DETACHED WITHOUT IGNORING

etel adnan

Spring is here, on the calendar and in the air. The grass is greening in the donkey meadow. They graze hay part of the day and the fresh green shoots the other part, roaming slowly, heads to the ground. It must be like eating strawberries after a winter of stale bread. I will go on giving them hay while the new grass is growing. The grass has no fiber in it yet. The donkeys will need the fiber of the hay until the grass grows up a ways. I learned this from old man Tom Pruitt working with cows. May have more hay than needed. Don't want any left over. I want to give them all fresh hay next year. I'll see about getting a first-cutting of the hay this time. It will cost more than the second-cutting, but will be worth it. It won't have so many sticks and stickers, stalks and stems. The donkeys like that part. They eat the stalks and stems. I grow weary of nettle splinters in fingers and thumbs from tearing the hay apart to fluff it up for them. Jenny doesn't like for me to wear gloves. The tips break off too deep inside the skin to pry out with a needle. Somebody told me to put a spot of iodine on it daily and the splinter will rise to the surface after several days. She got it from her grandpa. It took a week. In the summer I'll miss taking hay to the donkeys every day. Thinking about taking a folding chair into the meadow this summer to sit in and read, maybe under the dogwood tree, to be present with them in the meadow. They will graze nearby for awhile, and gradually graze about the meadow as usual. I can no longer go sit by the creek in the woods and watch the trout and minnows swim anymore. It's depressing to sit and watch the water, knowing it is poison to life forms. It is symbolic of so much that mountain spring water no longer sustains life. I can go sit in the meadow with the donkeys for the same relaxing focus of attention I found watching the water and the fish before. 

etel adnan

Talking with someone last week, she said it's depressing to look at things the way they are, and asked how I can be happy and still see things the way they are. All I could say was, deal with it. It's not easy for me to live in a country where at least half the population wants fascism. Yet, there is the other half that does not, my half. Where I live it's more like seventy-five percent and twenty-five percent. I don't care about the percentage. I don't even prefer the people of my quarter of the population. I do not care about the politics of anyone I know. A few from both sides are aggressive with their belief systems. I stay away from them, seeing the people who need to advertise their beliefs to be living commercials and little more, another word for missionaries. The church I grew up in taught me to believe I must persuade others to my belief system, which I could not do. Even in childhood I knew other people had their own ways of seeing for their own reasons. Who am I to be telling somebody else my belief system is right and theirs is wrong? I didn't even know what my belief system was, except what I was told it was supposed to be. Who was I to say the Baptist religion was right and the Catholic wrong? Just because I went to one against my will? Among the great benefits to my own mental health was learning to let go of thinking my product was better than anybody else's. I learned in school that I was not the fastest runner, did not make the best grades, didn't care about being a jock, was not and would never be popular  I've learned grown up I am not the one with the fastest, most retentive mind of people I know. I don't read fast. Care nothing for competition of any sort. In fact, have come to reject competition. When I catch self wanting to do something better than somebody else, I ask, Why? That's the end of it. I'm no fun to play games with for caring so little about winning.

etel adnan

I went to my thirtieth class reunion fifteen years ago at the College of Charleston. Everybody was lawyers, judges, doctors, politicians, professors, some in tailored tuxedos, and I was a house painter. In school, nobody wanted to be like their parents. At the reunion, I felt like I was among the parents of the people I went to school with. They were way beyond me in status, income, education. I didn't care. This was not my world. People I crossed paths with for a time. They were looking for success and found it. I was looking for success, too, and found it. My success was in my inner self, consciousness, my attitude toward life. If we'd dressed according to my idea of success, they'd have been a rough looking bunch, as rough looking as I was in the party to their success. I'd become acclimatized to the mountains and this was summer in Charleston. I wore a sport coat, and sweat so bad my shirt was soaked and the jacket was wet. I took napkins from the drinks table, one after the other, mopping the sweat off my face. I felt like a donkey in a herd of horses. Glad I did not turn out like them. Didn't want to then either. It was like they went to the College for job training, to get into medical school or law school. I went to the College for my life. I knew I knew nothing and wanted to learn something. I wanted to go on learning. I wanted to learn about life on earth, how best to live it in ways that are real instead of artificial, to face my life face-on and live as who I am, not what I'm expected to be, not what society looks up to, not what anybody looks up to. I came to the mountains with the last lines of WB Yeats' poem, Among School Children, in my mind, to start where all ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

etel adnan

I was grateful when my parachute landed me among the Pruitts, people of no social status, people who worked hard and lived hard, good people content being who they are. Raising cattle to become fast-food burgers seemed a waste, yet valid as work in service to humanity. I felt like house painting was valid work in that the only waste it left was empty paint cans and already discarded rags. It amounted to maintaining what is already here, instead of adding to what we already have too much of. I loved about interiors that paint can make the walls, ceiling and floor in a room of the most modest house look as good as a Manhattan uptown interior. The four walls and ceiling make an empty canvas to add color to, create a space using color. The most beautiful my house has ever been was when it was empty before I moved in. Justin and Crystal bought a modest house with all white walls inside. She painted the rooms different colors, light, beautiful colors. The vibe in the house felt good before, and by now the vibe is remarkably higher. My heart is with the working people. I seldom made more than minimum wage and didn't want more. I wanted to live simply among people who worked hard for little return. It means I live as a reader in a world of people who do not read. It's the same among the professional class. So what's the difference? In one class the people look down their noses at the working class, feeling themselves high up. People on the ground look small from up the ladder. Samuel Beckett's story, The Lost Ones, comes to mind often as a vision of civilization in our time. It plays on the inside of my skull in front fairly often, on the inner drive-in movie screen where I see my thoughts. It seems depressing to share a vision of the world with Beckett, though I deal with it by finding it good practice in detachment, being a passive observer.

etel adnan, herself

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OLD TIMES / NEW TIMES

jessica stockholder

I'm back from a couple hours with my friend Debi I've not seen in a few years. She's been through it and came out the other end. I've known Debi since she was sixteen, worked with her dad and her uncle on the farm putting up hay in the summers. Debi was a fire-haired hillbilly girl then, and now the fire has gone from her hair, but she's still a hillbilly and wouldn't be anything else. It's odd to see her aging. I see her taking on the look of about all her relatives past a certain age. I could have put several names to the face I saw this evening, all of them her cousins, aunts or uncles. She's a Pruitt and a Crouse by birth. Pruitts are special people to me. They are the first people I knew, the ones who taught me mountain ways and my way around. Debi is one of the last of the Pruitts I know, as the generations I have known are largely dead. The younger ones went to cities for work. She has become my thread that keeps me connected to her kin. And similarly, I am her thread to her relatives that are gone. I'd been in the hills about six months when I decided to check out a nearby church. I went a couple times. The third time, I was talking with two men out front before the meeting. One came over and one of the ones I was talking with asked him, "What was that shootin goin on up at your place yesterday?" Answer, "Aw, It was them Pruitt boys." He looked at me, turned and walked away. My thought at the moment: Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I have carried this maxim the whole way along and it has served me well. The Pruitt boys were rowdy and I rode around with them on weekends. They were the best education I could have had for introduction to mountain culture. I worked with two of them during the week and on weekends we ran the back roads throwing beer cans out the car windows. I kept my empty cans in a paper bag on the floor. They thought that was funny. I could not toss a beer can out the window. It wasn't possible. Even if my mind wanted to do it, my arm would not allow it. A .22 rifle was always with us. Sometimes we shot at the cans I saved. Never went back to the church.

 

neil jenney

 

We did not talk about these people who have a place in my heart and a place in her heart too. They are initially our bond. For her, I'm a witness to the wonderful people they were. The Pruitts are one of the mountain families that has a reputation for being either preachers or drunks. Such families tend to have at least one bootlegger in their near past, like daddy, grandpa and greatgrandpa. Liquor makers tend to be drinkers and many of them drink all the time. Heavy drinkers tend to be terrible husbands and parents, keep dysfunctional households and raise dysfunctional kids. The boys aligned with daddy tend to be rowdy and the boys aligned with mama tend to make preachers who condemn drinking. This becomes a social dynamic. A couple of generations down the line, one will have kids that stay in trouble, and another will have kids that go to church. When I run through the names of the families known for preachers and drunks, they tend to come from bootleggers just a few generations back. Throw in good and evil and the judgment begins. It has nothing to do with good and evil except a belief system that allows only one or the other. We don't call it good and evil anymore. It is black and white now. I hear it called gray in between. It is colors in between. In pigment, all colors mixed together make black. In light, all colors make white. It is colors between black and white, not gray. Duality is the nature of this world of experience. Duality makes the colors. We meander in the color zone, not at the poles. On the earth, nobody lives at the north or south poles. We live between the poles. Who is to say a handful of brothers and buddies are evil because they like to free their minds of their frustrations periodically? And who is to say a preacher who looks down his nose at drunks is good? In the culture we have the divide, drinkers and non-drinkers. The drinkers are bad and the non-drinkers are good. I go with the company of the bad, because I have experienced the hypocrisy of the good.

 

ai wei wei

 

An old-time square-dance tune is playing in my head, Have a drink on me / Have a drink on me / Aw Lord / Have another drink on me. It's a funny song. One of the aspects of traveling my own path that I especially like is seeing how limiting either/or thinking can be, caught up in the poles, ignoring everything in between. A walk to the waterfalls for me is the whole trip there and the whole trip back, the falls the turn around point. I love being under a canopy of trees. In conversation with my old deceased preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, Debi's uncle, I said I can worship God the same in the  woods among trees as well as in the church. No you can't. I'm glad my mind is not locked down in yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil. I don't even think about good and bad anymore. I'm happy to note that kind of thinking is gone from my head. I find that I personally prefer the company of lovers of God, but they're only a part of the whole. I know and like some people whose names make about anybody around here shudder. One in particular comes to the front of my mind, whose name I'll not mention to protect the innocent. Everybody shudders when they hear her name. I don't. I like her. I'm not going to push her buttons or piss her off, which can have a way of being lethal. Pushing other people's buttons is not my style, so I'm in no danger around her. In fact, I feel safe around her. When she's not giving herself a bad name, she has a great sense of humor, and is a no bullshit kinda woman. I respect her. I respect everybody who has been to prison. I respect her for what she's been through and I respect her character. Where trust is concerned, I would trust her and not most others. Debi too. I'd trust Debi to the grave. I want to be somebody Debi can trust. If need ever arises, I pray that I have what it takes to be there for Debi. This is how I feel with the people I call my friends.

 

the chakras

 

A month or so ago, Debi had an experience with the Holy Spirit. She told me the experience and I believe her interpretation of it. It brought to mind a day I remember several years ago, a day when I was in the spirit from the moment I woke in the morning unto night. Memorable day. I listened to Debi's experience happy for her. She needed an upliftment. Like I say, she's been through it and came out the other end. This must have been the quasar at the other end of her interior black hole. She said she's happy for the first time in her life. I saw it. It was in everything about her, her movement, her attitude. She wasn't new in that it changed her away from being Debi, but took her closer to Debi. She had the misfortune of being born with an incredibly fast, retentive mind in a social situation that had no place for such a mind. She had to dumb herself way down. The dumbing down took her with it. She brings to mind a Van Halen song, "Ya know I been to the edge. There I stood and looked down." Debi would say, Amen, to that. She came home to take care of her mother unto dying, then made her way for a few years taking care of an old woman with dementia, the shit on the walls variety. Since the year 2000, if you don't have a job in Sparta, you're out. The mechanics are having a minor boom since fewer people are buying new cars. She has dental issues, Social Services issues, poverty issues. She's getting by without a car, which is mighty troublesome. She's at the bottom where poverty is concerned, yet in her heart she's the best she's ever been in her life. She has a good dog, got rid of a loser man, is losing weight by cutting out soft drinks. She's had her hard times and she's had her good times. I asked her what church she was going to. I was gladdened to hear she was not going to church. She has the real thing, I was thinking, don't spoil it. Live it, enjoy your new perspective. I don't like to advise, but took a moment when she was talking about different interpretations of the Bible, to say, The red letters is the only part that's important, the rest of it is a history book, don't worry about interpretations. If I could leave anything of value with her, I felt like that was the best value I had to offer at the beginning of her path. I allowed myself to say it because it arose spontaneously, flowed from the moment.          

 

 

sol lewitt

 

 

 

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RUNNING THE MOUNTAIN ROADS WITH THE PRUITT BOYS

christo

It's Fourthajuly again. Lotsa parties at the river in the rain. The people who like to party on the river in this part of the mountains will be there, whatever the weather. They're people who understand that the weather is not constant blue sky. It rains. It even storms. This is the earth we live on. The people partying at the river go there because they understand this is the earth we live on and it's time to party hearty. Guitars, banjos, beer, white liquor, what-have-you, all kinds of motorcycles; whole lotta party goin on. The South's gonna do it again! It's all good people taking a break, time off from work, get together with a bunch of friends and holler, Hail Yeah! Confederate flag on tshirts, bandanas, hats, pickups. To an insider, it's mostly people you know, many of them you have memories with, the people of your life. Also, to an insider, each has the backup of the whole if threatened by an outsider, or maybe life threatened by an insider too drunk to know what he's doing, or something. An outsider would only see rednecks to fear, the unpredictable unknown. It's a legitimate concern after a certain level of drinking, but only if the outsider is a provoking personality. Fights happen. Everybody there knows fights happen. Get a bunch of roosters together in a chicken pen and fights happen. It's no big deal. It's what men do. We're raised to be warriors, but allowed no outlet in our everyday lives except sublimation by watching tv. Boys grow up fighting. In the working class, men continue to fight. They know it's therapeutic release, much like the primal thrill that runs through a man's entire nervous system hunting. The women hunt and fight, too. They know the thrill as well.

christo

Every year there is less and less river front to party on due to subdivisions. It aint what it used to be. Everything changes we tell ourselves. Acceptance is the only recourse we have, and it's so relaxing when we get there. A bend in the New River at the Nile had a rather large cleared place beside the road at the state line with Virginia. It's all covered up in ironweed now. A lot of stories came out of that party place. Like the boy that shot a girl in the leg, drunk, stoned, the whole deal, and his lawyer got him out of the charges by finding this spot on maps is different from survey to survey. It could not be determined for certain which state he was in, NC or Virginia. It didn't go to court. I spent quite a bit of time there with the Pruitt Boys in my first year in the mountains, talking with other people that go there to drink beer at a place by the river where it's quiet. They were my tour guides, friends and body guards the summer of 1977. We shot .22 rifles there. I was surprised at how good a shot I was at the start, attributed it to years of using a camera, holding it steady, squeezing the trigger gently. We'd throw a beer can out into the river and shoot at it until it sank, if that could be done before the current carried it out of range. Mostly, we didn't hit it, and even more mostly we didn't care. A chance to hear a gun go boom. Drink some beer, get a little high, stop at the liquor store, four of us in Van's old Dodge. He called it the Goat. It would go anywhere with a good posi-trac rear end. A few years later he drove it through a power pole 12 feet above the ground, went off a bank in a curve shit-faced drunk. I think of Van whenever I see the replacement pole out in the field from the road. He woke up on the hood of the car with his twelve year old nephew beside him on the hood. Neither one was hurt. Van lost his drivers license forever.

christo

They taught me an awful lot just by taking me around to drop in on different people they knew, go to the pool room and have a beer, play some pool, shoot the breeze with the others in there. I'm recalling a time in the pool room, a guy in his thirties whose name I don't remember, a drunk who drank himself to oblivion every time he started. This night in the pool room he was on the edge of the big O. Don Pruitt was a little bit anxious about the jukebox. One of them told me that if somebody played Amazing Grace on the jukebox, this drunk guy would start preaching. I was told that if somebody plays it, we're leaving. Don didn't like it. A drunk man preaching ran all over him. It was humiliating seeing the guy so out of control manipulated for a quarter and a laugh. Don wasn't one for church, nor church people, but he was a believer in his heart. It was too much disrespect all the way around for him to tolerate seeing. With two uncles and a great grandfather preachers, he got his church upbringing. He just rejected the people of the church because they wouldn't accept him. He didn't care about the people in the church and relatives talking about him living in sin drinking beer. One thing he knew, he wasn't a hypocrite. And he grew up knowing all of them. Eventually, somebody played Amazing Grace on the jukebox. The guy started getting wound up and Don said, We're leaving. We all went out the door in a hurry to keep up with him so he wouldn't drive off without us.

christo

A moment stays in my mind of a Sunday morning in the spring of my first year, been here about six or seven months through the winter. I wanted to experience a mountain church meeting. I picked one in Whitehead, won't say which, because it doesn't matter. Before the meeting I was standing outside talking with a couple of up in years men and another came up, How ye a-doin fellers? One of the men said, What was that shootin goin on up by your place yesterday, brother? Aw, it was them Pruitt boys. He looked at me, turned and walked away. My thought that moment, Anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me. I have lived by that all the years I've been in these mountains. I mean it, too. It has served me well. It keeps pretentious people out of my life. The Pruitts were not exactly high up on the social ladder. My maxim meant to me a vow I would never seek a height where I could look down on these people. The day before, we had been at a place on the back part of Waterfall Road, the Robert Frost path untaken. A flat place in the road they called "the flat" was a place trash was thrown down the bank above the 3rd waterfall. Years of household trash thrown down there. We found an old 45, circle in the center, label for a ring and black record itself for a ring. Woods all around as far as you could imagine. We fixed it to the front of a white Styrofoam plate somehow and used it for a target. All of us hit the center every time. It was too close to miss. We'd just been by the house of a friend of theirs who gave us a J wrapped in pink paper. We called it the pink rocket. It took us there, too. Hanging at the dump looking through trash, picking up something to shoot at, our empty beer cans targets too. Car doors open, radio playing Moe Bandy, Sammi Smith. Then it was off to the next whatever might happen.

christo

 

For me, they were people to be looked up to. I'd just come out of a lifetime of school into a car with three hard working, hard fighting, hard drinking, hard driving brothers who weren't particularly liked by everybody, but weren't afraid of anybody either. The whole county knew you take one on, you've got all three. They always had guns. We had good times and good laughs, laughing like kids, my dog Sadie on the back seat between me and Van or Bill, whoever was not driving, beer cans tossed out the windows when they ran dry. I couldn't do it. I put mine in a paper bag kept under the seat. They thought that was the dumbest thing they ever seen. I couldn't help it. The mountain scenery they were driving me through all over the county was awe inspiring to me. I couldn't trash it consciously, to be one of the guys. It was home to them. I had no issue with them doing whatever they did. I was the visitor. I felt like God landed my parachute among them to learn from them, them in particular. I was not here to tell them how they oughta be. I was here to learn. Like their uncle Tom Pruitt, they were my teachers without teaching. Any highway in the county, Bill would point at a rock sticking out from a stone bank and say, That's where I broke my collar bone and right arm. Another place a tree, That's where I broke my left leg, left arm and ribs. He was a terrible driver when he was drunk. Just before I arrived here, he'd bought a new Ford and totaled it before he made it home. Insurance took care of it. He seldom reached his destination til next day when he took off driving drunk. In a fight, it took knocking him out to stop him.

christo

I never wanted to be thought of as better than any one of the Pruitt boys. I may not drive cars through power poles and get beer bottles broken over my head, but it doesn't make me better than them. We drifted apart after awhile. Don moved into town. Van lived in Cherry Lane. Bill, who had been staying with Tom was off to North Dakota with Margie Walls. I'd see them every once in awhile over the years, not as much as I wanted to, not near as much as I wanted to. Our lives took us in different directions. A year of weekend school with three hillbillies of my generation, working with Bill and Don on the farm in the spring, summer and fall, I got my feet planted on the ground in my new mountain home. I had the beginnings of knowing where I am. They made good references later. When I'd meet new people I'd mention I knew the Pruitts and old man Tom. Everybody knew them. I didn't care what they thought of the Pruitt boys. I knew what they thought from different things I'd heard, but none of it made me ashamed of them. One time years later I was painting at the Nile and a man I didn't know came up to see what I was doing. He was a little suspicious of me and I was a little suspicious of him. We talked a bit. Turned out he knew everybody I knew, he was Harlan Andrews's first cousin, and by the time we'd finished talking we were friends.  

christo

 

 

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