It’s a fine day outside, and I’ve returned from wandering the fields and hills before being productive and answering emails and confirming events. The witch hazel is blooming, a river of lime haze floating above the banks of the mountain stream. A buzzard’s wings caught the flash of the sun still behind the mountain. The sycamores stood in the silver light of a clear dawn in the valley, while a stand of oaks, copying the buzzard, blazed gold high on the opposite ridge.
Clean spring mornings and blustery autumn afternoons tug on my shoelaces. They whisper questions in my ear about sensibility, responsibility, necessity.
Baby dontcha wanna go?
Dusty records make it worse. I pine for a new pair of boots and a time machine. Try this one on for size:
My buddy Hudson (check out his blog) said I should read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. What a stick of dynamite. The used pages from an eBay bargain bin seemed steeped in cedar, fragrant, moonlit, enough to make me want to go to California and…oh god, who do I think I am, Kerouac reviewing Kerouac?
(Maybe all coffee shops are really just drab “ComicCons”, cosplays of people trying to be brilliant and understated.)
Point is, it made a good dent in my brain. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (also just finished, for the third time), set my head on fire.
So here I am, wandering morning fields, answering emails, and holding my dented brain that’s still smoldering. Good books will do that.
What do certain books do for us? And TO us?
Chat GPT and Wikipedia and the Man will tell you what works of literature and art “mean.”
But what do they mean to you?
Robert Johnson tunes make me want to hop a westbound freight. Jack Kerouac makes me want to grab a rucksack and head off into the unknown. Ray Bradbury makes me want to start a league to preserve knowledge, set up in a marble hall with statues of men of old.
Maybe I’m getting stuck in the format again.
Perhaps it’s like art. People with more traditional jobs confide to me that if they had a few more days off, they’d create that masterpiece. I listen to the echoes of myself, of what I’ve been saying for years, and never profited upon it’s realization. (Maybe it’s different for them.)
I even went a step further. If I had a studio. Then I had a studio. If I wandered a bit. I came back home, mostly unchanged. Then… If I had more time, I’d be more happy.
Repeated enough, it didn’t get truer, but the wind from the words gathered, and made a little whirlwind, fitfully kicking up a few ashes in the courtyard. I watched, both discouraged and heartened by the immutability of Reality. Working with oak is like that. It’s hard, it’s tough, but it’s honest, and you can build something lasting and beautiful.
Again: what do these books - thoughts - songs - images - do for us?
I really don’t know. The little nugget I’m snagging for this go ‘round is a looking under the surface. The wild freedom of a rucksack life (Dharma Bums) applied to the everyday is a fresh set of eyes to marvel at the coffee pot. A fictional city chattering in murderous vapidity one moment, reduced to ashes the next (Fahrenheit 451) a call to pay attention to what’s real right now.
Stories and archetypes whisper from the shelves, nudging us towards Truth on our daily paths.
And even though the commute last night was normal, and the steering wheel of my car economy, and my voice commands are building an Orwellian world, it was good to feel the push of the button and to say in a clear tone “Play Tom Waits on Spotify.”
The full moon peeked over the mountain, the valley is silver and black as I drove home.
Nighthawks at the diner….God’s away on Business…
The road unfolded ghostly gray, and the train track flew over on an ancient steel trestle.
Baby, dontcha wanna go….