she had prepared. It was like eating God, eating love, it was like tasting food for the first time. Through tears I said to my friend, “This is communion! No one can eat this and not feel one with God.”

The restaurant almost empty, emboldened by the wine, we began to cry out, “Madelana we worship you!” “Madelena, you are breaking our hearts!” “Madelena, you must come home with us!” We motherless men ate and drank and called to Madelena, our cook, our lover, our mother, the divine feminine incarnate. But Madelena, not unaware of her powers and the effect they had on men, ignored our cries of praise. She did not acknowledge us, nor the three or four men who lingered at her counter. Instead she stayed busy at her art, her large eyes attentive to her handiwork, her red lips even, without expression.

We ate and laughed and cried and shared our plates until Kirk pushed himself back from the table, and looked at me. I returned his smile, my senses awake, my heart alive, my head full of wonder. Kirk looked at me, and loved me, and called out into the half empty room, “More wine! More wine ! My friend is himself again. My friend has returned!”

I laughed, suddenly hearing the truth in his words. I had been lost, disconnected, stuck someplace within myself, outside of myself. Overwork, repressed feelings, overthinking, I had become detached, distant, stuck. But the movement of the river, the sun burning on my skin, the fasting from food, the smell of the woods, the throbbing music, the poetry of grief, the woman with ancient beauty, the culinary love-making, the care of a good friend had brought me home to myself.

Without thought, I stood upon my chair and called to Madelena. “Madelena you have healed me!” I raised my glass to her and she gave me a small smile and a quick nod.

The waiter returned with our check, we were now the only patrons left in the room. “But we’re still hungry,” I protested. “We’ve traveled far, the night is young, we’re not ready to leave.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied, “but the kitchen is closed.”

“That’s not possible,” I protested.

“Don’t you see,” Kirk interrupted. “We are two pilgrim souls. We alone can appreciate her gifts.”

The young waiter looked confused and embarrassed. “Let me talk to her.” We clinked our glasses and waited, in full confidence, that she could not turn away such devotion.

The waiter returned, “She wants to know what you want from her.”

“What we want?” I shouted, my heart now burning within. “We want her to feed us. We want everything! All of it! Until we are satisfied.” I stood and looked past the waiter, I looked at Madelena standing at the center of the room. “We want everything, the whole meal, repeated. The appetizers, the bread, the salads, the vegetables, the main courses, everything, everything, everything, all over again.”

At this my friend rose immediately to his feet. “Yes, yes! Exactly! Whatever the price! All of it!” We stood and watched and waited while Madelena studied us without expression. It was nearing eleven at night, the front door was locked, the tables had been cleared and set for the next day. We waited in confidence, with full hearts, with my desires returned and intact, we waited.

Then slowly, her face broke open, she looked at us, felt our hearts and smiled and said, “Sit down.”

“Hurray!” We shouted, like boys on a playground. We sat, our table was wiped clean, fresh napkins and silverware were placed in front of us, a new candle was lit and brought to our table, with new glassware, a fresh bottle of wine. We sat and we ate, slowly, gratefully, until long after midnight we ate and laughed and cried at the flavors and talked of past love, broken dreams, and sorrows. We ate and Kirk quoted poetry to Madelena, we drank and sang songs to Madelena. And later, as she ushered us out the front door, she kissed our cheeks goodnight and we walked across the street and found a room and slept the deep sleep of full-hearted men.

We slept until noon then awoke, refreshed, without hangovers or heaviness, and began the drive home. “Do you want breakfast?” Kirk asked. “Yes.” I told him, “I want pancakes and eggs, bacon, dark coffee and a beautiful waitress.”

“My friend is back.” Kirk smiled. And we headed for home.

Driving the Baby-Sitter

He drove the mini-van through the stonewall streets of suburban Wellesley. She sat shotgun, shoulders tense but otherwise her demeanor was more like an anthropologist that an actual babysitter. At a stop sign they sat for a minute, blinded in the slow rhythm of passing headlights. He tried to see her face in the shadows and beams; her face was all shadows and beams.

She read somewhere--some novel that fell into her flickering attention during the chemo--that adults gradually lose their faces. The responsive and unselfconscious face that children have hardens into a shiny mask. That made some sense. He seemed all gauzed over with care and a kind of eager safeness, but still nice. And still sort of like a kid, or maybe it was only the studied appearance of vulnerability, although she wanted it to be real. He was trying to see her partly-collapsed face without looking.

And then they were driving along one of the last stone walls and the turn at the swing set was familiar and they were talking about her next surgery and the waiting and rehab. And she said that she was done with being afraid of death. That if she died that was okay but that life was so good, so so good, and she was done with being afraid to be corny.

He seemed to be thinking about how to respond, and then only pressed his lips together in place of a smile and they pulled up to her parents' untouched lawn. She was used to this, to the look of faces trying to see her face, and it didn't bother her anymore. She wanted to see their faces, too, and maybe it wasn't so different. For just a moment his face was his real face, and she had to get out of the car.

Ill Wind....

The last two days have been especially windy, blowing hard and seemingly in my face, no matter which direction I ride. The wind tests my mettle: the landscape does not change, so the obstacles of hill and turn are relatively constant. The traffic changes but on my route is usually not bad the whole way (touch wood, etc.), and besides, the traffic is just people doing what I'm doing - trying to get somewhere. But the wind is both natural, and I cannot help think, capricious, changeable, and cruel, seeking to thwart my homeward aim. So narcissistic. So vain. I probably think this wind is about me. Ridiculous, right? Well, I thought so, but then tonight I was going easily up a gentle hill near the park and the wind suddenly started up again, pushing me back, but this time on the wind came the smell of freshly frying fish and chips from Hip Hop Fish and Chicken, and Man, does it smell good. I'm huffing and sweating against the wind, now contending with this visceral tugging sensation in my gut. So distracting. An ill wind blowing me no good, indeed.... I get around the corner and suddenly the smell and the wind die down, and I'm no longer being tested, punished. I become expansive, say Hey to folks as I ride by, and find myself smiling a little.

Life has its ups and downs....

My rock has two wheels, but every (work) day I roll it down the hill and back up again. Which, OK, is the opposite of what Sisyphus was required to do, but the idea seems to fit well enough. Sisyphus was a right bastard - greedy, murderous, and too clever for his own good - but a hero to some nonetheless. He was punished for hubris, made to roll a boulder up a hill every day only to watch it roll down that hill at the end of every day.

So. Late June, and the minivan dies. Or rather it needs $5000 worth of repairs, which is just about the value of this vehicle at the time (since it looks like it's been rolled down the hill a few too many times its own self). British Petroleum are busy pumping toxic dispersants on top of 5 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. My baseline emotional state at the time can best be described as impotent rage. Zeus, I tend to think, was peeing himself with laughter.

A radio report describes the change in our energy usage from oil in the 70s to coal now and the fact that really in order to reduce dependence on foreign oil we must reduce the amount of gasoline we use. How much we drive. My wife suggests we go down to one car. Our eldest is off to college in the fall, so we will be down one in the headcount, so why not?

My rage arcs up like the 4th of July fireworks we can see over the ridge. How can we do this? It will be so inconvenient, tiresome, tiring, dangerous. Difficult. But, like the fireworks, the rage is gone quickly and leaves only a strange calm.

Because, if I bike to work, I will be feel like I'm fucking BP the way it is fucking the Gulf. I will be exercising frequently, a habit that has failed to re-materialize after a recent hiatus. I will be doing something to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, since George the Chimp's YeeeHawww foreign policy seems to have made things consistently worse over Where The Oil Is. Hubris? We voted for the Chimp then didn't understand why we were loathed everywhere; we deregulated everything and are impotent to stop the collapse of financial markets, the defiling of the wetlands. On and on.

So that is why I find myself rolling my rock down the hill and pushing it back up nearly every work day. I tell my demoralized patients about Sisyphus with some regularity, about Camus' view of him as a hero, doing what he has to and Camus seeing the fulfillment in the work. The boulder is heavy but it is not hard to imagine Sisyphus noticing things on the way up and the way down - a new flower springing up, a new thought, the view from the top, however brief. I will try to pause in my boulder-rolling and jot down a few observations. I will try to temper the impotent rage, or at least channel it more effectively, and I will try not to say, "Who's laughing now, Zeus?"

Because that would be hubris.

Porn Star Names, Workable or Not

I was just informed that scrunchies have been inducing fashion despair in your better class of girls for, like, ever. Didn't know, and now I have that sort of post-car accident feeling of being hit by waves of the reality of the grim nearness of disaster. Because the fact is that if I had gotten a bald spot on my crown I would probably have grown a ponytail and held it back with a scrunchy.

The second thing is that we have a channel on our no-cable setup that plays bad movies continuously. It's called THIS. I don't know why. You would think that if you watched THIS you would find out the pun or catch phrase that THIS is meant to call instantly to the viewer's mind. As far as I know, there's nothing like that. It's just THIS.

But so if you want to watch TV and don't have much time, it's a pretty good option. You can walk in, turn on THIS, watch two circa-1972-AfroAmericans being blacksploited in bell bottoms with vertical stripes and groovy vests with no shirts underneath, and big moustaches, watch them go after each other by kicking kungfu style very near the edge of a tall urban building. That is maybe in a slum, probably. And one of them has a Zulu spear that he bends his knees a lot and thrusts out at the other guy and the spear flexes and wobbles at the furthest point of the thrust where he holds it for a minute so you can see his tricepts and the spear wobbles and the feathers near the tip fly about in the urban breeze with a tribal jauntiness that goes great, weirdly, with the bell bottoms. And you can imagine the evasive capering of the spearee well enough to need no assistance from yours truly.

Anyway, my real point is that I was just watching the opening credits of "Raiders of the Seven Seas" (1953), a title suggesting a degree of organization and follow-through that you would expect from a newly anointed Superpower. Sheesh: all seven? It has Lon Chaney Jr., Donna Reed, and someone named Yvonne Wood. So this all comes around to porn star names, as so often. But in this case the pieces don't quite fit together, if you'll pardon. That is, if it's Yvonne Wood (which it is) then she doesn't really have wood to deliver. And the whole near-medical bravura of the porn idiom is immediately punctured for your thinking viewer. And if it's Ivan Wood then he's saying right up front that he wants wood, when it is his job to deliver it. So on the one hand this would seem to be a movie about uncommonly competent and organized pirates: no starry-eyed rabblement, no casual hobbyists, no flighty chargers off on some impulsive tear with the oven left on.

But no sooner have you begun to enjoy the possibilities, amid the glow of the opening credits, of Yvonne Wood as a really workable porn star name, than you're disappointed by the suspicion that, for reasons too complex to twig all at once, it doesn't quite work. Like right after you break into Jello that has actually formed in the little bowl, and maybe been covered with prophylactic cellophane. Pure potential energy. And then--unalterably--absence: absolute nevermind: the uninterrogatable goneness of the utter, unrenewable, glossy plane. It was going to get mixed up in your stomach, anyway, but that's the sort of consolation unavailable to the cognoscenti. Jello is always eaten in a state of close-but-no-Kewpie-doll heaviness that is almost a metacliche. A cliche about a cliche. And maybe it would be possible to punch out the other side of this heaviness. But that would require giving up on perfection in this world. The movie gets five stars out of ten from IMDB. It's pretty good.

Perfume Review: Terre d'Hermes

We've known each other for years, Terry and me. He was best man at my wedding, and right afterwards my wife pointed out that he smells like rotten oranges. No way, I says, what do you mean rotten oranges? Swear to God, she says. Well. So after the honeymoon I see Terry at work and go up to him, you know, to catch up or whatever. And he gives me this big hug, right? And for the first time I smelled it. The top of his head smells like warm stones like since we were kids, but sure enough wafting up from his armpits there's this rotten orange smell. Not real strong or nothing but once you notice that a guy smells like rotten oranges you just kind of can't let loose of it, you know? And I don't know if this is like some Yoko Ono, ESP, woman influence thing. Because I can't figure how come I didn't notice it before. And now I find myself compulsively walking by his cubicle, especially on warm days, like how you can't stop smelling your hand sometimes after you've been chopping garlic or whatever.
And then recently the dreams start. There's a stone throne at the end of this long, low underground chamber, right? And Brenda, my wife, right? she's being forced forward, towards the throne, by this group of small but very strong and serious oranges. Or I think they're oranges, maybe they're like tangerines or something. It's dark. But they smell like oranges. Or like the armpits of oranges. I know this sounds crazy but just listen. And the oranges have this strange, serious, sort of angry, reverent look on their faces, and their eyes are glued on the throne. And Brenda is struggling and looking scared and disgusted but also kind of fascinated. Almost like she wants them to drag her over to the throne. And then I look and sitting on the throne is Terry. Friggin Terry that I've known since 6th grade, only now he's on this throne with these servants that are oranges. Or tangerines, maybe. And did I say they were in long robes?, the citrus I mean. What do you think it means, Doc? I'm not crazy or nothing, am I?

Some Stuff I've Been Reading: The Build-your-own-America Kit Redux

When I go back to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes now, looking for a brief sentence that sums up the book, I realize how much I’ve invented my own version. Or maybe I have a clearer idea of what the book is about than Marcus could have. He only wrote it. The book centers around Bob Dylan and The Band and the extraordinarily jumble of tunes and fragments they recorded at an ad hoc studio in Woodstock, New York, during the summer and fall of 1967. Marcus attempts a sort of excavation of the images in the songs—the murder ballads and flood laments, twisted novelty songs and stomped-through blues standards— to figure out where Dylan might have come across them and what they might say about the way that Dylan was thinking about America at that moment.

But what comes out of a reading of the book is the sense that one could build one’s own America. That America is not merely something given at birth but something that changes over one’s lifetime and to which one might contribute. Or more than that, in Marcus’s chapter on Harry Smith’s construction of The Anthology of American Folk Music you get the sense that you could assemble your own America out of the hundred possible versions and all the spare parts, that the American past is a vast sourcebook of images, sounds, ideas, events and decisions, any of which might be an important clue about how to live. I was used to the idea that there is a black America and a white America, a rich America and poor America, red and blue, urban and rural, East and South and West.

But what Marcus shows is that Harry Smith assembled his six disc anthology in such a way as to rework those categories. Smith presents the American past as an odd and uncomfortable jumble of images, black and white performers presented side by side, unified not by race or class but by the basic occasions and themes of American life. He calls the three sets of tracks (two discs for each) “Ballads”, “Social Music”, and “Songs”. Smith’s anthology privileges the grotesque and the tendencies towards tall tales in American music, and invites you to think not about ethnicity or even genre but about ways of inhabiting the American imagination. I would have denied that there might be such a thing as an American imagination before reading Invisible Republic and then going back and spending several months with the Harry Smith anthology. Now “the American imagination” seems to me a useful and optimistic phrase. Of course one can, and should, go beyond national boundaries in exploring and constructing one’s world. But for most of us, the things that have formed our assumptions, desires and sensibilities are American, and so the American past is as much a sort of cultural genetic record as it is a warehouse of spare parts.

But the phrase “American imagination” seems optimistic for a couple of reasons that have to do with much of the rest of my reading of the last year. One has to do with something that Ralph Ellison says in his 1970 essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”. “Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black… Without the presence of Negro American style, our jokes, our tall tales, even our sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace.” This seems true to me. I know that my gait can be distinguished from an Englishman’s at 100 yards: I’ve had it done. I resented it in my Anglophile youth. Then for many years my loose-hipped American stride just seemed a flat fact, like the fact of the slight twist in my spine. It now seems to suggest the openness of human nature.

That is, America really is a mishmash of ethnicities and regional peculiarities. Salad bowl seems not quite right: burrito, maybe. But it also seems true in my experience that, although we may not be converging towards a single ethnicity, Americans mostly share certain elements of a recognizable national sensibility. If we are all, despite our other differences, “also somehow black,” then there must be something about our literature, music and political process that actually shapes us. The working definition of ‘identity’ in America must have to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture. We can work our way towards each other, or towards a fuller version of ourselves, by working with the sourcebook of the American tradition.

Here’s why this matters to me. The circumstances of my childhood presented me—maybe this is true of most of us?—with a number of seemingly unbreachable barriers between myself and the people and traditions around me. I was raised during formative years by a middle class and relatively lettered family in poor, rural Tennessee town called Copperhill. My father was a white collar worker in a mining concern that essentially was the local economy and that almost entirely imported its management from the world outside of Appalachia. Further, this mining concern had a history of union/management conflict that went back nearly a hundred years. Even before that the people who worked in the mines, often at great personal risk and physical expense, were locals; the people who directed the mining and grew wealthy from it were, from the earliest days of industrial production, outsiders. The outside world, for all its promise and importance, was deeply suspect. I was raised up on the weird doubleness of a culture that at once sorts people into definite categories and sends them to the same schools, that at once prizes and disdains wealth and culture. And although it’s not as if I had that much of either, in the context of a town in which many children’s parents were on welfare and functionally illiterate, the marks of relative wealth and culture were ubiquitous in me like a sort of ostentatious over-grooming. My speech, dress, bearing, sense of the seemly and unseemly, sense of the importance of seemliness—all this betrayed me as a foreigner with every gesture.

My response to this was to wear my foreignness with as much defiance and panache as I could muster. And as I reflect on this now, the two—defiance and panache—are very much at odds. I’m sure no one was fooled. At any rate, I played up my odd, invented foreignness, and it suited me in a way. I went to the English and Irish traditions looking for cues about how to think and be, became enamored of the young Yeats, the English Romantics, the tweed jacket, the pentameter line. And everything American, including the flag, reminded me of my quasi-exile in this country that I grew to hate for excluding me. But of course it also formed me. It’s the problem of the anti-Semitic Jew, the misogynist woman, the racist African-American. I’m sure this dissonance isn’t peculiar to America. There must be some self-suspicion and self-loathing wherever there is both social division and the hope of crossing through it. But America makes this sense of being alienated from what is right in front of you common and binding to an unusual degree. The reason is in the word “America”. The country is called The United States of America but we actually use the word “American” to mean something different than “of or relating to the United States.” To be American in some way is something exalted and ideal. At any moment the actual United States only approximates to the ideal of being American. As a boy I was an American without feeling in the slightest American.

But Ellison helps, especially when seen through Dylan as seen through Marcus. Ellison suggests that whatever we are, whether we recognize it or not, we are formed in our sensibility by each other. And Dylan’s growth as a musician suggests that we can participate in our own formation, build our own America and coin our own way of living it. Dylan’s restless movement beyond the walls around his Jewish and mid-Western heritage into the broad, muddy, polyglot, multi-ethnic American voice—itself restlessly moving between high and low culture, between sacred and profane—becomes a kind of self-revision.

Maybe it’s also through Invisible Republic that I see the three big novels that I’ve read lately. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all make an argument about the extent to which it’s possible to make one’s own America, either in one’s own existential imagination or in one’s external world. Because I’m still reading and thinking through Shadow Country, I’ll start with that.

The central figure of the novel is a farmer and sometime desperado, Edgar A. Watson. His own identity and place in the culture are problematic because he is among the large group of Southern whites who grew up with the grand legend of the antebellum South, the difficult present reality of belonging to an ethnic group that had outlived its economy, and a cabal of Northern whites and freed slaves as the ostensible cause. As Edgar grows up he loses his father to drink and racial vigilantism (his father’s own), his mother to fantasies of the past, his sister to the psychological toll of domestic violence, a black half brother to lynching, his inheritance to debt, his public honor to rumor, and finally his heritage to exile. Watson finds himself forced to flee a corrupt law and reinvent himself again and again, each time with different materials to hand. The central events of the narrative begin when Watson, aged 36 and several times a fugitive, arrives in southern Florida and begins to establish himself.

But actually this is not where the novel begins. The first of its three sections is a series of first-hand accounts of Watson’s life, beginning with the time in Florida when he was already seen as a tyrant and murderer. The second follows one of Watson's sons through an attempt to clear him of much of his rumored brutality, and ends with this son's conclusion that although his father's crimes are greatly exaggerated, they are too great to warrant defense. They are also too entangled in the great history of Southern violence to be told with anything like a moral lesson. There is none.

So while the narrative circles around E.A. Watson the whole time, we arguably never see the man. Ain't that the way of it? The structure of the novel suggests that Matthiessen’s real subject is not so much Watson’s life as the question of why various people think it happened and what various people think it means for the present. By the time Watson is gunned down by a group of locals, most of them his neighbors and associates, the reader is pretty sure that vigilantism is in fact the only possible way deal with people like him. The answer to violence really is violence? Well, no, but the understanding required to reach acceptance may be beyond all but the best of us. In a book that reminds me more accurately and uncomfortably than anything I’ve perhaps ever read of the air of violence of my Tennessee childhood, violence finally comes to seem both piteous and completely human.

Both Watson’s brutality, and the violence finally required to stop him, seem to come out of the same gravitational force of historical violence. This violence first seeks land and and wealth, and then finds its sturdy, enduring orbit around race, class and region, and finally becomes so much a part of every thought and gesture that it is nearly invisible. But then before you show up in Copperhill, Tennessee today and assert such a thing, first you ought to be sure it’s worth fighting about. The mutual hatreds that kept me from my classmates in grade school continue to sweep our worlds farther apart. But that hatred was false: it had to do with our heritage and not ourselves. And with deliberate and soulful effort heritage can be reworked.

Girl and Bear Part 5

Grace sat on the rag rug, in the dark log cabin, and stared at the fire, picturing the glowing coals as sunlit peaches.

“Eat your dinner,” her father interrupted. She reached down and lifted a coin of buttered potato into her mouth. “Grace, that creature could’ve killed you?”

Grace tried to find words, but her mouth wouldn’t release them. The bear had spoken to her. It was not pretend. It wasn’t a dream or a game. She could still feel his words against her ear: Help me. It was as real as the heat from the fire burning in the belly of the black stove. Help me.

They sat with the sound of the creaking fire between them until her father stood from the rocking chair, exhaled and said, “Well, I’m just glad you’re alright.” His voice calmed, he reached down and rested his hand on her head. Grace closed her eyes, grateful for the gentle weight, “I’m just glad that bear took a liking to you.” Grace turned her eyes to see his face soften, “You need to take care of yourself, Grace. My heart can’t afford another loss. It just can’t.” Grace loosened at the warmth in his voice. He reached down and picked her up and she let her body go limp against his chest. She dropped her cheek against his shoulder, closed her eyes, and was at the edge of dreams by the time he set her in bed.

***

It was her heart that stirred her awake; her heart shaking with hope at the sound of a woman’s voice in the front room. It took a few minutes of listening before her ears could hear and her mind understand that the voice of the woman was not her mother. It was the pastor’s wife. With disappointed she opened her ears and listened.

“Jonathan says his brother needs a hand and he knows you’re a good worker. He figures in six months you could cover your losses and start over.”

Silence. She pictured her father’s eyes searching the floor.

“Listen, Harley dear. Listen to me. I heard what happened at the park last week.” The pastor’s wife spoke with a gentleness rarely heard in the house. “Harley. The girl needs a mother. We’d be happy to take her in. She’d be closer to town, she’d see other children. We’d take good care of her until you return. I think it might be good for her to get out of this dark hollow for awhile.”

Grace waited, her chest tightly breathing. How could her father leave her? How could he make her an orphan like that? She waited for him to tell the pastor’s wife to go home. She waited until her heart dropped, dropped into a pool of tears at his one response, “Alright.”

***

The first thing that Grace noticed as she entered the pastor’s house was the light. The pastor’s house was full of light from the tall bay windows, to the electric lamps wired along the entryway. All this light turned the front room into a morning garden of wallpapered roses. Everything glowed with morning sun--the laced cloth on the dining room table, the sheen on the mahogany bookshelf, the bluewater vase on the entry table, the beveled glass on the china cabinet—everything skipping with sparkles.

The pastor’s wife closed the front door. “Well, here you are dear. Now don’t look so downcast. It’s only for a few months. You'll take Sarah's old room upstairs, across from the boys. I placed some of her old dresses in the closet. You’re free to wear anything that fits.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Now, you call me Mother while you’re in this house. That’s what everyone calls me, the boys, the Reverend, even the neighbors. You don’t need to be formal. Mother. Alright?” Her voice was warm and sweet and her hands smelled of lavender.

“Alright.”

“Good. Now up to your room while I fix supper.” The pastor’s wife leaned down and hugged Grace against her bosom which was warm and soft like a sponge. She kissed her forehead then stood and stroked the back of her hair. Grace stayed still at the touch, her body suddenly hungry for affection.

“Alright, now,” the pastor’s wife said while patting her head. “up you go.”

Grace walked up the oak stairs, her hand caressing the varnished banister. The bedroom was almost as large as her father’s house. She stepped inside and looked around--a bed so tall and full of feathers that it seemed to float above the floor. A window with lace curtains. A flowered carpet. A real nightstand with a miniature stained glass lamp just like a tiny chapel, with a golden pull chain that caused the glass to glow inside. There was a cedar box filled with two china dolls, their doll-sized wardrobe folded neatly beneath them; a little desk with a feathered pen and glass ink blotter. There was a white brick fireplace in the corner, the kindling stacked and ready, with a reading chair and a tiny stand of books.

The wallpapered closet was full of pressed dresses including a fur-lined coat, that felt as soft as rabbit ears. The closet floor was covered in neatly paired shoes, lace up boots, and polished Sunday shoes.

Gracie closed the closet door, then walked over and quietly shut the bedroom door. This was her room. Her very own room. She lay back on the clean pillows that smelled of rose-pedals and soap and let her heart spill over in wonder. The heaviness of her abandonment suddenly lifted and she spread her arms across the quilted bedcover, then hugged herself tight, and smiled.

With Every Steamboat Like a Hymn

Josh Ritter show last night in Baltimore. Really amazing. His band has gotten even bigger--huge swinging grooves swelling up under what are essentially folk songs. And he now has so many songs, so many words to know, and just stands at the mic and pours them out in torrents. It's an experience of being near the Source, and you leave looking at things--especially clouds and trees and wind--as more news from the Source. Everything comes out and takes shape for a while.

Looking around the audience, thinking about who I saw in DC last year. There are now young finance guys chatting about old-school video games they can now get as iphone apps, and there are more teen girls with their palms held to the lights. A few hungry swimmers like me, of course looking reverent and studious. And more than a few shining faces waiting for lines that are close to motherlanguage for them, although they might not think of it that way--faces that wait and then sit in the sweet downbeat of a moment, and maybe look thoughtful for a second and then let the next phrase and the next take them to places they've forgotten again.